Our Revenge Will Be the Laughter of Our Children

What is it about the revolutionary that draws our fascinated attention? Whether one calls it the North of Ireland or Northern Ireland, the Troubles continue to haunt the land and those who lived through them.

- Philip Metres

Séanna Walsh’s face is impassive. That’s the first thing you notice about him, after his imposing bulk of a body. It appears he has spent a long time to compose his face, to harden it, until it became hewn, glacial. Beneath it, you sense unplumbable depths. He was just sixteen years old when he went to prison for the first time in 1973, as a Volunteer in the Irish Republican Army, long before his black hair started turning ice-white. During the next twenty-five years, he’d spend over twenty years in serving three sentences, until he was finally released under the terms of the Good Friday Accords.

Still, Séanna hasn’t lost his sense of humor. Our delegation of students and faculty from John Carroll University have just arrived to Belfast from America on an overnight flight, bleary-eyed, and now find ourselves at Malone Lodge Apartments hosting Séanna and his comrade Jim Gibney, prominent activists in the Republican movement, party members of Sinn Fein.

Leaning in on the rickety chair we’ve set up for him, Séanna asks us, “Have you had any rest yet?”

“None at all,” I say, hoping the legs of the chair don’t give out underneath him.

“Then you’ll get some during this talk,” he quips, leaning back. We laugh, and the ghost of a smile seems to pass over his face.

Perhaps he’s softened a bit, since I first met him eight years before, but it’s hard to tell.

Just behind him the bay window opens up, and the city is spread out below, all the way to the Black Mountain that stands at its far edge.