Morrison, Danny

Danny Morrison was born in Belfast in 1953. He was interned in Long Kesh in 1972 and after his release became editor of the Sinn Fein newspaper, Republican News, at the age of 22, during an IRA ceasefire in 1975.

In 1978 he was charged with IRA membership and conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice. He defended himself in court and was granted bail. The charges were withdrawn in February 1979. In 1982 he was elected in Mid-Ulster to the Northern Ireland Assembly on an abstentionist ticket. He was national director of publicity for Sinn Fein from 1979 until his arrest in January 1990 in connection with the abduction of Sandy Lynch, an IRA informer for which he was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment.

During the 1981 hunger strikes he was a spokesperson for IRA Volunteer Bobby Sands MP and later that year during a crucial debate at Sinn Feins annual conference (the Airdfheis) called for the party to embrace electoral politics, coining the phrase which was to sum up the Republican Movements strategy of going forward with an armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other. In December 1981 an attempt was made on his life when a loyalist gunman opened fire a number of times on Morrison and his wife but missed.

He has written three novels. West Belfast was published in November 1989; On the Back of the Swallow was written in prison and published nine months before his release in May 1995; The Wrong Man was begun in prison, completed after his release and was published in February 1997. His fourth book, Then The Walls Came Down, is based on his prison letters and was published by Mercier Press in October 1999. He was released from prison in 1995 during the IRA ceasefire and though he remains a republican gave up political activism to devote himself to writing and reviewing full-time. He has written and reviewed for The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, The Observer, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.

He has recently completed an adaptation of The Wrong Man as a stage play.

To visit Dannys website, please click the underlined link: Danny Morrison.