This for me was never going to be an abstract, academic topic. These were my friends and neighbours being killed, or joining the paramilitary organisations and going off (sometimes just a few streets away) to kill others. What kind of approach do you use here to get to the heart of what was going on? My approach was a mixture of reportage and ethnography, with taped interviews which I transcribed and carried out discourse analysis on. The work was highly autobiographical at times. It had to be. I had after all the same early experiences as those that I was writing about. I needed to analyse my own feelings and thoughts about Protestants and Catholics, who or what I was, and consider my own sense of identity and what I might do to maintain it.

Selected Publications

Beattie, G. (2004)
Protestant Boy. Read more >
London: Granta.

Beattie, G. and Doherty, K. (1995)
'I saw what really happened.' The discursive construction of victims and perpetrators in first-hand accounts of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology: 14: 408-433.

Beattie, G. (1992)
We Are the People: Journeys through the Heart of Protestant Ulster. Read more >
London: Heinemann.