Fifty years ago in late March a 900-page novel about Ireland from the Penal Laws through the Famine to the Rising, started its climb up the U.S. best seller lists. Trinity by Leon Uris would become the best-selling novel in America through that Bicentennial Summer. There’s no question whose side it took in the centuries-old conflict between Ireland and England, Catholic and Protestant.

In the classic Say Nothing mode that dominates discussion of such incidents in Ireland, Rory never talks about the ancient past