Book Review: Rough Justice, autobiography of Maurice Bobo Ward
This is a very sad book indeed, filled with poverty, abuse, violence, incarceration and little light relief. It's author, gangland robber Bobo Ward, was gunned down shortly after its completion. Even all the more sad as he was beginning to gain insight into himself, and some of his actions. The States of Fear documentary triggered off dealing with his childhood abuse in a reform school for young offenders. While it does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions, one can cannot fail to draw the links between the abuse of the child and the man's violent rage and ongoing hatred of authority. Bobo is a paradigm of extreme macho toughness, but at points in the book there are touching displays of sheer naivety. In the last years of his life, the man who once gaurded Larry Dunne's Drug store, and at a later stage beat up heroin pushers in his home area of Clondalkin, now put his energies into Survivors of Child abuse. While the gardaí are routinely called "the filth" in passages of the book, individual guards who helped him in reporting his abuse are thanked very deeply and sincerely. When his young son is handicapped for life in a brutal accident in a coporation flats lift, the tragedy of this life is heaped upon heap. One heart goes out to this mans partners and children.
<< Home