Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide

Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide is a lived system of signals and restrictions in which schools, religious authority, domestic language, and political checkpoints mark who belongs and who is treated as an outsider. Through Cushla Lavery’s experiences, the novel shows sectarianism operating both openly—in warnings of communal hatred and intimidation—and quietly, through assumptions embedded in ordinary speech and social space. Acts of kindness and political moderation offer alternatives, but do not dissolve the boundaries around them.

Everyday codes of belonging

The divide appears in the language used to assess a home. At a gathering hosted by Mrs Coyle, Cushla hears Michael Agnew praised for bringing “good Protestant whiskey” and reflects on how cleanliness and order are described as Protestant-looking. The expression is not confined to Protestants: Catholics use it too, as though the community’s categories have become part of a shared vocabulary. Cushla watches Mrs Coyle, hoping for acknowledgment that the remark carries an implication about Catholics, but receives no sign. She feels doubly isolated: the comment has made her identity conspicuous, while the only other Catholic she expects to be present already dislikes her.

The scene also makes social exclusion visible through timing. Cushla and Michael have arrived before the other guests, and she realizes that he and their hosts may not have wanted the others to see them arrive together. Her humiliation comes from being treated as someone whose presence requires management, even in a private house. Sectarian belonging is therefore conveyed not only by declarations of allegiance but by who is welcomed openly, who is kept apart, and what others assume need not be acknowledged.

School, religion, and inherited fear

At the school, the parish setting gives religious authority a direct presence in children’s daily lives. The school stands on land shared with the church and parochial house, and Father Slattery enters classrooms unannounced to deliver catechism lessons. Cushla has complained to Bradley that his visits unsettle the pupils. Her distrust also has a personal history: when her father was delirious in hospital, Father Slattery prayed with him and then persuaded him to write a cheque for a colour television. The priest’s authority thus reaches beyond doctrine, carrying influence into family life.

In one classroom confrontation, Father Slattery turns a question about a seven-year-old pupil’s age into a lesson about sectarian hostility. He tells the children a story involving violence against a Catholic girl, then insists that the important point is Protestant hatred of Catholics. Cushla sees Davy McGeown looking to her for protection, while another boy watches the strap in Bradley’s pocket. The episode shows how fear is transmitted as instruction: children are asked to understand themselves through communal danger before they can assess the story’s details or meaning. Father Slattery’s lesson does not merely describe division; it gives the children a stark, authoritative interpretation of it.

His influence continues through the preparation for First Confession. Cushla tells the pupils that they are too young to have serious sins and suggests ordinary childhood misbehaviour as something they might confess. Father Slattery instead teaches original sin, remorse, and guilt, warning that he will show no leniency and linking the length of a child’s penance to the extent of that child’s sinfulness. He gives the children images of Padre Pio and speaks of his wounds; as he hands one to Davy, he bends to say something privately. Cushla hurries towards the boy, but Father Slattery is already walking away. The episode places religious objects and teaching within an atmosphere of discipline and unease, rather than presenting faith as a single, uncomplicated source of comfort.

Political boundaries and qualified refusal

During the strike, the divide takes physical form at a checkpoint. Cushla is driving with her mother, Gina Lavery, towards her father’s grave when armed men stop her car. One of them is Fidel, someone Cushla has known most of her life. Gina recognizes him through his disguise, and he lets them pass. In the days that follow, however, shortages at home occupy Cushla so completely that she only later grasps the encounter’s political meaning: an acquaintance had stopped her at a paramilitarised barrier established to prevent people like her from participating in government, and had pretended not to know her. Familiarity does not prevent the checkpoint from enforcing a communal boundary; if anything, Fidel’s refusal of recognition makes that boundary sharper.

The novel also distinguishes such exclusion from the views of people who reject violence as a political instrument. On a walk with Cushla, Michael describes himself as an all-Ireland person and says he loves Ireland but does not believe the cause is worth killing anyone for. His position does not erase the political divisions surrounding them. Near Trinity College, bouquets mark a place where bombs had killed eleven people on a street beside their hotel. The contrast is between an expressed attachment to Ireland and the lethal consequences of political conflict, not between political feeling and indifference.

Cushla describes why police officers visit her school: it is considered safe because it is not in an area regarded as a Republican stronghold, while other places are inaccessible to them. Michael responds that police work is made harder by their own prejudice. Their exchange identifies two pressures at once: the danger and restricted access confronting the police, and the bias that can shape the exercise of their authority. The school’s relative safety is not evidence that sectarian tension has disappeared; it depends on how the surrounding territory is classified.

Religious practice, care, and the limits of crossing

Cushla’s everyday relationship with Catholic practice differs from Father Slattery’s use of religious authority. In a religious shop after a weekend away with Michael, she chooses Davy a navy-blue missal embossed with silver and plain rosary beads, along with a novena to Saint Joseph that her grandmother used to recite when someone was in trouble. She has little faith, yet the familiar prayer card retains a practical family association. At the same time, she sees the items through Michael’s eyes as mass-produced piety and feels their purchase is compromised by the circumstances of their weekend. The objects hold several meanings at once: a gift for Davy, a remembered family custom, and a reminder of Cushla’s divided private life.

Later, when fear about Tommy McGeown’s arrest enters the household, Cushla silently bargains with God, promising to become a nun if only the situation proves to be a mistake. The prayer is not a formal lesson delivered by a priest but a desperate appeal shaped by the religious language she knows. Set beside the school’s enforced guilt and Father Slattery’s use of doctrine, it shows that Catholic practice can also remain intimate and improvised—something Cushla reaches for when ordinary action offers no certainty.

These scenes do not suggest that personal affection or shared religious objects can overcome the political and communal structures around them. Cushla’s care for the McGeown children, Michael’s refusal to justify killing, and Fidel’s momentary permission to pass all occur within a society where boundaries continue to organize safety, recognition, and belonging. The divide is powerful precisely because it reaches from public violence and political exclusion into classrooms, homes, speech, and private acts of faith.