Sectarianism

Sectarianism in the novel operates as an everyday system of classification as well as a source of overt violence. Religious identity determines how families are judged, what children are taught to fear, and how acts of care or association may be read by others. Through Cushla Lavery’s efforts to support the McGeowns, the story connects the intimate pressures of school and neighbourhood life with the wider atmosphere of communal division and security policing.

Identity and Social Classification

At school, Davy McGeown is already marked out before he has done anything wrong. When he appears without his coat, headmaster Bradley considers what punishment might fit, while the staff’s knowledge of the family—his father’s insecure work and his mother’s Protestant background, despite the children being brought up Catholic—shapes their expectations of him. Bradley regards the family as profoundly suspect. Cushla intervenes, placing her hands on Davy’s shoulders and steering him away. In her classroom, Davy sits at the front not as a reward or punishment but because other children torment him. The contrast shows how institutional judgement can reinforce the social exclusion that a teacher is trying to interrupt.

That classification is also written onto the neighbourhood. Cushla drives through rows of beige houses and past kerbs still marked by red, white, and blue paint. At the McGeowns’ house, the family’s windows are screened by net curtains, coal bags sit beside the door, and sectarian graffiti runs down the garden wall. The setting makes communal hostility part of the ordinary route to a front door: it is not an abstract political dispute but a message fixed to the boundary of a family home.

The novel places this experience beside the uneasy label of a mixed town. At the pub, people describe Cushla’s family’s town as mixed with evident distaste, because Catholics make up only a small minority there. Eamonn Lavery has stopped buying a Belfast newspaper for the pub, wary of what its selection might imply about him. Cushla objects to the assumption that his family’s lives are easy because their town has seen relatively little trouble. She explains that her brother is afraid of offending someone and ending up on a loyalist hit list. Her interlocutor counters with the experience of being stopped and searched by British soldiers. The exchange does not settle whose danger matters more; its competitive structure exposes how sectarian division can turn suffering into a contest rather than a basis for recognition.

The School, Religious Authority, and Fear

Sectarian ideas are taught directly to children through religious authority. When Father Slattery enters the classroom after Davy and another boy have been disciplined, he quizzes the pupils on prayers and turns to Davy, who is seven. Slattery tells the children a story of a young Catholic girl attacked by Protestant men, then dismisses Davy’s question about her age and insists that what matters is that Protestants hate Catholics. By directing the lesson at Davy and invoking his family, he makes a child’s identity part of the warning. The episode shows religious instruction being used not simply to communicate doctrine but to make communal fear appear like a moral certainty.

Cushla’s distrust of Father Slattery has a personal as well as professional basis. He enters classrooms unannounced to deliver catechism, despite her concern that his visits unsettle the pupils. When Cushla’s father was delirious in hospital, Slattery prayed with him and persuaded him to write a cheque for a colour television. The incident complicates the priest’s public authority: his religious role does not make him trustworthy in Cushla’s eyes, and the school’s deference to him leaves her with little power to keep him away from her pupils.

The children’s First Confession further joins religious practice to discipline and fear. Cushla tells them they are too young to have serious sins and suggests ordinary childhood misbehaviour they might confess. Slattery instead speaks of original sin, remorse, and guilt, warns that he will show no leniency, and makes the duration of a child’s penance a public measure of sinfulness. He gives the children images of Padre Pio and speaks of his wounds; when he bends to say something to Davy, Cushla rushes across the church but arrives after Slattery has walked away. The scene leaves a significant boundary of knowledge: Cushla sees the exchange and fears its implications, but the evidence does not disclose what was said.

Language, Names, and Belonging

Sectarian identity is also heard and negotiated through language. Cushla has studied Irish, though she says it has little practical use where she lives. When Victor asks her to explain the Irish word for no, he treats the language’s forms as evidence of evasiveness and presses her to defend their meaning. The exchange turns a language lesson into a test of cultural legitimacy: Cushla’s knowledge is made answerable to someone who approaches Irish as a political problem rather than simply as a language.

A childhood memory makes the social force of pronunciation and naming still more intimate. At a birthday party, Cushla meets girls who ask her to spell her name and react when she reaches the fourth letter. She later understands that Catholics and Protestants pronounce the letter H differently. When she says a mild expression of surprise after winning a game, the response in the other household is to hush her for swearing. What wounds her most is that, after making her spell her name, the girls still do not remember it. The episode shows belonging being policed through small, ordinary distinctions—speech, manners, and memory—rather than through explicit declarations of hatred alone.

The limits imposed on language do not prevent people from seeking contact across them. Michael Agnew invites Cushla to join an Irish-language conversation group. Later, when questioned about her connection to Michael, she identifies the invitation as one way she knew him outside the pub. The same cultural practice that can be scrutinized as a marker of identity can also provide a setting for acquaintance; the novel does not make language itself either proof of political allegiance or a guarantee of solidarity.

Care, Institutions, and Consequences

Cushla’s support for the McGeowns exposes the unequal ways institutions respond to children and families. When she defends her effort to help Davy’s mother, Bradley warns her that children from the school have been taken into care and says he cannot overlook pupils who may be at risk. He invokes a case involving a British Army captain’s wife who burned her child with a cigarette. Cushla knows, however, that a nurse—not Bradley—reported that case. She also remembers an earlier child who came to school with blood on his trousers: Bradley sent Father Slattery to speak privately to the father and make him swear on a Bible that he would not approach the boy again. To Cushla, Bradley’s warning is less evidence of consistent child protection than an effort to mark her conduct. The juxtaposition sets formal concern for welfare against selective institutional response.

Sectarianism also shapes how Cushla’s actions are interpreted after the McGeown home burns. She tells an investigator that Davy called to say the house was on fire and that she drove up and took the family away for one night; she says she did not know Tommy McGeown had been arrested. The investigator responds that she is the connection between the victim and his killer. Her act of sheltering a family, which she presents as a limited response to an emergency, becomes part of the framework through which suspicion is directed at her. The episode shows how association can acquire a dangerous meaning in a setting where communal identity, policing, and political violence overlap.

The novel does not present religious practice only as an instrument of institutional control. While away with Michael, Cushla buys Davy a navy-blue missal and plain silver rosary beads, as well as a novena to St Joseph that her grandmother used to recite when someone was in trouble. She watches the assistant place the objects in a bag and recognizes the dissonance between these familiar devotional items and the circumstances of her trip. Later, frightened by events surrounding Tommy’s arrest and the family’s safety, she makes an inward prayer in which she promises to change her life if they can be brought through the crisis. Her plea draws on the language of Catholic devotion even as it shows desperation rather than settled theological certainty. Across these scenes, inherited prayer can offer a vocabulary for care and fear, while church authority can also intensify guilt and enforce communal divisions.