‘They have a woman in charge of them, don’t they, the cops, so what do you expect?’ said Barry, blowing out a long stream of smoke before he forked up some more scrambled eggs. ‘Me – I wouldn’t put a woman in charge of lifting up the toilet seats so that the men could take a piss.’

‘Sure like, but what are we going to do about Tommy O’Flynn?’ asked Gavin. ‘The longer we leave it, the longer he’s going to believe that he’s got away with whacking your Michael and that we don’t have the guts to pay him back.’

‘It wasn’t only my Michael, Gavin. It was Saoirse and Fiona and little Éann. I want Tommy all right, by Christ I want Tommy because it was Tommy who paid Donal Hagerty to shoot Michael and nobody can tell me different. And it’s not only Tommy I’m gunning for. I want to take down the rest of his shitehawks, like that Milo Milligan. But – what do you know, Lenny from The Weavers rang me this morning and told me that it’s Maddie O’Flynn’s twenty-first birthday on Saturday and that the O’Flynn family are after holding a party. He said that they’ll be catering for three dozen of them, at least.’

‘So? You’re not planning on taking her a present, are you?’

‘You might say so, in a kind of a way. I’ve been thinking, right, about an eye for an eye, and why not? Michael was one thing. Michael did what he did and he was wide to what could happen to him if he crossed the O’Flynns. But Saoirse and Fiona and little Éann never did a scrap of harm to nobody, did they, they never hurt a fecking fly, yet that made no odds. Them fecking O’Flynns still took them down.’

‘Holy Joseph, Barry. You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.’

‘Give them O’Flynns a couple of hours at that party and they’ll all be half-fluthered, won’t they? They’ll all be singing and dancing and they’ll have the music playing so loud that it’ll take them a while to catch on to what’s hitting them. If there’s four or five of us we can be in and out of there before you can say bás gasta agus ceann éasca.1

‘One of us in the front bar, one in the back, one in the upstairs lounge and two outside keeping sketch for the law.’

Feargal whistled. ‘It’s going to take some fierce planning, though, Barry. We’ll be needing two motors at least, and we’ll have to work out where we’re going to park them and where we’re going to drive them off to afterwards. And what shooters we’re going to take, and how much ammo.’