Free Anglo-Irish Murders by Ruth Dudley Edwards

spoke in what sounded to Amiss like fluent Irish. She looked perplexed and asked Okinawa a brief question, to which he responded volubly. Her puzzled response was again brief. Okinawa turned to Amiss. ‘I think we need a diplomatic solution to this, Lobert. Raochrí cannot understand my Ilish.’
    ‘Is that because it’s a Japanese variant?’ asked Amiss desperately.
    ‘Maybe it is because I learned my Ilish in the south-west of Ireland, in Kelly, and she does not understand the dialect. Her diarect is difficult for me too.’ He turned to Laochraí. ‘Will it be easier if we speak in Engrish?’
    She looked cross. ‘It is my human right to have people speak my language.’
    ‘But is it not their human light to have you speak theirs? However, if it helps you,’ he bowed again, ‘I will stay with you and do my best.’
    Laochraí looked at Okinawa and then at Amiss. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It can wait until the official interpreter gets here.’ And with her two friends, she headed towards reception.
    Another set of headlights came into view. Okinawa picked up his camera and walked back towards his vantage-point, but not before giving Amiss a little grin.
    The baroness watched him go. ‘I’ve always been dead against foreign intervention in our affairs,’ she said, ‘but after watching the demolition of Lucrezia Borgia there, I’m beginning to change my mind. That is one useful Nip.’
    ***
    After thirty minutes in which Amiss, with the help of the newly-arrived Simon Gibson, welcomed the baroness’ Indian friend, one Scot, Welsh Wyn, one Englishman, a Dublin minister and his entourage, the interpreter and the signer and the main speaker, he was able to steal a moment alone with Gibson.
    ‘What’s going on with the DUPEs, Simon? They seem to be best pals with the Irish. Look at them. They’re hugger-muggering with the MOPEs now.’
    ‘You’ll see plenty more of that. MOPEs and DUPEs have plenty in common and specialize in the “let’s-go-the-extra-mile-for-peace” lingo they’ve learned from the useful idiots who equate words with deeds.’
    ‘Still, the DUPEs seemed a lot more reasonable than the MOPEs.’
    ‘I’m afraid these MOPEs are particularly grim,’ said Gibson, ‘but in some ways bloody O’Flynn aka Call-me-Cormac’s the worst. He’s been a nightmare addition to MOPEery.’ He shook his head. ‘Not that there wasn’t a kind of tragic inevitability about the kind of priest they would attract.’
    ‘Quick drink before we go back on duty?’
    ‘OK. I need it.’
    When Amiss returned with their gin-and-tonics, Gibson had become contemplative. ‘You know, you spend your life in that bloody place—Northern Ireland—trying to break down prejudices, and then people wilfully or ignorantly insist on reinforcing and indeed exaggerating the stereotypes you’ve been challenging.
    ‘Thus the kind of Jesuit sent off to be a spiritual adviser to MOPEers isn’t a perfectly sane chap with an interest in ethical philosophy and a desire to promote tolerance but a dimwit who thinks they don’t sufficiently realise how thoroughly oppressed they are. So he sets out to make them develop a more bitter sense of victimhood than they already had.’
    He took a large sip. ‘You can’t entirely blame Call-me-Cormac. He was no doubt doing useful things in South America and they took him away and posted him to Belfast. So naturally he runs around the place trying to persuade the well-housed inhabitants on generous welfare benefits that they are trampled-upon peons who are entitled to rise up against their tormentors.’
    ‘The British? The unionists? Who exactly?’
    ‘Well you and I know that their main tormentors are their own so-called community leaders—MOPEs and DUPEs alike—who brain-wash the gullible and beat up anyone who challenges them. We also know the British government pours resources into the place that it would never devote to the quiescent needy closer to home.
    ‘But