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.
