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

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It reminds us of all those thousands of ordinary people who died and who but for this book would be remembered only by family and friends. Readers unfamiliar with the troubles also need to bear in mind that acts of violence not leading to death – torture, maiming, beating – obviously do not fall into the remit of Lost Lives, although they often appear in the context of a given case. With the last update of the book in 2008, a number of killings have not been recorded for posterity in Lost Lives and probably never will be. This book has been described as the greatest single piece of scholarship in either journalism or in historical studies that has ever been conducted in Ireland, in its encyclopedic detail, in its towering integrity and in its moral compassion.

We all regard that as a shame and a disgrace which goes against the spirit of the book," said David McKittrick, one of the five-strong team who produced Lost Lives.As a frequent visitor to Belfast and a partisan of the city and its people, this read is painful, and difficult, but invaluable. Any lingering thoughts that the book could be revived were shattered by the death of Seamus Kelters two years ago. We have been updating and adding to it to include the outcomes of such recent inquiries including the Smithwick Tribunal, the Saville Inquiry and De Silva. The film features graphic contemporary footage of the Troubles that is juxtaposed against imagery of the natural landscape of Northern Ireland including rivers, waterfalls, and a swan. The authors didn't have a direct say on which of their stories would be included, but when they saw a rough cut of the movie they were satisfied.

The book was written by four journalists, the late Seamus Kelters, David McKittrick, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton, as an compilation of the Troubles related deaths across three decades. This book--a brilliant combination of the journalistic and the scholarly--will stand as a memorial to the dead. He has also worked as a producer with BBC Northern Ireland's political unit and its current affairs programme Spotlight. Thornton said that much more material had become available since the book was published and he and the other authors had hoped to update it but no publishers were interested.Former Dublin senator Ian Marshall said he had written to the First and Deputy First Ministers on Friday to ask them to get involved.

You are very welcome to quote up to 100 words from any article posted on Vulpes Libris - as long as you quote accurately, give us due credit and link back to the original post. It is a shame that some of those implicated with the killings remain unnamed despite detailed descriptions listed in the book for events and convictions which followed various atrocities and clearly allude to assailents who are known to the families of those affected.

Lost Lives shows that while the great majority of the killing was done by republican groups and loyalist paramilitary organisations, the deepest source of resentment and sense of injustice is to be found among the several hundred families which lost members at the hands of the security forces. It is not concerned with the political bickering, but with the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict. All the casualties are here: the RUC officer, the young soldier, the IRA volunteer, the loyalist paramilitary, the Catholic mother, the Protestant worker, the newborn baby. Co-author David McKittrick said that it was intended to be as “unemotional and flat as possible” and the carefully crafted dedication of just 17 words, reads: ‘This work is dedicated to our children, that they might learn from lessons of the past’.