Dolours Price and the human cost of armed revolution…

Very good piece from Kevin Myers in the Indo yesterday:

Like many of their generation, they [the Price sisters] were hellbent on achieving the utterly unattainable: a united Ireland by force of arms. I knew a couple of their IRA Andersonstown colleagues, Mairead Farrell and Sean McDermott: intelligent and likeable, yet driven by a fearsome and quite lethal intensity, they did not expect to survive the struggle, and their fatalism was duly justified.

He concludes:

What a waste of a life: what a tragic and terrible waste. But such is the harvest of armed republicanism, repeated down the generations: futile suffering inflicted and futile suffering endured. How many other republican veterans have spent their later years, wrestling with their own terrible memories? And in the darker watches of that dreadful vigil, how many of them have heard the quintessence of every single “armed struggle”: the dull thud of hessian-wrapped spades at midnight?

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