“Grass?” I asked Mrs. Donnelly.
“Informer,” she whispered, not meeting my eyes.
Later that morning I was interviewed at length by an officer from the Dingle Garda office named Flaherty, suspicious of my explanations for being out that early. Making things worse, he couldn’t understand why in the world an American would stoop to learning, in his words, “a useless language like Irish.” But his interrogation was nothing compared to the conversation I had the next day with two men with stern expressions and unfamiliar accents, whom I eventually determined to be police security officials from Belfast.
It turned out the body was that of a local boy named Sean Murphy. He’d grown up in Ballynafarragy, and then—like the majority of young people his age—left seeking work at 18, first to Limerick,
