“It’s no problem, Ms. Gordon. I’m used to it. There aren’t many firms in the city who do criminal work any longer, thanks to the Legal Aid changes. We’re the largest, and I’m the senior criminal partner. By the way, I’m sorry about this, but we’ll have to talk in here. Since the Strangeways riots, our police stations are so overcrowded with remand prisoners that there are no more secure interview rooms. They’ve all become holding cells. Now, if I can just sort out some details?” She took a pad from her briefcase and moved swiftly through the formalities. “So what brings you back to Britain?” the solicitor asked.

Lindsay ran a hand through her hair and pulled a wry face. “I’m beginning to wonder myself,” she said. “My doctoral thesis is a study of how women have worked within the trade union movement to achieve changes in media attitudes towards them. That’s why I came back for the Amalgamated Media Workers’ Union’s first annual conference. Years ago I used to be active in the Journalists’ Union, which has been swallowed up by the new union, and I needed to talk to people who were involved in the equality struggles of the seventies and eighties. I thought that coming to the conference would be a good way of catching several of them in the same place.”

Jennifer nodded as she jotted notes with a shiny silver fountain pen. “And you arrived here when?”

Lindsay closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Monday afternoon,” she said.

The foyer of Wilberforce Hall was buzzing. But the focus of attention wasn’t the long trestle table where arriving delegates were registered and supplied with their conference packs. It was the photocopied A4 sheets that the earlier arrivals were waving under the noses of their friends and acquaintances as soon as they put their noses across the threshold. As Lindsay joined the queue, the pony-tailed young man behind her was accosted by a woman in her mid-forties.

“Have you seen this, Liam?” the woman demanded in a harsh Ulster accent. “It’s outrageous! Look what they’re saying about Fearghal O’Donovan!”

Lindsay sneaked a look over the young man’s shoulder as he took the brandished sheet of paper. She read:

Conference Chronicle
The Paper Off The Record
When Irish Ayes Are Lying?

Some of us were more than slightly gobsmacked at the turn-out in the election for an assistant general secretary (Ireland) last month. For those of us more familiar with the depressingly low numbers of members who normally vote in elections for fulltime officials, seeing returns of sixty-two per cent was pretty astonishing. And a staggering eightynine per cent of them voted for former despatch worker Fearghal O’Donovan.