Those for whom peace comes too late

Is that it then? Four thousand deaths later, the second Intifada ends in an outing to Sharm el-Sheik? While we may only be a news item away from the shattering of our own peace, it is difficult to force the mind to remember the worst of it, both in Israel and here at home.

Time was when we would come home from Israel and spend weeks in Northern Ireland. I never saw the place much till friends married up there. There, I learned new facts of life. With my own man being British and me not having lost my Clare accent, I never stopped to think of the implications of simple things, like he and I going to the local launderette in Belfast. "Surely, you don't mean you're going together?" asked my friend. "Are you out of your mind?"

To tell the truth, it was more comfortable to be in the North because it was hard to come from the uncertainty of Israel to the normality of Clare. Nice peaceful Clare where the neighbours would go milk the cows of the lads who would be away for a bit, like. Gone up north or over beyond. No questions asked.

In Portadown one day, chatting to my friend as we walked past Evans, a woman in front of us heard our Free State accents and half turned with horror on her face and scooted away from us still half turned, crab-like. Fear. When we wanted to go pick out a kitten in Portadown, I took a last-minute message from the kitten-owner. "Best come the back way", she said, "I forgot that they are burning Lundy tonight". Quick pause in the proceedings to explain to small child about Lundy, the Siege of Derry, 1688/89.

Later, as we bade goodbye to the chosen kitty who had another week or two of her mother's milk to enjoy, one of the early birds, a woman of about 75 with white hair was out on her deckchair in good time to see the effigy of Lundy being burned. And for all the world, didn't she remind me of my own mother at Ennis Station at 3am on a morning in 1978, distributing our deck chairs to her friends at they went off to see the Pope in Limerick.

In 1998, we were in the North for most of July. My friend's husband would go on forays, taking the kids for a swim in the nearby pool in the evenings and report back on the state of play as we waited for Drumcree to blow. One evening, a local flower shop was burned. And on the 12th itself, the three little Quinn boys in Ballymoney went the way of the flower shop. That evening, on television, we watched France win the World Cup and the streets of Paris fill with joy. Next day, white-faced, we were walking in the utter beauty of the Mournes and down the Fairy Glen near Rostrevor. And in August, came Omagh.

In Israel, they kept a watch on developments in Ireland. In Haifa, where we lived, there was a synagogue next door and down at the end of the street where Ahmadiyyas lived, there was a twin minaretted mosque, painted white, sitting atop one of the hills of Mount Carmel.

On a bus one morning in July 1997 when the IRA announced the second ceasefire, those who knew me to be Irish clapped the development as reported on the bus radio, turning around in their seats, smiling, nodding. The magic thing. Peace. Six years later, in March 2003, a bus at the top of that street was suicide bombed at lunchtime. 17 dead, 53 wounded.

In June 2001, about 20 children from my daughter's class went to celebrate the end of the school year with a meal in a restaurant in Haifa. Being a Saturday, it was the busiest day of the week for the restaurant, and having eaten there practically every week for 15 years, I felt at home enough to help tidy up.

The waiter, Hana Francis, who was older than the rest, tidied with me. We spoke a little of the events of the night before when 21 young people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a disco in Tel Aviv. That day, Hana had two years and four months of life left. In October 2003, he died in the restaurant, along with three staff and 17 customers, numbering among them Jews, Muslims and Christians. The suicide bomber was a young woman from Jenin, a lawyer, who had lost three men in her life to the violence.

Whatever the Sharm el-Sheik meeting may bring, and however our own story unfolds here, it serves us to remember those at the heart of it, the Quinn boys and Hana Frances, for whom there will be no walks on Mourne Mountains or the wadis of Mount Carmel. And Noran Iayd Deeb, the ten-year-old Palestinian girl shot and killed in the yard of the UN-run school in Gaza last week and for whom the trip to Sharm el-Sheik by the men who make war and then make peace, has come exactly seven days too late.