Sunday, September 12, 2004

Living Dangerously

At work we don’t get as many harassment cases as we used to. The loyalist feud in Belfast has calmed down. At its height families were being hunted from their homes in droves and quite a few of them landed in Ballymena. We still get the odd one. These are people who get in trouble with their neighbours for one thing or another and sometimes their neighbours have certain connections. They come to us and they are absolute angels with wings. We wonder how anybody could be so vicious, so evil as to drive this sweet person from her home.

Now if you were such a person would you get a skinful down you at the top of the town, then call in to one of the most loyalist bars in the town, where noticing that the majority of punters were rigged out in Rangers or England clothing, you would then have a bit of a banter with two of the larger lumpens about how you were a Celtic supporter and sure we’re all the same. She lived.

I know. I know it is savage but it is how things are, not how we would want them to be. And despite everything I know she was lucky. If they’d set the women on her God knows where it would have ended.

The thing that puzzles me is, where is the sense of self-preservation?

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