Synopsis
Colours is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicenter of political and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. McDonald time travels in two directions—first back to the dark days of Ulster's violent past; and second, he uses some of the key incidents of his boyhood and youth to compare the Ireland of then with the Ireland of the 21st century. It is a journey that takes him from the GPO in Dublin, a revered site in the history of Irish Republicanism where the 1916 Easter Rising was launched, to the sex shops and the swinging parties of post-modern hedonistic Dublin. Filled with football thugs, terrorists, madams, paedophile priests, abuse survivors, drug dealers, comic writers, and modern-day martyrs, Colours exposes Ireland in all its complexity and diversity, as seen through the eyes of a someone who has experienced firsthand an island and a nation undergoing revolutionary changes.