David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

sense.”

The Limits of Power
    I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
    Ecclesiastes 9:11

1.
    When the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed. She and her husband had just bought a house in Belfast. They had a baby. It was the summer of 1969, and Catholics and Protestants—the two religious communities that have lived uneasily alongside each other throughout the country’s history—were at each other’s throats. There were bombings and riots. Gangs of Protestant militants—Loyalists, as they were called—roamed the streets, burning down houses. The Lawlors were Catholic, and Catholics have always been a minority in Northern Ireland. Every day, they grew more frightened.
    “I’d come home at night,” Lawlor said, “and there would be writing on the door: ‘Taigs out.’ ‘Taigs’ is a derogatory word for an Irish Catholic. Or ‘No Pope here.’ Another night we were there, we were very lucky. A bomb came into the backyard and didn’t explode. One day I went to knock on my neighbor’s door, and I realized that she was gone. I found out that day that a lot of people had gone. So when my husband, Terry, came home from work, I said, ‘Terry, what’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘We’re in danger.’
    “We left the home that night. We had no phone. You remember, this is in the days before mobiles. We walked out. The fear was in me. I put my son in his pram. I gathered up best we could pieces of clothes for him and ourselves. There was a tray at the bottom of the pram, and we stuffed them all in the tray. And Terry says to me, ‘Right, Rosie, we’re just going to walk straight out of here and we’re gonna smile at everybody.’ I was trembling. I was a teenage mum, a teenage girl who got married, nineteen, married, new baby, new world, new life. Taken away from me like that. D’you know? And I have no power to stop it. Fear is an awful thing, and I remember being really, really scared.”
    The safest place they knew was the all-Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, in West Belfast, where Lawlor’s parents lived. But they had no car, and with Belfast in turmoil, no taxi wanted to venture into a Catholic neighborhood. Finally they tricked a cab into stopping by saying their baby was sick and needed to get to a hospital. They shut the car door and Terry told the driver, “I want you to take us to Ballymurphy.” The driver said, “Oh, no, I’m not doing that.” But Terry had a poker, and he took it out, and he placed the point against the back of the driver’s neck and said, “You’re going to take us.” The cabdriver drove them to the edge of Ballymurphy and stopped. “I don’t care if you stick that in me,” he said. “I’m not going any further.” The Lawlors gathered up their baby and their worldly possessions and ran for their lives.
    At the beginning of 1970, things got worse. That Easter, there was a riot in Ballymurphy. The British Army was called in: a fleet of armored cars with barbed wire on their bumpers patrolled the streets. Lawlor would push her pram past soldiers with automatic rifles and tear-gas grenades. One weekend in June, there was a gun battle in the bordering neighborhood: a group of Catholic gunmen stepped into the middle of the road and opened fire on a group of Protestant bystanders. In response, Protestant Loyalists tried to burn down a Catholic church near the docks. For five hours, the two sides fought, locked in deadly gun battle. Hundreds of fires burned across the city. By the end of the weekend, six people were dead and more than two hundred injured. The British home secretary responsible for Northern Ireland flew up from London, surveyed the chaos, and ran back to his plane. “For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch,” he said, burying his head in his hands. “What a bloody awful country.”
    A week later, a woman came through Ballymurphy. Her name was Harriet Carson. “She was famous for hitting Maggie Thatcher over the head with a handbag at City Hall,” Lawlor said. “I knew her growing up. Harriet was coming around with two lids of pots, and she was banging them together and she was shouting, ‘Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered.’ She was shouting it up. And I