Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles

Product Information

Lost Lives: The Stories of men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, (4th Ed.). Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company. ... [] - [Book] Lost Lives is a cinematic, feature-length film inspired by the book of the same name. Written over seven years by five journalists, it is the only book to record the circumstances of every death in the Northern Irish Troubles. Gareth Cross (22 January 2021). "Lost Lives: NI public records office working through archive material relating to rare book on Troubles deaths". The Belfast Telegraph . Retrieved 1 February 2021. Lost Lives is not a documentary but a landmark film delivering a creative, visual response to the book and what it represents.

As a reference book, Lost Lives is indispensable; as a landscape of history painted in fine detail, it is unique. For anyone interested in Northern Ireand - or in the human cost of conflict anywhere - this is destined to be the defining work.'

A reporter from the Irish Times named Kevin Myers was in the middle of it. He was in a house and was shot at by some sniper from a house across the road. A soldier who was down in the street shot at the sniper and the reporter thought that saved his life. He ran down to the street to get away from the madness. He saw three kids throwing stones at the soldiers from an alley between two houses. He told them there was shooting going on and they didn't believe him, they hadn't noticed it. Then the soldier who had just shot at the sniper thought there was another sniper in the alley where the kids were, and fired again. It was also shown on BBC One NI at 21:00 on 16 February 2020, and on BBC Two at 22:00 on 7 March 2020. (It was available on BBC iPlayer for a period after its broadcast.) So – 3,712 death over a period of 40 years. From three year old Jonathan Ball, an English kid killed in Warrington, a town in England, when the IRA planted bombs in litter bins in a shopping mall (a 12 year old boy was also killed in that one) all the way to 91 year old Martha Smylie who was killed by a UDA bomb which was planted at the Imperial Hotel in Belfast. The bomb damaged her old peoples’ home next door and this old lady was badly injured, and died the following day. The film features an extraordinary cast list of leading Irish actors, reading extracts. Featured in the film are Kenneth Branagh, Bríd Brennan, Roma Downey, Adrian Dunbar, Michelle Fairley, Bronagh Gallagher, Brendan Gleeson, Dan Gordon, Ciarán Hinds, Conleth Hill, Susan Lynch, Des McAleer, Martin McCann, Ian McElhinney, Sean McGinley, James Nesbitt, Liam Neeson, Emer O’Connor, Stephen Rea, Judith Roddy, Michael Smiley and Bronagh Waugh.

The film was directed by Michael Hewitt and Dermot Lavery. Hewitt said he felt the actors were not just "lending their voices but giving their voice in support of what the film represents for us" which was "A reminder of the terrible loss, in the hope that we do not repeat the mistakes of our past". Lavery said that the book was "...a riposte, a challenge to all of us, for allowing this terrible loss of life, all this grief and heartache in the place where we lived" and that "You just need to hold the book in your hand and feel the weight of that loss". [5] There may be some who believe that more detail should have been given to provide more context for each death, but had the authors done this the work would have lost it's poignancy and impact as the individual deaths got lost in the political and religious miasma.I’m from the North of Ireland and lived through the troubles. This book a reminder of how abnormal a society I lived in. Excellent reference book I got it when first published 20 years ago. I believe it is now a collectors item. The book and the film do not mention peace talks and negotiations that sought to bring a cessation of the conflict. [5] Robert McCrum in his 2000 review of the book for The Guardian wrote that "It is not fiction, though it is full of heartrending stories, any one of which might provide a gifted writer with the bare bones of a shattering novel. It is not biography, though it is full of ordinary people's lives. It is not really journalism, though it has been compiled by four journalists who may, collectively, have just written the book of their career" and that "There is not space to do justice to the scholarly comprehensiveness, the magisterial evenhandedness or the moral integrity of this astonishing book. Now that the Troubles seem to be over, the publication of Lost Lives is perhaps the great monument for which the bloody history of Northern Ireland has been waiting". [1] Reception [ edit ] Over a seven-year period, the authors examined every death which was directly caused by the troubles. Their research involved interviewing witnesses, scouring published material, and drawing on a range of investigative sources to produce this study. They trace the origins of the conflict from the firing of the first shots, through the carnage of the 1970s and 1980s and up to the republican and loyalist ceasefires and beyond.