evidence: If they didn’t pay it, they couldn’t work there. It still happens now, even in peacetime. The lower Newtownards Road, a Protestant area, was pocked with shuttered windows, the remnants of small businesses that couldn’t afford the regular payout to the Loyalists. [...] The second promise was prosperity. Peace, we were assured, would bring a thriving new economy. It never appeared. It didn’t matter what qualifications you had, the most plentiful work was to be found in call centres, answering or making calls for a minimum wage. They were egalitarian shitholes; middle-class kids with PhDs mixed with kids with no GCSEs, and they all earned the same for doing the same grunt work. If you were lucky, the job didn’t come with timed toilet breaks. In the end, most graduates ended up leaving. People who’d been searching for jobs for two years in Northern Ireland would find one within eight weeks in London. But it was like escaping from one trap only to walk into another; London offered jobs but it didn’t offer a life. Most people I knew out there were just scraping by, paying £650 a month for a bedroom in a grotty apartment. Eventually, they’d figure out you couldn’t buy a house for £100K in London the way you could in Belfast and would either return, settling for what work they could find and swapping career dreams for family life, or head farther afield. [...] Yet this turned out to be a lie, too.