Eamonn

Eamonn, Cushla Lavery’s brother, is both a family caretaker and a force of conflict in her life. He notices their mother Gina’s worsening drinking and later checks on her, yet when Cushla shelters the McGeown family he orders them out and threatens Cushla. His story also runs through the Lavery bar: a business that once drew customers escaping the city’s chaos, then dwindles as fear and sectarian pressure take hold, until a bomb drives Eamonn to consider leaving.

Family Role and Responsibilities

Eamonn is closely involved in the practical life of his family. When Cushla telephones the bar, she shouts that Gina is drunk all the time and that bottles are scattered through the house. Later, Eamonn calls to ask how their mother is. His response suggests that he has not ignored Gina’s condition, although his remark that she cannot stand Marian’s family explains why he had not thought to ask them for help. The exchange locates care within a family network that is strained and selective: concern is present, but so are assumptions about who can be asked and who will be welcome.

Eamonn’s own household appears in the later aftermath. He calls round with his children, and Cushla hears that there is now a third child, another little girl. The visit marks the continuation of family life while Cushla remains withdrawn from almost everyone else. She keeps out of Eamonn’s way when he comes, listening from her bedroom door as he and Gina speak. Their connection persists, but it is no longer easy closeness: Cushla is near enough to hear him and deliberately avoids being drawn into contact.

The Bar and the Changing City

In Cushla’s recollection, Eamonn is in a good mood and talks about booking a band for the upstairs lounge, a room the bar no longer uses. His idea reaches back toward the bar’s “good old days,” when it prospered for a couple of years after The Troubles began. Drinkers drove out from the city to escape the chaos. That brief rise did not last; as people became afraid to go out at all, the very disorder that had once sent customers to the bar helped empty it again.

The proposed entertainment gives Eamonn a practical, sociable ambition: to make an unused room active and restore something of the bar’s former life. The boys bicker over possible acts, each choice revealing a different taste. Fidel favours Lynyrd Skynyrd because he feels an affinity with the Confederate Army; Leslie wants Doctor Hook and the Medicine Show; Minty hesitates before settling on Clodagh Rodgers, whose reputation for her legs apparently outweighs, for him, the fact that she is a Catholic from Ballymena. Eamonn’s hopeful plan sits amid these casual exchanges, while the scene’s remembered setting makes clear how precarious that ordinary conviviality has become.

By the later aftermath, the business is “trickling down the tubes.” Leslie drinks in the bar frequented by soldiers; Minty no longer waves to Gina in town; and Fidel still appears occasionally with men he used to meet privately above the shop. After those visitors leave, Eamonn finds cigarettes ground into the carpet and black, molten holes in the upholstery. Catholics have also drifted away, unwilling to seem to condone the family’s sheltering of the McGeowns. Only Jimmy comes every evening, and Gina attributes his continued presence to his being “not right in the head.” The bar’s decline is therefore not just a loss of trade: the social habits and loyalties that once made it a meeting place have become liabilities.

The McGeown Family and a Domestic Rupture

When the McGeowns are staying with Cushla and Gina, Eamonn summons the two women into the hall and says the family has to go. Cushla answers that she will try to arrange something that morning and insists the stay will only last a few days. Eamonn swings toward her with an open hand, as if he is about to slap her. Gina catches his hand before it can land. The gesture makes the disagreement physical, but it also gives Gina an active part in stopping the violence.

Eamonn does not relent. He looms into Cushla’s face, calls her a degrading name, and orders that the McGeowns leave at once. His fury is presented as self-righteous, almost graceful in its certainty. The scene sharpens the conflict between Cushla’s attempt to help a vulnerable family and Eamonn’s demand that their home be cleared of them. He is not simply objecting in private: his insistence forces an immediate choice about where they can go, and the family’s later displacement to the edge of Short Strand remains part of the cost of that choice.

The contrast with his concern for Gina is telling without making his motives simple. Eamonn can be attentive to his mother and still become threatening toward Cushla; care within the family does not make him gentle in conflict. His order also places the women in a divided position: Gina’s hand restrains him, while Cushla is left asking what to do as his car revs outside. The family home offers shelter, but Eamonn’s authority can abruptly withdraw it.

The Bombing and the Decision to Leave

The bar’s final crisis comes with a bomb concealed in an empty beer keg beside the building. An anonymous caller gives the police fifteen minutes’ warning, enough time for the bar to be evacuated. Eamonn watches the explosion from the tunnel between two RUC men. One remarks that somebody must be looking after him, since nobody receives that much notice. The Laverys suspect Fidel was responsible for the warning, though the passage presents this as their belief rather than confirmed knowledge. In a place where the absence of deaths can feel like a gift, survival offers little reassurance about what comes next.

After the bombing, Eamonn says he will put the place on the market and move away, perhaps down south. His plan marks a sharp reversal from the earlier hope of bringing music back to the unused lounge. Then he imagined reopening a room; now he is prepared to sell the whole place. The bar’s evacuation prevents deaths, but it cannot restore the business or the community around it. Eamonn’s trajectory links family protection, intimidation, and retreat: he tries to manage the people and premises nearest to him, but the pressures of violence and dwindling custom finally make departure seem more viable than renewal.