This concerns one of the brightest pupils in her class, seven-year-old Davy McGeown who comes from a mixed home (one parent Catholic, the other Protestant). In a second plot strand we find another situation in which Cushla “trespasses” into dangerous, forbidden territory. In the times in which they live and in the eyes of friends, neighbours and associates their religious affiliations put them on diametrically opposing sides. The affair on which they embark must be kept secret for Michael is not only married, he’s Protestant and has taken on political cases on behalf of known Republicans. It’s in the pub that Cushla meets Michael Agnew, a handsome, sophisticated and charismatic barrister. It looked like a photograph until the car bulged and exploded into a great ball of fire and its doors somersaulted away from it, glass from the surrounding buildings falling like hail on the tarmac. A march on Stormont, thousands moving up the long avenue to the Parliament building. A boy of six or seven climbing up the side of a Saracen personnel carrier to poke a stone into one of the slits from which the soldiers pointed their guns. The news started the way it always did with a montage of short scenes. When she’s not cleaning up after her mother, Cushla gives a hand behind the bar of her brother’s pub, frequently coming in for unwarranted attention from chippy, drunken British soldiers. Her widowed mother has become increasingly erratic, her behaviour fuelled by an alcohol intake so high she sometimes passes out. The vocabulary of a 7-year-old child now.Ĭushla’s home life is just as stressful.

Instead of inconsequential snippets about pop groups and football matches, the children of St Dallan’s school offer headlines about car bombings, shootings, internments and beatings.īooby trap.

Every school day begins, at the headmaster’s direction, with reports from her class about what they’ve heard on the news. Trespasses reflects these times through the experiences of Cushla Lavery, a primary school teacher in a suburb of Belfast. The other guests just shrug and return to their drinks.

When a Catholic wedding party is interrupted by squaddies who swagger around but leave without questioning anyone, it’s only the bride who seems outraged at the intrusion. She evokes the tinderbox atmosphere of a community whose residents have become accustomed - almost inured - to army checkpoints, armed patrols and alerts. Louise Kennedy’s debut novel is set in a Belfast suburb during the turbulent times before the accord, a period known as The Troubles. It seems fitting to write a review of Trespasses during the week of events marking the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the landmark peace accord that ended three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

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