• [as Mike Farrell,] Struggle in the North (Belfast: Peoples’ Democracy 1970), pamph. [see extract].
• ’New Nations for Old’, in Northern Star, no. 5 (1970) [Xerox copy published by Peoples Democracy, Belfast, 1970, held in Birmingham UL].
• The Battle for Algeria (Belfast: Peoples Democracy 1973), [16pp.].
• with Phil McCullough, Behind the Wire (Belfast: Peoples Democracy 1974), 40pp., ill.
• Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto Press 1976; 2nd imp. 1976), 406pp.
• ed., with Vincent Browne, The Magill book of Irish Politics (Dublin: Magill 1981), 382pp., ill. [30cm.].
• Arming the Protestants: The Formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary, 1920-27 (London: Pluto Press 1983), x., 374pp.
• Sheltering the Fugitive?: The Extradition of Irish Political Offenders (Cork: Mercier 1985), 139pp.
• Emergency Legislation: The Apparatus of Repression [Field Day Pamphlet No. 11] (Field Day Co. 1986), q.pp.

Also ed., Twenty Years On (Dingle: Brandon Press 1988), 160pp. [see contents].

[...]
While we in Dublin were calling people Balubas, the revolt of Catholics and their allies among liberal Protestants and left-wingers was arguably the first white rebellion to be directly and explicitly inspired by a Black movement. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, formed in 1967, was another example of the Americanization of Ireland. But the defining influence was not the America of capital and commodities and Westerns. It was the America of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. “We plagiarised an entire movement”, acknowledged the manager of the Derry museum, Adrian Kerr. “We even went as far as stealing the song.” (Kerr, Irish Times, 4 March 2017). The song was the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome”, adopted almost immediately by NICRA.
 One of the key turning points in the emergence of the struggle in Northern Ireland as an international story was consciously modelled on a similar moment in US history. In January 1969, a march for civil rights, from Belfast to Derry, was organized by the student-led People”s Democracy group. When it came to Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were viciously attacked by a loyalist mob that included off-duty members of the notoriously sectarian auxiliary police force, the B-Specials. Some of the RUC members on duty tried to protect the marchers, but most stood by while they were assaulted with iron bars, bottles, and cudgels studded with nails. Burntollet Bridge was a knowing simulacrum of Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The main organizer of the march, Michael Farrell, wrote that “The march was modelled on the Selma−Montgomery march in Alabama in 1966, which had exposed the racist thuggery of America”s deep South and forced the US government into major reforms.” (Farrell, The Orange State, p.249.)
  If the aim was to expose the thuggish sectarianism that was woven into the bland respectability of the Northern Ireland state, Burntollet was a horrifying success. But the analogy on which it was based was problematic. Northern Ireland was not the Deep South. Organized discrimination against Catholics was outrageous, humiliating and deeply corrupt. It locked in generational poverty and undermined the pretence of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom. But its scale and depth were nothing like the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. The self-conscious claim that Catholics “viewed ourselves as Ulster”s white negroes” (Fionnbarra O Dochtartiagh, Ulster’s White Negroes, Edin. 1994, p.14.) was an appropriation of the pain of others. While for most civil rights activists such an identification was meant to imply solidarity in an international struggle for justice, it could also fuse uncomfortably with the old Christian Brothers claim that “In the martyrology of history, among crucified nations Ireland occupies the foremost place”.8 Solidarity could shade into exceptionalism.
  Nor was the strategy of revolt nearly as clear. If Selma and the rest of the civil rights struggle forced the US government into major reforms, the parallel ambition was to force the British government in London to pay attention to the conditions it had allowed to fester in Northern Ireland and enact an equally momentous series of reforms. The problem was that, while this was indeed the goal of NICRA, it was not the only agenda. Farrell suggested that the goal of his Irish Selma was also to reopen “the whole Irish question for the first time in 50 years” – in other words, to revisit the partition of 1921 and move towards a United Ireland.
  Which was the aim – to reform Northern Ireland or to wipe it off the map? The hesitation between these two purposes would prove to be fatal. Unionist reactionaries could claim, in self-justification, that the true purpose of the civil rights movement was not to end discrimination but to destroy the state and force them against their will into a Catholic-controlled thirty-two-county Ireland in which the boot of repression would merely be placed on the other foot. Nationalists could conclude that Northern Ireland was unreformable and that indeed there could be no justice without the demolition of the existing state. These were existential questions and such questions tend to be answered by violence. [...]