Word: irished
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...irony is not academic. It explains why the "men of violence" prevail, and why peace is no closer now than it has been for the last eight years. It points to the profound ambiguity with which the Northern Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, view themselves and their sectarian opponents. On the one hand, there is the desire to find reconciliation. On the other, there is the incapability to compromise on points of belief and the adamant unwillingness to concede anything in the name of moderation...
...division of sympathies is complicated because each group has reason to fear the other. In the foreign press and the propaganda of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the conflict in Ulster is often portrayed only as a struggle of a Catholic minority against an oppressive Protestant majority backed by the British government. In reality the struggle is that of a "double minority." It is both the Catholic attempt to secure long-withheld civil rights; in Ulster, and the Protestant desire to insure British identity in the face of the Catholic majority to the south...
...sardined hordes of humanity away, in towards Manhattan. Down below, on the street--a saloon-infested, neon-gaudy strip called Roosevelt Ave., deep in the heart of Elmwood, Queens--the people muddle on, oblivious to the noise and to everything else. On the side streets beckon the bars, little Irish holes-in-the-wall where the Hugheses and McAfees gather to put away their beers and spill their guts, and flashy dives where the Puerto Ricans and Blacks, so new to the neighborhood, huddle in self-protection. This may be Queens, but it is really New York, a microcosm...
...means gone. Last week as the two women received congratulations from friends and supporters, three more victims of the Irish Republican Army's Provisional unit were being buried: a prison guard who was machine-gunned in his car, a school-bus driver who was shot to death as he stopped on his route, and a woman private in the Ulster Defence Regiment, who was gunned down in her mobile home. The third group of attackers even turned their guns on their victim's terrified three-year-old daughter, sending bullets through the Teddy bear she was holding...
...straight down into the box . . . The hour hand was nearly touching the nipple of metal." Atwater's stage machinery creaks a bit as Thomas and his bomb-making opponent are brought together, but the resolution is authentic, and properly somber. The rights and wrongs of the Catholic-Protestant, Irish-English struggle are lost in echoes of past foulness. The gray of gelignite is the only visible future. - John Skow