Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
Guns in the Family
By Fintan O'Toole
Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
by Joseph O'Neill
Granta Books, 338 pp., $27.95
In the first week of September 2001, before a vastly more important story of terror and violence began to break, scenes from an unremarkable stretch of road in North Belfast occupied the news pages and television screens. Those scenes were, even to reporters hardened by more than thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, deeply shocking. Little girls were walking up the road to the Holy Cross school, hand in hand with their mothers or fathers. From behind a human screen of policemen in riot gear, grown-ups were spitting, throwing bottles, and screaming abuse: 'whores,' 'sluts,' 'Fenian bastards,' 'animals,' and the chant, rising in pitch and menace, of 'scum, scum, scum.'
Review, 4212 words
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