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

eyes,” she went on. “That’s the way it was. And Eamon was shot, shot by a British soldier. Him and another fellow were having a smoke, and one shot rang out, and Eamon got it. He lived for eleven weeks. He died on the sixteenth of January, at seventeen and a half years of age.” She began to tear up. “My father never worked again at the dock. My mother was destroyed, heartbroken. It’s forty years ago this year. It’s still rough.”
    Lawlor was a young wife and mother, living what she had expected would be a normal life in modern Belfast. But then she lost her home. She was threatened and harassed. Her relatives down the hill were imprisoned in their homes. Her brother was shot and killed. She never wanted any of it, nor asked for any of it, nor could even make sense of what happened. “That was my life, my whole new life,” she said. “And then this was forced upon me. And I go, This is not right. D’you know? Here are my people I grew up with in school, being burnt out of their houses. The British Army that came in to protect us has now turned on us and is wracking and ruining. I became hooked. I don’t mean that flippantly. I became that way because I can’t sit in the house while this is going on. I can’t be a nine-to-five mother.
    “People call it the Troubles,” she continued. “It was war! The British Army was out there with armored cars and weapons and you name it. That’s a war zone we lived in. The British Army came in here with every means that they had available to put us down. And we were like rubber dolls—we’d just bounce back up again. Don’t get me wrong. We got hurt on the way down. A lot of people had heartache. I suffered from anger for a long, long time, and I’ve apologized to my children for that. But the circumstances dictated that. It wasn’t how I was. I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.”

6.
    When General Freeland’s men descended on the Lower Falls, the first thing the neighbors did was run to St. Peter’s Cathedral, the local Catholic church just a few blocks away. The defining feature of the Lower Falls, like so many of the other Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast, was its religiosity. St. Peter’s was the heart of the neighborhood. Four hundred people would attend mass at St. Peter’s on a typical weekday. The most important man in the community was the local priest. He came running. He went up to the soldiers. The raid must be done quickly, he warned them, or there would be trouble.
    Forty-five minutes passed, and the soldiers emerged with their haul: fifteen pistols, a rifle, a Schmeisser submachine gun, and a cache of explosives and ammunition. The patrol packed up and left, turning onto a side street that would take them out of the Lower Falls. In the interim, however, a small crowd had gathered, and as the armored cars turned the corner, a number of young men ran forward and started throwing stones at the soldiers. The patrol stopped. The crowd grew angry. The soldiers responded with tear gas. The crowd grew angrier. Stones turned to petrol bombs and petrol bombs to bullets. A taxi driver said he had seen someone carrying a submachine gun heading for Balkan Street. The rioters set up roadblocks to slow the army’s advance: a truck was set ablaze, blocking the end of the street. The soldiers fired even more tear gas, until the wind had carried it clear across the Lower Falls. The crowd grew angrier still.
    Why did the patrol stop? Why didn’t they just keep going? Lingering in the neighborhood is exactly what the priest told them not to do. The priest went back to the soldiers and pleaded with them again. If they stopped the tear gas, he said, he would get the crowd to stop throwing stones. The soldiers didn’t listen. Their instructions were to get tough and be seen to get tough with thugs and gunmen. The priest turned back toward the crowd. As he did, the soldiers fired off another round of tear gas. The canisters fell at the feet of the priest, and he staggered across the street, leaning on a windowsill as he gasped for air. In a neighborhood so devout that four hundred people would show up for mass on a typical weekday, the British Army gassed the priest.
    That was when the riot started. Freeland called in reinforcements. To subdue a community of eight thousand people—packed into tiny houses along narrow streets—the British brought in three thousand troops. And not just any troops. To a fiercely Catholic neighborhood,