Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Different kinds of closure

Two Irish actors on very different business in Northern Ireland yesterday, but both representative of the recent history of Ireland (via Irish Times): Stephen Rea carrying the coffin of his ex-wife, convicted IRA bomber Dolours Price, and Liam Neeson in Ballymena to collect the freedom of the city, an honour about which he had rightly expressed some reservations before given the town's reputation as a hotbed of Paisleyism. The right way to look at it is that Ballymena gave the freedom of the town to Michael Collins.