But I took no joy in him being hurt, unless I was the one who did the hurting. He was part of my shrinking history and I clung to the battered remnants like an early morning wino and his last drops of rotgut.

I asked,

“How?”

Pause.

Stewart was trying to phrase it as delicately as he could, gave up, said,

“He was mugged.”

I nearly went,

“But he’s a priest.”

The awful fact wasn’t that priests were mugged in our new shiny country, it was that more weren’t.

Stewart said that Malachy was in UCHG, the University Hospital, in intensive care. I said I’d get up there straightaway. He said, hesitantly,

“Ah Jack, go easy.”

Then a thought hit me.

Hard.

Steel in my voice, stiffening my question, I asked,

“You think I did it?”

“Of course not.”

I eased, said,

“Well, least you think I have some standards.”

He shot back,

“If you mugged him, he wouldn’t be in the hospital.”

“What?”

“He’d be in the morgue.”

And he clicked off.

Reluctantly, I left Eyre Square. Was it my imagination or was the sun already receding? The recession was in full bite. We’d buried the Celtic Tiger ages ago. The papers carried daily dire forebodings of worse to come. The specter of emigration was looming all over again.

And yet.

A huge new outlet for TK Maxx had just opened. “Designer clothes at affordable prices.” The Grand Opening a week before, people had queued for seven hours. The line of recession-proof people had stretched from the statue of Liam Mallow, our Republican hero, past Boyles Betting Shop (free coffee for punters!) along Cuba’s nightclub pink facade, and of course the inevitable off-license (ten cans of Bavarian Lager for ten euros) to the very doors of the new shopping mecca.