I had already given some thought to this as we were working on the first module and I’m sure it will come up again. I’ve been recalling some memories, as time and memories are big themes in my work, particularly the slice of time encompassing the period when I made my MSc in Physics in Canada in the mid-1970s.
One of the memories I mentioned contained an incident on a train when I met a girl with her parents of Irish extraction. This morning I was listening to a drama on BBC Sounds about the violence in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s and how it was supported by money collected by the Irish diaspora in London and New York. The girl had told me her name was Patricia Sarsfield. I had asked was she named after the Irish military leader in the 17th century. She then told me she collected money for Norraid in the pubs in Quebec. I said that the money went to the IRA, not to the wives and children of civilians injured in the Troubles. (I didn’t tell her that my parents had been ‘forced out’ of their home by the IRA in 1972, just 5 years earlier, and my great-grandfather’s farmhouse in Co. Monaghan had been burned down in 1917 by Sinn Fein. ) She stopped talking about this. When they left the train, she gave me a slip of paper with her contact details. On it her name was Patricia Donnelly.
I didn’t put this in my first post. I hadn’t forgotten it, so I’m not quite sure why. Self-censoring? Today’s radio drama brought it back. I don’t recall if I thought at the time that the girl was testing me to see if I was an IRA supporter, or was she just naive ? Should I have posted the slip of paper with her contact details? (Were they true?)
I also am concerned about posting real names of people that I had intimate relationships with during that period. Some of them are still my friends, some I have lost contact with, but could be informed by third parties. There are things that might be hurtful to them, which they didn’t know about back then, and colour their view of our relationship now and then. What should I do? (see what Joseph Joffo says, quoted in my post https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/wallet6/2023/08/21/a-bag-of-marbles/ ).
