Rose McGowan & the heartbreaking old cause

She has a look of the Irish, that Rose McGowan: she'd put me in mind of the girls one would see out on a big Friday night in Belfast or Dublin. She was born in Firenze, though, but her father's an Irishman. This all comes out because of the stew over her remarks about the IRA at a Toronto press conference held for the movie she's in that's adapted from the memoir by the Provo informer Martin McGartland. 'I imagine', said Rose, 'had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 per cent have been in the IRA. My heart just broke for the cause.' McGartland doesn't sound too happy about the movie in any case, and he's definitely not pleased with Rose now ('Rose McGowan's comments were insulting to victims of IRA terrorism and she should apologise. It's easy to say this sort of thing when you live in LA.' Ouch.) Even the producers of the movie have had to distance themselves from their own talent. Whether the publicity helps or hinders the picture, I don't know: IRA touts are not the most promising commercial subject, and a right old moral thicket from which to try to pull out a genuinely good picture. I haven't read McGartland's book, but there have been some good accounts of informing on the 'Ra (Eamon Collins' Killing Rage) and others that are at least interesting (Sean O'Callaghan's The Informer). Yet they all tell the same essential story: 'My people were being oppressed and so I joined an organisation I considered revolutionary, so as to strike back. But to my horror this organisation also numbered among its members some rather disreputable characters...' It's a good yarn, and it works for people, but it could never be reckoned as the whole truth.