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Where Are You Really From?: A Story of Race, Family and Politics
Tim Brannigan
Blackstaff Press
Price: £9.99
Born into a white, devoutly Catholic Belfast family, Peggy Brannigan was shattered when she became pregnant as a result of an extra-marital affair with a Ghanaian medical student.
Unwilling to have an abortion or to have the baby adopted, but aware that having a black baby would cause a scandal, Peggy came up with an audacious plan to keep her child.
When baby Tim was born hospital staff smuggled him into St Joseph s Baby Home with instructions not to adopt and told the rest of the Brannigan family that the baby had been stillborn.
One year later, Peggy adopted Tim herself and brought him to live with her husband and their three sons in the Falls Road Area of Belfast. It was 1966.
Told here for the first time, Where Are You Really From?:
A Story of Race, Family and Politics by Tim Brannigan is Tim's extraordinary story of growing up as a black child in Belfast and as part of a republican family living at the centre of a vicious and prolonged bloody conflict.
Tim's story gives us an in depth look in the difficult times many children of colour faced in Ireland and is a step further along the road already set by My Eyes Only Look Out by Margaret McCarthy.
Where Are You Really From?: A Story of Race, Family and Politics is a story of racial prejudice, sectarian tensions and family secrets, and describes in vivid detail Tim's childhood during the turbulent 1970s and 80s, his seven-year stint as a republican prisoner in Crumlin Road Jail and the H-blocks, his coming to terms with his mother's revelation of the true circumstances surrounding his birth, and his desperate attempts to trace the father who abandoned him.
Where Are You Really From?: A Story of Race, Family and Politics by Tim Brannigan is available to buy now.
Click here to read Declan Cashin's interview with Tim Brannigan:
