A SEPARATE STRUGGLE THE TROUBLES IN NORTHERN IRELAND PUT BROTHERS ON DIFFERENT PATHS.(LIFE & LEISURE)

Byline: PAUL GRONDAHL STAFF WRITER

The Pierce brothers, built powerful and low like linebackers, lumbered over hexagonal columns of ancient lava at land's end.

This stretch of Northern Ireland's northeastern coast is known as the Giant's Causeway as if a giant could step across all the way to Scotland, a dark and lumpy outline visible 11 miles across the ocean, where the volcanic rocks form a mirror image.

The brothers moved beyond warning signs with lifelines and floats attached and negotiated the dark, seaweed-slickened ring of rock where the great Atlantic waves came crashing.

From a distance, the two brothers appeared, like the buff-colored rocks they stood upon, as mirror images. Both wore jeans, tennis shoes and parkas zipped up tight around thick necks. Baseball caps one for the Chicago Bulls, the other NASA barely fit atop their heads.

The brothers looked down and scuffed the rock with their feet as they talked. Their words came haltingly and there was an awkwardness to this meeting, because the only common ground they had known for so long was the inside of a prison during fleeting visits.

For all their physical likeness, the two were strangers in a way, separated by an ocean of experience. They had been divided for nearly a quarter century by The Troubles, the armed conflict that raged through their Belfast neighborhood and tore at the fabric of families like theirs.

Two worlds

The oldest brother was visiting from America, a success story who fled the horrors of his war-torn homeland, but kept coming back to assuage his guilt and did what he could for the struggle from afar. The youngest was just out of prison, a soldier in the Irish Republican Army who paid the cost of the fight for political freedom by spending half his life behind bars.

Both brothers sprang from the defiant verses of IRA battle anthems, raised in a family of staunch Republicans who would lay down their lives for a united Ireland free of British rule. Today, they were at once intimates of a shared past and strangers of an uncertain future.

George ``Geordie'' Pierce, 54, is the oldest. In 1974, he fled the shooting and bombing and burned-out row houses of the New Lodge neighborhood of Belfast for New York. He stayed wary and on the move, an illegal immigrant hiding behind an assumed name for more than a decade.

John Pierce, 38, is the youngest. He was only 13 when Geordie left, and he was already running with a hard crowd involved in the shadowy underground of the IRA. When he was 21, he was sent to Long Kesh prison, home to the hardest core of IRA guerrillas.

By the late-1980s, Geordie Pierce was legal. Now a Civil Service Employees Association organizer who lives in Troy, Geordie kept in touch with family and Republican stalwarts in late-night phone calls. His passport holds the stamps of nearly two dozen visits to Ireland in the past decade, trips on which he always …