In Europe

lose a whole series of friends and relatives; because of this book, all those connections have suddenly become clear as well. The chain reactions of revenge, back and forth: in January 1976, three Protestants were murdered in a bar by IRA supporters; in revenge, six Catholic men were shot and killed in a living room during a ‘post-New Year sing-song’ around the piano; in response, the IRA machine-gunned a van carrying ten Protestant workers close to Kingsmills. Nineteen lives lost within a week. The grisliest details: limbs that flew over rooftops, decapitated victims. The weapons: baseball bats, butcher's knives, pistols, fire bombs, fertiliser bombs, machine guns, Semtex bombs. The nightwatchman Thomas Madden, tortured by Unionists, screamed:‘Kill me, kill me now!'The heroic deaths: the woman who threw herself in front of her husband, a soldier, during an IRA attack. The deaths from sorrow: Anne Maguire, whose three children had been killed in 1976 and who cut her own wrists four years later – there was no life for her without her babies. Those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong moment: the old woman in a pub who was struck by a gas bomb. The brutal errors: the IRA gunman who burst through a door, shot the father of the family and then cried: ‘Damn it, wrong address!’
    The IRA and other republican groups accounted for most of the casualties: 2,139. The Protestant Unionists were responsible for 1,050 killings.The British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary killed 367 people. The majority of the victims were, as noted, not activists. An increasing share of the violence, in fact, served only to maintain the groups’ internal authority. The tables drawn up in
Lost Lives
speak for themselves: 115 IRA members were killed by the police and the British Army, 149 by the IRA itself, 138 Catholic citizens were killed by actions taken by the British Army, 198 by the IRA.
    Worth noting in this regard is the story of Jean McConville from West Belfast, a young widow with ten children, born Protestant but married to a Catholic contractor. The couple lived in a Protestant neighbourhood at first, but were harassed there so badly after 1969 that they moved to a Catholic section of town. In early 1972, her husband died of cancer. Soon afterwards, during a skirmish outside her house, she provided assistance to a young British soldier who had been wounded in front of her door. For the IRA, that deed of compassion was reason enough to put her on its blacklist. On 6 December, 1972 she was abducted and beaten for several hours. She escaped, but the next evening, while she was taking a bath, four young women entered her home and dragged her outside. Her eldest daughter – fifteen at the time – had gone to the chip shop, the youngest children clung to their mother and begged the women to let her go, the older children were hysterical with fear.
    They never saw Jean again. The children kept quiet about the kidnapping for several weeks, and tried to survive on their own. Finally, welfare bodies pulled the family apart. For the children, that was the start of a year-long odyssey from one orphanage to the next.
    Lost lives. Just outside Belfast, at the foot of a road embankment, lies a wilderness of tall grass, crooked stones, rusty iron and grey Celtic crosses: Milltown cemetery. To the left lie the republicans, finally in possession of their full names and ranks, as in a real war cemetery. ‘Capt Joseph Fitzsimmons, killed in action, 28 May, 1972, IRA’;‘Officer Danny Loughran, People's Liberation Army, murdered 5 April, 1975 by NLF’; ‘Joseph and Pete McGouch, “One day I will walk with you …”’
    On 16 March, 1988, the Unionist Michael Stone disrupted an IRA funeral here with shots and hand grenades: three dead, sixty wounded. He had thrown his hand grenades too soon. ‘If they had exploded in theair, he would have killed a great many more republicans,’ his sympathisers complained later. Stone is still their hero.
    Lost lives. ‘We have good hope,’ says Teresa Pickering. ‘But there isn't a family in Northern Ireland that hasn't been damaged.’ Teresa is a mother of three, one of countless women who have had to pilot their families through this war.‘Whole groups of boys were always on the run, including my own seventeen-year-old brother. There were always people hiding out, police raids, arson.’ She tells me about how one night three British soldiers forced their way into her home one