Susan McKay is an author and journalist based in Dublin. She is the author of the highly acclaimed "Bear In Mind These Dead" (2008) and the widely praised "Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People" (2005).
From the Introduction by Gareth Peirce:
"This record of the tiny organisation, British Irish Rights Watch, operating on barely a shoestring, is highly educative. Achieving the organisation's objective - to use international law as a framework in which to challenge the British state's actions towards individuals and entire communities in the North of Ireland - had to depend, first and foremost, on the vigorous pursuit and collection of evidence, building up from unchallengeable data, the "data" being the detailed experience of men and women of decades of profound injustice.
Of course familiarity with detail means that its repetition in other arenas can be immediately recognized and analysed - torture by the British Army in Iraq in 2003 employing the same techniques used (and prohibited) in the North of Ireland in the early 1970s. This is a record of a baton being picked up; for its authors as for every member of every generation attempting to confront the wholesale contradiction of legal theory and state practice, it has been essential training."
Gareth Peirce is a highly regarded human rights solicitor and a partner with Birnberg Peirce Solicitors in London. She is the author of "Despatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice" (2010) in addition to being a regular contributor to The London Review of Books.
