Northern Ireland

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.


An eloquently written, finely observed, unflinchingly honest account

Belfast Telegraph