Sometimes I think foreign visitors don’t take Ireland and its people serious, with all their trad sessions and leprechauns and failed banks and ghost estates sitting there at the fringe of Europe. Ireland never picked a fight with the whole world like the Germans did, but some of the people here cared enough about their country and its imaginary borders and imaginary religions that they killed each other with bombs and snipers and hunger strikes and shotguns again and again. And the walls they built in Belfast were as effective as the one in Berlin.