You can see now where Homer got the idea for the Sirens that sing to Odysseus

"Ah howyah Maria, love yer handbag, I've one just like it, I got it down in Moore Street"

Kabzeel Burke. Sounds like the rest of the Burke family would quickly form a circle around me to start casting out demons.

Cheers John, maybe - I'll email them tomorrow

Pity candidates' photos are on the ballot paper now. Be some craic otherwise if Steen and Steenson were both runnning.

I said the pamphlet had been written by a Tom Henry who I'd known for many years. That was me being Jesuitical: "Tom Henry" was my da's nom de plume. My granda was baptised Thomas Henry Glennon, so you can see where he got it from. I knew "Tom Henry" from the day I was born until he the day he died.

I wrote about this in an article for Village Magazine a few years ago, which reproduced the text of my da's unpublished manuscript: villagemagazine.ie/the-battle-f...

Much of his working day involved shuttling bags of cash between yer man's various businesses. My da didn't fancy playing the role of The Victim in an armed robbery gone wrong, so he moved to Dublin. Me, my mum and brother followed him 18 months later. And that's how come we left Belfast.

Now virtually unemployable, the only place he could get work was as a bookkeeper to a shady guy with a string of businesses along the Falls. I have a notion who it was but my da would never tell me. Yer man thought profit should be tax-deductible, so you can see what my da was up against.

All of a sudden, my da stopped getting work from the CCDC. He was now a pariah to middle-class nationalist Belfast. He was already a pariah to unionist Belfast on account of what he'd been doing before. In a city bitterly divided on sectarian lines, he'd now uniquely managed to piss off both sides.

In the Bishop of Down & Connor's own front room, my da told him, "The Italians have the mafia. The loyalists have the Orange Order. You have no need of either, as you've already surrounded yourself with corruption." My da never told me how Philbin reacted, I'm guessing he didn't take it well.

One Sunday night, when he figured the two boys wouldn't be around, he went over to Philbin's palace on the Antrim Road to confront him about the pamphlet which he himself had commissioned being spiked. Words were had.

This didn't go down well with Conaty and Murphy, who were intent on cosying up to British Army HQ in Lisburn as the voice of moderate nationalists, so couldn't be pointing the finger at the Army. After a while, there was no sign of my da's pamhplet being published - he put two and two together...

So on the basis of the evidence, my da concluded that the whole episode would never have transpired the way it did if the British Army had only stuck to its own written agreements - they could've prevented the whole thing, but they screwed up. First major loyalist-IRA gun battle, and they blew it.

But anyway yer man gave my da documents signed by the British Army, making promises to the local CDC with regards to security arrangements, e.g. where there'd be manned Army barricades, frequency and routes for mobile patrols, etc. All of which the Army had failed to honour on the night in question.