In Europe

location for gloomy costume dramas. The courtyards have high grey walls; between them, hundreds of little children, often nothing but petty shoplifters, took their exercise in the nineteenth century. Their forgotten bodies are still buried here beneath the paving stones. A few doors down is the prison chapelwhere poet Joseph Plunkett married his beloved Grace Gifford at 1.30 a.m. on 4 May, 1916. They were given exactly ten minutes together. Two hours later he faced the firing squad.
    And then: the same grey walls against which the Irish executed each other later, during the brief civil war between the IRA and the Free State Army, until the IRA literally buried its weapons in 1923. What was that bloody fratricide all about? Strictly speaking, about whether to accept a peace with Britain, with a divided Ireland as part of the bargain. But, above all, the war had to do with the two eternal questions posed again and again by the dead in every war: hasn't it been enough? Haven't too many of us fallen already? Or: was that all, is this what we died for, why don't the rest of you push on?
    That is how the dead generations have always ruled over this land.
    Empty beer barrels rattle through the narrow streets of early morning Dublin. In Henry Street the Christmas decorations are already being strung up. At St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, near O'Connell Street, at least a hundred people are attending morning Mass on this normal working day: office workers, housewives, a striking number of young people. The church itself is sober and square, white and grey, no statues, no gold. The people pray intensely for peace, everyone is holding hands. The cry of gulls can be heard above the dome.
    Later I drive through the pleasant hills of Armagh. The border between the republic and Ulster slips by unnoticed, but soon you see them popping up: villages encircled by British and Ulster flags, flapping islands of Protestantism. Tractors come by pulling beets and manure, I see trailers full of family-owned turf, along the road are dead foxes, badgers and weasels, enough meat to feed an orphanage, just lying on the road here every night.
    ‘The Killing Fields’ is what they call this part of the country. More victims have fallen among these prosperous hills than in all the poor neighbourhoods of Belfast put together. For years the IRA did its best to terrorise the Protestant farmers into moving away, so they could have the land for themselves. Farmers’ sons were the primary targets. For more than thirty years, Western Europe's last religious war raged between the villages here, but today it has little to do with faith. Religion here seemsto be in a state of suspended animation: ever since the seventeenth century it has been raining heaven and hell here, without pause.
    Omagh looks like a provincial Dutch steel town: a post office, a Boots chemist. At the top of the shopping street, a redevelopment project is in progress; huge holes have been excavated left and right. One of the houses beside the construction site is blackened. On a lawn lie three bouquets, still in the florist's wrapping.
    The bomb that exploded here on the busy Saturday afternoon of 15 August, 1998 was made from Semtex, artificial fertiliser and motor oil. It took the lives of Brenda Devine, twenty months old, Oran Doherty, a boy of eight, Samantha McFarland and Lorraine Wilson, two seventeen-year-old girlfriends, and twenty-four others. It was a last-ditch attempt by the Real IRA, a radical splinter group, to block the peace process. It had the very opposite effect, and united all Ireland in abhorrence.
    Omagh was the worst outrage of the war: two whole housing blocks were blown up. It was also one of the most cruel: a warning had been telephoned in beforehand for another location, so that many people had crowded together at precisely the spot where the bomb actually exploded. Everywhere that afternoon parents were out shopping with their children, to buy new uniforms for the start of the school year. ‘I saw people with protruding abdominal wounds,’ one policeman said. ‘We used Pampers Nappies from Boots to staunch the bleeding.’
    The infirmary looked like a field hospital at the front lines. Thirty children lost their mothers. The toddler Brenda Devine was buried in a little white coffin, carried by her father. Her mother had burns over two thirds of her body, and knew nothing about her daughter's funeral. Brenda had been asked to be a bridesmaid; her mother had taken