John Conroy

(BELFAST) — If everything had gone according to plan, Harry Toner would be a wealthy man today. At 60, he would be taking it easy, enjoying the profits from the hotel he and his wife built up from nothing, resting comfortably on his impeccable reputation in the industry. Instead he is running a catering service for the Belfast City Council and struggling to make the mortgage payments on his home. All he has to show for the once flourishing Hotel Windsor is a pile of debts and a medal from the Queen for his services in the industry, a medal about which he has an Irish Catholic’s mixed feelings. A lesser man would be broken completely, but Harry Toner struggles on, proud that his three children got good educations, proud that he never paid protection money, proud that no one got killed in his hotel. “Every once in a while, something would happen and there would be a surge of feeling,” says his wife Moira of the last decade here, “a feeling that this would