‘The trouble we’ve seen’

Women’s Stories from the North of Ireland is a collection of twenty-one interviews with women who tell of their experiences during the conflict in the North of Ireland. They are stories which are both tragic and defiant. The women speak of great sadness and loss, but they also talk about survival and struggle against threats, state oppression and economic and social marginalisation.

Journalist and author Silvia Calamati has interviewed women in Derry, Portadown, South Armagh and Belfast. She records the experiences of women whose husbands and relatives have been killed, whose children have been mutilated, who have spent years in prison and who have been blinded by plastic bullets. They talk about the financial difficulties and the personal effects of violence on their lives and those of their families. In short, the women speak about ‘the trouble they’ve seen…’

The interviews mainly cover the 1990s and provide an important record of these women’s lives both before and after the 1994 cease fires.

The women are: Eileen Brennan, Emma Groves, Rosaleen Walsh, Mairéad Caraher, Ann Bradley, Clare Dignan, Diane Hamill, Annie Armstrong, Lorraine McKenna, Rosemary Nelson, Padraigín Drinan, Geraldine O’Connor, Bridget Coogan, Martina Anderson, Karen Quinn, Róisín McAliskey, Bernadette Sands, Kathy Hughes, Christine from Derry, Marion McGilloway, Oonagh Marron.

Silvia Calamati is a journalist and writer. Since 1982 she has concerned herself with the Irish question. From 1990 until 1995 she covered Northern Ireland for the Italian weekly Avvenimenti.