Westerners from Another World

My host here in Ireland, for the first few weeks of my visit, was writer Robert Allen, a Belfast lad who hales from a Protestant background. It would be presumtious of me to try and explain briefly in a blog entry what it must have been like for him growing up in Ulster in the 1970s, and how he still grapples with rejecting his unionist background. For this is the stuff of books not blogs.

But a story in today's Sunday Times, of Ireland brouches the subject well. The writer, Belfast native Walter Ellis, also from a Protestant background, tells a tale about his relationship with a friend and distant cousin who became a member of the Official IRA and then a leader of the Irish National Liberation Army.

Writes Ellis: "... Most westerners, growing up in stable societies, did not go through what I and other Ulster men and women experienced in the 1970s and beyond. ..."