Out Of Ireland -- by Mark O'Neill

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I have a bias toward Mark O'Neill's work. He and I were colleagues at United International College in China just a few years ago, and this is not the first time I have read one of his 15 books. I hope to catch up with the rest, too.

Mark was originally a journalist and was thrown right into the thick of "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland. His perspective in that troubled era mostly in the 1970s was strong, worth any trouble you might go through to get a copy of the book, and vastly more than anything I remember in our six years in China. There's a lot to read and understand here. It was essentially a battle of Protestants against Catholics, but it brought in the UK government, the world press, and too many needless deaths.

I've been to Ireland three times and to Londonderry (Derry), once. I was with a friend on that trip, in the 1990s. He is Catholic, I wasn't, and we could feel a difference in the general atmosphere when we traveled back into The Republic. I also found the area in Derry where the British army shot down several residents in the early 1970s, just for my own personal marker.

Mark also said more about his Presbyterian missionary grandfather who was based in Manchuria when the Japanese invaded in 1942. He was one of several noted in Out Of Ireland who contributed to the cultural history of East Asia from Ireland.

Reading Out Of Ireland increased my understanding of where my father's side originated from in Northern Ireland, and where I had been in China for six years.