1999 (48 page)

“An office building?” She looked puzzled. “I don't understand. Do we have business here?”

“We have property here. We own this place.”

“You must be joking.”

“Not about something as valuable as this; the market for property in city centre is beginning to climb. I bought this old house several years ago and have been fixing it up with an eye to making it into a home for us.”

“But offices…”

“On leases. If you like this house we can let them expire and move in ourselves.”

Barbara stared at Barry's old Georgian girl. She was elegant now, fully restored and the finest house in the street. Among her neighbours, many of whom were still dilapidated if not derelict, she shone like a diamond.

I wish Mother could see this!
Barbara thought.

Barry took her on a conducted tour, pointing out temporary walls and partitions that could easily be removed to make the building a private residence again.

“But it's huge, Barry! We'd have to have servants, and where do you get servants these days?”

“We needn't occupy all of it,” he assured her. “We could keep the ground floor as offices for the sake of the income, which is not inconsiderable. Even if we persuade Ursula and Breda to join us we would still have plenty of room.”

“We'll ask Ursula when she comes up at Christmas,” Barbara decided. “If they want to live here with us you can start tearing up those leases.”

“It doesn't work quite that way, they have to run out in the normal course. But the longest only lasts until the end of 1999.”

“The Millennium,” Barbara whispered.

They were almost back in Harold's Cross before she lost her temper.

“How dare you keep it from me all this time! Spending all that money. And staying away from the children…”

Here we go,
he thought. “I never stayed away from the children. I stayed in the new house, or rather the new old house, when you and I were separated because I had to stay somewhere. But I always wanted to be with you.”

“If that was true you would have shared this with me from the beginning.”

How could he explain so she would understand? He parked the car and turned to face her. “Barbara, you had your singing career. That was
yours.
No, don't say anything, I know it didn't turn out the way you wanted, but it was personal to you. Your voice, no one else's. Maybe I felt like that about the house. I wanted something that was personal to me.”

“How could a mansion in Mountjoy Square be personal to you?”

“I have no idea,” he replied honestly. “Nor did I intend to keep it a secret. Things just worked out that way.”

She turned away from him; stared out the window. “Things always work out other than the way we intend.”

She sounded sorrowful rather than angry, so he tried again. “What about the house, sweetheart? Would you like us to live there?”

She gave a shrug. “I don't care. No. I mean I'll think about. There's no rush, is there?”

“There's no rush,” he said.

Another bitter divorce referendum was too close to call on polling day. The final result was a vote for divorce by only 50.3 percent, one of the narrowest margins in Irish history.

 

When
The Irish Press
closed down, Ursula grieved as if for a death in the family. “Eamon de Valera founded that newspaper,” she told Barry over the telephone. “I can't believe it's gone.”

“I thought you were anti–de Valera.”

“I never said that,” she replied indignantly.

 

The peace process was thrown into disarray when British Prime Minister John Major demanded a statement of surrender from the IRA. However Sinn Féin used all its influence to sustain the ceasefire.

In December the head of the International Body on Decommissioning, former U.S. senator George Mitchell, invited submissions from all parties on arms decommissioning. Sinn Féin actively engaged with the IBD, hoping to resolve the impasse in the peace process.

 

In March of 1997 Ted Kennedy called for an immediate and unconditional resumption of the IRA ceasefire. May elections brought the Labour Party back to power in Britain, and in Northern Ireland returned Gerry Adams and his party colleague, Martin McGuinness, as MPs.

The new prime minister, with a strong mandate for change, was an energetic young man called Tony Blair.

Blair appointed Dr. Mo Mowlam as Northern Ireland secretary. One of her immediate priorities was to work towards the restoration of the IRA ceasefire, and to include Sinn Féin in multiparty talks about the future.

She arrived complete with a built-in reputation as a hardhead. Barry remarked to Éamonn MacThomáis, “I like hardheads. It's easier to do business with them than with people who deal in platitudes and warm fuzzy feelings.”

 

In the Republic a carefully selected handful of government representatives attended a brief ceremony in Arbour Hill on the anniversary of the 1916 Rising, which otherwise went unremarked.

Except by republicans.

On April twenty-seventh a Catholic man, Robert Hamill, was kicked and beaten by a loyalist mob in Portadown. Several on-duty members of the RUC were sitting in a police car in plain sight of the attack. They made no effort to intervene. Hamill died of his injuries on May eighth.

 

The signs were hopeful when in June Bertie Ahern of Fianna Fáil replaced the strongly anti-republican John Bruton as
taoiseach
. At least Ahern came from a republican background.

 

Barry Halloran took the obligatory photograph of the new
taoiseach
in his new office, in front of a portrait of Patrick Pearse.

On the third of July Bertie Ahern held his first meeting with Tony Blair. The Northern Ireland situation was very much on the agenda. Both men were determined to progress towards a peaceful solution.

A letter sent to Martin McGuinness from the British government on the ninth of the month stated that Sinn Féin could participate in peace talks without any decommissioning of IRA weapons, provided the Mitchell Principles were followed.

On the twelfth of July two Protestant teenagers were wounded by an IRA sniper when they wandered too close to the demarcation line between Catholic and Protestant communities.

On the fifteenth an eighteen-year-old Catholic girl in County Antrim was shot dead by the LVF while visiting her Protestant boyfriend.

The following day, the text of an Ulster Unionist document proposing full IRA decommissioning was presented to both the British and Irish governments. The DUP, which had not drawn up the paper, was unhappy and threatened to withdraw from further negotiations.

Ignoring this development, a joint statement from John Hume and Gerry Adams welcomed what it called “considerable progress” in the peace process.

 

On the nineteenth the IRA announced a restoration of the 1994 ceasefire.

 

Mo Mowlam said she would monitor republican activity during the next six weeks to determine if Sinn Féin would be admitted to the all-party talks scheduled for September.

Mowlam did not fit any known political mould. There was no doubt that she was highly intelligent, but she was also down-to-earth, straightforward, and possessed an irrepressible sense of humour in spite of the fact that she had recently undergone brain surgery for cancer. Dealing every day with life and death, she retained the ability to take nothing too seriously.

Irish people north and south loved nothing more than a good story. They began collecting Mo Mowlam stories.

On one memorable occasion she opened a meeting with Tony Blair and Ian Paisley by propping her feet on the table, flinging off her wig, and saying to Paisley, “Hi, babe. How's tricks?” For perhaps the only time in his life, Ian Paisley was speechless.

 

That summer Hong Kong was returned from British rule and threw itself a huge party to celebrate freedom from the Empire.

Chris Patten, the former governor of the former Crown colony, returned to Britain to begin drafting proposals for revamping the RUC in Northern Ireland.

 

In July there was huge trouble over the issue of Orange parades during the Marching Season. Drumcree became a byword for organised unionist bigotry while world television cameras watched, revealing the insanity of the Irish once again. Within sight of Drumcree Church marchers with stony faces and bowler hats spewed hatred for their fellow man—as long as he was Catholic.

Barry was not present to photograph the scene. He had taken the children to the farm in Clare. While they were entertaining and being entertained by their grandmother, he gave himself a little holiday by driving over to Lough Derg to fish.

He loved the lake that lay between Clare and Tipperary. It was unpredictable; dangerous. In five minutes it could go from serene tranquillity to thunder and lightning and storm-tossed waves.

If Barbara were a lake she would be Lough Derg.

 

On the twelfth of August Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin and Ken Maginnis of the Ulster Unionist Party participated in a debate on BBC television. Barry made certain that his children watched.

Brian pointed out the good points and the bad points of each man's argument.

“Don't tell me you want to be a politician,” his mother teased.

His eyes flashed. “I don't know just what I'm going to be. But whatever it is, I'll win.”

Two weeks later Mo Mowlam told the
Belfast Telegraph
that she did not necessarily define “consent,” meaning the consent of the people to Irish unification, in a geographic sense.

Assuming that by this she meant if the majority on the island wanted unification it would happen, the members of the UUP in the British Parliament described Dr. Mowlam as “hostile.”

On the following day she told the House of Commons she accepted the IRA ceasefire as genuine, and invited Sinn Féin to participate in all-party peace talks at Stormont.

On the ninth of September Sinn Féin signed the Mitchell Principles and joined the other parties at Stormont. Barry photographed Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and Gerry Kelly on the front steps of the imposing building.

The UUP and other unionist parties withdrew from the talks for the day.

“Decommissioning is going to be the stumbling block, all right,” Éamonn MacThomáis agreed with Barry. “Every time we start to get somewhere one of the unionist parties will pull that rabbit out of the hat again. But I know the Army, there's not a chance in hell they'll give up their arms again, even if they bury them twelve feet deep in the ground. You just can't be defenceless when you live with people you can't trust.”

“It always comes back to trust, doesn't it?” Barry said wearily.

When do you put aside a lack of trust and just get on with it?

 

At the end of August Diana, the former princess of Wales, was killed in an automobile crash in Paris.

 

That autumn Mo Mowlam announced that internment was to be removed from the statute books.

 

In the Republic tax receipts were nine hundred million pounds more than expected. Ireland Inc. was in business.

 

The republican splinter groups were in business too. In spite of the Provo ceasefire the dissidents continued their warfare against northern loyalists and anyone else in the Protestant community who looked like an easy target.

In October the Continuity IRA put a bomb through the letter box of David Trimble's constituency office.

Barry and Éamonn stood on the O'Connell Street Bridge, looking down at the murky waters of the Liffey. “It breaks my heart,” Barry said. “When I was growing up we still had old IRA men who had fought in the War of Independence and carried their ideals in their eyes. They were tough and hard; they'd had to be. But they were men Pearse and Connolly could have been proud of. Now it's all changed. There's a faction that seems to be more interested in perpetuating the Army for its own sake than in accomplishing what the Army was founded to achieve.”