CROSSING
THE LINE
Martin Dillon worked as a BBC journalist for eighteen years,
producing award-winning programmes for television and radio,
and has won international acclaim for his unique, investigative
books on the Ireland conflict. Conor Cruise O’Brien, the renowned
historian and scholar, described him as ‘our Virgil to that inferno’.
CROSSING
THE LINE
MY LIFE ON THE EDGE
Martin Dillon
First published in 2017 by
Merrion Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© 2017, Martin Dillon
9781785371301 (Paper)
9781785371318 (Kindle)
9781785371325 (Epub)
9781785371332 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the
copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Interior design by www.jminfotechindia.com
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro 11.5/15 pt
Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy
Cover back: Martin Dillon
To my wife
Violeta
A stocking leaves a shapely leg.
Over the head, it bends the nose.
Eyes partially blinded,
twitch in the gauze.
The mouth sucks in nylon,
ears pinned back, hearing impaired.
A knot on the skull hides humanity.
– Martin Dillon, ‘Non-Heads’
Contents
1.Belfast – Early Family Roots
3.Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist
4.George Campbell’s ‘Non-Heads’
6.Fathers and Sons
7.Coming of Age
Part Two
8.The Troubles and Journalism Beckon
9.Setting the Record Straight
10.A Surreal, Violent Landscape
11.Balaclavas, Breadcrumbs and Romper Rooms
12.The BBC Years
13.Irish Literary Giants and a Stray
14.Challenging the BBC’s Ethics
15.Genesis of the Peace Process: Hume v Adams
16.Time to Talkback and Natural-Born Killers
17.The Joker Club
18.Agent Ascot: Paedophile, Terrorist and British Spy
19.Murderous Choices: Getting Rid of ‘The Monkey’
20.Counterterrorism’s Moral Ambiguity
21.In the BBC’s Crosshairs
22.Legacies of Home
Epilogue
Index
Foreword
Journalism is apparently the first draft of history so presumably the journalist’s memoir can be the second. If Martin Dillon’s remembrance here achieves equivalent significance to his original reportage, then this book should be of historical import.
In the 1960s the half-century-old partition of Ireland into two states, one post-colonial, the other neo-colonial, began to sunder. Once more, and to the great chagrin of London and Dublin, the Irish problem had to be solved again.
Northern Ireland was being ambushed by a series of forces past and present; the Vatican
