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“... Protestants, even in the Republic. Then my old schoolfriend Ernie comes in with his friend Ciaran – they wave at the others and join us. Ernie is fascinated by cars and soon shifts the talk in that direction. ‘I see you’ve given up on the Toyota,’ he says. ‘How many miles had she on the clock?’ I tell him the car was so battered and ancient ...”

“... blue ... eye’ fixed on ‘the bright days of her youth’, the seanbhean devotes herself in Ciaran Carson’s 1990 translation to ‘lamenting all the halcyon monotony of that pluperfect time’. Ní Dhomhnaill’s quarrel with this figure is not just that in the past men were hanged and ‘mowed down / In their hundreds’ when they answered her ...”