Making Sense of the Troubles : A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

David McKittrick has reported on Northern Ireland since the early 1970s, and Making Sense of the Troubles is his history of the conflict, written with the historian David McVea. He joined the Irish Times as a Belfast reporter in 1973 and later became Ireland correspondent of The Independent in London. He won the Orwell Prize for journalism in 2000 and is one of the authors of Lost Lives, a reference work that records each death of the Troubles in turn.

McVea studied politics and modern history at Queen's University Belfast and headed the politics department at a Belfast grammar school, where he taught history and political studies.

The book sets out the whole conflict in one volume. The first edition of 2000 ran to twelve chapters covering 1921 to 2000, starting with partition, and added a chronology, statistical tables, a glossary and bibliographical notes. This Penguin paperback is the revised and updated 2012 edition of Making Sense of the Troubles, taking in later events such as IRA disbandment and the power sharing government at Stormont. A chapter from the first edition, on the end of Stormont in 1972 and 1973, is reproduced on the CAIN archive at Ulster University with the publisher's permission.

Reviewing it in The Independent in 2001, Patricia Craig said its strength was the way it could "pinpoint the causes of trouble while avoiding oversimplification". In The Blanket, Buffy Maguire praised its reference tools and its clarity on complex events, but said it offers no new analysis and that some conclusions reflect a wish to appear even handed. A review on the Mr Ulster blog called its factual reporting flawless but argued that the overall story was not neutral. Both reviews covered the first edition, and both saw it as suited to general readers rather than those already versed in Irish history.