Belfast confetti torrent

Can't Wait for Tomorrow Ricky Warwick. Throwin' Dirt Ricky Warwick. Thousands Are Leaving Ricky Warwick. Hank's Blues Ricky Warwick. Belfast Confetti Ricky Warwick.

Angel of Guile Ricky Warwick. Punchin' Thunder Ricky Warwick. Born Fightin' Ricky Warwick. Can't Hurt a Fool Ricky Warwick. All Right Reserved. Not Now Yes. We have noticed that you have an ad blocker enabled on your browser. To experience full features of the site please disable it for www.

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Please verify. Didn't receive verification mail? You can now login with your mobile number too. Register Mobile Number. Ok got it! Your password has been successfully updated Ok got it! Enter Existing Password. Enter New Password. It is just entirely different. Lyons spoke for quite a while in this vein and then, unprompted, veered into an analysis-at-a-distance of the republican leadership.

Before , this was a Protestant state, for Protestant people. The Protestants have lost their hold on the government, their police force. They are unsure of power now. Lyons said. I have probably seen ten thousand victims over the years—a vast number of them. I see the usual symptoms: fear, anxiety, insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, replays stimulated by television or for no reason at all, irritability, a lack of concentration. And much worse. How can I support the violence?

I am picking up the pieces every day. Both republican and unionist paramilitaries say they can no longer trust the police to do their jobs. Although the Royal Ulster Constabulary claims to have a high rate of arrests and convictions for common street crime it is higher than in American cities, certainly , the I. Geoffrey Maxwell, a Protestant in his thirties who was a community organizer in North Belfast before coming to work at FAlT, grew up in Lisburn when the infamous and since murdered U.

Maxwell is intimately familiar with Belfast and the suburbs around it, and one morning at the Fait offices he described the world of the paramilitaries—young thugs operating with all the insouciance and brutality of the Mob fifty years ago. In the poorer sections of Belfast and Londonderry, and in many of the towns and villages of Northern Ireland, members of the I.

And, what is more, for young kids in those areas, joining a paramilitary group is a career path, a way out of unemployment. If you are Protestant, you grow up believing that all Catholics support the I. As kids in Protestant Lisburn, we never heard that there were these Prod paramilitaries, the Shankill Butchers, going around killing Catholics.

We had selective propaganda. The U. You could recruit openly at school. When you reached sixteen or so, it was clear: either you were in the organization or you were crossing the organization. Extreme loyalists tried to ally themselves with Israel or South Africa. The paramilitaries on both sides expend endless labor on their self-appointed policing operations.

By comparison, political assassinations are far less frequent and far less strenuous. They are given a warning that their child should cease his larcenies or expect the paramilitaries to take matters into their own hands. If the paramilitaries decide that the next step is required, someone will be found the next morning severely beaten, or with a bullet in his knee. The kneecappings sometimes come by surprise but often by appointment.

Sometimes the I. If he is wise, the offender is on the next ferry to Liverpool. Punishments are usually random. Sinn Fein will tell you that there is a set list—that this offense means a beating or that means a knee. A few guys in a bar decide what to do, and they do it—beat someone with iron bars or planks or baseball bats, or chase the guy out of the country. There is a lot of talk about the Troubles, but the biggest war is the war between the paramilitaries and their own communities.

In , the I. But the Provos of late have been more sinister—more multiple shootings, both knees, both elbows, and so on. You might get a six-pack—both knees, the ankles, the elbows. They used to shoot people in public, and the victim would be seen and taken to a hospital. Now the victim is taken farther away, and after he is shot he loses a lot of blood before anyone finds him. We had someone in Derry in who was shot in both legs. No ambulance was called for a while, and both legs were amputated and he died a few days later.

He was a Catholic shot by the Provos. They accused him of being a sex fiend. He had no criminal record. There was a guy in the I. They shot him in both ankles, both hands, both knees, both thighs, both elbows: a tenner.

Or they might have you bend over and shoot you in the spine. Very often with baseball bats. In Newry, a guy was beaten with a fire axe. Usually, informers get worse. People are more likely to dismiss it. You can live with that. To know the person was really innocent, that is harder to digest. Guys have been kneecapped three or four times and they keep on joyriding. It becomes a challenge.

They might drive up to the I. Look, they get kneecapped not because they stole but because they stole without permission from the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries have no conscience. On the same night the I. It would be comforting to think that Fait is a growing organization and that it is making great inroads in Northern Ireland.

Neither is the case. Its annual budget is roughly forty-five thousand dollars, and its main success has been in focussing the attention of the media and human-rights groups on the extrapolitical abuses of the paramilitaries.

Until recently, groups such as Amnesty International paid attention almost exclusively to the abuses of governments against their own people. If a victim comes to Fait for help, the group will offer counselling and the possibility of publicity, but it will not try to negotiate a settlement with a paramilitary group. But we refuse to deal with the paramilitaries.

People have a right to the presumption of innocence, to a free trial. Human rights are not up for negotiation. The paramilitaries have no moral or political mandate. The strangest figure working alongside Maxwell at Fait is a young man named Henry Robinson. In his youth, Robinson was a paramilitary, a kneecapper. His father drove buses and ambulances.

You got the impression in school that Cromwell was still roaming the streets doing evil things to the Irish, or something. When the riots started, the Catholics felt under attack, and so did the Protestants. A lot of recruiting went on. You know—boys as kids like meeting in secret and talking about secret things.

Now, with the paramilitaries it was the same thing, only they were talking about sinister things. I joined up with something called the Official I. It still exists, but off on the fringe, really. He was throwing his weight around. Our group met and decided the shooting would take place. It was a pretty simple thing.

I was nineteen at the time—my first time. I had a. It was a really strange feeling, a rush. A lot of adrenaline goes through your body. It was the middle of the day. I had a mask on, and there was another guy with me. The guy was with two of his mates. I walked up to him and said I was with the Irish Republican Army. When his mates saw the gun, they scattered. I shot him three times, hit him in both legs. Paramilitaries are like fundamentalists.

I had my mask off by that time. And so he told the police. A panel of cheerful, nodding Sinn Fein leaders listened all day to a series of individuals and groups who had come to plead their case: republicans, unionists, community workers, academics. The press was invited, and that was very much the point. Sinn Fein, we were to believe, has a humane side.

The peace side. But neither the press nor the participants seemed much deluded. A young woman, a Protestant minister, came to speak, and she refused to give her name. Her hands were vibrating. The most astonishing moment of the day came when a spindly old gentleman, a surgeon, arrived to give his own testimony. He was William Rutherford, retired after nearly twenty years as an emergency-room physician at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in West Belfast. One of his patients, back in , was Gerry Adams, who had been shot by a team of Ulster Freedom Fighters after leaving a Belfast court.

One of the bullets that hit Adams barely missed his spine. His wounds were so severe that it can be fairly said that Dr. Rutherford, a Protestant, saved his life. Adams showed up at the Peace Commission for a few minutes, but rushed off before his rescuer spoke. He might have done well to stay. Like the psychiatrist Dr. Lyons, Dr. Rutherford had been picking up the pieces all his professional life, and he spoke with a quiet passion of the need for the most obvious and difficult things: the laying down of arms; an agreement that has the consent and cooperation of all sides.

A few days later, I drove out to Dr. He is still healthy at seventy-two. He described the varieties of gore he had seen in his career. I knew that this did not happen in Belfast.

It was as if a red-hot needle had bored through the flesh, so small and yet. Sure, people had robbed banks and stores before the Troubles started, but they were quite happy to do it without shooting anybody. The poor Protestants had so little, but if the Catholics, who had even less, grabbed their share what would they, the Prods, be left with?

That was the conflict. At first, the mass of injuries was cuts, bruises, broken bones, broken noses. Then the guns came out. The next great phase was the bombings in pubs, in streets, bombs left in the boots of cars. There was a period when we used to get these all the time. From one bomb you could get a hundred people coming through the door. In the early stages, the bombs were mostly homemade explosives, so you were seeing a lot of people torn up by flying glass.

It depended on your proximity to the bomb. They lost legs. It was strange, but when you are working as a professional in these circumstances you have got technical problems to overcome.

You are taking care of blood loss, making sure you are setting up the right I. When that happened, we would call the hospital painters in to advise us. They were the only ones who understood what substances we were dealing with and how to clean them off. And then later in the nineteen-seventies we started getting the kneecappings. A lot of the shootings were around the kneecap but did not destroy the kneecap.

I never knew whether the people involved had any knowledge of anatomy, so they could calibrate the degrees of punishment. I suppose they did. But the point is, you have a lot of arteries, veins, and nerves behind the knee.

Our surgeons eventually got very good at repairing these injuries. We learned to create a new artery to replace areas where arteries had been tom apart by bullet wounds. I think we got a message before he was actually wheeled in that he was coming. It was within a couple of minutes of City Hall where he was shot. I remember coming into the resuscitation room taking charge of his case. I remember putting the chest drain into his chest, because there was a lot of bleeding around the lungs, and the blood can exert a lot of pressure down on the lung.

That made the breathing easier. I remember thinking how his speeches had needled me, got under my skin in the most annoying sense. It seemed to me there was a lot of bitterness in him, though he was possessed of great powers of logic. I suppose I even blamed him, in a way, for escalating things.

I was unsure if he was a politician or really a paramilitary commander, but he was definitely a stir-it-up sort of figure, one that kept it all going. I was born and bred on the other side of the fence from Adams, but when I was looking after him I treated him like any other patient. I never had to struggle with my emotions.

We have to concentrate. I can very well understand that some people on the military end of the armed struggle find it very difficult to stop.

These are people whose lives have little meaning outside the war. These are people whose money and power and status and wherewithal are dependent on the status quo. I think Gerry Adams does not want the republican movement to split over this issue.

He wants to be sure he has a good deal before he persuades them. But the Catholics must understand the Protestants and their fear. The fear is the fear of death, of communal death. If there were an externally imposed united Ireland within, say, eighteen months, a violent war would be likely. But if it is my kind of united Ireland people must be prepared to spend decades.

I was able to see Adams alone the day I was to leave Belfast for London. The press office set the time and the place—noon, at No. It seemed a propitious time to ask the old questions once more. The shells, as it turned out, did not explode, and there were no injuries. What there was was fear, uncertainty, confusion; in short, the I. Once I was buzzed into the Sinn Fein building, a friendly greeter led me into a small waiting room.

They were from the neighborhood and had come by for advice. A large percentage of the Falls Road area is on the dole—in fact, I. In the waiting room, I found forms for free health care and information on arranging for a funeral if you could not afford one. On the walls were posters and plaques in honor of I.

Here, inside, no one bothered with the pretense. I was summoned upstairs to meet Adams. We sat together in a room not much bigger than an elevator: it had just enough space for two folding chairs. Adams was, as usual, in jeans and a tweed jacket, and was friendly, as always, on a first-name basis from the start.

And, while he denied once more any links to or influence on I. Adams is a seductive performer. One cannot imagine that the republican movement and its terrorist army possess his better.

But his seductions are limited. The truth is that after an hour with Adams you begin to see that under his considerable powers as a front man, under his veneer of learning, he is a secret. Or a protector of secrets. Carson on the Flute — Carson was also a musician, playing traditional Irish music on the flute and tin whistle.

Troubles Poems — More poems relating to the Troubles conflict. The Troubles and Poetry — An article that explores poets' responses to the Troubles conflict. A fount of broken type. And the explosion. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire…. Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again. What is. Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.