Patriot Hearts Read Online Free Page A

hadn’t believed in before. It also gave me some assurance that I could hold a room. I became conscious of the importance of words and the influence they could have on people. Thanks to these women, I also came to understand that if you lead the right way, people will follow.
    By the time our first game came along, the women were ready to run through walls for me. I coached them for only two games before events changed the direction of my life, but I would always be proud that we won both of them.
    LIVING IN IRELAND , we were somewhat immune to the problems going on in Ulster. Most nights when you turned on the television, there would be some story about “the Troubles” that plagued Northern Ireland, but for a teenager it was a story on television, nothing more. The violence was so commonplace that there would be stories about milk prices, bus fares and telephone strikes before those about someone dying in Belfast because of the Catholic– Protestant war. That would change on the afternoon of May 14, 1974—the day that my family’s world changed forever.
    At 5:30 PM , as most people were heading home from work, three car bombs exploded in Dublin’s city centre. I remember feeling the blasts through my feet as I walked along a street far from where the explosions occurred. Within minutes I could hear the sound of ambulances making their way to the locations of the bombings, which happened on three different streets. In all, 26 people would die.
    In the immediate hours after the explosions, everyone in Dublin was frantic to hear from family members and loved ones. I was quick to assure my parents that I was okay. But as afternoon turned into night, my mom’s sister, Josephine, and her husband, Ned, hadn’t heard from their daughter, Siobhan, who would have been leaving her job downtown about the time of the explosions.
    Siobhan was among the dead.
    Those who were missing family members were urged to go downtown to a temporary mortuary to identify the bodies. For my aunt and uncle, that task was too much. Besides, they lived 130 kilometres away. My father volunteered for the assignment. He later described a scene at the provisional morgue that was nightmarish beyond belief. The bombs had ripped people into pieces. Body parts were stuffed in bags. It was a ring on a finger that helped identify Siobhan.
    Many of the dead had been young women who were employed in the civil service and were leaving their offices just as the blasts occurred. There were also 300 injured, many of whom would be permanently disfigured. The Ulster Volunteer Force would claim responsibility for the bombings almost 20 years later.
    It would be said that there was no family in Ireland that wasn’t affected in some way by what happened that day. I feel the country lost something that it never fully recovered. Bad history biting us again.
    My cousin’s funeral was difficult to sit through. I remember looking around the church at tear-streamed faces. My aunt and uncle were broken and almost unrecognizable in their grief. So was my father.
    I wouldn’t realize until later the extent to which the whole appalling chapter in the country’s history had emotionally ravaged my poor father. In the weeks that followed, he could barely talk about what had happened. He was haunted by the gruesome images he encountered at the morgue. He was never able to shake the feelings he was left with after having to see his niece’s body torn asunder. It was as if he was in a perpetual state of shock.
    Less than a month later, on June 4, my father was felled by a heart attack.
    He lapsed in and out of a coma. I remember sitting at his bedside by myself and praying that I could have one more conversation with him. He stirred and looked at me.
    “What are you doing here?” he said in a whisper. “Don’t you have things you should be doing?”
    It was so typical of my dad. Don’t you have things you should be doing? Which meant something better than sitting in a