Ireland – Page 4 – For the fainthearted . . .

It will be lonely this Christmas

A gentle, softly spoken man, he lived in a terraced house in a street of what had once been a mill town, but it was now the late 1980s and the town had become a dormitory for Belfast. The old community had been diluted by the arrival of thousands of new people living in the numerous housing developments that encompassed the town.

The streets in the town centre, streets of houses where the front door opened on to the pavement and where there was no more than a small yard …

Through the eyes of a child

The top deck of the bus through Inchicore was well-filled. Two seats in front, there sat a man with a girl of perhaps five or six years of age.

The girl had not reached that point that seems to come in the lives of most young people where she looked down all of the time, fixated upon the screen of a mobile phone through which to engage with the fake, imaginary world of the social media. Instead, she stared out of the window, pondering everything that the bus passed.

A …

An uncivil war

It is the centenary of the judicial murder of four prisoners by the Irish Free State. The killings were the first of dozens that were to follow in the government’s pursuit of its struggle against the Irregulars, the Anti-Treaty forces, the Republicans.

A man whom I came to know well would recount stories of the bitter days of the Irish Civil War. Sitting one day at his bedside in Nenagh Hospital, he recounted, in a clear and strong voice, a recollection of the times.

“They were going to shoot him.”…

Cheap flights

Airports used to be exotic places. The sort of place which seemed to require the wearing a collar and tie, if not a suit – or perhaps that was just Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport.

The fares created the ambience – London in the early-1980s could cost £200 return – only those who might wear smart clothes could afford to fly, most of us rattled by rail from Stranraer to Carlisle before changing trains for the journey south.

London Euston to Larne Harbour was a whole day journey, leaving London in the …

On the anniversary of the Poppy Day bombing

It is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the “Poppy Day Bombing,” the attack by the Provisional IRA on the crowd assembled for the Remembrance Sunday ceremony in the Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen.

For many people, it was only when we returned from ceremonies in our own towns and switched on the lunchtime news that we heard of the awful slaughter in a quiet provincial town, the murder of innocent people who had gathered to remember the dead.

The carnage in Enniskillen on 8th November, 1987 was an example of IRA …

The rise of nastiness

Watching The Banshees of Inisherin, there is a sense of the retrojection of 21st Century attitudes, a sense of the film as an allegory of the way society has developed.

It’s not that there was no nastiness, of course there was.

Anyone who has lived in rural Ireland will know the bitterness that can surround the sale of land, or the backbiting that can accompany the question of where the child of a marriage between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant partner will be baptised. There was always a capacity …