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…union that means we can export our goods throughout the British Empire. Ulster has prospered through the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, you blind, stupid rebel. Our language, our heritage, our culture are British through and through, but our roots are here, here in the north of Ireland. We are as Irish as you, but we’re Ulster Irish and we’re staying here. We’ve been here for three hundred years or more. Your guns and your bombs and your burning and butchering can’t wipe out three hundred years of history and, by Christ, they won’t wipe us out, they won’t make us budge, they won’t pull us down on our knees before any Popish image nor any Yankee-born Gaelic President. If you and your kind don’t like it here, go back to Dublin. Go back to your bogs and your mists where you belong.”
Jim Patterson was seething. His body quivered as he sat in his chair, his fists clenched so tightly that the knuckles shone like knobs of polished granite. He despised Flynn Casey, the local hero of the Easter Rising, the bitter and vindictive Sinn Fein Nationalist. No one but himself knew how many innocent men, how many brave British soldiers and Irish policemen, this Republican fanatic had knifed in the back or blown to bits with a bomb.
Flynn Casey remained as cool as a river. He faced Jim Patterson squarely, his head to one side, a hint of a grin on his face, both mocking and infuriating. “You’re a first-class eejit, Patterson,” he said. “If we were to take a man and put a rope around his neck and tighten it, tight as we could make it, what’s going to happen? It’s no good saying to the blood vessels in the head, ‘If you don’t like where you are, go back down into the rest of the body.’ They wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They don’t recognise any separation. They don’t belong exclusively in either the head or the body. They circulate freely all the time. They pass through the heart to be nourished with oxygen in the lungs, and they carry oxygen to the head, so the head can’t survive without them anyway. With a rope around his neck our man is going to die, you stupid bugger. That’s what they do to murderers and traitors, remember?”
“That’s something you would know about more than me,” said Jim Patterson.
The river was flowing into a hot spring. Flynn Casey leaned forward and jabbed a finger at his opponent. His blood was beginning to boil, and his voice hissed like escaping steam. “If the head goes, the body goes, barber, just as if you slit the one from the other with your razor. And that is not going to happen here. Ireland is one body, one whole, healthy body with head, heart, lungs and limbs and a constitution that will last forever…
Libros Libertad 