A few autobiographical sentences may not, I hope, be amiss. I was born in Tullow, one of the minor towns of County Carlow, itself a minor county of the Irish Free State, as it was then constituted. But my home – though I rarely felt at home there – was in Warrenpoint, a town only slightly larger than Tullow, in County Down, just across the Border in Northern Ireland. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the local police force, then called the Royal Ulster Constabulary. We were a Catholic family, living in the “married quarters” of the police barracks, not a comfortable situation in domestic, social, or political terms. My impulses were entirely nationalist, and I regarded the RUC as an alien instrument of occupation: its function was to enforce the status of Northern Ireland, a political entity I deplored. Whatever misgivings my father and mother felt on this issue, they did not discuss them in my presence. Religion and politics were beyond the pale of conversation.

Warrenpoint is a seaside resort on Carlingford Lough, but it is also distinctive for having the largest public square in Ireland. For that reason, when I was growing up, it was famous for political marches, Unionist flourishes, nationalist shows of resentment. Those occasions were equal in one respect, though not ecumenical in any: each party had two days in the year to itself.