1999 (22 page)

“I haven't mentioned this to anyone else yet,” McCoy went on, “because I wanted to talk to you first.” Barry saw the pupils of his eyes dilate suddenly. “I have a couple of those pictures right here,” he said in a totally different voice.

Barry did not have to look around to know a guard was approaching. He willed his taut body to relax. “Great. Let's see them, Séamus.”

McCoy forked two fingers into his shirt pocket and extracted several black-and-white snapshots. “One of the boys had a camera smuggled in,” he explained as he handed Barry the photographs. “For holiday snaps, like I said.”

The pictures showed a handful of grinning men lounging in front of a Nissan hut. They might be any high-spirited young lads, mugging for the camera. Unless you looked closely at their eyes.

“None of that now,” said the guard. He reached for the photographs.

 

Barry knew he would not sleep that night.

Before going to his room he bought a small bottle of whiskey. He left it unopened on the locker beside his bed.
“Ní bhíonn an rath ach mar a mbíonn an smach,”
he reminded himself, quoting an old Irish proverb: “There is no luck except where there is discipline.”

He stretched his long body diagonally across the lumpy bed and threw one forearm over his eyes. It would be a long time until dawn.

He paid one more visit to Long Kesh before returning to Dublin. Again it was difficult to speak openly, but he managed to tell McCoy, “I'm afraid I can't do that favour you asked of me.”

If the older man was disappointed he did not show it. “Any particular reason?”

“There is one, but I can't go into it now. Maybe when you're out of here.”

McCoy gave a hollow laugh. “For all I know that won't be until they carry me out in a box.”

 

When Barry returned to Harold's Cross Ursula was eager for news of McCoy. “Same old Séamus,” he told her. “He's holding up pretty well—better than I expected, in fact. In a way he's lucky he was lifted when he was, because that means he'll stay in the Cages. Men arrested since the opening of the H-Blocks are going straight into them.”

“The newspapers claim the H-Blocks are the last word in penal modernity,” said Ursula.

“Perhaps they are, but if I were a fanciful man I would say those buildings are evil. I could feel it.”

“I'm in charge of presentiments around here,” his mother reminded him.

Barry's “Shankill Horror” series was snapped up by the tabloids. Barbara lodged the cheques in the bank and ordered damp proofing for the house.

“Get something pretty for yourself,” Barry suggested.

“Why? When do you have time to look at me?”

“That's not true, sweetheart, I'm looking at you right now.” Although he had a hundred other things to do Barry let the world wait for a couple of hours while he proved he was not ignoring her.

 

James Callaghan became the new British prime minister in April of 1976. One of his first official acts was to order a change in the administrative ranks of Northern Ireland. The province was a seriously hot potato. A number of people had suggestions for dealing with the problem, but they were facing a stone wall. Two stone walls.

Republicans demanded the British army leave, to be followed by power sharing and ultimately a united Ireland.

Ian Paisley said No.

 

On the fourteenth of April a four-hour peace vigil was held in St. Anne's Cathedral, Belfast. The names of 1,289 victims of the violence in Northern Ireland were read aloud. Men and women fingered their rosaries; some wept silently.

Four days later Gerry Adams, in one of his “Brownie” articles, addressed a message to the Volunteers on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. “Active Republicanism means hard work, action, example…It means fighting. It's hard to write that down because, God knows, maybe I won't fight again and it will be cast up at me.”
¹

In the Republic the Fine Gael/Labour coalition completely ignored the anniversary of the Easter Rising until the Sinn Féin Party announced its own commemoration, to be called “Reclaim the Spirit of 1916.” The government banned the event. But over ten thousand people gathered at the GPO to hear a number of speakers. Nora Connolly, the daughter of James Connolly, one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic, was amongst those prosecuted for defying the government's ban.

The Irish government then staged its own hasty wreath-laying at the GPO, unannounced and unattended by the public. Barry was invited to photograph the event but he was too disgusted to attend.

“I thought the politicians liked having you take their pictures,” Barbara said. “You'll lose business if you act like that.”

He set his jaw and did not answer.

 

On the first of May Kenneth Newman, a dapper, slightly built pipe smoker and one of two deputy chief constables in Northern Ireland, was appointed chief constable of the RUC. Earlier in his career Newman had served with the police in Palestine and seen action during the violent campaign against the British policy of excluding the Jews.

Under the new chief constable new internal guidelines, known as the Walker Report, were issued. A policing culture was instituted that centralised decision-making power in the hands of the RUC Special Branch,
²
effectively making the Branch above any law but its own.

On the fifth of May nine republican prisoners tunnelled their way out of one of the Cages in Long Kesh. They had set up an ingenuous false wall at the rear of their Nissan hut, so that guards looking into the hut believed everything was normal. In actuality the wall concealed the soil they were digging out and the deepening hole.

A young recruit was assigned the role of lookout. His job was to stand at the front of the hut holding up a plate if the guards were coming, and lowering it as an all-clear. On the final day of tunnelling he was so excited he gave the wrong signal. Guards seized the men before they could make good their getaway.

On the day following the attempted breakout eight members of the SAS
^*
were discovered in the Republic of Ireland. They claimed they had crossed the border by mistake.

 

A brief note from McCoy informed the Hallorans, “We had a wee bit of excitement here a couple of weeks back. The seagull almost flew away.”

In the first week of June Barry had news of his own.

Ireland sweltered in a three-month heat wave that summer. Temperatures were in the seventies. Chemists sold salt tablets to their customers.

A new day dawned in aviation when the spectacular Concorde was launched.

Swedish pop group Abba hit the charts with “Money, Money, Money.”

For an undisclosed sum former film star Grace Kelly, now princess of Monaco, purchased her ancestral home in County Mayo; thirty-five acres with a two-room cottage.

 

“Good enough for some,” Barbara sniffed. The heat combined with her pregnancy was making her irritable. “With all that woman's wealth I don't know why she'd want to buy a hovel in the back of the beyond.”

“She's Irish,” Barry replied.

“I don't see what that has to do with it. She's not going to live there, she has that gorgeous palace in Monaco. It probably even has air-conditioning. If I had a home like that…” She left the thought hanging in the air.

Barry had become accustomed to the disparaging remarks she made about the house in Harold's Cross.
Isabella probably puts her up to it,
he thought.
Wants her princess to live in a castle. But castles are no place for Irish republicans, even if we could afford one.

Yet he found himself eyeing property that bore “For Sale” signs. Large old Georgian houses in a sufficient state of dilapidation to be affordable. Dublin was filled with them.

It would be quite an adventure to buy a place like that and restore it. And a good investment, too—if Ireland ever becomes prosperous enough to have a strong housing market.

Which seemed highly unlikely.

 

From the twenty-eighth of June there was a bank strike in the Republic. When people ran out of cheques they wrote them on scraps of paper and even paper napkins. Shopkeepers extended credit for food and other essentials; barter replaced the pound note as currency.

When the banks finally reopened on the sixth of September all cheques were honoured and debts paid. There was no report of anyone having lost money.

 

The fourth of July 1976, marked the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America. Huge celebrations were held throughout the nation. A number of Irish Americans sent for their impoverished relatives “in the Old Country” to spend a holiday sharing the fun. Men and women and wide-eyed children from Waterford and Galway and tiny farms in Kerry wandered along the streets of New York and Boston, staring at wonders they had never dreamed existed.

Meanwhile in Northern Ireland loyalists shot and bombed and bludgeoned Catholics and the IRA ambushed British soldiers and members of the RUC and planted bombs along lonely roadways frequented by the security forces.

And ordinary Irish men and women struggled to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

 

“We're going to have to raise our prices,” Barbara told Barry. “We can't afford to keep feeding the boarders on what they're paying us.”

He said, “They're doing the best they can, same as everyone else.”

“If the Irish had any gumption they'd stop meekly accepting whatever fate dishes out and make some changes. Isn't there any fight in you at all?”

Isn't there any fight in you at all? Oh, Barbara. If only you knew.

 

Louth man Séamus Ludlow was murdered while hitchhiking outside of Dundalk, and his body dumped by the roadside. The day after the body was found the Gardai claimed the IRA had killed Ludlow because he was an informer. The claim split his family in two—particularly after Special Branch tried to implicate some members of Ludlow's family in his murder.

Four days after Ludlow's death a group of heavily armed SAS men carrying weapons not associated with the British army and wearing civilian clothes were detained in nearby Omeath. Local people suspected they had been involved in a number of recent killings along the border, but they were released without charge after the Irish minister for foreign affairs, Fine Gael's Garret FitzGerald, intervened in the investigation.
¹

For over twenty years the Gardai would continue to insist the IRA had killed Ludlow. Then massive pressure from families of the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings caused a private inquiry into state-sponsored collusion to be undertaken. Justice Henry Barron, who headed up the enquiry and issued a report that has never been challenged by either the Irish or British governments, named and identified four loyalist paramilitaries as Ludlow's killers.

Liam Cosgrave, who had been
taoiseach
at the time of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, refused to cooperate with the enquiry.

 

Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to Ireland, was killed in Dublin on the twenty-first of July when an IRA land mine exploded under his car. Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave declared, “The atrocity fills all Irish people with a sense of shame.”
²

Eight days later Merlyn Rees told the House of Commons that there had been no discussions between Provisional Sinn Féin and the British government since early in the year.

Speaking at a republican rally on the anniversary of internment, Máire Drumm demanded the reinstatement of Special Category Status for republican prisoners. “If it is necessary,” she said, “Belfast will come down stone by stone.”
³

 

The summer grew hotter.

 

On the tenth of August an IRA getaway car went out of control when the driver was shot and killed by a soldier in the Andersonstown area of Belfast. The car mounted the pavement and crushed Anne Maguire and her three young children. Two of the children died at the scene; the third died later. Mrs. Maguire was seriously injured.

Within forty-eight hours a thousand women gathered in Andersonstown in a spontaneous demonstration calling for peace. An even larger crowd attended a second rally on the fourteenth. A week later Mairéad Corrigan, an aunt of the dead children, and local woman Betty Williams addressed twenty thousand women, both Catholic and Protestant, in Ormeau Park. The Peace People Movement was born.

When a woman called Rosaleen O'Kane was found in Cliftonpark Avenue on the seventeenth of September, the condition of her naked, badly burned corpse was such that the pathologist could not determine the exact cause of death. The police suspected she was yet another victim of the Shankill Butchers.

 

More than two years had passed since the bomb exploded in Talbot Street and Ursula was still an invalid.

Invalid.
The word burned inside her like an ulcer.
I hate that word. In valid. Not valid.

Among the things she had asked Barry to bring her from the farm was the treasured, well-worn dictionary Henry Mooney had given her so many years ago. She kept the book on her bedside locker. Looking up the definition for “valid” she read: “sound, defensible; legally acceptable.”

When Barbara came to her room to say lunch was ready, Ursula greeted her with a defiant, “I may not be sound but I am legally acceptable!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“My status.”

“I didn't know it was in question.”

“It is in question.”

Humour her,
Barbara told herself. “You're Barry's mother and Brian's grandmother and my mother-in-law, so that's your status.”

Ursula reached for the dictionary. “Status…status…here it is: ‘rank or social position; relative importance.'”

Barbara laughed. “Well, you're an important relative all right. As for the other—of all the people I know, you care the least about rank and social position. You're the exact opposite of my mother in that respect.” She began folding up the quilt at the foot of the bed.

Because of her advancing pregnancy Barbara no longer lifted Ursula. With fierce determination the older woman had learned to manoeuvre her upper body from the bed into the wheelchair unaided—as long as the wheels were locked. She could wheel the chair as well, and took pride in the speed she was able to obtain up and down the length of the front hall.

But it was not enough; not as good as being free.

“Every sentient being has a sense of status, Barbara,” she said as she settled herself in the chair. “Hens have a pecking order, bees have queens and drones. And look at the northern unionists. They're determined to remain part of Britain because they think it confers some sort of superior status.”

Barbara followed her out of the room. “Is this going to be another monologue about politics? Don't you Hallorans ever want to talk about anything else?”

“Don't you ever want to talk about anything but yourself?” Ursula retorted.

In angry silence broken only by the creaking of the wheelchair, the two women made their way to the dining room.

Barbara slammed a bowl of soup onto the table in front of Ursula.

“What's this?”

“Potato and cabbage.”

“I don't want it.”

“Suit yourself,” Barbara said coldly. She went into the kitchen and began the washing-up.
I should be more patient with Ursula,
she told herself as she worked.
She's old and crippled and life must be miserable for her, especially since she was always so active.

There was no sound from the dining room. Ursula was still sitting at the table.

Opening the fridge, Barbara noticed a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. She quickly shelled two and chopped them up with a bit of celery, stirred in a generous dollop of Philpott's homemade salad cream, arranged the result on a bed of lettuce, garnished the salad with a fan composed of thin slices of fragrant fresh tomato, and carried the pretty result to Ursula. “If you don't want the soup try this.”

Ursula glanced at the offering and looked away. “I hate eggs. You know I hate eggs.”

“Well, damn it, I hate waiting hand and foot on somebody who doesn't show an ounce of appreciation!”

The two women glared at each other for a long moment.

Ursula wheeled her chair around and went to her room.

 

As part of their campaign against the IRA the British government determined on a policy of criminalisation to obscure the historical and political causes of the problem in Northern Ireland. Henceforth no vestige of political status would be granted to any aspect of the republican movement. Volunteers, no matter what their crimes—or what unproven crimes they were accused of—were officially felons. British authorities spoke of “squeezing the IRA like toothpaste.” Referring to current paramilitary activity, they launched an advertising campaign that announced “Seven Years Is Too Much.”

IRA responded with a campaign of its own: “Seven Hundred Years Is Too Much.”

When he entered the H-Blocks on September fifteenth Ciaran Nugent, the first convicted IRA prisoner to be denied Special Category Status, refused to wear a prison uniform. He explained to his guards that he was a political prisoner and under the Geneva Convention was not to be treated as a common criminal. They would “have to nail the prison uniform on his back,” he said. Rather than go naked he wrapped himself in the blanket from his bed.

Nugent's act of defiance resonated through the Blocks. First one, then another man went “on the blanket.”

 

From his darkroom Barry could hear Barbara singing along with Thin Lizzy on the radio in the kitchen. Their latest hit was “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

 

In Armagh Women's Prison a handful of republican women began a protest in sympathy with the men on the blanket in the H-Blocks. Their prison, which stood in the centre of Armagh town and looked like an old warehouse, was notorious for its lack of facilities—and lack of common decency. Prisoners routinely were harassed and abused by their guards.
⁴
After joining the H-Block protest the republican women lost the very few basic privileges they had, but they held their ground.

 

On the fifteenth of October two brothers from the Ulster Defence Regiment were jailed for thirty-five years each in connection with the massacre of the Miami Showband. Seventeen months before the Showband killings they had faced charges of being involved with a loyalist bomb attack, but had been allowed to continue serving with the Regiment.

It was proved in court that Thomas Raymond Crozier and Rodney Shane McDowell were also members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, but they were not given additional sentences for belonging to an illegal organisation.

 

After being refused a visa to travel to the United States for badly needed eye surgery, Sinn Féin vice-president Máire Drumm was admitted to the Mater Hospital in North Belfast. Two members of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, dressed in white lab coats, walked into the ward where Mrs. Drumm was recovering from her operation. They shot her dead at close range. Jim Craig, a leading member of the UDA who also was widely reputed to be working for Special Branch,
⁵
was arrested for the murder. Subsequently all charges against him were dropped.