Living with Ghosts: The Inside Story from a 'Troubles' Mind

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The minuscule geography of Northern Ireland is also ever present, the pressure of moving around Belfast – by any measure not a big city – surrounded in the 1980s and 1990s not just by looming hills, but army watchtowers and helicopters. Living with Ghosts is a moving and deeply personal account of one man’s doubts and decisions, and the challenges of reporting a war on his doorstep. He goes deep into his contacts with the IRA, the loyalist organisations, MI5, Special Branch, the army, and the many other players in the conflict period. In his journalistic career Rowan walked the thinnest of lines, where morals and principles were blurred, and as a result his mind became tortured.

In his journalistic career Rowan walked the thinnest of lines, where morals and principles were blurred, and as a result his mind became tortured. Since the late 1980s, he has reported on all the major developments on Northern Ireland’s journey from war to peace; stories he has told using a range of sources – IRA, loyalist, police, military, intelligence, political, Church and others. Living with Ghosts is a moving and deeply personal account of one man’s doubts and decisions, and the challenges of reporting a war on his doorstep.

He goes deep into his contacts with the IRA, the loyalist organisations, MI5, Special Branch, the army and the many other players in the conflict period. In his career Rowan walks along the thinnest of lines on a path where morals and ethics and principles are blurred, and his mind becomes tortured. Living with Ghosts : The Inside Story from a 'Troubles' Mind by Brian Rowan ( large paperback Sept 2022) Rs. Through astonishing interviews with powerful insiders, Blood and Oil tells how MBS's cabal played the Saudi economy and capitalised on the omnipotence of feudal power while effectively stamping out dissent, before allegations of his extreme brutality and excess began to slip out.

His story takes us beyond the often strict boundaries of the news into the very real dilemmas and fears behind its scenes. The final part of this book describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief, from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump's march on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs, and ends with a defence of the grubby glories of parliamentary politics and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.He goes deep into his contacts with the IRA, the loyalist organisations, MI5, Special Branch, the army and the many other players in the conflict period.

Living with Ghosts is a moving and deeply personal account of one man's doubts and decisions, and the challenges of reporting a war on his doorstep. In Living With Ghosts renowned veteran journalist Brian Rowan retraces his steps through Northern Ireland's conflict years, as he bravely delves into the darkness of those times.He has remained a well-sourced commentator and occasional reporter on talks processes since leaving the BBC. Brian Rowan’s intense new book, Living with Ghosts, might be said to be in disagreement with the title of the earlier work. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Living with Ghosts is a moving and deeply personal account of one man's doubts and decisions, and the challenges of reporting a war on his doorstep.

Thoughtful and melancholy … If this book helps to exorcise at least some of their demons, it will certainly have served a valuable purpose. He goes deep into his contacts with the IRA, the loyalist organisations, MI5, Special Branch, the Army and the many other players in the conflict period, and he joins the dots on a journey out of 'war' that has not yet found peace of mind.I hope that our political leaders do something, even at those late stage to address this, but I am no more convinced that they will do so, than the author will seek the help he needs! Brian argues that we cannot create a seamless narrative of the past, a full and agreed account of the past is not achievable, but, as he argues in the chapter on amnesty, there is a way out of it, albeit messy and never complete. It includes dramatic moments like Rowan’s transportation, with his eyes taped, to an IRA safe house to be briefed my men in balaclavas about the circumstances surrounding the murders of three men Rowan and his crew had reported on the previous evening, alleged security service informants whose naked bodies were discarded by roadsides in south Armagh. Across its pages, veteran journalist Brian Rowan retraces his steps back through the tunnel of Northern Ireland's conflict years and into the darkness of those times.