When the first novel by Maurice Leitch, The Liberty Lad, was published in 1965, the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles had not yet got under way. But intimations of the coming catastrophe were apparent: in civil rights agitation, in extreme nationalist Catholic disaffection, in sporadic violence and outbreaks of sectarian ferocity in the streets. Though it is not overtly political, The Liberty Lad reflects the deteriorating social and moral climate in the fictional Protestant mill village of Kildargan, with its damp terrace houses, its industrial decline and prevailing sense of poverty and malaise, all complicated by sectarian undertones.
Aside from anticipating the Troubles, it gained its author, who has died aged 90, a place among the many distinguished writers proscribed in the Irish republic for their treatment of sexuality. In an interview with Julia Carlson, author of Banned in Ireland (1990), Leitch commented: “[Homosexuality] seemed a subject worthy of writing about, because it was another extension of repression … It was also part of the 1950s and 60s, that sort of repression was everywhere around.”
