A splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, calling itself the Real IRA, claimed responsibility for two separate attacks in recent days that left two British soldiers and a policeman dead.
“All it is, is a couple of idiots making trouble,” said Martin Garrett at Saints and Sinners pub, a popular watering hole for Woodside’s Irish. “They have no support from Nationalists or Loyalists.”
Garrett, a Catholic from County Mayo in the Irish Republic and a 27 year resident of Woodside, dismissed the idea that the attack might derail the 1998 agreement between Republican groups seeking a unified Ireland and Unionist parties committed to keep the region part of Great Britain.
Down the road at Donovan’s Pub, Sunnyside resident Mike Ryan was much more cynical about the prospect for a lasting peace. “There’s a lot of stupid people everywhere who don’t know what decade they are living in,” Ryan said. “The hope is that this doesn’t go anywhere.”
A recent arrival to the U.S. from Cork City, Ryan frequently checks in with friends and family back home — where the big story in recent months has been Ireland’s own housing bubble burst and an economic slowdown hobbling the once-mighty “Celtic Tiger” of Europe.
“There is one woman I know who went to Ireland a couple years ago,” Ryan said. “Now she’s coming back.”
Back at Saints and Sinners, Garrett held out hope that his homeland, north and south, is ready to move on from the bloody conflict marring much of the Emerald Isle’s past.
“It’s over,” he said.
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