My one shot at the Darwin Awards

This story about how dissident republicans stowed bullets on top of a very hot boiler reminds me of how I nearly became the Troubles’ most slapstick victim.

Sometime in the late 1990s I was doing some holiday work for my dad, trying to work up the money to buy a Metallica ticket if I recall. I was helping him empty out a derelict ice cream/jam factory next to the Belfast-Dublin railway line.

I say helping him, but he’d typically start a bonfire and go off to another job, leaving me hurling decades’ of unimaginable detritus into the flames.

We’d been doing this for a few days when I noticed a plastic bag wrapped neatly on top of a pillar in the corner of a small backroom.

I’d been committing everything to the flames with the unquestioning verve of a 17th century witchfinder. Old ledgers, broken desks, bits of plastic that turned the flames green: all felt my fiery justice. Once for a laugh dad threw an old aerosol on (from a safe distance, obviously, he wasn’t irresponsible).

I paused with the plastic bag in my hand though. It seemed to have been placed there deliberately, on its own special perch high above the slowly disintegrating junk around it. I nervously unwrapped the plastic. Inside were hundreds of shiny bullets.

I was worried that whoever put them there would know I found them. The RUC, though, promised to deal with the matter with their customary sensitivity. The next day three police cars skidded around the corner like a scene from The Sweeney and officers poured out of the unmarked Sierras into the derelict factory.

Over time my unease at the mini arms-find lifted. In its place came a relief that I did not become the only person in Troubles history to have been shot by a bonfire.