1999 (11 page)

For the first time since agreeing to marry him she was throwing down a challenge.

Barry recognised it for what it was.
Oh no, you don't, my girl.
“I do want children,” he said quietly. Firmly. “I'm the fatherly type.” He began pulling names out of the air. “We'll call them Brian, Patrick, and…Grace.”

His new wife folded her arms across her chest. “We most certainly will not!”

They would spend their honeymoon in the seaside village of Lahinch, in the west of Clare. “You're going to love it,” Barry promised Barbara. “The county was always musical; everyone was expected to be able to sing or at least lilt, or maybe play a squeeze box. But trad is making a big comeback now and…”

“Trad?”

“Traditional music.”

“Like ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling'?”

“That's not traditional,” Barry told her. “It's not even Irish, it's a Tin Pan Alley tune.”

She replied frostily, “I defer to your superior musical knowledge, Mr. Halloran.”

Best avoid this subject for a while,
Barry warned himself.

They arrived long after dark, as he had planned. The only hotel was best seen in a dim light; it was shabby with the accumulation of too much history. Yet the old building had a certain glamour. It possessed a fine staircase from the Victorian era, and a faint, characteristic fragrance of vanilla.

Time stood still in Lahinch. The perfect place for a honeymoon.

On their wedding night Barry paused at the foot of the stairs. Reading his intention in his eyes, Barbara said, “I'm a big girl, you can't possibly carry me up those.”

He could and did. To the top of the stairs, to the end of the hall, into their room, and across to the bed. Their lovemaking was more passionate than ever, fuelled by the hidden, simmering rage Barry could control but not expunge.

Barbara attributed his intensity to her erotic power.

She slept late the next morning, and every morning thereafter. Room service was an unheard-of luxury, so Barry paid the owner extra to have a breakfast tray carried up to her. She did not come downstairs until noon at the earliest.

Barry spent his mornings wandering around Lahinch and along the seacoast. Alone with his thoughts. To his regret, they did not centre on the woman waiting for him in the hotel.

When he committed to the marriage he had resolved to give Barbara as much of himself as he could. For years he had cultivated a certain remoteness until it became an essential part of his character, but he knew it was an acquired characteristic. For Barbara's sake he must try to find his way back to the warm, open boy he once had been. For their honeymoon at least he would keep the world at arm's length.

Yet like weeds growing through pavement, the political situation was pushing through to poison the atmosphere. The desk clerk in the hotel was talking about it. The owner of the newsagency was talking about it. Even the fishermen on the pier were talking about it.

In Clare, the Banner County, which had a long history of republicanism, everyone was talking about the resurrection of the IRA.

I can trust Séamus to stay in Harold's Cross to keep things ticking over until we get home. Then I'll have to convince him he's absolutely essential to the ongoing operation of the boardinghouse.

But how the hell am I going to keep
me
out of it?

The turbulent Atlantic with its constantly changing moods made a perfect backdrop for Barbara. Barry took countless photographs of her on the beach. Watching the long rollers come sweeping in, or silhouetted against a flamboyant sunset.

“It's like being at the end of the world,” she said.

“Over here we say the next parish is Boston,” he replied.

Lahinch was far off the tourist trail. Most visitors were Irish families who rented battered caravans parked in the salty grass at the edge of the beach, and joined a transient community of swarming children and barking dogs and harassed parents who fled to the comfort of the nearest pub. They had no money for expensive souvenirs, so the village had no gift shop.

On the last day of their honeymoon Barry presented his wife with a glossy, trumpet-shaped seashell, a beautiful exotic washed up from some faraway land.
Like Barbara herself,
he thought.

“Where did you buy this?”

“I didn't buy it. The sea gave it to me.”

Her face fell. “Oh.” Wrapping the shell in soiled clothes, she tossed it into the bottom of her suitcase.

When they returned to the yellow brick house she put the shell on a shelf in the top of her wardrobe. She sometimes took it out and held it to her cheek. But never when Barry was in the room.

On the tenth of May a referendum on joining the European Economic Community was held in the Republic. 1,041,890 voted in favour, 211,891 opposed.

That night in the Bleeding Horse Brendan told the Usual Suspects, “It's something to cheer about, I tell you. Being part of the European Community will make such terms as unionism and republicanism redundant, because both parts of the island eventually will be subsumed into a United States of Europe. People living across the water already refer to themselves as English or Scots or Welsh. The only people who loudly proclaim British identity at every opportunity are the unionists in Northern Ireland. I feel confident that a united Europe will make no allowances for their petty provincialism.”

McCoy squinted at him through a pall of cigarette smoke. “You ever actually been in the north?”

“I have been in the north. I once gave a series of lectures at Queen's University.”

“Lectures. In university.” McCoy curled his lip. “You'd want to take a walk down the Falls Road. Or through the Shankill, for that matter. The problem's not in lecture halls, Professor, it's in heads and hearts on the street.”

 

Life in the yellow brick house resumed its familiar rhythm. A new bedroom was available for boarders because Barry and Barbara were sharing one. “When I go north you'll have two vacancies,” McCoy said.

Barry was ready for him. “You can't run out on me yet, Séamus. I was up in the attic yesterday and there's a lot of water seeping down from the roof. We'll need to do some serious repairs straightaway. Can I count on you?”

McCoy reluctantly agreed. Although Barry pretended to divide the work equally, he made sure to do the strenuous part himself. “You could have got Barbara to hand roofing nails to you,” McCoy grumbled.

“My Barbara? You must be joking.”

When the roof was done Barry announced that the long-abandoned mews at the rear of the property must be rescued before it finished falling down. “Barbara's had a brilliant idea. We can turn it into two, maybe even three, self-contained flats. I'll draw up the plans myself.”

McCoy was less than enthusiastic. “Doesn't picture-taking keep you busy enough?”

“We need more income. My mother says we're going to have three children.”

McCoy's bark of laughter became a racking cough. When he recovered he said, “By that time our boys will have run the Brits out of the north for good.”

“You sound optimistic.”

“I am optimistic. But it'll happen a lot faster if you're with us.”

Barry thrust his hands deep into his pockets so McCoy could not see his tightly balled fists. Self-control took all the strength he possessed. Yet he kept his voice gentle. “I have too many commitments here now.”

McCoy squinted up at him. “Is there something you're not telling me,
avic
?”

“I'm telling you the truth of the situation. That old mews will be a valuable asset, but rebuilding and fitting it out will take months. It needs wiring, plumbing, everything. My photographic assignments have to be given priority, so I can't do the work myself. I can hire the labour but without someone trustworthy to supervise them we could be robbed blind. See why I need you?”

“I see you've become a bloody capitalist,” McCoy growled, “willing to exploit the working classes. But if you're going to be pigheaded about it, I'll hang around and help. Only for a wee while, mind.”

McCoy was well aware of his cough; the occasional pain in his chest; the occasional taste of blood in his mouth.
It's an old scar that keeps tearing open,
he told himself.
If I take it easy for a few more weeks it'll heal on its own. Maybe by then I can persuade him to go with me.

 

Together with the Special Powers Act, which allowed internment of suspects without trial for an open-ended period, Bloody Sunday fed a burgeoning radicalism among the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Centuries of enforced servility in order to survive had made them timid; they had forgotten how to fight back.

They were relearning.

In the Northern Ireland Office a policy document entitled “The Future of Northern Ireland” flatly stated that the most salient feature of the Northern Ireland Parliament for more than half a century had been its virtually complete concentration in the hands of a single political party, the Ulster Unionists.
¹
With the dissolution of its parliament the control of what was often called “the province” had reverted to London. Unionists were alarmed. As the IRA gathered adherents, they felt themselves under siege on not one but two fronts.

In drawing up the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, under which a separate parliament had been established for those northeastern counties where Protestants were in the majority, the British government had stated its preference for an Irish union. Subsequently partition had been established with a democratic proviso: it was to remain in effect as long as the majority agreed. Implicit in that phrase was the understanding that if and when the majority in the north wished to reunite the island, they would be allowed to do so.

Unionist politicians were terrified that their hegemony in the Six Counties would not coincide with the long-term plans of London. Publicly they declared their allegiance to the Crown loud and long; privately they feared the British government would sell them down the river.

Throughout the summer the Army continued to expand. True to McCoy's prediction, many recruits did not come from a republican background. Some entered the IRA through left-wing politics; others simply gravitated towards militarism. Some of the latter, infuriated by the failure of the civil rights movement, had been operating freelance. Then one day a car would draw up and a smiling man lean out the window. “You boys really want to do something? Come join us.”

As always there were a few men and women who were in love with revolution for its own sake. Had the problems in the north not existed they would have sought and found other revolutions elsewhere in the world, and given them the same fanatic devotion.

The secretary of state for Northern Ireland insisted that the Ulster Defence Association was not as vicious as the Provos. However, the shooting of Catholic civilians by loyalists was taking place at an average of four a week.

 

One evening Barbara was aglow with excitement. While shopping in Dublin that afternoon she had wandered into a pub in Baggot Street that featured Irish music, the traditional sounds of pipe and bodhran. “It's absolutely brilliant!” she enthused to Barry. “I'm thrilled I've discovered it.”

Obviously she had forgotten what he told her about traditional music on their honeymoon. It was typical of Barbara, her husband observed to himself, that nothing existed unless she was personally acquainted with it.

He told her, “I've known about Irish music all my life. In the late forties Ursula and I used to listen to Séamus Ennis on Radio Éireann, when he was touring the country collecting the old songs for the Irish Folklore Society. Séamus Ennis was the greatest piper Ireland's ever produced, in my opinion. He did some of the first mobile radio broadcasts ever heard in this country, and educated us all. In those days the music was still vibrant and alive in many parts of the island.”

“Oh, but it's vibrant and alive now!” Barbara cried. “I can't imagine why you ever stopped listening to it.”

“I didn't stop, as you put it. Let's just say my interest was superseded by a passion for classical.”

Barbara would not give him an inch. “You know as much about classical music as a pig knows about a holiday.”

For a while she flung herself headlong into Irish music with the rabid devotion of the new convert. She bought stacks of records; she tuned the radio to any station that would play her new passion. At first she could not tell the good from the mediocre, or the original from the merely derivative. By the time she could, she was losing interest and looking for something else.

 

On the twenty-first of July the IRA set off twenty-two bombs in Belfast. Eleven people were killed; 130 injured. Within hours newspaper headlines proclaimed Bloody Friday. Ten days later three car bombs exploded in County Londonderry and six more died.

The Irish, who had been the victims of attack but never attacked another country, had become the aggressors. This was diametrically opposed to the British sense of order.

In a hastily arranged cabinet meeting the British government considered several radical proposals for handling the situation in Northern Ireland. Among these was the possibility of realigning the border to isolate Catholics from Protestants altogether. Almost half a million people would have to be relocated. Catholics would be pushed into southern and western enclaves, leaving Belfast a totally Protestant city in a tiny Protestant state.
²

The idea was abandoned for fear it would cause another international outcry and bring up Bloody Sunday again. Instead the British government began spending millions in a vain attempt to counter the “cowshed technology” of the IRA.

The rejuvenated Army was delighted. “Now that we're in the war,” newcomers boasted, “Ireland will be put back together in short order.” Old hands warned, “That's how people felt after partition. Everyone said it couldn't last, an island as small as Ireland couldn't be divided, it wasn't economically viable. But it's still divided.”

“And costing Britain a fortune,” the young ones countered. “They'll be glad to be rid of it. All we have to do is put on sufficient pressure.”

 

In March of 1973 the U.S. withdrew its last ground troops from Vietnam, but pledged to continue bombing and napalm attacks. The world gasped at the photo of a badly burned naked girl running down a road. The child's small face, deep in shock, looked strangely remote.

 

Mary McGee of Skerries, County Dublin, had four children and suffered from high blood pressure as well as having had a stroke. Her doctor strongly advised her against having any more children. Contraceptives were taboo in the Republic, forbidden by both Church and State, so Mrs. McGee sent to England for them. Upon its arrival in Ireland the package was seized by the postal authorities and its contents destroyed.
³

 

On the seventeenth of August
An Phoblacht
moved from its offices at 2A Lower Kevin St. to Kevin Barry House, 44 Parnell Square, and Éamonn MacThomáis took over as editor from Coleman Moynihan. When Barry called in looking for an assignment, Éamonn MacThomáis enlisted his help to transport the last load of books and files. “How's married life treating you?” he asked as they loaded boxes into Barry's car.

“Married life's fine,” Barry said automatically.

“And Séamus? How's he doing?”

“Not so good. He hasn't collapsed, which is what I halfway expected by now. Without having a doctor look at him I don't know what his situation is. The mews conversion should be finished by the end of autumn, and then I don't know how I'll keep him here.”

“He's still talking about going back on active duty, then?”

“Every day,” Barry said glumly.
I wish to God he wouldn't. Always bringing it up, reminding me, prodding me, making it so damn hard.

“Frankly,” said MacThomáis, “I thought you'd have gone by now yourself.”

“I'm up to me oxters in work here,” Barry replied. “The photography's really taken off.”

It had, but that was not his real reason.

MacThomáis soon began making major changes in
An Phoblacht.
A passionate, outspoken man, he had no hesitation about using his editorial powers to condemn British policy in Northern Ireland. He referred to the infamous 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India as an example of the savage reprisals the British used for keeping “the natives” in line.

He also reported the words of John Taylor of the Ulster Unionist Party who stated, “We should make it clear that force means death and whoever gets in our way, whether republicans or others, there will be killings.”
⁴

“I don't know why we have to live in Harold's Cross,” Barbara pouted one evening as she and Barry were getting ready for bed. “No one who's anyone lives here.”

Barry said, “I like to think I'm someone.”

“If you were we'd live in a better neighbourhood.”

Barry recognised the start of one of her campaigns. “If we had a television…” spoken like a child pleading for sweets meant “If I don't get a television immediately I will make every single day a misery.”

Barry was proud of having made a success of the boardinghouse and he liked living in Harold's Cross.

He intensely disliked being pressured.

Barbara bought an assortment of British magazines portraying luxurious homes and left them in prominent places around the house. She also began reading advertisements of property for sale aloud.