Father Kevin took a fit of playing the Beatles on his guitar on the Thursday afternoon and the whole assembly snivelled along as he plucked and warbled his way through ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Why would an apparently jolly priest on such good terms with Good Holy God single out numbers designed to make us cry? I hated sad songs. It took such an effort to hold tears in, anyone daring to force them out of you on a precious week off from The Hill should be shot.

When we were done drying our eyes, Father Kevin rounded us up like sheep. We had to hunker down in a circle of ten: five boys and five girls. Because we were hanging around each other Joe and me ended up in the same discussion group. Father Kevin wanted us to discuss a recent horror, what it meant to us, what it meant in the world, what it meant in terms of our faith. Two of the lay counsellors, one whose dog had been hanged by the UDR and one whose house had been torched, were on hand to tell us again about turning the other cheek when ‘confronted with acts of terrorism’. There were no Protestant representatives to chat about any horrors they’d lived through. Maybe they were all busy?

A British soldier had just been sent to the Province; it was his first tour. He was young, only nineteen, and was earmarked for Carncloon on account of its hotspot Tyrone border-town reputation where IRA men could run for the Republican hills of Donegal and from the jurisdiction of the Crown in a matter of minutes. When the Chinook landed he had jumped up, straight into the blades which were still spinning to allow for a swift take-off. The top of his head was sliced away and he near bled to death with his kitbag still around his shoulder.

The sirens had got up and the ambulance rushed him to Omagh with an RUC escort at full pelt but he died just this side of Drumquin. The news had been everywhere within hours. We had to tell each other what it meant while we sat cross-legged on the floor like children. The bulk of us said it was sad, nobody deserved to die like that, we were sad he was young, sad for his poor mammy in England, sad for all the people who had seen it, sad for the fact we knew he wouldn’t be the last. But Joe, Joseph, said something that blew a hole in the wall of high regard I had built around him.

–  The Brits have no right to be here, Ireland should be united. He wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s all he deserved when he was coming here to help keep us down!