The Belfast Blitz is not narrated in the available passage, which gives no account of the air raids or their consequences. Instead, a nighttime drive through Belfast brings the characters past the empty plinth of a statue destroyed by the Irish Republican Army, a separate bombing that the scene explicitly distinguishes from the Blitz by referring to it as the one bomb a speaker had no problem with.

The Nighttime Drive

The passage moves through Belfast by way of concrete landmarks: the ferry at the docks, the bridge over the black river, High Street, and Carlisle Circus. There, the car passes the severed plinth that once held the marble statue of Roaring Hanna, described as a Catholic-hating pastor. The absence of the statue prompts Cushla to remark that the place looks funny without it.

A Separate Bombing

The exchange identifies the destruction of Roaring Hanna’s statue as the work of the Irish Republican Army and presents it as a distinct act of political violence, not as part of the Belfast Blitz. The speaker’s approval of that particular bombing is sharply qualified: it is described as the one bomb they had no problem with. The passage supplies no further details about the Belfast Blitz itself, so it does not establish its timing, course, victims, or aftermath.