Taig

Taig is a sectarian slur for a Catholic whose force in the novel comes from its movement between public hostility and private relationships. It marks the McGeown family as targets of exclusion, shadows Catholic children even when they try to avoid attention, and becomes a charged word in Cushla Lavery’s confrontation with Michael Agnew. The label also sits within a wider pattern in which communal identity can shape how people are judged and how responsibility for violence is understood.

Meaning and Social Use

The novel presents Taig as a label imposed on Catholics, not as a neutral description. Its plural form is painted on the low wall outside the McGeowns’ house, turning a religious identity into a public instruction to leave. The words appear amid other details of the family’s circumstances: their house stands at the back of an estate, with a field of gorse behind it, coal bags beside the door, and net curtains over the windows. The slur makes the threat legible on the boundary of their home, where private life meets the hostility of the surrounding community.

The same family is judged at school through assumptions about class and religion. Bradley, the headmaster, knows that Davy McGeown’s father rarely has roofing work and that his mother is Protestant while her children are being brought up Catholic. He regards the family as dangerously alien, although Cushla steps in to explain Davy’s forgotten coat as a mistake and guides him away. The episode does not show Bradley using the slur itself; instead, it reveals the kind of suspicion that gives such a label social power. Davy is also seated at the front because other pupils torment him, making the consequences of being marked visible within the classroom as well as outside the family home.

Visibility and Exclusion

The children’s Catholic identity becomes apparent even when they are not wearing uniforms. During a school outing, they walk in their own clothes, which are meant to protect them from being singled out. But because other schools in town require regulation clothing, the children remain identifiable as Catholics. Their attempt at concealment therefore fails: the absence of a uniform distinguishes them instead. As Gerry Devlin leads the line across the road, Cushla stays at the back with Davy, while Fidel watches the procession from outside his shop. The scene shows how communal identity can be assigned through appearance and circumstance, without anyone having to speak the slur.

The McGeowns are also subject to neighborhood talk that reduces their circumstances to a stereotype. Gina Lavery reports hearing a woman say she had often seen Seamie McGeown staggering home drunk, then rejects that as an excuse for the severe beating he suffered. The episode does not identify the gossip as an instance of the word Taig. Its relevance is the wider atmosphere of judgment around the family: even accounts of harm are filtered through claims about what kind of person Seamie is presumed to be. Against that reduction, Cushla’s attention to Davy and her concern for the family insist on their particular needs rather than a ready-made communal or class judgment.

Intimacy and Communal Identity

Cushla brings the label into her argument with Michael, asking whether she is the first Catholic woman he has been involved with and challenging the idea that their relationship can be understood as an act of community relations. Her accusation turns the term inward: it is no longer only a word painted on a wall or a category used to distinguish schoolchildren, but a name she uses to confront the unequal terms on which Michael understands their affair. The exchange exposes how a relationship across communal boundaries can be treated as an experiment or social gesture by one person, while the other demands recognition as an individual.

The novel gives communal identification a different, conflicted expression after Michael is killed. On the way to his funeral, Gina reacts with shame that one of her own community has committed the killing; Cushla silently identifies the category at issue as Catholic. The newspaper reports that the murder bears the hallmarks of an IRA assassination, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army later claims responsibility, portraying Michael as an agent of a corrupt judicial system. Gina condemns the killers even as she recognizes them as belonging to her community. The sequence distinguishes shared identity from shared responsibility: the category can name a community, but it does not settle what any individual thinks or does.

From Label to Suspicion

The treatment of the McGeowns also shows how association can become a basis for suspicion without the slur itself being spoken. When Bradley warns Cushla that she must report pupils who may be at risk, she recalls that he had not made an earlier report about a child’s abuse; she concludes that his concern is directed at her rather than at the family. Later, while questioning her after Michael’s death, an investigator calls her the connection between the victim and his killer. Cushla has explained that the McGeowns stayed at her house for one night after Davy told her their home was on fire, and that she did not know Tommy McGeown had been arrested. The accusation converts contact and assistance into grounds for suspicion.

These episodes are not equivalent to the direct use of Taig, and the novel does not present them as proof that every institutional judgment is explicitly sectarian. Together, however, they reveal a recurring movement from identity or association to presumed character: the McGeowns are treated as suspect at school and exposed to hostility at home; Cushla’s help becomes a connection investigators scrutinize; and Catholic identity remains present in both the intimacy of her relationship and the public interpretation of Michael’s death. The slur’s significance lies in this wider structure of labeling, in which a communal category can precede the person and narrow the meanings others allow that person to have.