According to her op-ed piece in the Guardian, Lionel Shriver–author of We Need To Talk About Kevin (see interview in ThreeMonkeysOnline)–lived in Belfast for 12 years. She uses this background as a platform for her views on the “stupidity of the Troubles.” She makes some reasonable if not massively original points–for example, Irish people like to pontificate about U.S. problems but get snotty when outsiders respond by pointing out that Ireland, North or South, is not entirely perfect. She’s also relevant when she compares the peaceful strategy of civil disobedience to gain Civil Rights in the American South with the IRA’s bloody campaign waged ostensibly to gain the same rights. (I’m pretty sure, however, that when Malcolm X said “by any means necessary” he wasn’t thinking of linking arms and chanting “we shall overcome.”)But where Shriver loses me is when lapses into the usual whinging Micks stereotype deployed by those hostile to the Nationalist agenda.She writes:”By the 1980s, Ulster Catholics had the finest public housing in Europe, and the highest number of leisure centres per capita in the UK, while working-class Protestant enclaves were still ailing.” The first statement is hard to swallow–the public housing stock in Northern Ireland is probably of a better quality than that of the Republic’s (big deal), but the best in Europe? The second comment is just fatuous–if I were a proper journalist I would try to hunt down how often this pseudo statistic is trotted out in attempt to undermine the reasons for discontent in Ulster.It’s used so often it makes you ask if there was a comparison chart created in some Whitehall backroom–with one axis of the graph labelled “IRA attacks” and the other “Number of step aerobic classes in NI.”