Word: belfasters
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...initial setting for the film is the war zone of Belfast in 1974. English troops parole the streets with rifles on their hips; when a youth, stealing scrap metal from a roof, waves a stick around, these troops pronounce him a "sniper" and shoot at him. The young man flees, and is chased through the small alleys and homes of Belfast; meanwhile, its inhabitants beat the walls and pavement with trash can lids to raise an alarm. Soon a riot has been provoked, and English tanks and soldiers careen through the streets. The young man who started this uproar...
...Name of the Father. Daniel Day Lewis stars as Gerry Conlon, the Belfast man who, while on a London spree in 1975, was unjustly arrested, convicted and jailed as an I.R.A. terrorist. The British police in charge of the case were no Miss Marples; they tortured the four major suspects to extract bogus confessions. In director Jim Sheridan's tense retelling of this shameful chapter in British jurisimprudence, the lads are smacked, threatened and humiliated. And Gerry's saintly father (Pete Postlethwaite), jailed with him, is allowed to die slowly, with little medical attention. By the end of the movie...
...grew up in the mill town of Ballymena, in Northern Ireland. A strapping lad, he was a youthful boxing champion. "I thought I wanted to be professional. But I realized I didn't have the killer instinct." Soon he was driving a forklift at the Guinness brewery in Belfast by day, and at night filling the Lyric Theatre stage with roles like that of Lennie in Of Mice and Men. In 1986 he moved to Los Angeles, where he was felled by diverticulitis, an intestinal disorder. That experience scarred him. "I can't plan for next Thursday," he says...
Colm M., 25, is a Belfast-born barman and bouncer. More a charmer than a strongarm, Colm arrived in New York as a teenager. His father came originally to escape "the troubles." Colm, his mother and three siblings followed on visitor's visas and stayed on. "There was nothing there for us," he explains. Even so, it took him years to adjust to American cultural attitudes. "In Ireland everybody was afraid of the teacher, but here the kid would tell the teacher to F off. In Ireland you could get killed for that. First the teacher would kill you; then...
Like a revenger's tragedy, the violence in Northern Ireland never goes unanswered. On a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, Thomas Begley, a 23-year- old I.R.A. member, walked into Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast carrying a Semtex bomb that exploded, probably prematurely. Nine Protestants, including Michelle Baird, 7, and Leanne Murray, 13, were killed -- along with Begley himself. The reply came three days later at 7:30 a.m. Two Protestant gunman fired long bursts from automatic weapons into a group of city sanitation workers in largely Roman Catholic West Belfast. Two Catholic men were...