The IRA men of the 1970s heard the ghosts of the 1916 rebels whispering: the voices that said those who still dared to fight, kill and die would gain the true, whole, pure Ireland. The voices that said that there was still the North to be won, waiting for those with enough passion to seize it.

The ideal of purity screwed us all. All that passion meant in the North, in the end, was a weeping widow or a husband disembowelled with grief, a schoolgirl with half a leg, a dead teenage soldier, a buried policeman, a kid caught in cross-fire, a mother without her son. It was a dream that burned itself out in zigzagging paths of pain. Ireland was susceptible to the whispers of ghosts, and so we made more of them.

25

The stuff we’ve all found out now, you wouldn’t believe. There were secrets concealed within secrets, leaks and surprises. Whether you’re planning on killing or trying to stop it, you need to suck up wee pieces of information. Someone needs to tell you all the little things that someone else doesn’t want you to know.

Official fingers became unofficially busy in paramilitary pies, encouraging an informer here, protecting another one there. The British made decisions in which means and ends formed knots that proved hard to untangle: information sometimes came from the best of people, sometimes from the very worst. Later these stories started to drift up from history, bulging and distorted, lost toys stirred from the bottom of a stagnant well.

I picked up a London listings magazine about six months ago; flicking through it for a film to watch, I came across an article about a guy called Gerry Maguire. It was publicising a club night he was running: ‘This week the legendary Belfast-born DJ returns to Free London, spinning his celebrated mixture of trance, funk and house until the early hours.’ Belfast-born. I looked more closely at the photograph: a good-looking fella a bit younger than me with light brown hair and a carefully shaped wee beard, wearing a T-shirt with a logo of something fashionable I didn’t understand on it. He looked vaguely familiar.

I read on, noting that the interview was conducted in a style faintly breathless with respect, as if the journalist had pressed his face against the window of a more desirable life. There was talk of summers in mega-clubs in Ibiza and Gerry being flown halfway across the world to DJ at private parties. What music, the journalist asked, did Gerry himself like to get up and groove to? Gerry replied: ‘I don’t dance that much myself, because I injured my leg in a childhood accident. But it’s definitely my job to keep everyone else up on the dance floor.’