Michael lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence. The others spoke haltingly, in sentences with atrocious syntax, accents so off she hardly recognised some words, but they went on. Aside from the obvious one, this was the real difference between them. They had the confidence to be foolish, to be wrong. She asked Michael […]

According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of […]