Gardens near my house have half-buried skeletons emerging from the lawns, some with shreds of tissue still adhering. I saw skulls on a barbecue yesterday, as if the residents were planning human brains for tea. It’s like a simulation of a particularly horrifying civil war, scenes too violent for newspapers and television. You’d think the people of suburban Dublin were going about their business ignoring continual, open-air mass killing and torture. They represent sadism without suffering, dismemberment and execution without pain, because they are made of petrochemical rather than organic material, plastic not flesh.
