The truth of it
In a churchyard in County Monaghan I stood beside the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments until he had been killed by British soldiers in a neighbouring meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears cam into my eye as I stood there (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working nearby asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was simply crying for them all, whatever side they were on. “That’s the truth of it,” he said, “that’s the truth.”
