Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty Page B

reasonable. In a normal society all the political parties would welcome this.”
    I poured myself a modest measure of the Black Label. He opened his filing cabinet and gave me a folder marked “Secret.”
    â€œAll the station chiefs got a copy a day early. Read it here. In my office. Don’t make any notes, just read it. I’ll go get some grub and come back in ten minutes.”
    He exited and left me with the whiskey and a photocopy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
    I read it.
    It was a deal between the Thatcher and FitzGerald governments aimed at generating political progress in Ulster. McArthur was right. It was harmless stuff. A benign, innocuous series of cross-border panels and task forces, and an attempt to get a regional assembly off the ground. In theory, Nationalists would like it because of the cross-border dimensions and the nuanced notion that the views of the Irish government had to be taken into account when discussing Northern Irish affairs. Unionists would like it (the civil servants must have thought) because it guaranteed the union of Northern Ireland with the rest of the UK until a majority of its population wanted a change in its sovereign status.
    McArthur came back in with a packet of Mr. Kipling’s French Fancies.
    I took one of the pink ones.
    â€œYour assessment, Duffy?”
    â€œYou’re right, sir. In a normal country this bold attempt to seize the middle ground would be met with polite agreement by all sides of the political divide.”
    â€œBut not here.”
    â€œHere the politics are centrifugal not centrist. Extreme Nationalists and extreme Unionists will condemn the Agreement as a sell-out of their principles, and the moderates in the middle who support it will look like fools.”
    â€œSpecial Branch reckons the Unionists will give us the most trouble.”
    â€œI expect so, sir.”
    For seventy-five years, ever since Winston Churchill’s promise to send Dreadnoughts to bombard Belfast during the Third Home Rule Crisis, the Unionists had suspected some sort of treachery from Albion Perfide. It was obvious to everyone that Britain’s political class wanted to get out of Northern Ireland just as they had got out of India, Malaya, Aden, Rhodesia, and all the other nasty post-imperial trouble spots. Few Unionist politicians had the ability to parse the subtleties of Whitehall’s actions—yes, the Brits were leaving, but they were going to take fifty years to do it, and they weren’t going to run out with their tail between their legs as they did in, say, Palestine. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was not Albion Perfide.
    McArthur and I finished the bottle of whiskey between us.
    â€œI suppose we’re just unlucky, sir, to have this on your watch.”
    â€œOr lucky. Depends on your point of view.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, sir?”
    â€œBack where I’m from—across the water—people do what, exactly? Go to the shopping mall, go to the garden center, watch the fucking football? Eighty years of that until you die in a hospital bed, fat and alone, suffering from cancer or congestive heart failure. Our ancestors were hunters, Duffy. Survival of the fittest! A thousand generations of hunters. Hunters not bloody shoppers! And at least here we’re fighting for a better tomorrow.”
    â€œEr, that’s not the speech you’re going to give to the men, is it?” I said anxiously.
    â€œWhy shouldn’t I?”
    I thought about McCrabban. “Well, for one thing most of them are quite religious, sir.”
    â€œLook, Duffy, maybe the forces of chaos will win, probably they will win, but we’ll give them a hell of a fight of it, eh, Sean, eh?”
    He yawned heavily and I was relieved to see that it was just the whiskey talking. “Yes, sir,” I replied in a monotone.
    He stared at me, his eyes like Elmer Fudd’s in Hare-Brained Hypnotist .
    â€œSir, if you don’t mind, I have