This vibrant, righteously angry, often bleakly funny memoir freights much grim wisdom about the conflict it recalls - the vicious early convulsions of Northern Ireland's Troubles.

The best of Myers's observations, however, resonate beyond the Belfast ghettoes in which, to the bafflement of sane observers, late-20th-century Europeans brutalised each other with often shockingly imaginative violence. Any reader with experience of war zones will recognise the tawdry intrigue, pathetic machismo and giddy abandonment of personal responsibility common to all comparable places. Any reader with no such experience, who has considered Northern Ireland or other internecine dust-ups from a distance, and wondered what the hell the protagonists thought they were doing, will find few more bracing lessons.

“Everyone in Northern Ireland lied,” Myers writes. “Everyone, without exception: Republicans, Loyalists, soldiers, police - everyone. Lying is easy in such a place. It is the default mode to which everyone turns when there is no consensus about truth. In the absence of an agreed reality, truth is whatever you're having yourself.”

Watching The Door, then, is Myers's truth. Today, the author is a choleric, keyboard-thumping columnist on The Irish Independent, where he vituperates exuberantly at an extensive menagerie of bêtes noires - most frequently, still, the semi-retired warlords of Northern Ireland, whose recent reinvention as respectable politicians fools Myers as little as it should fool anyone. A little less than 40 years ago, Irish-born, English-raised Myers was a 22-year-old Dublin university graduate who stumbled into a reporting gig and found himself drawn to Belfast for all the reasons that young men and young reporters are drawn to such environments: adventure, opportunity, the gratifying self-righteousness that being in a war zone confers upon combatants and chroniclers alike. Over a decade in Belfast, Myers survives riots, gun battles, one pub bombing, several death threats and a couple of abortive lynchings. He becomes intimately involved with the people doing the dying and the killing. What he passes along here is learnt the hard way.

Watching The Door distinguishes itself from most Troubles literature by disdaining examination of the historical grievances routinely deployed by both Republicans and Loyalists as justifications for their mayhem. This is obviously partly an editorial decision - Myers wishing to tell his own story as concisely as possible. But it is also indicative of Myers's attitude to the Troubles as a whole - one of complete, and quite proper, disgust with all parties to a grotesque, barbarous, utterly unnecessary conflict, which was fuelled at least partly by the willingness of outsiders to take its mythologies seriously.

Though Myers is honest about the moral swamps he ends up floundering in himself - he frets, at some cost to his own psychological wellbeing, about lives ended or altered by his own errors of omission or commission - he keeps a refreshingly firm grip on one too-often overlooked principle: that the willingness of people to take or give life for a cause is not proof that the cause isn't foolish, or even criminal. He writes of the Provisional IRA that it “did not consult the living, only the past and the future”. The characterisation rings just as true if applied to any variety of ideological headbanger who believes that other people matter less than his beliefs.

Myers leavens his brutally evocative reportage with rueful ruminations on his eventful personal life, which mostly read as farcical Confessions of a War Correspondent, and only occasionally as gratuitous gloating. It's difficult to say, even on repeated readings, whether it is what Myers intends to suggest, but his romantic fortunes acquire an accidental symmetry with the political and religious carnage around him when he is calamitously unhorsed by a break-up with the woman he loves.

Myers writes lucidly and movingly of the unravelling that ensues, illuminating the remarkable similarities between a heartbroken person and a war-torn society: both, when in the depths of their dysfunction, are illogical, unfathomable, unreasonable, petulant, impenetrably narcissistic, wantonly self-destructive and thunderously tedious to all but those who find something morbidly fascinating in humanity's ceaseless determination to act against its own interests, and whose appetite for the consequent drama may well be part of the problem.

Which, of course, is kind of where Myers came in. “The absence of sense,” he decides, in one of many asides destined for quotations anthologies, “is what makes wars possible.”

Watching The Door: Cheating Death In 1970s Belfast, by Kevin Myers
Atlantic, £14.99

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