Growing up with the IRA means it’s good enough for me

[two gun sid]

From Daily Ireland:
I grew up with the IRA. Not in the IRA – never had the nerve – but with the IRA. I remember as an 11-year-old visiting my brother in Dundalk in my St Mary’s uniform when he was on the run.
He was ten years older than me, but at that time it seemed much more. These days you wouldn’t think there were two years between us, never mind ten.
As he sat speaking to our mother in an upstairs lounge, he leaned forward and his jacket moved to the side to reveal a handgun in the waistband of his trousers. As I sat there eating crisps and drinking Coca-Cola I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
Occasionally my brother would venture home for a visit and he’d give me and my brothers 50p each to stand at strategic corners near our home in Lenadoon looking out for foot patrols. Which was nice.
Not so nice were the late-night visits by British soldiers with their faces blackened who ordered us out of bed.
As we left our bedrooms, soldiers would take up position at the windows in the hope that my brother would make a home visit in the wee small hours....I was notorious as having the worst republican contacts of any journalist in Ireland because the makey-uppy ‘republican sources’ route was never open to me – I just couldn’t do it, for one thing because I had to look them in the eye in the supermarket aisle or down the pub; and for another thing because none of them ever told lies to me.
Which is why when I asked them yesterday if it was really over and they said yes, it was good enough for me.

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