Duncan: The news from Northern Ireland is indeed depressing. By chance, I have just been reading Kevin Myers memoir of the 1970s Troubles, Watching the Door, which I’ll be reviewing elsewhere. Kevin’s book is a timely reminder of the horrors that everyone supposed had ended eleven years ago.

Both Britain and the Irish Republic are sailing into stormy economic waters. The supply of idle, alienated young men is only going to grow. In Ireland, some of them will be pulled back to the old dream of a united, Brit-free republic — one of the most powerful ethnonationalist dreams of the past century. Peeling off the leaders and giving them government jobs, limousines, etc. works for a while, but as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and the Prime Ministers of the 1960-70s learned, and as perhaps Gordon Brown is about to learn, there is always another cohort of dreamers coming up who will despise the accommodators only a little less than they despise the Brits. To the more passionate sort of young republican, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness are just two more Dermot MacMurroughs.

And then there’s the criminal aspect. One by-product of the Troubles was a network of criminal enterprises — protection rackets, organized auto theft, and in later years rising drug activity — that have survived the bombing operations and that still flourish, on both sides of the sectarian wall. Their intimidation, combined with still-lingering mistrust of the police in Northern Ireland, keeps up a distressing level of lawlessness, making it easier for terrorists to move around and finance their activities.

I have no idea whether these recent killings are just a random spike, or whether they presage a new round of Troubles. The latter is certainly possible, for the above reasons. Against it, there’s a broad public sentiment for peace, and much more equality of opportunity in the province now than there was in the 60s, when the last round started. (Though against that, the pendulum may have swung too far the other way, with much resentment among working-class unionists/loyalists/Protestants at the favoritism shown, they believe, to nationalists/republicans/Catholics. Historically, though, loyalist terrorism — I don’t say misbehavior, I say terrorism — has been reactive, starting up when republican terrorism has scored a few successes.)

I’ll recommend Kevin’s book as a good read, though you need a fairly strong stomach. Of older books on the late-20th-century Troubles, among the best is Jonathan Stevenson’s 1997 We Wrecked the Place. If it’s a movie you’re wantin’, here’s one from the 1940s, with a young James Mason. I’ll admit it’s only tenuously connected to the later Troubles, but I’m the world’s biggest James Mason fan. I could watch that man peel potatoes.