Seamus Mallon: A Shared Home PlaceAuthor :
Paperback
Published : Friday 17 May 2019
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Paperback
17 May 2019
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€20.00
Description
Seamus Mallon, Deputy Leader of the SDLP from 1979 to 2001, recounts his happy upbringing in south Armagh as a Catholic in a 90 per cent Protestant village; his turbulent years as a constitutional politician; and his central role in the peace process.
This timely memoir by one of the most prominent Catholic nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland is a primary source for the social and political history of the province, from the onset of the Troubles in the 1960s to the 1990s peace process and beyond. Its authentic voice lends it a vitality and an urgency that illuminates our recent past. In this book, Mallon describes his happy upbringing in South Armagh as a Catholic in a 90% Protestant village; his turbulent years as a constitutional politician in the violent maelstrom of near-civil war, when he was the target of both loyalist violence and republican vilification; and his central role in the peace process as the man who complemented John Hume, doing the 'spade-work' to reach a hard-won deal with the Ulster Unionists. Now in his eighty-third year, he calls for a new beginning in Northern Ireland, based on the ideal that it is a shared home place for all its people, and that Irish unity can only come about through unionist consent. His surprising and innovative proposal, based on a little-known clause in the Good Friday Agreement, shows how this might be implemented.
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