David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed and a new mother in Ireland in the summer of 1969. Militant Catholics and Protestants were attacking each other across the country. Catholics were a minority in Northern Ireland and the Catholic Lawlors were afraid. They fled to the Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, where things worsened by 1970. There were gunfights and riots. The British Army was summoned to maintain order. In June a woman named Harriet Carson arrived. She walked through the streets banging two pot lids and yelling for the hiding families to out. She said they all needed to go to the Lower Falls neighborhood, where families were locked in their houses and had no way to get food for their children: “The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched for illegal weapons” (199). Lawlor’s father was worried that if they tried to help, the British Army would turn on them.

“The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists—Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.—wrote a report (“Rebellion and Authority”) about how to deal with insurgencies” (201). Their conclusion framed getting insurgents under control as a mathematical problem: “If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough” (201).