At times there appeared to be a distinct possibility the same terrible aftermath might be re-enacted. One of the IRA splinter groups detonated a massive car bomb in the County Tyrone town of Strabane, which killed men, women and children. There were other smaller attacks. Then I read of the exposure of informers, members of the IRA who worked for British and Irish intelligence. More surprisingly, the IRA appeared to let them get on with their lives, they did not execute them by a bullet to the back of the neck, the traditional IRA punishment for informers. Nothing happened for a long period – they went into internal and external exile, in hiding and when the media's attention was elsewhere, IRA sympathisers killed them.
        The principal characters in A Fine Country, Hugh O'Neill, Eamon Delaney, his handler in the IRA, Mary, who was one of the IRA agents who smuggled Hugh from Skopelos to London, Iggy Donnellan the IRA Chief of Staff and Michael Donnellan, to whose Irish club in London, the IRA unit took Hugh, were all alive at the end of the novel.
        What, I began to wonder, did a man as powerful as Iggy Davin do now his time as Chief of Staff was spent mostly keeping order in the ranks, or in one of Davin's catch phrases, “putting manners on people”. How was Eamon, a scholarly man, whose nickname in the Movement was the Monk due to his temperance and chastity, spending his days? Where was Mary the former IRA volunteer? And Hugh, how was Hugh after the death of his lover Godfrey, who sacrificed his own life to save his? What had happened to Michael Donnellan? Hugh O'Neill and Michael Donnellan were both wanted by the British authorities and as such were not eligible for the pardons granted to the Republican and Loyalist prisoners as part of the Good Friday Agreement prisoners.
        Some years ago, we were on holiday in Galicia, mainly to visit Santiago de Compestela. In the throng of tourists and pilgrims in the cathedral and the vast expanse of the great square of the city, Praza do Obradoiro, the idea came to me that maybe here, and on what the Spanish call the Costa da Morte, I might have a setting to begin my novel. There is a long history between parts of Galicia and Ireland going back to 1601, when an expedition force from A Coruña landed Spanish troops in Kinsale on the southern tip of Ireland in another futile attempt to regain Catholic Ireland from the clutches of Protestant England. In addition to the historical connection, the Galicians and Irish share a number of characteristics: they are both Celts; they enjoy, if that is the correct term, a wet and windy climate; their music, with the bagpipes a feature of both, is similar. Due to years of poverty, emigration was the only life for large numbers of their populations; the Galicians went to Cuba and Spanish-speaking South America. And walking across the Praza do Obradoiro one evening, a man in a traditional Galician costume grabbed my arm and wanted to take me on a tour. When I declined he said, “But you are Irish, we are both Celts, come!”
        Rumours persist that sections of the IRA are involved in drug running. The Costa da Morte has a long history of smuggling and in later years became an entry point for Colombian drug runners into Europe. Reports list Spain as having Europe's biggest number of drug users. From Santiago de Compestela we drove down to the coast, along the Costa da Morte, out to Finisterre, the end of the world to the early pilgrims from all across Europe who walked on to there from Santiago to complete the pilgrimage. We continued with a few days in Baiona and a trip into Portugal, about ten minutes drive away, so that when we returned home, I felt I had the opening chapters of my novel.

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