The McGowan Trilogy

I have been meditating on my personal response to the piece, for the purposes of finding a quote for the programme.
What the piece means to me today is as follows:
¨For a large part of my early childhood in the 1970’s I lived with my actor mother, Annie Balfour and stepfather, Dublin-born actor Derrick O’Connor in Shepherds Bush, West London, at the heart of a then thriving community of actors, theatre makers and filmakers passionate about their identity as people of Ireland settling in Britain. At the same time, the IRA bombs exploded in and around the areas I frequented. Fear became an ever-present norm.
I could never have imagined then that I would one day find myself discovering and empathising with the humanity, sufferings and struggle of the people responsible for those bombs. And yet, on reading The McGowan Trilogy and through the research that has followed, this is what I have experienced.
A people brutalised and made desperate by the intolerable oppression they had endured, since far beyond the uprising of 1916, sincerely believing theirs was a just and necessary life-and-death struggle for freedom. Discovering, as we all invariably and inevitably do, that in a war of violence there can be no victors. That following a path of violence can only lead to the corruption of our humanity.¨