The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee E-Book

Paul Gibson

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 561

Beschreibung

"The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee" is the winner of the WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR and EIR SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR. This powerful and raw memoir tells the story of Eamonn Magee, a world-champion boxer from Ireland who struggled with addiction, violence, and tragedy. A gifted fighter, Eamonn's career was plagued by personal demons and brushes with the law, but he found solace in training his son's boxing career. However, his dreams of a Magee dynasty were shattered when his son was brutally murdered. With unbridled honesty, "The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee" takes readers on a journey of heartache, laughter, and ultimately, redemption. If you're a fan of sports memoirs and true crime books, this is a must-read. Don't miss out on this compelling, unforgettable story of a life lived on the brink. Order your copy today!

Leseprobe

MERCIER PRESS

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Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

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© Paul D. Gibson, 2018

ISBN: 978 1 78117 573 6

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 574 3

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 575 0

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

For Eamonn Jr and

Terrence ‘Doc’ Magee

ACRONYMS

BBBofC: British Boxing Board of Control

BUI: Boxing Union of Ireland

GAA: Gaelic Athletic Association

IABA: Irish Amateur Boxing Association

IBF: International Boxing Federation

INLA: Irish National Liberation Army

IPLO: Irish People’s Liberation Organisation

IRA: Irish Republican Army

NICRA: Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association

OC: Officer Commanding

PIRA: Provisional Irish Republican Army

PPS: Public Prosecution Service

PSNI: Police Service of Northern Ireland

RUC: Royal Ulster Constabulary

UDA: Ulster Defence Association

UDR: Ulster Defence Regiment

UFF: Ulster Freedom Fighters

UVF: Ulster Volunteer Force

WBA: World Boxing Association

WBC: World Boxing Council

WBO: World Boxing Organisation

WBU: World Boxing Union

THE END

14 March 2017

‘He pleaded guilty this morning.’

‘At last.’

‘Aye. Yesterday he was still pushing for manslaughter but he came in this morning and pleaded guilty to the murder charge.’

‘Was he sentenced?’

‘He’s getting life but we’ve to go back to hear the minimum tariff. And I’ll make sure he serves every second of it here and not in Turkey.’

‘Did he look you in the eye?’

‘No. No, he was smirking away yesterday, but he kept his head down today.’

‘It’s over then.’

‘Not ’til I hear for how many years the bastard will rot away in an Irish cell.’

10 June 2017

‘Eamonn.’

‘Paul. Listen, it’s about time I loosened my tongue a bit here.’

‘Okay, mate. Go on.’

‘I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face and I swear to God I don’t know …’ [heavy sobs]

‘Take it easy, mate. Take it easy. What’s happening?’

‘Fourteen years? Fourteen fucking years? For a premeditated murder in cold blood? He was a hitman. He went tooled up. He knew how to use a knife because he’d learnt it in his military service in Turkey. He lay in wait for my son. For his prey. He stabbed his prey in the thigh and the buttock to drop it and then ended his life with two strikes through the lungs. Then he stabbed him some more …’ [more sobs]

‘I’m sorry, Eamonn. Fourteen years is an insult.’

‘Correct. A fucking insult. Someone has done a deal somewhere. But why would anyone help that bastard? He’s wasted two years of everyone’s time and public money. Two years prolonging our agony. Six separate counsels he’s been through. All telling him the same: you’re a murderer – stop with this manslaughter nonsense. He sacked them all. We had a jury sworn in and all at one point ’til he dismissed his counsel and set us back to square one. And now the fucking system helps him out …’

‘It’s a disgrace, mate. Who knows how–’

‘I’m disgusted with them all. I’m disgusted with the PPS who have treated me like dirt from day one. Liaison officers supposed to be helping us and they never answered their phones. I’m disgusted with Judge Treacy. I was delighted when we got him for the trial. I’d have picked him out of a hundred judges cos he’s a tough bastard. And then he hands down fourteen years. That day he got up and walked out of his own courtroom with his head down without even asking for the court to stand. I’ve never seen a judge leave his own courtroom like that. It showed me a deal had been done and he was ashamed of the sentence he’d just handed down. Fuck sake, he gave someone sixteen years the following week for attempted murder.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I’m fucking serious. Sure, I know people have done longer for armed robbery. Judge Stephens, too, in the appeal. They should all be ashamed. My own barrister and counsel couldn’t have done more for me. Working ’til two or three in the morning every night so they were. But I’m disgusted with the whole justice system in this country. They’ve let me down. They’ve let my son down. What fucking justice?’

‘I know, mate.’

[through heavy sobs] ‘What fucking justice?’

PROLOGUE

‘A book?’ the passive-aggressive voice on the other end of the phone answers me incredulously. ‘Listen, I’ve been beaten with baseball bats, I’ve had my throat slashed, I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been exiled out of the country. My family’s been held captive in our home as well. I’ve been shot twice, I’ve been in prison and my son’s just been stabbed to death. Amongst all that, I was the welterweight champion of the world while drinking the bar dry and doing enough coke to kill a small horse every night. My life’s not a book. It’s a fucking movie script.’

These were the first words Eamonn Sean Terrence Magee ever spoke to me. I was sitting in a Madrid car park while he stood in John Breen’s gym on the outskirts of Belfast. I still recall the pressure I felt, the fear that I’d lose him before I ever had him, the creeping sense of panic that I’d caught him on one of his supposedly many off days.

Magee is an alcoholic. More than that, I’d been warned he can be a truculent, temperamental, dangerous, depressive, paranoid alcoholic. I believed I had to time my call wisely. Weekends were likely to be a write-off, for example. Too early or too late on any day of the week may lead to an unfavourable response from the ex-boxer. I reasoned that after a mid-week gym session was probably my best bet. There was every chance he would have turned up for it reeking of the previous night’s excesses, but hopefully he’d sweat and beat enough of it out of his system to be open to my suggestions. Having earlier spoken to Breen, his closest confidant in boxing, I knew that on this day Eamonn was scheduled to work with Marco McCullough ahead of the local featherweight’s November outing in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. A text message from Breen was my cue that it was now or never.

‘I don’t want to talk about all this on the phone,’ Magee decides after a couple of minutes listening to my rambling pitch. ‘Come over here and we’ll sit down face to face and see what happens.’

This is as good as I could have expected. He hasn’t swung the door wide open, but neither has he slammed it shut in my face. The crafty southpaw has left it cautiously ajar so he can get a peek at me before making any definitive decision. I am heading home in a couple of weeks to watch the boxing bill McCullough is on anyway, so we choose the pre-fight weigh-in in the Waterfront Hall for our first physical encounter.

***

I see McCullough first, his soft features pale and drawn from the effects of days of rigorous abstinence to coerce his body down to the nine stone limit. Magee then comes into focus, lurking in the background, partially disguised by a flat cap pulled low and a scarf around his neck behind which he can tuck his chin. Magee’s posture is striking to observe. All the damage, the attacks by blade and bullet and tooth and bat, has been inflicted onto his left side and, perhaps as a result, he now tends to subconsciously tilt his head and lean to the right. But, as always, his visible facial features are the dead giveaways: the flattened and fattened misshapen nose that dominates his countenance, underlined by thin, terse lips that remain pursed through habit to hide his once-missing front teeth. I can instantly pick his weathered and scarred, old-before-its-time face out of a cast of millions. He is an unmistakeable figure in Northern Irish life.

We shake hands, nod a greeting to one another and agree to find a quiet spot after the weigh-in formalities to sit down and discuss my vision for his story.

It would be disingenuous to say Eamonn Magee was ever a hero of mine, but certainly he is someone who has always fascinated me. There is nothing a boxing fan loves more than a hometown hero to support, and I am no different. I am a handful of years too young to remember Barry McGuigan in his prime, but I was there riding the mid-90s Celtic wave across the Irish Sea with the rest of them as Steve Collins gate-crashed the golden era of British super middleweight boxing to dethrone Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank. Collins is from Dublin, of course, but Ireland is a small island and we get behind our own regardless of exact place of birth.

By the time the Celtic Warrior had hung up his gloves, Belfast’s Wayne McCullough was a world champion, but his decision to relocate to the US left him out of sight and somewhat out of mind. As the new millennium arrived, the likes of Damaen Kelly and Brian Magee were quality professionals performing admirably, but they fell short in truly capturing my imagination. I needed something deeper than decent ring performances to grab onto.

As an extremely individual pursuit, boxing cannot rely upon the rabid tribal allegiances of team sports for its lifeblood. For that reason, solo sports tend to be more dramatic by nature and, like all good theatre, the success of the storyline is dependent upon the audience connecting with the portrayal of a character and his foe. It is largely irrelevant what emotion forges this connection – love, empathy, loathing, awe, whatever. All that matters is that enough people feel enough of something to want to watch an athlete in the boxing ring, or on the tennis court, or on the golf course and so on, over and over again. Magee achieved that, although to this day it is difficult to put my finger on exactly how he managed it. He has that aura particular to geniuses and cult figures that demands you pay attention to even the most insignificant moments of their existence. The sense of unpredictability that surrounds those who live their lives on a knife edge, coupled with Magee’s constant underlying dark and volatile character, combines to convert the routine or mundane into a potential spectacle. He holds a magnetism that appears to attract trouble and tragedy in equal measure, with fleeting flashes of glory occasionally interspersing the two. Gifted and flawed: two characteristics guaranteed to produce a compelling subject.

***

I had expected the meeting place of which we earlier spoke to be somewhere either within the confines of the Waterfront Hall itself or alongside it in one of the neighbouring cafés or, much more likely, bars. As it turns out, Magee slipped out of range as soon as it was confirmed his fighter and their opponent had made weight, and decanted to a bar on the other side of the city centre.

‘I’m in Madden’s,’ he says when I call looking for him. ‘C’mon over here, it’s a quiet spot.’

Madden’s Bar is tucked away on the corner of Marquis Street and Berry Street where the black taxis lie waiting to ferry cargo out of the centre heading north or west. These black immigrants from the boroughs of London were introduced in the late 1960s for their ability to rumble over the remains of smouldering barricades and turn on a sixpence to dart down a side street and avoid the epicentre of a riot or disturbance. With the bus service regularly beaten into submission by the violence of those desolate decades, a black cab was often the only means of escaping the city centre as night fell. As with everything in the province at that time, the service was segregated, with separate associations for Catholic and Protestant drivers and passengers. It was felt to be safer that way but, of course, it also made it easier to identify what community a particular taxi was from or where it was headed, so it wasn’t long before the dark vehicles became prey to terrorist assassination gangs.

Today the old hackney carriages enjoy a much safer existence on the streets of Belfast. One of the many fruits borne by the peace process has been the emergence of curious tourists to the Northern Irish capital and who better to lead them on a tour of the city, focusing on sectarian flashpoints and the gable-wall murals that tell a version of the story, than a wizened old taxi driver and his trusty black cab?

Madden’s Bar has enjoyed a similar renaissance. It has always been a nationalist establishment but only since the turn of the century has it felt totally comfortable nailing its colours to the mast. A large mural depicting an old Irish fiddler playing at a table covered with pints of Guinness and prints of Irish language publications now proudly adorns the outside wall. Fáilte Isteach, or welcome inside, underscores the artwork and on either side of the front door An ceol traidisiúnta (and an pionta) is fearr sa chathair lets Gaelic speakers know the best traditional music and pint in the city can be located within. The Irish proverb Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste (broken Irish is better than clever English) is another prominent and unambiguous sign that there is more green, white and orange than red, white and blue in this old watering hole’s DNA.

Outsiders who visit today for a pint of Harp, a bowl of Irish stew and a traditional Irish music session may wonder why there would ever have been any fuss about such a public preponderance of Celtic lettering, but those who lived through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s know differently. Scores have been murdered in sectarian attacks on the streets in and around Madden’s over the years. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) killed Roman Catholics on Marquis Street itself, as well as on neighbouring Millfield, North Queen Street and in Smithfield Market. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), meanwhile, shot and killed British soldiers on Berry Street and Chapel Lane, and murdered a Protestant civilian on Millfield. But the attack which resonates deepest with Madden’s and its customers took place on 5 June 1976.

That evening, five members of the UVF’s Shankill Battalion pulled up outside the Chlorane Bar on Gresham Street, four minutes’ walk from Madden’s, in a hijacked black taxi. One of them was Robert ‘Basher’ Bates, a leading member of Lenny Murphy’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang, whose policy of abducting, torturing and murdering randomly chosen Catholics terrorised the nationalist community for almost a decade. The driver waited outside with the engine running as the four masked and armed passengers alighted and entered the bar. Once inside they told the stunned drinkers to divide into groups according to religion. Unusually for a bar in central Belfast in the 1970s, both Catholics and Protestants frequented the Chlorane and so the terrified customers were at this stage unsure as to the particular ecclesiastical persuasion of these killers. In the confusion a couple tried to make a run for it and all hell broke loose. When the gunfire died down and the murderers made their escape along North Street and back into the loyalist Shankill, five bodies lay lifeless on the bloodied barroom floor. Three were Catholic and two were Protestant. Ten days later any trace of the bar was forever destroyed in a bomb attack. The Chlorane was probably chosen for the ease with which the attackers were able to escape but it could just as easily have been Madden’s.

Now, seventeen years on from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that, theoretically at least, decommissioned the paramilitaries and brought an uneasy peace to the province, such a threat to innocent patrons in a bar like Madden’s is basically zero. The Northern Irish are famed for their long memories but just in case the punters have one too many and lose sight of how far the city has come, a telling remnant from the past greets all who approach Madden’s threshold. A buzzer on the door still alerts bar staff to someone waiting outside and allows them to check their identities and intentions via a CCTV camera and inside screen. It is one of the few city-centre bars that continues with this security measure.

As I wait for my Guinness to settle and then be topped off, an American couple standing at the bar, visibly emboldened by the effects of an afternoon supping a selection of Irish nectar, finally musters up the courage to enquire as to why such caution is still deemed necessary. The barman gives a masterful response that finds the perfect balance between granting the tipsy visitors sufficient reassurance that they have nothing to worry about and insinuating enough about the area’s dangerous past to send them home with a famous story to tell about their day in a real, hard Belfast drinking den.

Magee is at the other end of the bar when I enter, still wrapped up in his coat, scarf and flat-cap ensemble, finishing off a pint of Harp. He pays for my pint, orders himself another, and we move to the corner for a bit of privacy.

Madden’s is a dimly lit, claustrophobic, wooden box of a place, a comfortable coffin serving beer and whiskey. Photographs of revellers both young and old, local and international, now plaster the walls alongside posters promoting Irish folk festivals and vintage advertisements for products as varied as St Bruno tobacco, Diamond dyes and Bass ale. The cluttered bar is compact but stuffed with all the spirits and stout required for a decent night out. The foreign banknotes pinned to the wall above the platoons of liquor bottles are testament to the range of nationalities that have sampled the liquid delights within.

Wooden benches line the wooden panelled walls, with wooden chairs around wooden tables peppering the floor space. The only thing that isn’t wooden is the craic guaranteed when the pints are flowing and the live music sparks up and grows outwardly and organically from a designated corner. Please make these seats available to musicians after 9 p.m. is written on the backrest of a bench. There’s a hierarchy in these traditional pubs and a talented vocalist, fiddler or bodhrán player will always hold more sway than most. There’ll be regular performers, but anyone with the ability to keep up is welcome to sit down with their instrument and play along. Some nights a session will begin with just a voice and a tin whistle and end with five or six times that number united as one within the controlled chaos that is live traditional Irish music in a heaving, bouncing, beer-soaked bar.

We are too early for a shindig on this afternoon, however. When we sit down at a table upon which You don’t miss the water until the well runs dry is inscribed in Gaelic, there are no more than a handful of souls in the pub as a CD of Irish rebel songs plays softly in the background.

I quickly begin my pre-prepared spiel. I’m from the other side of town but essentially the same community. I’m nine years younger but also lived through the Troubles. I’m a boxing fan, I understand the sport. I’m a good writer, a good storyteller. I’ve the connections to get us a deal and do this properly. I’m passionate about this, willing to drop everything to focus on the project until it is complete. Basically, I’m the man for the job of telling your life story, Eamonn.

He listens intently and then begins with a warning. His is not what anyone would describe as a normal life, he says. He’s going to tell me everything, the truth and nothing but the truth: that is how he puts it with more than a gentle nod towards his long and chequered relationship with the judicial system. I’m going to hear things that will shock and offend me. I’m going to hear things that could put me, him and the subjects of the anecdotes at risk from the police and, more worryingly, other forces that still patrol and control the streets of Belfast. He asks me if I take anything and from the look in his eye I know he’s not referring to half a sugar in my morning coffee. A few lines of cocaine with his mates will be the only way to get all the best stories out of them, he continues. It’s clear he wants to get a few things out in the open immediately so there are no surprises further down the line.

In truth, I am treating this as nothing more than a brief meet and greet, so I’m reluctant to start talking about any of the peaks and troughs of Magee’s life and career. I want to go in prepared for those, armed and ready to delve as deep as I can and learn as much as possible from Eamonn in the process. But he’s not really a man for small talk and his life rarely dabbles in the mundane that the rest of us recognise as daily existence, so we inevitably end up skimming over some of the more gruesome or glorious moments from the past forty-four years.

His narrow eyes dampen noticeably when I ask how he got through the recent memorial for his murdered son, Eamonn Junior.

‘It’s not easy,’ is his understated response, ‘and it’s never going to be.’

It’s a feeling he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, he says, and he has a few of those. He tells me about a poem someone composed for Eamonn Jr that would break my heart. His son was an angel, he says; nothing like his old man.

We talk a little about his boxing, how his slick style contrasted so starkly with the thuggish image he has always carried as a violent street fighter. He describes himself as a natural, clever fighter and his eyes sparkle briefly as he talks about spying a flaw in Jon Thaxton’s footwork early in their 2002 bout. Magee noticed how, when he circled and manoeuvred the Englishman around the ring, Thaxton was prone to crossing his legs for a split second when forced into a particular position.

‘I only had to wait,’ Magee tells me with a sly grin, ‘and then bang in the sixth round. Boxing is a game of chess, you see.’

The Thaxton victory led to the biggest moment of his career, fighting against Ricky Hatton. I still can’t watch the fight without feeling frustrated that he couldn’t finish the Mancunian in the second stanza when, having already been knocked down in the first, Hatton was buzzed again and in serious trouble. Magee famously left the arena to smoke a cigarette barely an hour before his ring-walk that night and I feel compelled to ask whether he has any regrets about how he lived his life between fights – a lifestyle that, it’s fair to say, may have adversely affected his career.

‘I don’t regret anything and I wouldn’t change a thing,’ comes the immediate smiling reply.

I don’t believe him, but I say nothing.

‘My life has been great craic,’ he concludes with another grin, but this one is unmistakably tinged with sadness.

My remark was an obvious reference to the booze and women and drugs and fags. He laughs when admitting that his old manager, the late Mike Callahan, would traverse the city depositing notes behind bars warning publicans not to serve Eamonn in the lead-up to a fight. But his reluctance to travel within the postcode of the straight and narrow had much more serious consequences than an inability to finish off a struggling foe in the ring.

He brings up the punishment shooting by the IRA himself. The Night of the Long Knives is how it was known in north Belfast: a famous occasion in 1992 when the republican paramilitary group handed down their own unique brand of justice to known drug dealers in the area. Thirteen were targeted that night and twenty-year-old Magee was one of them. Only the intervention of his father, who pleaded with the local IRA commander that his son was fighting for the Irish title in a couple of months, saved Eamonn from a bullet through his kneecap. That injury would almost certainly have ended any hopes of a boxing career. Instead he received a flesh wound to his calf for his troubles. He won that Irish title, by the way, fighting with a bandaged leg and wearing white socks that gradually reddened with his own seeping blood as the night went on.

The IRA attack is just one of the many contradictions that swirl around the ill-informed myth of Eamonn Magee. In general, sport in Northern Ireland is just another means by which segregation is maintained by those with a vested interest in keeping society divided and conquered. Yet, despite its roots in the working-class districts most embittered and affected by the Troubles, boxing has only ever united the two communities in the province. From Barry McGuigan and his dove-of-peace shorts, to Wayne McCullough carrying the Irish tricolour at the 1992 Olympic Games, any sectarian leanings have always been left at the gym door.

It has often been said that Eamonn Magee never got that memo. There is a belief that he carried his political baggage with him everywhere he went and, in exacerbating any underlying nationalistic tensions that existed, proved more divisive than unifying throughout his career. Those who hold this belief point to his father’s republican past and Magee’s own youthful dalliance with political violence. They point to run-ins with the law, allegedly laced with distinct sectarian undertones. They point to his in-your-face Irish nationalism at a time when a more restrained approach was urged.

I knew all this, but I had always sensed that the truth, as is its wont, was a more complex affair. If Magee was indeed a dyed-in-the-wool militant republican, why had the IRA shot and later exiled him? If he really was a dangerous bigot, how did his lifelong friendships with Protestants like McCullough or proud Englishmen like Hatton develop? If green, white and orange boxing attire truly defined him, what did it mean when he fought with the red hand of Ulster on his chest as an amateur representing his province?

The other topic Magee raises is the financial upside of spilling his heart onto the pages of my book. It soon becomes clear that the ex-fighter is still in possession of a rapier-sharp business mind. He has his own ideas for a title, release date, newspaper serialisation, a sequel and even a movie.

‘Did you see that Fighter film?’ he asks me. ‘They made a movie about Micky Ward and the fella isn’t fit to lace my boots.’

His eyes sparkle in such moments. As they do when he talks about beating ‘the ex-British soldier and Plastic Paddy, Shea Neary’, taking the piss out of a visiting Guardian newspaper journalist, or telling the promoter Barney Eastwood to shove his offer of 500 quid for ten victories up his hole. But the moments are fleeting and Magee’s default mood appears to be a mixture of pensive sadness with an undercurrent of bitterness. He is always said to have a chip on his shoulder, too, but no one has ever identified who axed it into place. I haven’t even begun to figure him out, have barely scratched the surface, but I’m hooked.

As night falls we rise to leave. The alcohol has taken its effect and dulled my senses somewhat, but it looks like we have a deal, sealed with a handshake and a silent acknowledgement that our word will be our bond going forward.

‘So where do we start then?’ he asks me as I put on my coat – he never took his off.

I had anticipated this question and have my response ready. While reading between the lines of an old Irish Independent piece on Magee, I thought I discovered the key to exploring this flawed and complicated man when the article touched very briefly on Eamonn’s formative years and ‘the scourge of internment’. This, I believed, was where his story must begin.

‘Internment,’ I say. ‘I’d like to begin with Operation Demetrius and internment.’

‘You’ll need to speak to my mother then.’

1 ARDOYNE ON FIRE

In the little streets of Belfast

In the dark of early morn

British soldiers came a-running

Wrecking little homes with scorn

Hear the sobs of crying children

Dragging fathers from their bed

Watch the scene as helpless mothers

Watch the blood fall from their heads

‘Men behind the Wire’, written by Long Kesh internee Paddy McGuigan

I’m too polite to ask but some swift mental arithmetic places Isobel Magee at around seventy years of age. For a woman who has been through the trials and travails she has, who has survived the stresses and strains of mothering Eamonn Magee for forty-four long years, she looks remarkably fit and well. Eamonn is her baby boy, the youngest of four brothers, and, as they stand side by side in the kitchen of her house on the same street in which she has lived for over four decades, there is a definite resemblance in the facial features, particularly when the eyes narrow in preparation for a sly or coy grin. Such an expression soon appears when Isobel confesses that if this was her book it would be entitled The Thorn in My Side. A warm maternal laugh quickly follows as she grabs hold of Eamonn’s arm, turns my way and, making direct eye contact for the first time, assures me that she loves her last-born with a passion. She holds my gaze as if to emphasise the point, to ensure I have taken it in. I sense that the explicit avowal of unconditional love for her son is a vital caveat Isobel wishes to declare before she opens up on some of the darker aspects of her family’s life. It feels almost like a warning to brace myself.

Eamonn is here this morning simply to make an introduction and then leave the two of us alone. It is an approach we will repeat for virtually every person I meet and speak with to learn his story. A lot of what I need to hear is difficult for the interviewee to say and might be even tougher for Eamonn to listen to. Everyone is just more comfortable this way. He embraces his mother and departs with a final, solemn instruction. ‘Tell him everything,’ he says. ‘Don’t hold anything back.’

Now that it is just the two of us, I suddenly become very conscious that, having just met this great-grandmother, I now need to ask her to dredge up a very private, sensitive and painful past; that I’m going to pry and probe and ask questions that will force her to recollect events that in an ideal world she would never, ever have to think about again. More than that, I’m going to record every word she says and later put it in a book for the whole world to read. I feel quite tense, unsure of exactly where or how to begin, wishing I had more time to simply get to know Eamonn, his family and friends before I march into their homes and shine a naked, unforgiving light on their shared histories.

But the nerves I feel prove to be mere butterflies flittering harmlessly about the pit of my stomach and the warmth of a mouthful of freshly brewed tea soon calms their wings. In contrast, as I settle into a chair and fiddle with my dictaphone, I note that Isobel is clasping her hands together as if in prayer in a futile attempt to mask their tremoring. The anxiety coursing through her veins at the thought of the conversation ahead is clear. The hands soon part to jolt a Lambert & Butler from its silver box. She smokes two in quick succession during the next ten minutes. Isobel later describes herself as a nervous but strong woman and I can’t improve upon that incredibly self-aware summation of her character.

The initial rapid nicotine intake turns out to be nothing more than a nerve-settler and the remainder of the pack is left untouched for over an hour as we become more comfortable in each other’s presence. Contrary to Eamonn’s instructions, Isobel does hold back at the outset. But by the time she is calmly enjoying a third smoke, we are returning to explore and embellish answers to questions originally judged too delicate for full disclosure. I cannot blame her for the former response and I am eternally grateful for the latter.

Isobel is my most accurate lens through which to view Eamonn’s formative years on earth. She is key to setting the scene and beginning the journey to understanding this dangerously flawed man. I need her memory if I am going to get a true sense of what life was like for her kid growing up in north Belfast in the early 1970s.

I was another mother’s kid growing up in east Belfast in the early 1980s, but the trip across town and, more importantly, the change in decade ensured I was raised in a totally different world. By Troubles standards, I had it easy. I still remember a British Army checkpoint at the end of my street, demanding some form of identification from my father upon arrival and departure, one squaddie brandishing a torch in my face in the back of the car while his companion quizzed my dad on his business that particular evening. They were generally polite but rarely friendly. I remember a few years later throwing apples at the same checkpoint before running giddily for cover on nearby waste ground. I remember army helicopters hovering for hours on end through the night, blazing their spotlights onto the streets and keeping me from sleep. I remember sleepovers with friends when we’d hear a bomb explode in the darkness, then bet each other the size in pounds of Semtex used and the exact location of the blast. I remember queueing in the rain outside shops in the city centre alongside my mother or grandmother for what seemed like an eternity because the handbag of every single woman was checked for incendiary devices before they could enter. Many must have slipped through the net for I also remember my mother dashing out the door to pick up a bargain in a shop advertising a bomb- or smoke-damage sale. I remember meeting my father when he finished work and the security gates were closing around the city centre, leaving it an empty and haunted ghost town by 6 p.m. I remember walking home in my Catholic school uniform and a motorbike cruising along beside me while from behind a darkened visor I was warned to take a different route home or the UVF would burn my school to the ground with all us wee Fenian bastards locked inside. I remember death. I remember a primary-school classmate being absent for a few weeks because her father opened the family’s front door one night and was shot in the face by a member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). I remember a friend being called out of class and sent home because the bookmakers at the end of his street, which his family members frequented, had been sprayed with Ulster Defence Association (UDA) bullets, leaving five dead and nine wounded. I remember seeing another girl from the year above me in school pictured on the front of the Irish News, crying uncontrollably at the graveside of her father, who was being buried as the latest victim of mindless, sectarian violence. Despite these memories, like I say, I know I had little to complain about by Northern Ireland Troubles standards.

By any standards, anywhere in the world, Eamonn Magee did not have it so easy. In truth, not many elite prizefighters do. It is just too tough a profession to enter voluntarily and excel at if your upbringing ensures alternative career options are on the table. If you have not become accustomed early on to life being a struggle, it is unlikely your soul will have been blessed, or cursed, with the resolve to do what it takes in the gym and ring to succeed at the very top of professional boxing. But everything in life is relative and, even in the company of his fighting peers, the narrative of Eamonn’s childhood stands out as a particularly extreme version of the oft-told, ghetto-kid-against-the-odds, pugilistic chronicle. The boxes of poverty, adversity, substance abuse, an incarcerated father and problems with authority are all ticked with a bold, inedible marker pen, but what sets Magee apart is the ethno-political conflict that raged around the young fighter and consumed the community in which he grew up.

Magee was born and raised within the epicentre of Belfast’s sectarian violence in the Ardoyne, a small republican enclave of barely 5,000 people, surrounded on all sides by the loyalist strongholds of the Crumlin Road, Glenbryn and the Torrens estate. It is what is known in Belfast as an interface area: a drop of green in a perilous lake of red, white and blue, separated from geographical neighbours by so-called peace walls, the barbed-wire-topped barriers that scar the city. The isolation naturally fosters a siege mentality, a belief that it is them against the world and they must fight to survive. The frequently dark reality of life within the north Belfast district during the Troubles proved that belief to be well placed more often than not.

By fluke of birth he arrived jabbing and hooking on 13 July 1971. The date gives rise to the family joke that his mother deliberately held him in her womb for longer than nature wished to ensure he was not born on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the most celebrated date on the Orange Order’s calendar. On this day the Protestant fraternity remembers King William III’s 1690 Battle of the Boyne victory over the Catholic King James II, which ushered in a Protestant Ascendancy on the island. Orange Order marches through the streets of Northern Ireland continue to heighten tensions and test cross-community relations every summer, no more so than in the Ardoyne, where a contentious parade along the Crumlin Road meets with annual resistance from local Catholic residents who find the music, banners and garb of the Orangemen sectarian, supremacist and unnecessarily triumphalist. The row of shops where the protestors gather and prepare to exchange insults and missiles with the passing marchers lies a stone’s throw from the Magee family home.

In 2015, when I began this book, parade-inspired trouble in the area was regarded as being relatively tame. An Orange Lodge spokesman was charged with two counts of attempted murder after ploughing his car into a crowd of Ardoyne locals in broad daylight, seriously injuring a sixteen-year-old girl. A police officer lost most of his ear after being struck with a piece of flying masonry and twenty-three of his colleagues in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) also required hospital treatment. Meanwhile, residents on both sides of the Crumlin Road boarded up their windows and hunkered down as youthful, alcohol-fuelled riots raged through the night. It is quite shocking that this is what passes as tame in north Belfast, but three or four decades ago, when Eamonn would have been the teenage rioter with a petrol bomb in one hand and a bottle of cider in the other, the situation on the ground was a damn sight worse. Back then the Ardoyne was a community at best under siege and at worst engaged in all-out guerrilla warfare. How it found itself in such trauma and turmoil will forever be disputed by the two sides, but for the locals who bore the brunt of it, it was simply the inevitable outcome of fifty years of Protestant, unionist misrule.

***

The state of Northern Ireland was only born when the Emerald Isle was partitioned by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. The vast bulk of the Catholic-dominated country’s Protestant community was embedded in the northeast of the island and, after some nimble gerrymandering, the six counties of Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh were cordoned off to form a critical mass for the desired demographic. Nobody was under any illusions as to the raison d’être of the fledgling nation and its new government, but James Craig, the Ulster Unionist Party leader and first prime minister of Northern Ireland, hammered home the fact just in case: ‘All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State,’ he declared in the Northern Ireland House of Commons, based in Stormont, before later describing the objective as being ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. This most certainly was not a céad míle fáilte to the significant minority of the newly formed country.

The problem from the outset was that the size of the Protestant majority never really matched the vehemence of the government’s rhetoric. A census in 1926 revealed that the various Protestant denominations made up only sixty-two per cent of the population and by 1971 that figure had decreased to just fifty-three per cent. Despite those statistics, in 1921 unionists managed to secure sixty-seven per cent of the popular vote and seventy-seven per cent of the parliamentary seats on offer. Fifty years later, their share of the vote had dropped to forty-eight per cent, yet they still maintained sixty-nine per cent of the elected representatives. That absolute and seemingly unshakeable unionist majority at Stormont facilitated the creation of a framework that – through institutionalised discrimination against the Catholic community in areas such as electoral systems, employment, housing, policing and education – helped maintain a Protestant dominance of life in Northern Ireland for well over half a century.

The inevitable Catholic or nationalist discontent at the reality they faced never abated, but for the first four or five decades it was, by and large, kept simmering just below the surface. The 1922 Special Powers Act was crucial here, providing the authorities with a range of draconian powers with which they could swiftly quell any hint of dissent towards the established status quo. Then, in the mid-1960s, the built-up sense of oppression finally broke for air and manifested as a civil rights movement, modelled along the lines of counterparts in the USA, who had been battling racial segregation and discrimination for over a decade. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) emerged in 1967 and set about campaigning for electoral reform, fair allocation of government jobs and council housing, the repeal of the Special Powers Act and the disbandment of the hated and feared Ulster Special Constabulary, otherwise known as the B-Specials. It was a protest organisation whose modus operandi focused on marches, pickets, sit-ins and non-violent civil-disobedience measures in an effort to raise global awareness of the situation in Northern Ireland and pressure the Stormont administration into reforms. As it turned out, their wait for international headlines was not a long one.

By 1968 the country was an open tinderbox beneath a shower of sparks as paranoia on both sides of the political and religious divide grew daily; it was only a matter of time before the whole place went up in flames. When a civil rights march on 5 October 1968 in Derry was violently broken up by baton-wielding Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers, the jarring footage was beamed into television sets around the world. The forty-eight-year-old state stood on the edge of a dangerous precipice: unfortunately, it blindly jumped.

The unionist prime minister of the day, Terence O’Neill, promised limited reforms that only served to enrage his own electorate and exasperate the majority of nationalists who expected so much more than what was on offer. A civil rights march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, organised by the student-run People’s Democracy, met a wall of resistance at Burntollet Bridge and sparked days of serious rioting in the nationalist Bogside of Derry. In March and April loyalist paramilitaries attacked electricity and water infrastructure installations and blamed their republican rivals in the hope that it would cause O’Neill to halt his paltry reforms. That these two groups effectively marched and bombed to display their disgust at the exact same appeasing measures shows just how far apart the two sides sat in the polarising conflict. Disillusioned, O’Neill resigned in April and the cycle of violence between Catholic, Protestant and state forces accelerated.

Some say the Troubles began that aforementioned autumnal 1968 day in Derry. Others predate it a couple of years to May 1966 and the re-emergence of the UVF on the streets of Belfast. For many, the so-called ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in August 1969 – when Derry saw three days of intense rioting between nationalists, unionists and the RUC following a Protestant Apprentice Boys parade along the city’s walls – was the definitive spark. Regardless, when the British Army began patrolling Belfast and Derry in the immediate aftermath of the Bogside unrest – a move named Operation Banner – it was clear that Northern Ireland was stumbling into uncharted and dangerous territory.

The Brits, as they were known, seemed to believe they would be in and, as soon as law and order had been restored, back out and home again. We now know it was the longest continual deployment in British military history, lasting thirty-eight long years. More than 300,000 army personnel were posted to the province before Operation Banner was finally wound down in July 2007. At one point in the mid-1970s there were over 27,000 soldiers stationed in the province. To put that figure in some context, the number of pairs of boots on the ground during the Afghanistan and Balkan conflicts never surpassed 10,000.

Ironically, given how history was to unfold, the majority of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland actually welcomed the British soldiers, famously serving tea and toast to the squaddies manning nationalist street corners in the north and west of the city. Fear of attack from loyalists was then the dominating emotion and so a belief that the army would protect innocents from the escalating mob violence that erupted when the sun went down was initially prevalent. For the people of Eamonn Magee’s Ardoyne district, that belief proved wholly unfounded.

For three nights in the middle of August 1969, Belfast saw the very worst of the sectarian rioting to date. On Wednesday 13 August, NICRA demonstrations against the heavy-handed police actions in Derry were infiltrated by the IRA and turned violent. RUC stations on Hastings Street and the Springfield Road were attacked with stones and petrol bombs and when the police responded by sending Shorland and Humber armoured cars onto the streets, the vehicles came under fire from rifle shots and hand grenades. All over Belfast residents began hastily erecting barricades to demarcate an already segregated city along stark, sectarian lines, while local priests promised to ring chapel bells as an alert that their parish was under attack.

The following night the violence intensified and flooded into the Ardoyne. Loyalist mobs rioted outside Holy Cross Catholic Church before crossing the Crumlin Road to attack the nationalist homes of Brookfield, Herbert, Butler and Hooker Streets in what is known as Old Ardoyne. As RUC armoured trucks smashed through the makeshift barriers the locals had hoped would keep them safe, petrol bombs were lobbed over the police officers’ heads and onto Catholic roofs and gardens. There was no huge IRA presence in the Ardoyne at that time, and what existed was conspicuous by its absence as the flames spread, so local men rallied together in an attempt to defend the neighbourhood. Ex-servicemen among their number dusted off old shotguns and fired towards the invaders: the response was RUC Sterling submachine-gun fire rattling down the narrow streets, killing two and wounding ten more.

Sammy McLarnon had just returned to his home on Herbert Street after helping his neighbours extinguish one of the many fires that were gutting houses in the area. As he and his pregnant wife debated whether to risk running up the road to leave their two children, aged two and one, with his mother, three RUC bullets came through the window. One entered Sammy’s skull and, while his eldest son looked on, the blood and life drained out of him onto the living-room floor. The twenty-seven-year-old bus conductor was the Ardoyne’s first official victim of the Troubles.

Barely an hour later, a second Ardoyne life was claimed. As spiralling petrol bombs lit up the night sky and scorched the earth where they shattered, Michael Lynch and a friend sheltered in a doorway on Butler Street, fearing for their lives. They were playing no role in the riots and their only wish was to make it home to Strathroy Park, about four streets away. Finally they made their move and ran, ducking across the road in the direction of Elmfield Street. A high-velocity bullet, fired from close range, pierced Michael’s chest and he was dead before his body came to rest on the cold footpath.

It was a similar story on Friday night, with the British Army still nowhere to be seen in the Ardoyne. In a variation of the old cowboy, circling-the-wagons trick, locals hijacked fifty buses, parked them at the various entry points to the district and set them ablaze. Twenty people were injured by shotgun blasts that night and the official government investigation into the riots, the Scarman Report, later noted that an RUC armoured vehicle sat idly by and watched as a loyalist mob set Brookfield Street alight, house by house. In response, republican gunmen shot dead David Linton, an innocent man walking along the Crumlin Road and the first Protestant civilian to lose his life in the Troubles.

To celebrate their successes, loyalist lyricists quickly penned a vindictive song that they sang to the tune of Johnny Cash’s 1961 ode to Ireland, ‘Forty Shades of Green’. They named it ‘The Night We Burned Ardoyne’ and it soon became a favourite of the Orange Lodge flute bands based in north Belfast:

I have often thought and wondered, what the outcome might have been

If the army hadn’t come in, to protect those men in green

Well they shouted all their insults, they threw their petrol bombs and shots

But on the 16th night of August we should have shot the lot

Do you remember Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne?

But still fresh in my memory was the night we burned Ardoyne

We chased those Fenian gunmen, down Hooker Street they tore

And the song we sang and loved so well was ‘The Sash my Father Wore’

So remember all you Fenians, you rebels to the core

The next time you start trouble, Ardoyne will be no more

On Saturday 16 August the British Army was finally deployed on the Crumlin Road to bring a degree of calm to communities that now considered themselves at war with one another. Scarman described it as the ‘quiet of exhaustion’ rather than any meaningful, peaceful cessation of violence and that is exactly what it was. The people paused for breath and emerged from what remained of their charred homes to look around at the devastation that had been wrought and take stock of the losses suffered. Seven were dead and over 750 injured. At least seventy-two Catholics and sixty-one Protestants had suffered gunshot wounds; 275 buildings were destroyed, of which eighty-four per cent were occupied by Catholics. Many decided to flee; 1,505 Catholic and 315 Protestant families were forced from their homes by flames or intimidation. Those who stayed, through necessity or defiance, hardened their stance and began preparing defences against future attacks. Almost overnight, an entire community had been politicised and radicalised, the events of August 1969 seared into their collective consciousness and destined to define much of what would happen in the Ardoyne for the next thirty or forty years.

Decades of perceived oppression and two summer nights of mayhem had combined to forge an atmosphere in which an armed and rebellious organisation could flourish. The riots, along with the old-guard IRA’s apparent inability to protect their own community, also accelerated a split in the militant republican movement, which gave birth to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) or Provos. Those who stayed put, the men and women who adhered to an ideology of revolutionary socialism rather than the romantic physical force nationalism of the Provos, became known as the Official IRA, or the Stickies, and gradually lost influence over the path the republican struggle was to follow.

Eamonn’s father, Terrence, was one of the many young Ardoyne men who felt compelled to do something more to defend his people. As Isobel puts it, her husband simply ‘got more involved’. Such euphemistic terminology is common in Northern Ireland when speaking of the Troubles. It derives from both a necessary reluctance and a genuine inability to make declarations as if absolute truths. Terrence would never have sat his wife and family down and explained that he was now a high-ranking member of the PIRA. He would never have told them about operations or where he’d be, who he’d be with and what he’d be doing. For their own safety, the less they knew the better.

For the next two years the sectarian violence established itself as another facet of everyday life in Belfast. The crude barricades that had sprung up around the city at interfaces between nationalist and unionist areas were soon reinforced with British Army barbed wire and later replaced by the ironically named ‘peace walls’ that continue to divide society to this day. No-go areas for the Brits and other state security forces were declared in various parts of the Northern Irish capital. Full-scale riots erupted on a weekly basis and a tit-for-tat series of shootings and bombings was carried out by the rival paramilitary factions that were quickly gaining a stranglehold in working-class districts. The army and police patrolled the narrow streets in vehicles mounted with weaponry more suited to an open battlefield than the urban warrens that were now their daily beat. One blast of destruction from a .30 Browning machine gun mounted on top of a Shorland armoured personnel carrier was enough to scatter bricks and mortar the length and breadth of a street. Indeed, one high-ranking British officer commented that when he first arrived in Belfast and toured the devastation, he felt like he had stepped into a Second World War battle-scene photograph. He wasn’t far wrong. CS gas and rubber bullets were now being used for the first time on the UK population and Ian Freeland, the British Army’s overall commander in Northern Ireland, announced a shoot-to-kill policy towards the youthful petrol-bombers who peppered his men and vehicles at every opportunity. At one point in July 1970, 3,000 homes in the nationalist Falls area of west Belfast were placed under a thirty-six-hour curfew in which anyone found on the street was liable to be arrested or worse.

Death made an unwelcome return to the close-knit Ardoyne community as well during this period. In February 1971 Barney Watt emerged from the Ardoyne Working Men’s Club on Chatham Street and a British Army bullet ended his life. The twenty-eight-year-old from Hooker Street had no connections with the IRA; he was just another innocent civilian making his way home to see his wife, six months pregnant with their first child. The following night the IRA shot dead Royal Artillery Gunner Robert Curtis in the neighbouring New Lodge district in revenge. The twenty-year-old, whose wife was also pregnant with their first child, was the first British soldier to be killed in the Troubles.

Through it all, Isobel fought to keep her family as safe as possible. On the day she went into labour with Eamonn and entered the Royal Victoria Hospital, a British soldier was cut down by an IRA sniper in Andersonstown. On the day she was discharged with her bundle of joy wrapped tightly in her arms, the Provos repeated the trick on the Falls Road that runs past the hospital. This was the society waiting to greet Eamonn with open, poisoned, bloody arms. His three brothers provided him with a warmer welcome into their already cramped terraced house on Ballycastle Street, but within a fortnight the entire family was fleeing for their lives across the Oldpark Road and into the Ardoyne as their neighbourhood was ethnically cleansed. This time, the short fuse of sectarian violence was lit by Operation Demetrius and the introduction of internment.

***

Operation Demetrius, the British and Unionist governments’ ham-fisted response to a security situation that had long since spiralled out of control, began at 4.30 a.m. on Monday 9 August 1971. Armed with a hopelessly outdated and inaccurate list of 450 Catholic males drawn up by the notoriously bigoted RUC Special Branch, the British Army swept through the Belfast ghettoes, their rifle butts smashing windows and skulls as they went. In total, 342 men were dragged from their beds under a barrage of baton blows and sectarian insults and taken to makeshift detention centres in various secret locations throughout the province that morning. The number would eventually rise to almost 2,000 and each was beaten, abused and interrogated. To exacerbate the tragic course of events, the British soldiers on the ground were not particularly diligent in their work. It later emerged that sons were taken in the absence of a wanted father, as well as anyone with a beard in such and such a house. It was standard procedure. The fact that the vast majority of those initially interned had no connection to militant republicanism whatsoever made the savage experiment all the more reprehensible. The so-called ‘Fourteen Hooded Men’ were singled out for particularly harsh treatment that included five techniques later ruled to be ‘inhuman and degrading’ by the European Court of Human Rights: starvation, forced stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and subjection to noise. Torture by any other name.

In response, Belfast violently imploded in an upsurge of sectarian shootings and bombings. Seventeen civilians were killed by the British Army in the following days, including eleven by the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment in an infamous incident that would become known as the Ballymurphy Massacre. Among the dead was Father Hugh McMullan, the first Catholic priest to lose his life in the Troubles, shot by an army sniper as he went to the aid of a wounded man.

The second major flashpoint was the Ardoyne. There, the army shot three dead in the opening hours of Demetrius and most of the densely populated area was soon up in flames once again. Where before Catholic and Protestant families on the fringes of the district had lived side by side in an uneasy truce, they now retreated behind the dividing line of the ironically named Alliance Avenue. Such was the rabid hatred in the air, Protestant families opened the gas valves and burned almost 200 of their own properties on Velsheda Park, Farringdon Gardens and Cranbrook Gardens as they abandoned them, lest they fall into Catholic hands. In the process, fifty-year-old mother of nine Sarah Worthington was shot dead by the British Army as she prepared to exit her home through the kitchen door. An estimated 7,000 Catholics across the entire city were left homeless by the blazes that raged through the night, internally displaced in their own land. 2,500 of that number fled over the border to the south of Ireland and never returned. They were perhaps the lucky ones.