Massereene Barracks enters the book through the attack of 7 March 2009, when an ordinary Saturday-night delivery became the setting for the killing of two British soldiers. The barracks’ significance lies in the collision of routine and renewed violence: the soldiers were preparing to leave for Afghanistan, while the attack showed that armed conflict in Northern Ireland had not become merely a story of the past. The subsequent investigation, which led to Marian Price, further connects the site to the book’s account of republican division and the difficult politics of remembering the conflict.

The barracks and its routine

At Massereene Barracks, Saturday nights had a familiar pattern. Young soldiers on the base ordered pizza from a nearby Domino’s, sometimes generating as many as twenty separate deliveries over the course of an evening. Shortly before ten o’clock on 7 March, two soldiers went out to the brick gatehouse at the entrance to collect food. They were dressed in desert camouflage and scheduled to fly later that night to Afghanistan for a six-month tour. The deliveries were ordinary enough that two cars from the same restaurant arrived at once, their drivers taking hot boxes from insulated bags.

That mundane routine establishes the scene before it is violently interrupted. A third vehicle, a green sedan, pulled up and gunmen opened fire. The barracks is not described through its architecture or military history; instead, the approach to its gatehouse, the waiting soldiers, and the overlapping pizza orders define it as a working base embedded in everyday life. The attack turns that everyday threshold into a place of sudden, close-range killing.

The attack at the gatehouse

The two gunmen wore dark clothing and balaclavas. After an initial sustained volley, they approached the soldiers, who had fallen to the ground, and fired repeatedly at close range. They discharged more than sixty rounds in roughly half a minute, then escaped in the green car. Patrick Azimkar, twenty-one and from north London, and Mark Quinsey, twenty-three and from Birmingham, were killed. Two other soldiers and both deliverymen were wounded. The deliverymen included a local young man and an immigrant from Poland, placing civilians as well as military personnel among those caught in the attack.

The incident broke a long interval: twelve years had passed since the last British soldier was killed in Northern Ireland. The Real Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility in a telephone call to a Dublin newspaper. Its spokesman treated the deliverymen as legitimate targets because they were serving the soldiers. That justification widened the attack’s stakes beyond the two men at the gate: an ordinary commercial service was recast by the group as participation in the conflict. The book sets this claim against the actual scene, where delivery workers arriving with food were wounded alongside the soldiers.

Investigation and Marian Price

A major investigation followed, with several arrests. Eight months after the shooting, heavily armed police entered a house in Andersonstown. Investigators had traced the telephone used to claim responsibility to a pay-as-you-go phone bought at a Tesco supermarket in Newtownabbey the day after the attack. Shop CCTV showed a pale, late-middle-aged woman in a heavy dark coat buying it. As she reached into her wallet, she looked up and directly into the camera. The woman was Marian Price.

After two days of questioning about the barracks shooting, Marian was released without charge. The book places her response in contrast with that of her sister, Dolours Price: Dolours could not commit herself to republican splinter groups continuing the violence, whereas Marian maintained that armed struggle still had a place in the present and future. Eighteen months after her release, Marian was detained again and ultimately charged with providing property for terrorist purposes, as well as in connection with a dissident rally in Derry. These later developments do not alter what the barracks attack itself established, but they show how its investigation continued to reverberate through republican politics and personal histories.

A site in an unsettled peace

The attack is presented as an exception to a Northern Ireland that had become peaceful apart from occasional dissident violence, but not as proof that the conflict’s divisions had disappeared. The surrounding account describes a society still marked by separation, contested symbols, and unresolved disagreement over how the past should be understood. In that setting, Massereene Barracks becomes a point where the apparent distance of the Troubles collapses: violence returns not through a commemorative mural or a guided tour, but through gunfire at a base gate during a pizza delivery.

The book’s broader concern is how conflict continues to shape public memory after armed campaigns recede. Political discipline and the continuing authority of paramilitary organizations could, in one account, help contain dissent and prevent a return to wider violence; critics saw the same discipline as self-interested and cruel. The attack at Massereene gives that tension a concrete form. It shows the persistence of armed republican action while also recording its human consequences, including the deaths of two soldiers and the wounding of deliverymen. The barracks is therefore not simply a backdrop to a discrete shooting: it is the site where post-conflict normality proves fragile, and where the past’s unresolved claims intrude into an ordinary evening.