Book review: A People Under Siege calls for an unlikely surrender from Unionists to the inevitable
insider history of unionism is impressive, but his idealistic call for his community to reinvent itself, offering more liberal and inclusive policies, sounds like a voice in the wilderness
Aaron Edwards learned as a child that it’s not always easy being an Ulster unionist. Born in 1980, he soon got used to hearing that a friend’s father or a local shopkeeper had been killed by the IRA. Even after the Good Friday Agreement, he attended an Orange Order parade in north Belfast and watched nationalists throw bricks, golf balls and containers filled with urine at it.
“We were led to believe such violence had finally abated,” Edwards wryly recalls in A People Under Siege, his earnest, humane and challenging study of the unionist psyche. “It was hard to square this myth with the reality as another bottle of piss whizzed past me.”
