Walking through West Belfast with Danny Morrison feels like taking part in an archaeological excavation, where each step uncovers another layer of history. We meet in front of Divis Tower, overlooking Falls Road. The building stands as one of the most significant witnesses to the summer of 1969, widely regarded as the beginning of the conflict known as the Troubles. In this neighbourhood, where Morrison was born and raised and where some of Belfast’s bloodiest clashes took place, every street carries a different meaning for him. Every corner is part of a history woven from resistance and loss. Yet Morrison does not begin that history with the summer of 1969, or even with the Easter Rising of 1916. He traces its roots back to the reign of Henry VIII and the Protestant settlers brought from Britain in the centuries that followed. It was in this period that the foundations were laid for the struggle over religion, identity and sovereignty that continues to this day.

As we walk along the Falls Road, he points out the streets where childhood friends and comrades were killed. He talks about homes raided by the British Army, prisons, hunger strikes, funerals and prison visits. These streets shaped not only Morrison’s childhood but also his political life. As a teenager, he joined the Provisional IRA. During the 1981 hunger strikes, he served as Sinn Féin’s Director of Publicity and as spokesperson for Bobby Sands. He later spent years in prison and became closely associated with advocating an electoral strategy alongside armed struggle, encapsulated in the phrase “the ballot box and the Armalite.”

Now in his seventies, Morrison remains active in politics, although in recent years he has become better known as a writer. All the Dead Voices, first published in 2002 and based on his own memories, was republished in an updated edition last year. Its title comes from a passage in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which the dead speak about their lives.

“What made you return to All the Dead Voices?” I ask. I wonder whether, after more than twenty years, those voices still had something new to say.

He says the new edition includes chapters about people who left a mark on his life and are no longer alive. But it was not only the passing of time or new losses that changed the book. Since writing the first edition, he has lived through experiences he could never have imagined. The most remarkable of them was joining a reconciliation group that brings together former IRA volunteers, retired officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), former British soldiers and former loyalist paramilitaries. They meet several times a year; sometimes they speak at universities, sometimes they simply share a meal and talk.

“These meetings gave me an insight into what my opponent—what my enemy—had gone through, his experience or her experience of the conflict from their side,” he says. “I think it contributes to one’s humanity to be able to see things afresh from another point of view.”

But reconciliation does not mean giving up one’s political beliefs or ideals. It means recognising that the other side has its own memory, its own suffering, and reasons that it believes justified its actions.

I tell him that one of the first political books that shaped me as a teenager was Bobby Sands’s One Day in My Life. Morrison tells me that he edited Sands’s early writings for publication, including that book. I ask him what Bobby Sands would make of Northern Ireland today. Which developments would have made him proud, and which would have disappointed him?

Morrison believes Sands would have shared the disappointments felt by many republicans, particularly the slow pace of political change. He is careful not to speak for him with certainty, but says Sands understood politics and knew that negotiations involved compromise. He recalls that when the IRA declared its ceasefire in 1994, between 85 and 90 per cent of republican prisoners—including some of Sands’s closest comrades—supported the republican leadership and what could be achieved through negotiations. Morrison believes Sands would also have supported the peace process and might even have become one of the republican negotiators sitting across the table from the British government.

From Bobby Sands and his legacy, our conversation turns to collective memory. I ask how a society can honour its dead without passing hatred and conflict on to the next generation.

“That’s a bit of a dilemma,” he says. He recalls how his goddaughter, when she was younger, watched documentaries and history programmes about the IRA and would say she wished she had been alive to take part in “adventures and gun battles and escaping from jail”. For a child who never experienced the fear and loss of those years, he says, the conflict can easily appear exciting. “You have to be careful,” he says. “First of all, you have to be true to the people who sacrificed their lives or whose lives were taken.” That also means telling their stories, he adds, because those stories are often about the IRA, prison or the hunger strikes. “At the same time, you’re trying to strike a balance where you don’t romanticise it or glorify it so that the next generation thinks they missed out on something.”

For Morrison, that is why the benefits of the peace process should be emphasised alongside the losses of the conflict. He avoids romanticising the IRA, but argues that no history of the conflict can be understood by separating the organisation from British rule or from the circumstances in which Northern Ireland was created. He believes that if the British government had recognised republican grievances much earlier, “we wouldn’t have had half of the deaths, or a quarter of the deaths.”

Morrison’s criticism extends well beyond the British government. In his view, successive Irish governments, the Catholic Church and John Hume’s SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) all contributed to what he sees as a false narrative of the conflict. He rejects the portrayal of republicans as the aggressors while Britain appeared as a neutral peacekeeping force caught between two communities. “They weren’t peacekeepers,” he says. “They were aggressors. They were military occupiers of our area.”

He is equally critical of the SDLP. Morrison argues that the party should have confronted Britain much more robustly over abuses such as internment and torture. Instead, he believes political rivalry played a role. In his view, the party saw IRA members being arrested and imprisoned as a way of depleting “the potential opposition to them within the ghettos”, leaving the SDLP with a monopoly of political control.

He says the Catholic hierarchy occasionally criticised British abuses, but usually only when evidence of abuse or torture had become impossible to deny. More broadly, he believes the Church legitimised Britain’s presence in Northern Ireland by treating the IRA, rather than state policy, as the source of the violence.

Morrison insists the British Army was never neutral. As one of the clearest examples, he points to the Falls Curfew of July 1970, when West Belfast was sealed off by the Army. “The British Army came in to show that they supported the unionists and that they were out to disarm the nationalists,” he says. According to Morrison, witnessing that operation convinced many young people that the British narrative of impartial peacekeeping was false, encouraging them to join the IRA.

I ask him what he thinks of Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, one of the most controversial works on the IRA published in recent years.

He describes Keefe as “talented” and readily acknowledges that the book is “well written”. “People are seduced by the power of the narrative,” he says. Morrison argues that Keefe used the recordings gathered as part of the Boston College Belfast Project selectively and misleadingly, and that the project itself was shaped from the outset by what he calls “a Get Gerry Adams agenda”. In his view, the book pushes the role of the British state in the conflict into the background. The ultimate effect, he argues, is to cast Gerry Adams as the villain, while readers come to accept that portrayal as the truth.

Morrison has known Gerry Adams for more than fifty years. He believes Adams possesses a natural magnetism, but says what made him such an effective leader was his political instinct and natural ability in politics, diplomacy and negotiation. He notes that Jonathan Powell, one of the British officials involved in the peace process, described Adams and Martin McGuinness as “brilliant negotiators” in his book on the negotiations. “That’s a tribute coming from your enemy,” Morrison adds. Adams and McGuinness, he says, did not learn negotiation at university or from textbooks; they rose to the challenge through the conflict itself.

Today, Northern Ireland’s peace process is studied around the world as a model. I ask Morrison what lessons, if any, it might offer for dialogue between Turkey and the PKK.

While every conflict has its own historical and political context, he says, trust is indispensable. He recalls the secret contacts between the British government and the republican leadership before the 1994 ceasefire. The understanding, he says, was simple: if the IRA declared a sustained ceasefire, Sinn Féin—until then excluded—would be admitted to the peace talks. But when the ceasefire was announced, Prime Minister John Major reneged on that commitment and refused to allow Sinn Féin into the negotiations.

The result, Morrison recalls, was the collapse of the ceasefire following the Canary Wharf bombing in February 1996. Shortly afterwards, however, the British government reversed its position and agreed to Sinn Féin’s participation.

“For Sinn Féin, one of the most important issues was that the IRA prisoners be released,” he says. Britain agreed, although the releases were spread over two years rather than taking place immediately. Another major dispute concerned IRA decommissioning. Morrison says the issue had never been raised during the secret contacts and appeared only later, making many republicans feel they had been ambushed. “We weren’t defeated,” they argued. “Why should we hand over our guns?”

“Thirty years after the ceasefire, what does peace mean to you today?” I ask.

“I no longer feel vanquished,” he says. In his view, the peace process was not the result of the struggle having failed, but of Britain finally accepting that it could not defeat the IRA militarily or keep Sinn Féin out of politics.

According to Morrison, the greatest change since the ceasefire has been not simply that the guns fell silent, but that “the monopoly of unionism is gone”. He is quick to add that this does not mean sectarianism has disappeared. He points to the burning of a replica mosque on top of a bonfire a few weeks earlier. “They characterise immigration as being a takeover of the white Christian world by Muslims,” he says. In his view, this is not only hostility towards immigrants, but an old sectarian reflex now directed at new minorities.

Even so, he believes the balance of power has changed. “Sinn Féin being in power has given a huge degree of confidence to the nationalist community,” he says. He recalls that well-paid jobs, especially state jobs, were once largely monopolised by the unionist community. Citing Harland & Wolff, the shipyard that built the Titanic, he says that at its height around 30,000 Protestants worked there, compared with only about 200 Catholics.

Today, he says, Catholics are strongly represented across almost every profession, which has increased the community’s confidence. Morrison sees history as a long-term transformation. He believes one of the developments that accelerated that transformation was “the disastrous Brexit”. Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union, he recalls, but “we were overridden by English opinion”. Brexit, however, has completely changed the way a united Ireland is viewed within society.

“The effects of Brexit have forced a lot of business people from the unionist tradition and big farmers from the unionist tradition to look at a united Ireland from the point of view of their economic interests,” he says.

Morrison remains actively involved in efforts towards a united Ireland. According to opinion polls, support for reunification has reached a majority in both the Republic of Ireland, at 59 per cent, and Northern Ireland, at 63 per cent. For Morrison, however, the central issue is not when a referendum will be held, but how to prepare for it. He argues that extensive economic research is needed, together with a settlement capable of gaining broad acceptance across society.

He has no doubt that North and South will eventually be reunited. “It is the political objective of my life,” he says, “which I have spent fifty-five, coming up to sixty years, devoted to.” For that reason, Morrison’s account is not only an echo of the past, but also the vision of a future that generations have been trying to build.