Aoife Clifford

what do you do with that talent?

And they've decided to send him across to Manchester in order to revenge the three men's deaths with what is seen as a fairly audacious assassination attempt that he's going to try and do.

And he's just the man for the job because he's

Very single-minded.

I found him interesting, especially when you think about Drax, because he's quite a different type of villain in that you could imagine this book being rewritten from his perspective and him being actually potentially quite a sympathetic character.

I mean, because at some times, and that's what I really loved about the ambiguity around him.

I mean, he's an ex-soldier.

He's just been through the sort of the horrors of the Civil War.

And he is a bit more clear-headed about what the Irish need to do if they actually want to win.

And he's heralding, and I'm assuming Maguire's sort of making a couple of points, that he's heralding the change from sort of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to the beginnings of the IRA and a much more focused idea of what it's going to take to win and the terror that you're going to have to

put people through in order to finish this off as opposed to just making, you know, political points and having beers down at the pub and drinking your rebel songs, what it actually takes to win a war.

And he's bringing some sort of very cold-hearted viewpoint on it.

So in some ways he's quite a modern character, I thought.

Well, he's the nephew of James O'Connor and he's coming, he comes across in the same boat as Stephen Doyle from America.

He's gone across there to make his fortune and he's

Definitely the most lighthearted of the three characters, but has his own complications that he's bringing with him as well.

As a younger man, and he hasn't seen perhaps quite the same troubles as the two older men, he's still got a sense of adventure and fun and ends up working as a bit of a secret agent for the English police in the Irish community.

in order to feed them back information about what's going on.

I don't know if I would have thought of that in those terms about betrayal.

For me, the strength of the novel...