When the bell rang my class were pretty well shaken to the core, and I was afraid to approach the woman for fear it might be like some illness and I too might become infected. The illness is the rawest and most dangerous emotion, “hate” pure, undiluted burning hate. It was my simple ignorance of the depth of the Irish situation that had produced this shocking spectacle in my otherwise interesting and friendly class. I had taught lessons on the Irish situation for years, just another human tragedy, “read through to page 75 and be prepared for a quiz on it Friday.”

You see the conditions that lead to that bombing and so many like it, in the past has little to do with fact, or moral high ground, or trivial things like right and wrong. It has to do with “hate”, irrational, emotional aching deep within every man, woman and child on that tiny little chunk of the world. Their anguish, is their life, horror is not a fiction, something in a movie, it is real life, their family’s legacy, the personal adopted wrongs that they wear like torn rags, no matter how they dress or spiff themselves up, the torn rags of rage emerge.

I realise my pitiful rambling here can not convey that experience that my good ole grade tens endured, but afterward I remember sitting with them in silence ,as we reflected not on the history of Ireland, but the anger, hostility and desire for revenge that our departed guest had demonstrated far better then anything she could have said. And, as emotion we, the class and I, could not put into words, what we now knew to be the situation. Ireland was doomed to experience over and over, the sins of the past, with yet another ghastly act, but these have not been and will not be “senseless” act,s but are emotions out of control. Emotions that are shared by so many and felt by all. “Hurt us more so we may know the agony of our forefathers and so our children will know.”