Editor Katherine Armstrong shares her passion for Irish and Northern Irish crime fiction, and selects 25 of the best writers of Emerald Noir.

I grew up in Northern Ireland in the eighties and nineties, which was probably not Judith Chalmers’ first point of call for Wish You Were Here but still, it was home. As most people will remember, Northern Ireland during that period was an interesting place to be if you were particularly keen on scaring yourself silly. The television most evenings would have talk of car bombs, murders, knee-cappings and other assorted terrorist activities. Going to school in Belfast every day on the train you became used to having to get a replacement bus service due to bomb scares.  For anyone who wanted to skip class the various alphabetical groups bent on death and destruction could guarantee that no one would question your excuse for being late – there always seemed to be a bomb scare somewhere.

Throughout the difficult years there were books that focused on the Troubles – you know the stuff – where an English spy from British Intelligence would invariably fall in love with a Catholic girl who would betray him to the IRA and he’d be executed. But there was a huge gap in the market for really good home grown crime fiction. Over the past twenty years or so there has been an emergence of what has become known as Emerald Noir. It’s gritty, it’s realistic, and contemporary Ireland – both north and south – is a whole lot better for it.

But how has this come about? I think one of the main reasons is the change in the political state of Northern Ireland: the Republican and Loyalist ceasefires and the creation of the Stormont government. Once this happened all the terrorist groups moved into ‘ordinary’ crimes, running drugs and guns etc., which makes for more interesting and diverse fictional narratives. In the Republic of Ireland there was the rise of the Celtic Tiger that saw a huge influx of money enter the country and that inevitably led to more crime on the streets with the increase of gang culture. Traditionally Ireland has always had quite literary tastes in fiction – Joyce, Beckett, Shaw etc – but the success of ‘chick lit’ authors such as Marian Keyes and Cecilia Ahern has also meant that genre fiction has become more acceptable and that has helped open the Irish market to genres such as crime fiction.

Below is a list of twenty-five of the best Irish and Northern Irish crime writers past and present. This is by no means a definitive list as there are many other fantastic Irish/Northern Irish writers out there but I’ve narrowed the criteria specifically to writers who were born in Ireland/Northern Ireland and whose works are set there.

1. Eilís Dillon (1920–1994)

Eilís Dillon was born in Galway in 1920. Her uncle was the poet Joseph Mary Plunkett who was one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. He was executed in Kilmainham Gaol at the end of the Easter Rising in 1916.

Apart from writing children’s books in both Irish and English Eilís also wrote three detective stories that were published by Faber. Two were translated into other languages and all were published in America. They have since been reissued in America by specialist crime publisher Rue Morgue Press.

2. Eoin McNamee (1961–)

Eoin McNamee was born in Kilkeel, County Down. His debut novel, Resurrection Man, was described by the Irish Times as ‘one of the most outstanding pieces of Irish Fiction to come along in years’ and by Jonathan Coe as  ‘Impressively confident . . . as lean and grimly purposeful a book as the demon-driven terrorist it sets out to explore.’ McNamee is one of the leading chroniclers of Ireland’s troubled past and his latest novel, Orchid Blue, about the murder case that led to the last hanging to occur in Northern Ireland, will be published by Faber in November.

3. Colin Bateman (1962–)

Colin Bateman was born in Newtownards, County Down, but grew up in Bangor (my home town!). Bateman is a prolific writer but the book that launched his career in 1995 was Divorcing Jack (which was also made into a film in 1998). Dan Starkey, his not yet mature Belfast journalist protagonist, gets involved in murder and mayhem on the streets of Belfast before being rescued by a stripper dressed as a nun. Hilarity ensues. Fourteen novels have been published since then including Murphy’s Law, for which Bateman wrote the television screenplay. The character was specifically written for the actor James Nesbitt. The Day of the Jack Russell won The Last Laugh Award for the best comic crime novel published in the UK in 2009 at CrimeFest.

4. Brian McGilloway (1974–)

Born in Derry, Brian McGilloway is the author of the acclaimed Inspector Benedict Devlin series, the first of which, Borderlands, was published by Macmillan New Writing and was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger in 2007. Gallows Lane, his second novel, was shortlisted for the 2009 Irish Book Awards/Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year and has been longlisted for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.

Inspector Devlin is an unusual police detective in that he has a (mostly) happy family life and works in a close community where everyone knows everyone. The setting of Donegal provides Devlin with the added problems of policing the borderlands when he can’t investigate over the borderline. It’s a good series that has been building nicely.

5. Stuart Neville (1972–)

Stuart Neville was born in Armagh and is an author who has really taken off over the past year. His short story, The Last Dance, was published by ThugLit, the online crimezine, in 2008 which prompted a literary agent to get in touch and take him on. Neville’s short story turned novel, Followers, was published as The Twelve in the UK and as The Ghosts of Belfast in the US; it was also published in Japan. It has since won the LA Times Book Prize and been optioned for a movie. The sequel, Collusion, will be published in August.

6. Adrian McKinty

Originally born and reared in Carrickfergus, Adrian McKinty studied politics at Oxford University before moving to New York City in the 1990s. He worked as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a teacher, author and moving to Australia.  He is the author of the Dead Trilogy (featuring hitman Michael Forsythe) and two standalone novels, Fifty Grand and Hidden River. Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and selected by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The Dead Yard was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award.

7. Ingrid Black

Ingrid Black is the pseudonym of Irish journalist Eilis O’Hanlon and her husband Ian McConnel. Their first novel, The Dead, was published in 2003 and won a Shamus award. The Dark Eye was published in 2004, The Judas Heart in 2007 and Circle of the Dead in 2008.

Their main characters are former FBI agent turned true crime writer Saxon and Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Grace Fitzgerald who is part of the Dublin Murder Squad.

8. Declan Burke (1969–)

Ken Bruen once said of Declan Burke, ‘I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large – mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping . . . at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. Declan Burke, who was born in Sligo, is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007) and also runs the crime fiction blog Crime Always Pays. The Big O earned Burke comparisons with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen.

9. Ken Bruen (1951–)

Ken Bruen is like the Big Daddy of Irish crime fiction. His most famous creation is Jack Taylor and he sets his Taylor novels in Galway, where he was born and still lives. The Guards, the first book in the Jack Taylor series (published in the UK in 2001; US 2003), won a Shamus Award for Best Novel in 2003. The Jack Taylor series focuses on disgraced ex-Guard Jack Taylor who turns private investigator while struggling with a drink problem. The most recent Jack Taylor novel is The Devil (2010), described by the Irish Independent as ‘Brilliant . . . Bruen’s Galway is certainly not Bord Faílte-approved, but once again he has delivered a disturbing story that casts a very cold eye on the state of our nation’.

10. Eugene McEldowney (1943–)

Eugene McEldowney was born in Belfast but lived in Dublin as a journalist for the Irish Times before writing full time. His series of crime books feature Superintendent Cecil Megarry of the Northern Ireland Special Branch. He also writes standalone novels like 1999’s The Faloorie Man and 2002’s Stella’s Story.

11. Liz Allen (1969–)

Dublin born Allen worked on several national newspapers in Dublin before leaving journalism in 2001 to work on her first novel. The lead characters in her standalone books are both independent women: solicitor Deborah Parker [Last to Know], and crime profiler Kate Waters [The Set-Up]. Allen has been compared to Minette Walters.

12. Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn’s Winterland was published by Faber in 2009 to rave reviews. Returning to his native city of Dublin Glynn looks at big business corruption as the Celtic Tiger begins to wane. The Irish Independent thought it was ‘a fast-moving, tightly-plotted, exciting read from the bright new star of Dublin noir crime fiction’, while the Irish Times described it as ‘a page-turner in the best sense of the word, a novel filled with clearly drawn, morally ambiguous characters . . . The plot never lets up for a moment and the three set-pieces of the story are as good as anything I have read in contemporary crime fiction. The great achievement of the novel, however, is the creation of Gina Rafferty herself. Believing that a property developer has destroyed her family’s life, she acts as a metaphor for an entire country that has been shattered by greed and the machinations of the filthy rich. Because of this, Winterland takes its place as the first contemporary Irish novel to explore the disastrous effects of the property boom and the damage it has done to countless Irish families. For that, and for this thrilling, brilliantly written novel, Alan Glynn deserves enormous praise.’

13. Alex Barclay (1974–)

Author of the Joe Lucchesi novels – Darkhouse and The Caller – Dublin born, Cork based Barclay has had great success since making the move from fashion and beauty journalism into crime writing. Darkhouse, her first novel, garnered a lot of critical acclaim and was sold to ten countries. Blood Runs Cold and Time of Death are a separate series featuring FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce.

14. Gene Kerrigan

Dublin journalist and author Kerrigan writes both non-fiction and fiction. His crime fiction explores the Dublin underworld and gang culture and has garnered him much praise.

15. Cormac Millar (1950–)

Cork born writer Cormac Millar [pseudonym of Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin] is the son of Eilís Dillon and brother of the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. He is Associate Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His Dublin based crime novel An Irish Solution was the first work of fiction to be published in 2004 by the Penguin Ireland imprint. His second crime novel, The Grounds, was published in 2006.

16. Sam Millar (1955–)

Sam Millar was born in Belfast. He has been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Martin Healy Short Story Award and the Cork Literary Review Award. His short story Rain won the Brian Moore Short Story Award in 1998. His novel Bloodstorm introduces readers to Belfast private investigator Karl Kane. It was described by Publisher’s Weekly as ‘the first in a powerful new crime series from Millar. Extremely original, it is a chillingly gripping book’, and by BBC Radio Ulster as ‘a powerful, relentless page-turner of a book, leaving you gasping for more’.

17. Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes’ Dublin based PI Ed Loy books have seen him nominated for an Edgar, the CWA New Blood Dagger, a Shamus and a Macavity Award. His first Ed Loy novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, won the Shamus for Best First PI Novel. Hughes is also co-founder of Dublin’s Rough Magic Theatre Company, Ireland’s leading independent theatre company, as well as an award-winning playwright and screenwriter.

18. Tana French

Former professional actress French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the US and Malawi before settling in Dublin. Her first novel In the Woods won an Edgar for Best First Novel, Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was sold to 22 countries.  Her latest book, Faithful Place, will be published on 1 July.

19. Vincent Banville (1940–)

Vincent Banville was born in Wexford. Faber published An End to Flight under the pen name Vincent Lawrence in 1973. His crime series features Dublin PI John Blaine and he also writes a children’s series featuring Hennessey.

20. Arlene Hunt

Since beginning her writing career at the young age of 27 Arlene Hunt has since published 6 novels. Her books follow John and Sarah of QuicK Investigations, who were first introduced to readers in Hunt’s second novel False Intentions. Her fifth novel, Undertow, the fourth in the QuicK Investigations series was nominated for Best Crime Novel at the 2009 Irish Book Awards. Her latest novel, Blood Money, was published in March 2010.

21. John Banville (1945–)

Born in Wexford John Banville is one of Ireland’s best known and celebrated authors. His novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Christine Falls was first published in 2006 under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and introduced ex-hard-drinking Dublin pathologist Quirke.

22. Jim Lusby (1951–)

Waterford born Lusby now lives in Dublin. As well as writing short stories, for stage and radio, Lusby also writes as James Kennedy. His protagonist is Inspector Carl McCadden of Waterford police.

23. K. T. McCaffrey

Graphic designer McCaffrey’s first novel Revenge introduced feisty Dublin journalist Emma Boylan. The Observer has called McCaffrey, ‘A welcome addition to the ranks of superior crime writers’.

24. Andrew Nugent

Former lawyer turned Benedictine monk, Andrew Nugent’s novels set in Dublin follow Inspector Quilligan and Molly Power of the Irish Police Force Murder Squad.

25. John Galvin

A member of the Gardaí, John Galvin wrote Bog Warriors, a comic thriller set in Co Kerry, in his spare time. Published in 2000 it was followed by The Mercury Men in 2002. Galvin, originally from Co Cork, comes from a family of Guards.

Faber has just published Voices from the Grave, written by Ed Moloney and based on the testimonies of two senior figures in Northern Ireland’s long sectarian war, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine.  For many years Hughes was the close friend and brother-in-arms of Gerry Adams. Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA. Though no one believes him, the statements about him in this book are the first made by a republican central to the armed struggle, and Hughes’s account of his own part in the war is the first by a former leader of the IRA at the centre of the action. Until now silence and speculation has surrounded the leaders of the armed groups. Northern Ireland has had a purely political reconciliation accompanied by very little truth telling from those with blood on their hands.

Boston College years ago decided to fund a major series of interviews with former paramilitary leaders before too many of them passed away. They were encouraged to be frank; and to encourage honesty they were promised that nothing they said would be published before they died. Ervine died in 2007, Hughes a year later.

The book was eagerly awaited in Ireland, north and south. In one small bookshop-cum-newsagent in Andersonstown, the Republican working class estate in west Belfast, 85 copies were delivered at 8.30 on the day of the book’s release and were gone half an hour later. That pattern was repeated across the North of Ireland and throughout the south.

Ireland in the twentieth century was a place where the art of hiding crime and corruption in plain sight was brought to a very high level. And it demanded the willed blindness of those who couldn’t shoulder the consequences of seeing the truth and being forced to speak about it.

It was a common half serious threat – the last resort of a parent at wit’s end – that a child would be sent off to Artane or Daingean if they didn’t stop misbehaving. They were two of the ‘reformatories’ that everyone knew were hellholes, and that the people making them hellish were members of religious orders. But these grim oubliettes for the delinquent or orphan children of the poor were themselves immune to reform. Everyone could see, no one looked.

An Irish party leader and Taoiseach (prime minister), a modestly successful accountant before going into politics, was living by the early seventies the kind of life that Roman generals enjoyed after they’d plundered a province. He acquired a beautiful Georgian mansion with a 270-acre estate, a seriously large yacht, a string of racehorses, a private island off the coast of Kerry and a taste for very expensive old wine. He was tight with property developers, supermarket moguls, the big builders and their architects. Everyone saw what Charles Haughey was doing, but nobody dared look too closely. Writing about it could ruin your newspaper or your publisher and end your career.

The dogs in the street knew that Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy was a major figure on the IRA Army Council and in the South Armagh IRA, and that he ran a huge smuggling operation from his farm straddling the border with Northern Ireland, where crime and the armed struggle met. They also knew that Gerry Adams was the dominant personality in the IRA. Barking any of this aloud was a different matter.

As a young publisher, I was taught that staying away from Irish dogs that bark gives you one less headache in a profession already driven by anxiety. If the English libel laws are oppressive, the operation of essentially the same laws in Ireland is suffocating. The rich and powerful know they can intimidate journalists into cautious blandness. Much of the Irish Times, the best newspaper in the country, is written in an impenetrable language of court and tribunal reports, paraphrases of legal argument and studiedly careful allusion, with almost no explanation provided for the uninitiated of what is really going on. Meanwhile, paramilitary figures scan the index of every new book on the Ulster conflict while praying for a careless phrase that will allow them to sue.

Yet even the most cautious publisher has to get off the fence when what is hidden so publicly begins to become embarrassingly obvious, to stare you in the face. The first time I took such a step was when Fintan O’Toole began his vivid and scrupulous reports for the Irish Times on the so-called Beef Tribunal in the early nineties. This body was set up to investigate how one of Ireland’s then richest men, Larry Goodman, presided over a scam exporting substandard meat to Iraq. For this operation, which involved the detailed mislabelling of meat, Goodman was given incredibly generous export credit guarantees by the Fianna Fail government led by Charles Haughey. When Saddam Hussein failed to pay up, Goodman didn’t lose a penny. The question of who knew what was going on – who saw and bothered to register what they were looking at – was, as ever in Ireland, hotly contested. It was a huge political scandal, the first of many.

O’Toole was a brilliant essayist, cultural commentator and drama critic – his superb biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Johnston were yet to come – and sending him to cover this numbingly boring tribunal seemed like despatching James Wood to write about the inquiry into the third runway at Heathrow. But O’Toole had asked for this assignment: he saw its importance in exposing the way power and influence worked in Ireland. He wrote Meanwhile Back at the Ranch in a few months, a burning indictment of the system that had enabled the fraud.

I remember sitting at a dinner for the nominees of the Irish Times Literature Prizes beside Conor Brady, the then editor of the paper, who passionately admired Fintan’s work. When I mentioned that I was publishing the book – which touched on Haughey, his successor Albert Reynolds and other big fish in the stagnant pool of Irish power – Brady told me with great emphasis that I was taking a huge risk. ‘These are people who will spend a hundred pounds to take a penny off you’, he said. This was the received wisdom from the school of hard knocks. Few knew better how determined ‘these people’ could be. I spent some sleepless nights after that. Random House, for which I then worked, had an extreme aversion to libel risk.

But Fintan was very careful. Everything was sourced in evidence to the tribunal. A very clever lawyer who’s now a judge of the Irish Supreme Court read the manuscript for us as a pro-bono gesture to helping let more light into the murk. We published, the book became a best seller in Ireland and we waited for the legal letters. None came.

The second time I decided to step into an unsafe Irish area was in the tragic case of Eamon Collins. He was a low-level IRA man – the ‘intelligence officer’ of the Newry IRA – who had through his work engineered the murders of seven people. He had never pulled a trigger or planted a bomb, but he tracked targets and set them up. One of his victims was a colleague of his in the Customs Service, where he had his day job. Eamon had been arrested after other members of his unit had helped the South Armagh IRA in a mortar attack on Newry RUC station that killed nine officers. He was interrogated, manhandled a little, stressed and cracked. He talked and talked, and became briefly a supergrass, a pariah to the IRA. But then he was worked on patiently by those who came to visit him, and he withdrew his evidence. At his trial the judge, sitting without a jury, decided that the RUC evidence against him was tainted and the self-confessed conspirator in seven killings walked free.

Despite his change of heart, for most of his former comrades he was a ‘tout’, an informer, unreliable at best and at worst a traitor. He couldn’t take the ostracism. He had given his all, in his mind, for the cause of Irish freedom and now he was being treated like shit. So he started writing down what he had done, obsessive descriptions of his operations and his comrades, a weird mixture of gloating triumph, admiration for the hard men he had encountered – Eamon himself was a very small man with a desperate need to assert his toughness – and remorse for the people he had helped kill and bereave. He found his way to a TV production company and a diligent, patient researcher called Mick McGovern. They made a film, confessional and disturbing, and Eamon wanted to write a book with Mick’s help.

Until then no IRA man had given an honest, raw account of what his or her trade actually involved. Gerry Adams’s memoirs were masterpieces of sentimental obfuscation, and the novels of his cheery and ruthless sidekick Danny Morrison were even worse. Eamon Collins’s story was full of nauseating self-exculpation, self pity and bravado, but it was also relentlessly honest, packed with convincingly messy and squalid details about the stakeouts, the safe houses and weapons, and also about the cruel ineptitude of these part time guerrillas in a small northern town who couldn’t help fucking up: they killed a young boy in a bomb explosion because they gave inadequate warning, and a supposed RUC man who was in fact an elderly retired clerk. They occasionally got lucky, killing an actual armed policeman, narrowly missing a patrol of Royal Marines.

By the time Eamon found his way to me, two dozen publishers in these islands had turned him down. He was not a nice man. There was a demented, morally obtuse and childish quality about him, a lust for violence that came out even in his expressions of regret for what he had done. But he was driven to lay it all bare, and for me this was the first breath of truth about the reality of a dirty war from inside the group that was mainly responsible for prolonging it. Random House took a different view. The house was not yet the publisher by appointment to the court of Tony Blair, but by 1995 it was going that way, and sponsoring the memoirs of an unconvicted killer and terrorist would make for ‘very bad PR’, in the words of my otherwise supportive boss. And because Eamon was naming names, or barely disguised names, the cold lick of libel could be felt in all our discussions about the book.

Pressures like these, and the sheer boredom of working for a very large organization, made me move to Granta in 1995. Rea Hederman, the proprietor of Granta and the NYRB, had been a great newspaper editor in Mississippi and believed in publishing the truth and taking reasonable risks to achieve that aim. When Killing Rage was published, it was received pretty much as I’d hoped it would be, though we were denounced by Kevin Myers for pandering to obscenity. The obscenity was part of the point, and readers got it. The book has sold nearly 150,000 copies.

We were sued, but none of the libel claims amounted to anything significant, and it was possible to believe that one kind of Irish silence had been broken.

The book ultimately had a terrible outcome for its author. Republican writers attacked it, but none of Eamon’s revelations led to arrests or new trials. The ‘movement’, by then deep in the peace process, could treat the book as a work of ancient history and, as many of the principal actors in that process liked to say then and later, ‘move on’, with official amnesia intact. Eamon was less disposed to move.

He stayed put, against all advice, in the middle of a Republican estate in Newry, walking every day past graffiti denouncing him as a tout. He became something of a commentator for the newspapers. I think he thought that this public work and his successful book made him invulnerable. And he wanted to jerk the tail of the movement that he felt had betrayed him. When Tom Murphy sued the Sunday Times in 1998 over its claim that he was a member of the Army Council and Northern Command, among other things, Eamon gave evidence for the Times that he had met Murphy more than once in his capacity as an IRA leader. As he left the courtroom he called out ‘No hard feelings, Slab!’ Murphy lost his case, and at least half a million pounds. A few months later, after his family had been subjected to terrible bullying and derision for, Eamon Collins was stabbed to death as he walked his dogs early one winter morning on a quiet road outside Newry. No one has ever been charged with his murder.

Gerry Adams denied that the IRA had anything to do with his death, but in a chilling TV interview he declared that ‘that man’ (he refused to use Collins’s name) ‘had many enemies in many places’. This at least was true; and nearly all of them were in Adams’s party.

In the years since, much of what Irish people knew about their society has at last became sayable. Brave campaigners forced out the truth about the regime in the reformatories and Magdalene laundries and industrial schools. The sexual abuse of minors by men in positions of trust (not all of them priests) has become an international crisis for the Catholic Church. Charles Haughey, the great untouchable of Irish life, whose circle was considered to be so intricately mired in corruption that none of them would ever talk, had to endure in his final years seeing all his expensive linen being washed in public. Payoffs, kickbacks, overdrafts of half a million provided by compliant banks, enforced ‘donations’ from businessmen, money stuffed into brown envelopes: it was worse and more banal than anyone had ever imagined.

By then the Celtic Tiger was rampaging around the world. What started as a boom led by foreign technology companies and by EU investment seemed to promise a great new start for one of Europe’s most backward countries. That Beef Tribunal was such a big event, after all, because the export of cattle was still the country’s most important single industry in 1990. The Republic contained 3.5 million people and 8 million cattle. By 2000, young people had forgotten about emigration – their parents’ bad dream – and drank in bars staffed by Spanish and Polish immigrants.

A  different kind of hiding in plain sight now became obvious. Instead of investing in technology and education, those with access to capital embarked on a wild property boom that no sober economist should have viewed with anything other than alarm. Any naysayer was denounced as a traitor to the nation’s economic destiny. The government let the boom rip, refusing to regulate insane levels of debt and allowing banks to lend many times their capital to developers speculating on an unstoppable rise in property values.

Fintan O’Toole was one of the very few writers to challenge the official optimism, which had an almost North Korean tone, with paeans to the wisdom of the leaders and moguls. The wealth-creators were those with the capacity to innovate, to build and think big. You were not supposed to ask what was innovatory about a property bubble. When it burst, Fintan wrote Ship of Fools, a blistering polemic hammered out in an answering burst of creative anger. Even then, I had to listen to cautious Irish voices saying that Faber was being a little too brave for its own good. But there was little risk in telling the truth about this disaster. There was no hiding place for the reality of lost jobs, worthless building sites bought for €50 million an acre, the ghost estates built with tax breaks in desolate parts of Leitrim and Cavan.

Every other publisher who saw the proposal for the book turned down Voices from the Grave, as had happened with Killing Rage. The omertà of the ex-gunmen was again being matched by the caution of publishers. Whatever you say, say nothing: a Northern Irish mantra that has too often become a general rule of behaviour. Many publishers have in fact been very brave about publishing controversial Irish books, but sometimes there is a flinch away from trouble. I can understand this reluctance very well – who needs trouble, in this economic climate? -  but this seemed to me a potentially very important book, making it difficult for certain fictions to sustain themselves in Irish life. In that sense it may be historically significant. In its first week it entered the Irish bestseller list at no. 1, which does not happen very often. It will be interesting to see what effect the book has on our view of the Irish troubles and those who took part in them.