Now that the Troubles seem to be over, the publication of Lost Lives is perhaps the great monument for which the bloody history of Northern Ireland has been waiting”. A nine-year-old Derry boy, playing cowboys with his brother in the garden, stumbled over a tripwire and set off a bomb which killed him. Documentarists Michael Hewitt and Diarmuid Lavery have come up with an immensely powerful film about a remarkable artefact: a thumping chronicle written over seven years that stands as an obituary of 3,700 lives taken during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They have decided to go for the horror and I believe in some of the first screenings of the film, there were actual gasps in the audience". Hewitt and Lavery wouldn’t have had to wander far into the archives for visual evidence of the taut, fraught Ireland of yesteryear, yet be warned: there are images here that couldn’t have been shown on the nightly news, interrupting the detachment instilled in the original prose.

The deaths chosen for inclusion in the film are broadly representative of the ratio of deaths of Irish republicans, Loyalist paramilitaries and forces of the British state. We have done a lot of work in the hope it will be re-published again in 2019, which will be our fifth edition. Thornton said that he and the other authors were opposed to any potential governmental involvement in the reprinting of the book as it would "leave it open to political influence".Lavery and Hewitt are currently working on a major feature length documentary on the poet Seamus Heaney, for the BBC and Northern Ireland Screen. In January 2021 that the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland received the archive relating to the book consisting of “265 folders of mainly newspaper cuttings relating to most of those individuals who died as a result of conflict”. Lost Lives traces the origins of the conflict from the firing of the first shots, through the carnage of the 1970s and 1980s to the republican and loyalist ceasefires and beyond. We have been updating and adding to it to include the outcomes of such recent inquiries including the Smithwick Tribunal, the Saville Inquiry and De Silva.

Featuring high-end cinematography, an orchestral score and readings by an ensemble cast of Irish actors, including Kenneth Branagh, Brendan Gleeson, Roma Downey, Liam Neeson, Bríd Brennan and Stephen Rea, the film is a requiem.All died in the troubles so all are listed: readers will bring their own attitudes to bear, ranking different categories as deserving of different degrees of sympathy. He has won a number of other awards during more than 20 years of reporting on Northern Ireland, among them the Christopher Ewart-Biggs memorial prize for the promotion of peace and understanding in Ireland.