|
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]; ed. St. Thomas's, but expelled; place at St. Malachy's, Belfast, where he was taught
by Michael McLaverty; entered Magee College, Derry, and changed to TCD after two years; lived with Rosemary Rowley on Mount
St., sharing astrological enthusiasms; grad. BA English;
grad. MA from University of Essex in theoretical linguistics; met Mary Hudson, in Paris, 1973; settled in Dublin; appt. staff writer for Hibernia (props. John Mulcahy, ed. Brian Trench); appt. Belfast researcher for BBC Spotlight with Jeremy Paxman et al., 1975; moved to New York, 1976; wrote for became journalist; wrote on old Belfast in Irish Echo; moved to America; issued studies of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland; issued 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); d. of cancer; family received letters of condolence from Ted Kennedy and Hilary Clinton.
[ top ]
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, 272 pp., 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.
Phoenix: Policing the Shadows,” (with Susan Phoenix
Fiction, The Prisoner’s Wife ([1981]; Dublin: Poolbeg 1995). Miscellaneous, ‘Sean Juan, Canto I, His Birth’, in Threshold, No. 26 [1977], pp.31-35; short feature, ‘Poems and Bombs’, postulates ‘boems’ as a term for the spate of cash-in writing on the Troubles (Irish Times, 19.5.1977); Sean Juan Canto 1 (Belfast: Lapwing 1994), 40pp.;
Also essay on US media reporting of Troubles, in Bill Rollston & David Miller, War and Words: The Northern Ireland Media Reader (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.]
[ top ]
Criticism
Michael Painter, ‘Among the Dead Men’, review of Walking
Corpses, in Irish Times, 19 Feb. [q.date], Weekend,
p.9.
There is a commemorative website, created by his son, at www.jackholland.net with aan associated biography at www.jackholland.net/bio.php.
[ top ]
References
Susan & Ian Phoenix, eds., Policing the Shadows
(London: Hodder and Stoughton [q.date]), incls. excerpts.
[ top ]