The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast

During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran's The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran's fourteen-year relationship with the McNallys, a Catholic family of seven living in North Belfast that he first met as a backpacking teenager in 1979 and has visited many times since. Throughout the book he juxtaposes the ennui of his suburban Toronto upbringing with the comparatively weird life on Antrim Road, where the McNally kids walk toward oncoming traffic not to be visible to drivers, but to watch for paramilitaries intent on pulling over and killing them. While describing the family's bizarre struggle to get along with their neighbours, Foran evokes universals in the suburban experience—a Saturday shopping trip into the city, chasing the dog from a neighbour's yard, letting the craic (conversation, fun, good times) fly in the den after dinner—domestic details that don't change from a war zone in Ireland to a suburb of Toronto.