She introduced herself as the little fair-haired girl on the school bus; I was tiny, she said, you mightn’t remember. It was the service bus that crossed the Border at Carrickcarnon on the Dundalk-Newry road taking us to school. There’s a silence you get in the school bus when an armed soldier gets on board. It is that we cannot go back, any more than Germany could return to the Berlin Wall, any more than Argentina could go back to the disappeared. They know that when a soldier gets on your school bus then death gets on with him and when the soldier leaves, death doesn’t always leave.

Source: The Irish Times April 01, 2019 00:23 UTC