Jack Holland

Life
1947-2004; b. Falls Road; child of Catholic and protestant parents; raised initially in house of his grandfather Wm. Henry Holland, who kept a the dray-horses stables for a dairy; moved unhappily to Highcliff Gdns., a Protestant housing estate, at the death of his gd-f., 1953; freq. attacked by his neighbours; moved to the house of his his gd-m. Kate Murphy Holland at Drew St., Falls Road;

joined joined Royal Irish Astronomy Society, 1956 [aetat. 9]; attended - and was expelled from - St. Thomas’s, at Whiterock (where Seamus Heaney taught) and afterwards at St. Malachy’s, Belfast, where he was taught by Michael McLaverty; entered Magee College, Derry (Univ. of Ulster), and changed to TCD (Dublin) after two years; lived with Rosemary Rowley on Mount St., sharing astrological interests; grad. BA English and completed an MA in theoretical linguistics at the University of Essex;

met Mary Hudson, in Paris, 1973; settled in Dublin; appt. staff writer for Hibernia (prop. John Mulcahy, ed. Brian Trench); appt. Belfast researcher for BBC Spotlight with Jeremy Paxman et al., 1975; wrote on old Belfast in the Irish Echo; moved to New York, 1976; issued studies of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland with Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland since 1969 (1981); The American Connection: US Guns, Money and Influence in Northern Ireland (1989); also a novel, The Prisoner’s Wife (1981); he ghosted Phoenix: Policing the Shadows (1996) with Susan Phoenix, widow of Ian Phoenix, head of NI counter-intelligence unit; d. of cancer; his family received letters of condolence from Ted Kennedy and Hilary Clinton.

[See www.jackholland.net, a commemorative site created by his son, with a biography - online.]

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Works
Commentary
  • Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland since 1969 (NY 1981).
  • The American Connection: US Guns, Money and Influence in Northern Ireland (Swords: Poolbeg Press 1989), xiv, 272pp., and Do. [rep. edn.] ( Boulder, Colo. : Roberts Rinehart, 1999), xvii, 300pp.
  • Walking Corpses (Dublin: Torc 1994), 240pp.
  • with Henry McDonald, Deadly Divisions (Dublin: Torc 1994).
  • A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice [Brief History Ser.] (London: Robinson 2006), xv, 320pp.
  • with Susan Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows - The Secret War Against Terrorism in Northern Ireland (1996) [the story of Ian Phoenix, head of NI counter-intelligence unit]
Fiction
  • The Prisoner’s Wife ([1981]; Dublin: Poolbeg 1995).
Poetry
  • ‘Sean Juan, Canto I, His Birth’, in Threshold, No. 26 [1977], pp.31-35;
  • Sean Juan, Canto 1 (Belfast: Lapwing 1994), 40pp.
Miscellaneous
  • ‘Poems and Bombs’, in (Irish Times, 19 May 1977) [short feature proferring ‘boems’ as a term for the spate of cash-in writing on the Troubles.]
  • Contrib. an essay on US media’s reportage on the Troubles, in War and Words: The Northern Ireland Media Reader, ed. Bill Rollston & David Miller (Dublin: Beyond the Pale Publ. 1996).
  • ‘Murderous Confusion’, review of Nicholas Davies, Ten-Thirty-Three: The Inside Story of Britain’s Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland (Mainstream [1999], in The Irish Times [15 Jan. 2000].

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Criticism
Michael Painter, ‘Among the Dead Men’, review of Walking Corpses, in Irish Times, 19 Feb. [q.date], Weekend, p.9.

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References
Susan & Ian Phoenix, eds., Policing the Shadows (London: Hodder and Stoughton [q.date]), incls. excerpts.

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