David Remnick visited troubled and torn Belfast in the early 1990s. He wrote about his experience and interpretation in the New Yorker, published in April 1994. You can read
Remnick's account of his meeting with Gerry Adams in his Sinn Fein office in early 1990s Belfast
here. It was an incredibly broad and detailed account of life in Belfast and Northern Ireland at the time. A note on how Belfast was very
serene outside of the hotspots, how loyalist and republican paramilitaries are simply
base gangs like in any other city; he
painted a picture from his trip to Paisley's church, Martyr's Memorial; told us about Gerry Adams's
hallowed republican forbears; and retold us about
his ramble in the greens of outer Belfast with Michael Longley. One of the aspects of the long essay that most hit me was when
David Remnick said that Adams no right to the comparison with Mandela or Arafat:
