My Ma's a lovely woman & my Da's long dead.

Both born & bred in West Belfast & lived in Dermott Hill above Ballymurphy. A place that saw many many terrible things in the late 60s & 70s when trouble broke out here (therc was a massacre in Ballymurphy where British soldiers decided to shoot & kill 11 civilians). My Da was in the Officials (Official IRA) and my parents had to move out when the Provos (Provisional IRA) attacked the house and performed a mock execution on me dad. My Ma freaked & demanded they moved. They moved to Antrim (town about 30 miles outta Belfast), where I was born but moved back to West Belfast to look for work. They got a place on the Springfield Road which is just the worst road to buy a house. It splits Protestant & Catholic communities & there were riots & murders every week. It's where I got my fantastic forearm scar when I was a kid. He was followed & stalked by the Provisionals everywhere & when we moved to Poleglas (an estate in West Belfast) they sent a few guys there to make sure he didn't turn the Estate Official. Strangely enough one of the men that was sent to keep an eye on him, they got to jknow eachother & became best friends. He then put thaqt life behind him & joined the SDLP (peaceful Irish Nationalist party). We lived in that poor estate until it became too bad to function (bomb at the end of my street, soldiers shot, drug abuse, car theft u name it) we then moved to the suberbs of North Belfast & it was a disaster. It was an interface area & riots were common. It got too much & my parents split. He moved back West & discovered he had Cancer & another baby on the way to another woman. He died in 1999, I dont remember much everyone cried but me, my Ma took it worse than I thought she would. By this stage she was diagnosed with Lupus & has lived with it's madness since.

All this shapes a person. My Da was notr a bad guy just a rampant Irish Republican Socialist. He loved all his kids as did my ma (and still does). It's shaped me & maybe some of the sins of the father were echoed by the son but so were the great things about him.

Yea families...ya can't pick em.