Author Séamus Ó Tuama on completing his father’s unfinished manuscript – a history of Belfast from a native Irish perspective.
When my father, Diarmuid Ó Tuama, died suddenly in January 2023, he left behind more than a collection of notes and unfinished research. He left a conversation unfinished.
For many years he had been working on a history of nationalist Belfast, a city he loved deeply and whose story had become inseparable from his own. Like so much of his life, the project grew out of his passion for culture, history and community. As I began sorting through the papers, books and documents that filled his office, I found myself not only grieving his loss but also encountering aspects of him that had always been present: his curiosity, his determination to understand the past and his belief that ordinary people’s stories mattered.
Among those papers also was the family history he had first begun decades earlier. In 1996 he wrote that it was “a small effort to keep the memory of my parents and my father’s ancestors alive in our family.” What he left us with were words which would become the foundation for my own journey into our family’s past.
Finishing Béal Feirste: Belfast
Finishing the book proved both cathartic and difficult. In many ways, it allowed me to continue a conversation with my father after his death. As new discoveries emerged from archives, military records and family collections, I often found myself instinctively wanting to pick up the phone and tell him what I had found. There was genuine joy in uncovering documents that confirmed stories he had told me years before. More than once I could almost hear his voice saying, “Didn’t I tell you?” Yet the process was also marked by an unavoidable sadness. There were already so many conversations left unfinished when he died. The research inevitably raised new questions about our family’s past, questions I can never ask him, and mysteries I am attempting to solve alone.
What began as an effort to complete his work gradually became a journey back in time, through generations of family history. It required stepping into lives shaped by terrible poverty, forced displacement, conflict and resilience, as I tried to understand the choices communities made within the circumstances they faced. Whilst Diarmuid’s book begins with the Plantations in Ireland, the family aspect to the story begins in post-Famine Kanturk, where economic hardship drove my great-great-grandfather Daniel Twomey, then a young farm hand, to leave his home and father’s farm and join the British Army. His life took him from rural Cork to the cobbled streets of Victorian Belfast and eventually into the horrors of the Anglo-Egyptian War in Cairo, leading a group of army medics into the chaos of a burning Alexandria in 1882.
Life in Belfast
Daniel’s life in Belfast would be enriched by Sarah Duggan, a woman from rural Armagh who had migrated to the rapidly expanding industrial city. When Sarah and Daniel married in 1879 in Belfast, she brought with her the quiet resilience common to the generations of women who built lives in the shadow of Belfast’s booming, brutal linen industry. The harsh reality of that world was inherited fully by their daughter, Norah. A child mill worker, Norah spent her formative years navigating the damp, deafening, and hazardous environment of the Belfast mills, where lint-filled air and gruelling hours broke the health of thousands of young girls. The toll of that slave labour was absolute; Norah died in her mid-30s from disease and illness directly attributed to her years of working in the mills, leaving behind a tragic testament to the human cost of the city’s industrial wealth.
Daniel’s and Sarah’s children grew up as the religious minority on the impoverished streets of Belfast experiencing discrimination that shaped both their outlook and identity. I found myself fascinated by the twists and contradictions of their stories. Why did James Twomey, the son of Daniel, a British military veteran and decorated war hero, become involved in anti-recruitment campaigns against the very army his father had served? What was it like for him and his brothers defending their area during the Belfast pogroms of the early 1920s? Why did two Twomey brothers in Belfast then choose opposite sides during the Civil War? These were not abstract historical questions. They were the lived experiences of people whose decisions and sacrifices ultimately shaped the family I belong to today.
Forced out of Home
The same questions carried into my grandfather’s generation. Forced out of his home as a toddler during the violence of the 1920s, after his father James was chased from the Belfast shipyards, having to take the family and emigrate for a period to Glasgow. Returning to Belfast and as a young boy, experiencing a second pogrom in 1935. As a teenager then to be interned throughout the Second World War, losing the best years of his youth. Following his release in 1945 and after almost a quarter of a century of relative peace spent building a family and a life, he suddenly would find himself once again drawn into the upheaval of 1969 and a third pogrom against his community. Through his story and those of earlier generations, I came to appreciate more fully the cumulative impact of trauma, poverty, loss and political conflict upon families and communities.
In many respects, my father’s story of the history of Belfast’s nationalist people became impossible to separate from the story of the family. His broader history provided the backdrop, but family stories supplied the human detail, the texture and emotion that statistics and political narratives so often overlook.
My Father’s Story
As the research progressed, I realised that my father’s own story formed part of that continuum. His lifelong dedication to cultural revival, his role in helping to build a small school into a cultural institution, and his determined belief in empowering future generations, were all chapters in the same longer story of community resilience and renewal. Less than a year before he died, I stood beside him and my own son on the Dream Dearg (Irish Language activist) march through Belfast. Being part of three generations walking together through a city that had changed so dramatically during our family’s lifetime, I could not help reflecting on the distance travelled by those who came before us.
In the end, writing this book felt less like completing my father’s work and more like completing it with him. His research provided the spark, the framework and many of the questions. My role was simply to follow the trail he had left behind, adding new discoveries, perspectives and context where I could. Every archive visited, every document uncovered, and every story pieced together felt like one final collaboration.
History: not just dates and events
Above all, the experience reinforced within me, something my father always understood- that history is not merely about dates and events. It is about people, families and communities whose lives, struggles and achievements ripple across generations. If this book succeeds in preserving a small part of that inheritance, then it has fulfilled the purpose he first set out nearly three decades ago.
And while there remains a sadness that I could never place the finished work into his hands, I hope he and his many colleagues, friends and indeed foes, would recognise his own voice within its pages, his determination, his counter-narrative voice, his devilment, his passion for his people. More importantly, I hope he would know that the conversation he began continues still.
(c) Séamus Ó Tuama
About Béal Feirste: Belfast
This powerful family memoir transforms Belfast’s turbulent 350-year history into an intimate human story through the extraordinary Twomey family saga.
When Séamus Ó Tuama inherited his father Diarmuid’s incomplete manuscript – a history of the nationalist experience in Belfast over decades of upheaval – he set out to complete it, weaving in the family’s own history and personal experiences.
Béal Feirste: Belfast transforms Belfast’s turbulent history into an intimate story spanning four generations – from Daniel Twomey, a post-Famine farm boy from the Cork-Kerry border who became an economic conscript in the British Army stationed in Victorian Belfast, to his great-grandson Diarmuid Ó Tuama’s pioneering role in the city’s Irish language renaissance.
This family memoir places one community at the centre of Belfast’s most defining moments: the plantation, the pogroms, the Troubles and the cultural revolution that followed.
Béal Feirste: Belfast is never just one person’s story – it is a community’s struggle, told from the ground up, by people who lived it. Today, Belfast nurtures one of Ireland’s most dynamic urban Gaeltachts, where the language now thrives in the thousands of young voices of a new generation. This is Belfast’s story. One family’s telling of it.
Order your copy of Béal Feirste: Belfast online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Memoir on Writing.ie here.
