Cillefoyle Park

Cillefoyle Park is a historical fiction novel based on the factual contact in the 1970´s between the IRA and the British Government. The Contact, Brendan Duddy was a Nationalist Derry businessman but also a pacifist. In contact with the local police commander and MI5/MI6 agents, he conveyed messages between the British Government and the head of the IRA in Derry. The barman in this book is based on Eamon McCann who is a socialist activist..

Cillefoyle Park is about a bar man torn between the possibility of politics and the violence exploding on the streets of Derry, Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles in the mid 1970’s. That’s the treacherous dilemma that Dermot Lavery finds himself in when an innocent friendship with a neighbour – a schoolteacher leads them both into a precarious web of secrecy and intrigue with all sides of the endless conflict. Caught in a nightmare world of secret negotiations for a ceasefire, his life spins on the edge of clandestine friendship, love, meetings and certain death at any wrong turn - a constant struggle with his conscience and the challenge of simply staying alive.

Research for this book includes Galway University sources- Brendan Duddy,s diaries, Niall Ó Dochartaigh´s research papers, Eamon McCann´s books, the CAIN archive at University of Ulster,and Hugh Vaughan´s teenage years growing up in 1970´s Derry, attending school in the no-go area of Creggan. Other multiple sources were also used.