Head of Zeus to publish Cahill's memoir on the 'reality' of Sinn Féin

Head of Zeus’ Apollo imprint has acquired the rights to Rough Beast: My Story and the Reality of Sinn Féin by Mairia Cahill. 

Editor-in-chief Neil Belton acquired world all language rights direct from the author. The title will be published in trade paperback and e-book on the 21st September 2023.

Cahill is described as a "refugee" from Sinn Féin and the IRA. Her great-uncle Joe was one of the main founders of the Provisional IRA and her grandfather was Gerry Adams’ mentor in the republican movement. From an early age, the book’s synopsis reads, she was destined for a glittering career within the increasingly successful political machine of Sinn Féin.

In the book Cahill relates that at the age of 16, she was sexually abused by a prominent Belfast IRA man and later interrogated by the IRA about her allegations.

The publisher said: "Rough Beast is Mairia Cahill’s harrowing story, which she tells here for the first time in detail and with unsparing honesty. It is a story of unimaginable trauma and paramilitary corruption. It brings to life a world of IRA secrecy and parallel laws, of ruthless power wielded by figures who have never been democratically elected, and of ex-gunmen inspiring fear and silence.”

Cahill said: “Anna Burns, in her novel Milkman, wrote brilliantly about a young woman living in ‘totalitarian-run enclaves’ where brutality was as rife as the rumours which centred on her. That book had nothing to do with me, and yet in my world people also lived through appalling processes of mind and bodily control. Writing this book, I didn’t want it to be simply a documentation of the abuse I suffered. I wanted it to do more: to both explain and explore how powerful organisations can mould minds and life journeys through their actions, so that people will learn from it and ensure that no one else is treated in the same way.

"In my case, the IRA and Sinn Féin dealt with the matter of sexual abuse appallingly – both before and after I waived a lifetime right to anonymity. I have to question how any political party can be trusted to treat its electorate properly when it treated an abuse victim so disgracefully. This book describes my fight to hold my abusers, the IRA, Sinn Féin, and the criminal justice process to account. But it also, hopefully, will illustrate that those who have suffered can, despite everything, shape their own future, and that they should not simply be labelled as an ‘abuse victim’.”

Belton added: “I was aware of Mairia’s courageous public campaign to hold Sinn Féin to account for what was done to her, and to ask the party to acknowledge that they conducted a secret ‘inquiry’ into her sexual assault – a process that added insult to injury. I was not prepared for the horrifying, careful accumulation of detail in Mairia’s extraordinary account of her ordeal, and what it says about the modus operandi of the Republican movement. This is an important book.”

Cahill is a former Irish senator and councillor. At the age of 16 she was abused by a member of the IRA and waived anonymity in 2014. Charges against the alleged rapist were eventually dropped. The matter led to a furore in the Irish media and debates in Dáil Éireann [the lower house of the Irish legislature] and the Northern Irish Assembly, culminating in an investigation by Sir Keir Starmer and a public apology from the Director of Public Prosecutions. Cahill now writes a political opinion column for the Sunday Independent, has written for the Belfast Telegraph and Fortnight Magazine, and regularly appears as a media commentator.