The photographs in this book were taken between 1982 through 1985. At that time Ireland had one of the poorest economies and highest rate of emigration in Europe. And across the border the Northern Ireland economy was being crippled by ongoing sectarian violence, the English army occupation, and

hunger strikes against Margaret Thatcher’s IRA policies.

This all began to change in the mid-1980s with the rise of the “Celtic Tiger,” brought about by new economic polices that welcomed foreign high-tech companies to Ireland. And later, in the 1990s, the Good Friday Agreement finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. This book is a snapshot of life in the Irelands before Good Friday and the Celtic Tiger. Mostly gone now but not forgotten.

With North & South Ireland: Before Good Friday and the Celtic Tiger, James Higgins adds to his remarkable photography portfolio a set of astonishing images of people and places on an island that was on the cusp of enormous change. He’s cracked open a time capsule to reveal the enduring beauty, emotional power, and arresting visual facts of a land in two parts whose boundary lines fade under the photographer’s eye.

In the middle 1980s, Higgins traveled to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland several times. Initially, he was not searching for ancestors or out to explore a popular world destination. Rather, beginning with his first journey he was drawn in by Irish soulfulness. He did touch his roots among relatives in County Leitrim, but his curiosity sent him around the island to see what he could see, to find what he could find. He preserved what entered his mind.

These images give us Ireland from top to bottom in those years before the giant tech companies transformed the economy and before the peace accords in the North, which calmed the Troubles that had destabilized the society there for decades. Many Americans, in particular, will recognize in these photographs the land of origin of their forebears or the place they themselves toured in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. In their fixed form, Higgins’ photographs are timeless in the way the Irish sea and fields and faces hold time.