Seamas O'Reilly

Literally without fail.

If I got to school, I had to go through that thing twice.

So you tell these things to people and they're like, oh no, you did go through a lot.

And also the sort of queasy paranoia of the time, the fact that every adult I knew, every institution that I interacted with was completely formed from those times because it wasn't a switch.

You know, you might be young, but if you're, if you're talking to anybody who has lived through it, you know, my entire childhood and my entire adulthood was, you know, up till, you know, I left for Dublin when I was 18.

There was, you know, everyone was still in that and people were still processing.

I'd say even still now, there are probably people born, you know, two decades after me who are still very much shaped by that process.

Well, I certainly hope we get a chance to add to the collective truth.

I mean, I think the authors you mentioned, people like Susanna Dickey, Roisin Lanigan, I mean, there's just so many now.

I don't know that many of us, if I can say us, I don't know that many of us would have been getting those opportunities even 10 years ago.

I think there has been a sea change and I think everyone has noticed it.

Occasionally I'm asked if I...

I think we're all asked as ambassadors of whatever this thing is, you know, why that is.

I don't have a single answer.

I think the fact that we get the chance to be, you know, ambassadors or witnesses is good.

I also think the fact that maybe if I could imagine that we're all maybe in that sort of mid thirties to mid forties kind of age bracket, we do straddle both of those things.

We straddle the

sort of say nothing era.

And then the, you know, the ceasefire baby era as, as, as Lyra McKee once put it.

And so I think that those, those perspectives are maybe slightly more fresh, um, in mind.