Volume 37, Number 16 · October 25, 1990
Portrait of the Critic as a Young Man
By John Banville
Warrenpoint
by Denis Donoghue
Knopf, 194 pp., $19.95
To any Irish person who has paid the least attention to public affairs in the past decade or so, the name of Warrenpoint, County Down, will bring to mind before anything else the slaughter of eighteen British soldiers near there on August 27, 1979. On that day the Provisional IRA exploded a land mine at the gate of Narrow Water Castle, on the Newry-to-Warrenpoint road, as a patrol of the parachute regiment was passing by; a second bomb was detonated half an hour later, when rescue services and police had arrived 'to help the wounded and count the dead,' as the Irish Times report put it. Also on that day, on the other side of Ireland, in the 'Yeats Country' of County Sligo, a Provisional IRA bomb planted on a boat killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, as well as two fifteen-year-old boys, one of them Mountbatten's grandson; a relative, the eighty-two-year-old Dowager Lady Brabourne, was grievously injured, and died later.
Review, 3647 words
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