The Conversion of Ignatius Moriarty

Copyright © 2016 by Seamus McNinch.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016914223

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-1702-1

      Softcover      978-1-5245-1701-4

      eBook         978-1-5245-1700-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 09/23/2016

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

GLOSSARY

Foreword

I have been asked by to write a Foreword to this novel for three rea sons:

First, I have close personal knowledge about the life and thought of the author.

Second, I have been a Professor of Literature, specializing in the history and form of the novel, for more than forty-five years.

A third reason is that while the book seems simple on the surface, on closer reading it turns out to be much deeper and more complex than one might at first have imagined.

This needs some explaining:

I have known the author since 1992, when I met him in Bangkok, Thailand, where he had first served as an Intelligence Officer at the British Embassy, and, having resigned from government service, was working as a security and ethnic minority development consultant. At this time I was teaching courses on the History of the Novel in the English Department of the prestigious, Chulalongkorn University.

I knew him as a part of my expat circle of friends and drinking companions.

Seamus, as I and his close friends know him, had been born in Northern Ireland, a clever son of a well-respected schoolmaster, a good boy who grew up to become the recipient of a scholarship to attend Oxford University and read Modern Languages. What this means, in short, was that Seamus developed into a well-educated linguist and scholar - to the point where eventually he had read almost all of the great books of world literature, and most of them in their original languages. Impressive indeed!

After finishing his studies, he pursued a career as a military officer in the British Army, and after training he was sent -- in the prime of his life – back home to the place of his birth and childhood, to become an intelligence officer in that terrible period of modern history in Ulster, known as The Troubles. The situation between Catholic and Protestant, between Republicans and Loyalists, between the authorities and the common people at that time was of a mind-boggling complexity to any outsider - just as the situations narrated in his book are of considerable complexity! Despite all of this, by the time you finish reading his tale, you will almost feel you have been there in the Troubles too.

As Seamus was at the centre of the action, and – importantly – had been born and bred there, he knew what was truly happening on all sides and so, as a writer and an intelligence officer, he knows exactly what he is talking about, on all sides and levels.

This is an inside story which nobody knows better than him, and it is related to us in the way it was unfolding, as the plot was incrementally and unexpectedly thickening – progressing on its way - and then swiftly building towards ultimate release in a momentous climax!

Even though the novel pivots around a single character, it is really more of an inside account of the Zeitgeist of the period and the people surrounding the protagonist - in an epoch of history which may never have been recorded quite so carefully and clearly, and in such minute, objective detail before.

The scatalogical language used in the presentation is necessary to make the language realistic – to give local colour to the characters – to make their manner of speech culturally believable, and it is for the same reason that the text contains a lot of erotic imagery to introduce an underlying sense of sensual reality into what on the surface would appear to be just a prudish puritanical, republican or Loyalist or authoritarian slice of society.

As with Shakespeare or Faulkner, this is a tale of sound and fury which documents the incompetence, idiocy and tragedy evidenced in the actions of all involved. Often down into the tiniest fragments of local speech, in Tristram Shandy like accumulation of detail.

There is, perhaps, more density of detail than one might expect, but in the end, we find that no word has ever been wasted, and that everything meticulously mentioned eventually ties all together into a well-balanced organic whole, with coherence and unity.

The story sometimes seems to have a cast of thousands, all carefully divided into groups and sub-sets. I am convinced that it would make an excellent action-packed film, seen from the air, for which the director of cinematography would need to have a field officer’s inherent sense of planning, organization and discipline just to be able to keep track of all the groups of combatants and of where they were at any given moment in the plot’s movement. I can imagine that Seamus might have planned-out the plot and its development by visualizing the groups much as in a war-game, using toy soldiers spread out over a complex table-top battlefield, complete with topography and buildings, hills, trees, shrubbery, roads, vehicles and all.

Above, I have explained how Seamus, from his Oxford days, came to be at home with the form and development of the novel, and, thus, it comes as no surprise that his central character appears in the form of a traditional picaresque protagonist, who is an anti-hero, and who serves as a tool for stitching the events of the tale together in series. He does not grow or develop or become more mentally aware by the end of the story.

He is not like the figure in a Bildungs-roman or a Kunstler-roman or in Goethe’s Faust, who learns as he struggles his way through life and becomes wiser, based on experience. He is not a character who evolves a new philosophical view. This novel is rather a tale in which the main character remains no more intelligent or becomes in any way superior to the other ignorant, obnoxious and ridiculous characters who surround him – regardless of whatever their level of privilege or ignominy may be.

I shall not give away the story by hinting how the narrative unfolds. My purpose, here, is simply to help the reader get started with reading the book. If one sets off on the wrong foot - looking for a hero to admire or imagining the picaresque protagonist to embody some thinly-disguised autobiographical character with whom to identify – one will surely get lost and become confused.

As an aside, before I go on, if I may be allowed to make some personal comments, I would add that I first read the manuscript of this novel, some time ago, when I was in a Thai hospital after having had heart-complications. When I was well enough to sit up in bed and read, after getting a few pages into the story, and getting a proper feel for things, I got to laughing so hard that my nurses were afraid I would break open my stitches, and they took my copy of the manuscript away from me.

Another thing I should also mention, is that Seamus often repeated to me that every character in the story had actually existed in real-life, and the book, rather than being an imaginative creation of fiction, was based on a factual reality, all the way through, in full comprehensive detail, which was even stranger than fiction. Read it and see!

The book often reads like a satire based on over-exaggeration, as in Heller’s Catch-22, but in this case, the exaggeration was hardly necessary. The actual facts and the actions of the characters are so utterly bizarre and so fully absurd that the reader finds himself in a world where everything that is happening seems beyond belief!

I ought to note here, however, that the author’s purpose is not to ridicule or punish people for their faults and ignorance but rather to improve the world by humorously letting us see for ourselves where and how it could be better.

Thus far, I have avoided dropping too many author’s names -because I do not wish to sound like a stodgy Professor - but some academic comments are, perhaps, now in order – to suggest where Seamus’s novel has lots of parallels in World Literature. He, as a writer, is drawing on traditions that run throughout the history of the novel as a literary form.

Those in the know will tell you that the use of a picaresque central figure to tie a multi-event tale loosely together was a common device in early Spanish Literature and is best known as used in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In French, Voltaire’s Candide was written following this genre. Both landmark works paint a gloomy picture of human nature based on a lack of morality and corruption of mankind which we see wherever we look into human society. The innocent traveler wants the world to be good but, unfortunately, it turns out to be a lot worse than he could ever have imagined.

In the development of the English Novel, Fielding’s Tom Jones is the classic picaresque adventure, while Defoe’s Moll Flanders follows the same genre, using a female figure. Richardson’s Pamela is another example and there are many more. What is important for the reader to understand is that, in each case, the author is giving a critique of a morally corrupt society at large, through the eyes of a relatively innocent victim of circumstance, who is sometimes sexually vulnerable; from the uneducated-classes; who usually cannot do much to protect him/herself; and who helps him/herself survive by using his/her wits alone as best he/she can.

We as readers make judgments about the settings, characters and social situations presented, and we are able to develop a much wider world view than that of the poor protagonist – given his limitations. Moreover, the world view shown through the skill of the author can sometimes even become epic in proportion – making us widen our horizons – as we find, for example, in Joyce’s narratives about Dublin or in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; or to stretch the point across the Atlantic, in Melville’s Moby Dick, or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In each case, the writer seems to be asking, Just how ignorant, cruel and stupid can people be? Whether in religion, in government, the military or in other aspects of society?

It is an author’s job to describe the human drama, to tell it as it is, and a great artist should be able to do it with epic reach. As readers of World Literature, we can see the world as tragedy or as comedy, or as both, and we ask ourselves, How low and how high can humanity reach? Many of us in our lives have known the lowest of the low, and some of us have reached for the highest of the high and reached surcease from sorrow.

An author in his art can express his pain and find relief in describing the ignorance of the people and the cruel things he sees in his society, and by telling his story he may even grow and somehow find release.

James Joyce once visited Carl Jung in Zurich, and after they had finished talking, Jung’s advice to Joyce was that he should keep on writing – in other words, he should keep on doing what he had been doing as an artist because he felt it brought him mental relief and release. He was working it out on his own, Jung felt Joyce’s art was helping to ease his sense of spiritual pain, thereby also triggering positive energy – in the arising of a creative sense of release.

There is certainly a lot that I will never know about Seamus McNinch, but one time I jokingly asked him why he had no hair, and he said, It all fell out in Northern Ireland because of the tension in the air.

His novel tells about a catastrophic series of events which he experienced personally, up-front, in the mid-70s in Northern Ireland, at the time of Harold Wilson’s failing government. Seamus struggled through this period as best he could, and he survived to tell the tale.

Writing this novel was a kind of catharsis for him. It was good for him, and reading it might be good for you too, if it helps to give you some sense of understanding, relief, and release. Smile.

Professor David Holmes

PROLOGUE

In war, truth is the first casualty.

Aeschylus 535 – 456 BCE

Great is the truth, and mighty above all things.

1st Esdras 4.35

S eamus McNinch is, of course, a pseudonym. Shakespeare, Le Carre, McNab, Ryan, and many others are all pseudonyms. Why? Because the authors chose not to reveal the truth in a non-fictional manner through either fear for their personal security or social status, or because they were bound by strict legal oaths to higher authority never to reveal the truth. McNinch, like the others mentioned above, was left with only one way in which to get the truth across to the public at large, and that was by fic tion.

The events in this fictional tale are all based on truth. The protagonists on all sides, Republican, Loyalist, military, intelligence organisations, are based on actual personalities well known to the author during the Northern Ireland Troubles of the seventies. Let us never forget that person and personality is derived from the old Greek root persona – mask. That the events told here and the personalities you meet here are exaggerated, is because by such exaggeration more of the truth" may be revealed to you.

The general public thinks that the Troubles were caused by Protestant majority oppression of a Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, with the Catholics at last standing up and fighting for their Rights. To the ordinary Republican in Ulster that may have seemed the case. But that was just fact and reality, two things very, very different from the truth. The truth was that those two old comrades-in-arms, power and money, were what was inspiring the leadership on both sides of the religious/political divide. And very soon those two old comrades would begin to find willing counterparts in the military hierarchy and in the corridors of power of Stormont and Whitehall.

Since I cannot tell you the truth in a non-fictional manner, by reason of solemn and binding oaths given (and the undoubted repercussions should I break those oaths), I have chosen the method of a black fictional comedy of errors. I hope you will bear with me and find out the horrifying truths herein contained. If you do, then please look around you at the facts and the reality of the greater world around you today, and try to seek out the truth – for your own sake and the sake of generations to come. Those two old comrades-in-arms are out there – and everywhere, and you, dear readers, are being played as pawns! I wish you well in this frightening – but true - Game of Thrones.

CHAPTER One

I t wasn’t that Ignatius Aloysius Moriarty was incompetent or a fool, although most people would, with justification, have concurred with such a view. Rather, Moriarty was a professional walking disaster area, an ever-recurring thermo-nuclear nightmare in the happening, and a right pain in the arse to boot (and there were those who had booted him with great satisfaction to themselves and some not-inconsiderable pain to Moriarty’s poste rior.).

But it wasn’t all Moriarty’s fault, for what hope could you expect for an Ulster Presbyterian with such an archetypal Catholic string of names as ‘Ignatius Aloysius Moriarty’. These names had justifiably engendered a certain blood-lust among his fellow Protestants at Carnaughts Academy for the Sons and Daughters of Not-So-Gentlefolk, as his Primary School had once been termed by the local General Practitioner, or as the just as unfortunately local RUC sergeant in the neighbouring village more aptly and accurately put it, ‘a festering dunghill of fucking little perverts who think failing the 11 Plus is matriculation into bloody Sodom and Gomorrah Open University.’

And Sergeant Simpson, whose tenure at Kells and Connor RUC Station, or the ‘Barracks’, as it was lovingly known to one and all, had been brought about by the mass execution of the bestial passengers of a pig lorry, while acting on not-so-accurate intelligence from a not-so-sober PIRA source along the border with the Free State, had every reason imaginable - and some, indeed, abominable - to regard the alumni of Carnaughts Academy as the offspring of the Devil’s worst transvestite shag. For Sergeant Simpson, once upon a time an able man, with an illustrious career of maintaining Protestant hegemony and the status quo ante Troubles no longer before him, was a Cullybackey man, and therefore ought to have won the gold medal in the great Olympics of sectarianism. He had a deep sense of what a good Protestant should look like and act like, and an equally good sense of what a bloody papist looked like and should die like. It offended Sergeant Simpson to the quick to have to accept that the inhabitants of his security bailiwick, where not a living Catholic could be found, were not the good Citizens of the Free Presbyterian Paradise ordained by the Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley, but were mentally handicapped, sexually abnormal, morally degenerate descendants of a one night stand between the Devil’s daughter and Finn MacCoul’s prize boar.

But if anything offended Sergeant Simpson more than the fact that his superiors failed to accept that the ambushed pigs on the border - albeit not the Finnerty Gang on a rocketing raid to massacre the military at Cullyhanna, had, after all, been of Catholic ownership and from the Free State and, therefore, fair game in a free-fire zone, was that the biggest albatross around his red Cullybackey neck was Ignatius Aloysius Moriarty, the insufferable, snivelling little excuse for a git. As the good Sergeant thought, anyone living in the environs of Kells and Connor with a name like that was either someone’s idea of a sick joke or - more likely - a fucking Fenian fifth columnist masquerading as a sick joke. And even though he had beaten the shite out of the little bastard on every occasion he could catch him alone and in the dark, and pissed enough not to answer in kind, Moriarty refused either to give up the ghost or emigrate to Australia where his family name and undoubted lack of intellect would have ensured him a meteoric rise to prominence in politics, or - more likely - exile to Tasmania for buggering disenfranchised koala bears.

Ignatius, after several years of having the nocturnal shit kicked out of him while wending his way homeward from any one of a number of pubs, had begun to suspect that somebody had it in for him - in a rather major way. The trouble was, as he had such an incredible gift for getting anything wrong, he had managed to offend everyone within a fifty-mile radius since nine months before birth, and thus he had no criteria on which to isolate his main source of late night/early morning assault and battery. So popular was Ignatius that a local farmer, Bobby Graham, had spent six months in the Waveney Hospital in Ballymena after an abortive attempt to run Moriarty down in a Fordson tractor ended up with Moriarty somersaulting fifty feet through the air to a safe landing in a steaming midden, and Farmer Graham arse-over-tit down a twenty foot gradient, into which he was swiftly and painfully pursued by one ton of best 1955 vintage agricultural technology.

And once, while vomiting his way merrily home from a still he had perchance found in Jock Allen’s peat bog, Moriarty had meandered in front of a bus full of not-too-sober Broughshane Masons, who were returning home from an over-convivial banquet in Belfast. The result of this particular encounter was a hand brake turn both Paddy Hopkirk and the SAS bodyguard teams would have been justly proud of, a one hundred foot skid, a sonic bang into the parapet of Kellswater Bridge, a spectacular slow-motion flight by a noble blue Leyland Viking (which ended in the total obliteration of Farmer Graham’s cow-shed), and an impressive funeral in full Masonic regalia two days later. (At this funeral His Grace the Bishop of Galway, sole Mason and, indeed, sole Protestant in that far county, had given an impressive eulogy - before disgracing himself two hours later by singing the ‘Sash’ in Paddy McCallion’s pub in Ballymena with his pants and gaiters round his ankles, his apron round his bum, and a pint of Bass balanced on his wife’s beatitude. All would have been well for His Grace the Bishop - despite the fact that Paddy McCallion, Purveyor of Liquor to the Protestant Community, was the local IRA Commandant and the biggest bum-bandit in Ballymena - if the local Worshipful Master had not boked up his Guinness all over the marble-topped table, thus causing the good Bishop to lose his footing, fall forward from grace on to the counter, and circumcise - without the aid of anaesthetic - his elegant staff of office. The sight of the Bishop’s bare bum under his apron flap was too much for McCallion, who shouted up the IRA, and was paradoxically trying to get up a Protestant Bishop, when the Lodge’s Junior Warden, who fortuitously happened to be the local RUC Detective Inspector, stepped in and arrested him under the Prevention of Terrorism Act).

So even when not physically present (and there was, as sure as hell, no way he was ever mentally present anywhere) at the scene of any disaster within the fifty mile radius of his ramblings, a close examination of every such disastrous event invariably revealed that Moriarty himself had initiated the train of events that led to the ultimate catastrophe.

Brave men had from time to time attempted to rid society of the threat posed by Ignatius Moriarty. The result was always the same. Somehow or other Moriarty was saved through his own brilliant incompetence, while the well-intentioned assassins seemed always to meet with a terrible retribution. For example, there was Sammy Coulter, who had lain in wait for days in the hedgerow of a sunken road near McCrory’s pub in Slaght, after burying a blockbuster of a fertiliser and diesel mix bomb at the bottom of a boortry bush, where Ignatius - under autopilot - was wont to have a good slash after a night out. True to form Moriarty at last staggered down the lane, stopped, slashed, farted with that soul-searching liquidity which always has the perpetrator saying mournfully Oh Shit!, and staggered on.

Sammy, who had been frantically pressing the two bare wires of his command detonated mine on to his battery terminals, and was cursing Eveready, the Pope, and any other bastard he could think of in his frustration, finally broke down in tears and walked disconsolately down to the boortry bush to retrieve his dud device for another day. Unbeknownst to Sammy, a pregnant sheep. wandering aimlessly across the hillside. chose the site of his flat battery and two connected command wires to urinate, thus creating an effective and perfect circuit and sending Sammy Coulter in a fine red mist over at least two and a half townlands. Two hundred yards down the lane the blast wave hit Ignatius, causing him to fart again in empathy, fill his trousers, and thank God that he had tied bailer twine round both legs above the knee, just in case of such eventualities occurring as a rat running up or fourteen pints of Heinz baked beans and Bass-driven bowel movement running down.

The local UVF company, under the leadership of ‘Fingers’ Davidson (so called because his left hand had no fingers on it, due to having been in the process of opening the door of a getaway car after a bank job on behalf of the future of Protestantism, just as the car accelerated unsympathetically off without him), had spent months in planning the demise of Moriarty. As Fingers told his band of brainless volunteers, Moriarty is the nearest thing to a fucking Fenian we’ve got around here, so he’ll bloody well have to do! As Fingers and three of his feckless band drove down the Antrim line in a souped-up Morris Minor, disguised as a non-getaway vehicle by a bale of hay and an occupied pig-creel sticking out of the boot, Moriarty was trying to stay on the footpath and walk the opposite way. As Morris and Moriarty neared, Moriarty tripped over an undone bootlace, fell prone to the ground and was unscathed by the hail of bullets.

Not so unscathed were Fingers and the Boys, who had the unfortunate experience of running out of ammunition just as a Bedford four tonner full of Paras came the opposite way. The Paras had been beaten in a ‘friendly’ football match at the Royal Irish Ranger’s Depot in Ballymena and had been prevented by their accompanying officer from kicking the living daylights out of the Rangers after their defeat became obvious (they certainly teach the young Ruperts all about man management at Sandhurst). Neither had they been permitted to rape and pillage the streets of the little market town because it was Protestant and was, therefore - supposedly, but totally erroneously - ‘on our side.’ To twelve steely-eyed, hyper fit, totally dedicated mass murderers in red berets the appearance of a Morris Minor full of guns and Fingers, going like the clappers at sixty miles an hour, belching blue smoke, and scattering a hay bale and a pig creel containing a two hundred weight sow (experiencing some understandable stress) all over the road, was just too unbelievably good to be true. Twelve full SLR magazines, six PVC rounds, and a stale cellophane-wrapped NAAFI sandwich later, Fingers and his merry men became the subject of an enquiry by a Special Tribunal in Whitehall, martyrs for the Cause, and the reason for street parties all over Catholic West Belfast. For the next week Paras on patrol in the Ardoyne found that the sniper’s bullet had been exchanged by an ecstatically grateful Republican community for as much tea as they could drink and as much nooky as they could stand to attention for up against the walls of Flax Street Mill. And Moriarty? Well, he woke from a concussion in the act of embracing an occupied pig creel, which only confirmed his increasingly widespread reputation for having a predilection for forbidden flesh.

In the end things got so bad that mothers locked up their children and farmers their livestock, if Moriarty was seen or even rumoured to be in the area. Indeed, as the seventies passed with a succession of bangs into the eighties, the only remaining social intercourse that Ignatius enjoyed was his frequent encounters in dark alleyways and deserted country roads with his nemesis, the masked and avenging Sergeant Simpson, Cullybackey’s answer to Attilla the Hun. As the townlands centred on Kells and Connor appeared to Ignatius to empty more and more of their human and animal population, he made a painfully slow and semi-conscious decision that it was time to assert himself as a Presbyterian and as an upstanding member of the community. He made, in fact, a decision which was to be as significant in Irish history as St. Patrick slinging out the snakes; as Cromwell’s decision to solve the Catholic problem by barbecuing the good citizens of Dundalk and Drogheda; as Michael Collins believing - right up until the hail of bullets smacked him in the gob - that common-sense, compromise and moderation would prevail; as the H-Block inmates thinking that Maggie Thatcher really could give a fuck if they wandered round bollock-naked in mid-February spreading shite on walls - Ignatius Aloysius Moriarty decided to join the Orange Order!

Ignatius, of course, could be excused for not fully understanding the extent of the danger he was about to cause to the very fabric of Protestant society in mid-Antrim. But still, in his rare moments of sobriety he realised that it might be rather imprudent just to walk up to the door of an Orange Hall and say, My name’s Moriarty and I’ve come to join. Although bedwetting, bestiality. and chronic insanity, could be traced by the Mormon Church through several millennia of generations of Moriartys, none of his ancestors had ever willingly committed suicide - unless drinking yourself to death can be looked upon as taking your own life, in which case the Clan Moriarty surpassed even the very enviable success story of the Japanese secondary school system. Ignatius had enough experience of being filled in by total strangers, let alone by people he knew - including members of his own family - not to make the mistake of taking a direct approach with the Archangel of Doom and his hellions, namely Big Bertie Mulholland and the Boys. He would have to think up a more subtle approach to entering society.

For several weeks Moriarty pondered over his pints. At last, one evening in Molloy’s public bar, he shot to his feet, overturning a table full of other people’s drink, and shouted out I’ve got it! Whereupon the pub emptied, and those who had been present scratched themselves psychosomatically for days afterwards. Moriarty, a look close to orgasm on his face, cornered the frantic owner of Molloy’s at the end of the snug, grasped him in a tight embrace and said again, in a rather effeminate high-pitched falsetto voice, I’ve got it!’, with the immediate and unintentional result that one of the finest Protestants in Kells and Connor, Billy Stevenson, whose only crimes in life had been to own a pub called Molloy’s and to water the whiskey, succumbed to a premature death through massive heart failure. Ignoring the body Moriarty staggered to the door and exited into the night.

Halfway up a dark entry the masked avenger, Sergeant Simpson, waited impatiently for his prey. He had been somewhat alarmed by the earlier exodus of crotch-scratching locals from both doors and some of the windows (glass and all) of Molloy’s, but had since settled back into his normal routine mood for nocturnal violence. With a look which - surprisingly - mirrored that on Moriarty’s face, he watched the attempts of the hapless Ignatius to negotiate the widest village Main Street in all Ireland, by rubbing shoulders with the walls on both sides. Bouncing off parked cars and ricocheting off the village pump and occasionally spinning round to walk back the way he had just come, Moriarty was in exactly the right state of matter over mind that Sergeant Simpson was partial to, that is, too fucking blootered to fight back.

Like the last frame of the Rake’s Progress, Moriarty passed the entrance to the alley, whereupon the masked avenger leapt out behind him, brandishing aloft his weapon of the evening, a blackthorn stick, symbol of Protestant hegemony over the Catholic oppressed and bloody sore on the pate and shins. But just as the blackthorn stick descended in a two-handed belt, Moriarty, tripping once again over his own feet, as was his wont, spun round with a look of pure ecstasy on his face. Looking directly into the masked avenger’s eyes, Ignatius shouted out with demonic glee, I’ve got it! Sergeant Simpson, who had never before seen the Devil, even under drink, suddenly met him for the first time. Dropping the blackthorn stick, he took off up the street screaming at the top of his lungs, He’s fucking got it! He’s fucking got it! The little bastard’s fucking got it! and words to that general effect. Meanwhile, as lights came on in upstairs windows and double barrelled shotguns poked menacingly out, Moriarty, belching and farting rhythmically in contentment, passed on his way to glory by way of two gardens, a privet hedge and an unfortunate collection of rather fragile ceramic leprechauns (Made in Taiwan), which appeared in the dim moonlight to have been intent on protecting a dog turd by a goldfish pond prior to their sad obliteration.

Now the workings of the mid-Ulster Protestant mind, aided by drink and abetted by centuries of inbreeding and cultural deprivation, are a marvel to behold. It is for this very reason that the cream of mid-Ulster’s manhood has so frequently found fame and fortune abroad. In the case of Moriarty,