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for two French loaves and an almond ring, and every so often a chocolate or pineapple cake. I pass Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and continue west through Crowe Street passing the town hall. I continue along the side wall of the county-court house and enter the Market Square. It was here I sat with Cora just two weeks ago. And it was here in this square where I first took notice of politics, first made conclusions on the story of Ireland, and first decided my role. That was 1981, and I was ten years old.
    Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner in a British jail in Northern Ireland, died after sixty-six days of a hunger strike. He was twenty-seven years old. Nine other men would follow him that summer on a demand for identity, a demand to be recognised as political prisoners. The streets and the television stations were full of it. The newspapers Dad brought home were full of it. Mam and Dad’s talk at the kitchen table and neighbours’ talk over fences was full of it. The walls, hoardings, and bridges around town were full of it. The list of the prisoners’ five demands was everywhere, with SMASH H-BLOCK below them as a sign-off.
    At the time I wondered why a people with so little, against an enemy with so much, would put all this effort into a battle for clothes and visits — a battle that could never affect the war. I asked Dad what was going on. ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.’ A protest base was established in the Market Square throughout the Bobby Sands hunger strike, and every day on the way from school I walked through it just to try to catch some of the fever. I didn’t. I just couldn’t figure the thing out. The black flags appeared on the day he died; they hung from every lamppost. That day, a skinny teenage girl in tight jeans and sporting a short haircut asked me to sign a petition. ‘Why?’ I asked, and the question seemed to throw her. It didn’t make sense. My ten-year-old head couldn’t figure it out. Bobby Sands had contested a Westminster seat during his hunger strike, and he had won — graffiti on an old wall near the school read, THE RIGHT HON BOBBY SANDS MP. I looked at the wall every day. The Right Hon Bobby Sands MP . Why, I thought, are we celebrating participation in the very thing that has persecuted us all this time? But celebration it was, BOBBY SANDS MP was everywhere.
    There were riots in the north when he died. We watched it all on television: women blowing whistles and banging dustbin lids on the pavements, youths attacking armoured cars, police lines behind riot shields, and petrol bombs flying in the night. The funeral was like a state affair — a long cortege of tens of thousands, a colour party, and shots into the air. And everyone had something to say about it.
    A week later, after fifty-nine days on hunger strike, Francis Hughes died. He was twenty-five. So the whole thing was repeated. And then another hunger striker died, and then another, and then another. It seemed to go on forever. In the Republic, though everyone was gripped by it, and concerned, we were yet distanced, kind of detached, as though it were remote and happening in another country altogether. We sat as spectators in our living rooms as bin lids rattled in the mornings, stones were launched in the afternoons, and petrol bombs flew at night. We watched the long funeral processions, the stiff-stepped coffin-carrying, and the colour parties shooting bullets up into a sky that never harmed Ireland. And here in Dundalk the black flags hung in the Market Square. Ten men were dead by the time it finished. I asked Dad why it had stopped. ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.’ I didn’t know it then — I know it now — but Dad was right. It was only ever politics, and we lost.
    And we Irish are too used to losing. We are too fond of celebrating moral defeats; too fond of celebrating small victories that