Word: iras
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sharp contrast of old and new Belfast raised one overriding question: Did Northern Ireland's Catholics get anything they wanted? Northern Ireland, after all, still belongs to the Queen. I asked a former IRA car bomber. "We got absolutely nothing," Marion said. "We were betrayed...
...lingering doubt I had that the conflict was truly over disappeared when I saw the Europa. There wasn't even a car bomb barrier out front. The place was full of families, many of them American, coming home for Easter. Ex-IRA foot soldiers out front offered driving tours of the old IRA battlefields. Who would ever have thought Northern Ireland would be turned into a theme park...
...Marion joined the IRA when she was seventeen, showing up at an IRA "call house" every day after school. She was never sure what the night's mission would be, but often as not it involved delivering a car bomb. She was (and still is) beautiful, and easily passed through the British checkpoints. "You never forget the smell of sodium nitro benzene" - the improvised explosive used by the IRA in the early days. "It smelled like marzipan...
...eventually went to jail after being caught parking a car bomb in London, but was released under an amnesty. Did she ever think of going back to war? "No. It's finished." Marion was convinced the IRA rank and file were betrayed by its leadership, and it had all been a waste of lives. She now is married and working as a nurse...
...asked a former IRA soldier, a bomb maker, if Marion was right. "You can't know for sure," he said. "They wrongly called an end to the conflict in 1962." He agreed that no one was satisfied with the power-sharing agreement that technically gives the province's Catholics as much say in government as the Protestants. And one of the biggest problems for Northern Irish Catholics is unemployment; much of the lost generation only knows how to fight...