1999 (30 page)

“Fancy you remembering that!” He was pleased.

“Seeing you again reminded me, that's all. Some years ago I met a Belfast woman whose maiden name was Baines. She's Winifred Speer now.”

“Aunt Winnie! I can hardly believe it. How ever did you meet her?”

Ursula shrugged. “This is a small country, Lewis; we all know someone who knows someone.”

“Do you see her often? Does she ever talk about me?”

“I only met her once and you weren't mentioned at all.” Looking past him, Ursula flashed her most radiant smile. “There you are, Séamus!” she cried with the warmth one might show to a lover. McCoy felt a flush of heat rise upwards from his collar.

Baines looked from one to the other. Cleared his throat; a small, precise sound. “I see your friend has arrived, Ursula. It was nice meeting you again, but I must be going. Cheerio.” He walked away with a very straight back.

McCoy glared after him. “Do you know that man?”

“I do not know that man.” Ursula reached for the glass in its sodden napkin. “I never did,” she added. “What have you done with my whiskey, Séamus? Drunk it all yourself?”

“Is he…I mean, was he—”

“One of the many things I like about you,” Ursula interrupted, “is that you never ask personal questions.”

McCoy looked down at his shoes. “Aye,” he said.

“Good. So let's go get a refill for this glass, shall we? And whatever you're having yourself.”

Barbara, with her American penchant for hyperbole, would have said, “One of the things I love about you,” and it would have meant nothing. Ursula had said “like,” but McCoy knew she meant it.

His heart lifted.

 

Operation Sitric continued. Wars were being fought and won and lost elsewhere, but Barry Halloran kept his focus on Viking Dublin.

On the twenty-first of the month the Supreme Court granted an injunction to John Paul & Co. Ltd. The court warned that the current illegal occupiers of Wood Quay were incurring criminal responsibility and making themselves liable for damages on a massive scale.

By the time their representatives left the court, the bulldozers and rock-breakers were back at work.

Vested interests, which the Irish people had never been willing to tackle head-on, had triumphed again. The new civic offices that would soon glower over the Liffey became a permanent monument to ugliness; an indictment set in concrete of the failure of the nation's leadership at a crucial moment.

 

One of the victims of the Shankill Butchers who had survived an horrific attack was able to identify the members of the gang. They were arrested and all convicted except for Lenny Murphy, who escaped on a technicality. He swiftly assembled a new gang and resumed his campaign of torture and murder.

 

In the summer of 1979 two Catholic priests—Father Alec Reid, of the Redemptorist order, and Father Desmond Wilson, a priest in Gerry Adams's home parish of West Belfast—were engaged in the thankless task of seeking to bring peace to Northern Ireland. All Catholics were deemed targets by the loyalist death squads, but these two men, acting independently, reached beyond the Catholic community to offer aid and succour to people of every persuasion. They listened, they talked, and most of all they refused to give up hope.

Amongst some—though by no means all—of the Protestant clergy a similar hope was struggling to be born.

When in July it was announced that the new pope planned a visit to Ireland, Ian Paisley responded with his usual vigour. “This visit is not on, full stop. The pope is Antichrist, the man of sin in the Church.”
¹

 

Classiebawn Castle, at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, was the summer retreat of Lord Earl Mountbatten, hero of Burma and the uncle of Prince Philip. Here, with minimum security consisting of two members of the Garda Siochana, Mountbatten could relax with family and friends away from the rigid formality of his life in England. He kept a small yacht in the harbour and was fond of fishing and tending his lobster pots; the pleasant pastimes of an elderly man who had long been out of the wars.

In the 1960s the IRA had considered a hit on Mountbatten while he was at Mullaghmore, but the idea was rejected. Mullaghmore was in the Republic. Any member of the British royal family was considered a legitimate target in Northern Ireland, but it was Army policy to commit no violence south of the border.
²

By 1979 the ongoing violence in the north, with the numbers of casualties continuing to mount, was causing the Provisional leadership to think again. The IRA wanted to strike a major blow against the British; one that would state, once and for all, that this was war. A war the British could end by withdrawing their occupying forces.

The Volunteers of South Armagh were highly skilled in the use of the radio-controlled bomb. Television repair shops provided both the necessary material and excellent cover. Even British Intelligence was forced to admit that the IRA had achieved an exceptional level of skill in this particular area.

The South Armagh Brigade decided to mount an action at Warrenpoint, a Northern Ireland town just across the border from the Republic. They had observed that whenever a bomb exploded in the vicinity of British troops, the soldiers ran to the nearest “hard shelter” to regroup. The plan at Warrenpoint was to set up a smaller bomb beside the road along which a large convoy was due to pass, and plant a larger bomb in concealment at the gatehouse of Narrow Water Castle, one hundred yards away.

Meanwhile another team was assigned to Mullaghmore. Their job was to place a fifty-pound gelignite bomb on board Mountbatten's boat, which was unguarded. The two operations were coordinated to take place at almost the same time; a devastating double attack that in its own way mirrored the double attack on Dublin and Monaghan five years earlier.

On Bank Holiday Monday, the twenty-seventh of August, a unit from South Armagh was manning their detonators just across the river from Warrenpoint. A second team was in place at Mullaghmore Harbour. Mountbatten's boat,
Shadow Five
, was painted in the colours of an admiral's barge. The vivid green hull stood out clearly in the binoculars trained upon it as it slipped its moorings and set out into the bay.

The time was eleven-thirty.

On board the vessel that bright summer morning were the seventy-nine-year-old Lord Mountbatten and six others, including three children—two of them Mountbatten's grandchildren. Watching from the shore was the IRA's “button man” with his finger on the detonator of the hidden bomb.

When the boat was a hundred yards from shore he pressed the trigger.

A massive explosion tore the little yacht and its occupants to pieces.

That same afternoon two IRA men waited across the river from Warrenpoint until a convoy of thirty members of the British parachute regiment came down the carriageway on the opposite shore. They had to pass close to a hay trailer stalled on the road. At that moment the first bomb, which had been hidden in the hay, was detonated. Five hundred pounds of explosive slammed into the rear of the convoy. Of the nine soldiers in the last vehicle, only two survived.

Ammunition in a burning truck started to explode. Thinking they were under fire, the paras ducked behind their vehicles and began to shoot back. Unfortunately they had no idea where the enemy was, and so fired wildly in every direction. Bullets shattered nearby trees and tore their leaves to ribbons. Other drivers on the carriageway fled for their lives. The hail of futile gunfire lasted until an officer roared an order for the paras to seek the nearest hard shelter.

A command post was swiftly set up at the entrance to Narrow Water Castle. Twenty minutes after the first bomb, a much larger one destroyed the gatehouse. Another eleven soldiers died along with their commander. Smoking debris, bloody clothing, burning straw, mutilated human torsos, and various body parts littered the landscape.

The IRA had killed eighteen British soldiers in one blow, its largest single score ever. The massacre of the hated paras and the killing of a member of the royal family in a single day were a turning point in the undeclared war. As was true with Bloody Sunday, nothing would be the same again.

The death of soldiers in what some perceived as a war was understandable. The murder of a defenceless old man who was also an internationally recognised hero was unforgivable.

 

Philpott was in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. Ursula was in the parlour, telling the children a story Ned Halloran had told her when she was little. “Once upon another time entirely, when Ireland was a hot dry land and the sun shone until everyone was sick of sunshine, a young man fell under an enchantment. He was a tall short fat thin man, and every woman loved him because every woman saw in him what she most desired. That, however, was not the enchantment.”

Barbara walked briskly into the room and switched on the television. “It's time for the six o'clock news and the boarders will be here any minute,” she announced, “so we need to clear you out of here.”

“This is our house too!” Brian protested.

Then the news began.

One of the major wire services sent Barry to Sligo to photograph the Mountbatten assassination scene. Classiebawn's mythic outline silhouetted against a bloody sunset. Debris still floating on the water; occasional bits drifting into shore like scattered memories. Then on to Warrenpoint and a verdant meadow beside a river. Another castle; more debris. More remnants of what had been lives.

When his work at Warrenpoint was finished Barry methodically packed up his equipment and stored it in the boot of Apollo.
Holding on to control.
He drove to a republican-owned pub in the lovely nearby town of Rostrevor and bought three bottles of Irish whiskey.
A bomb inside me ticking; ticking.
Apollo carried him up into the vast, windswept expanses of the Mourne Mountains. “Where dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea,” he sang as he drove. He found a place where there was no visible indication that humanity had ever existed, and stopped the car.

The bomb ticking, ticking.

Barry sat for a long time breathing the cool clean air off the sea, and listening to the roar of the silence. Then he threw the car keys into a patch of furze where he would only be able to find them once he was sober again, and started drinking his whiskey.

 

After the assassination of Lord Mountbatten there was a rush of recruitment among loyalists and republicans as well. As one loyalist would say years later, “People from both sides joined the paramilitaries willingly, yet in a way they were sleepwalking too. It was something they felt compelled to do because they simply didn't know what
else
to do.”

 

On the twenty-ninth of September Pope John Paul II arrived in Ireland for a three-day visit. The plane that was bringing him flew right over the Phoenix Park on its way to the airport. Looking down from his window he saw over a million people already gathered in the park, waiting to hear him celebrate Mass.

Barry had offered to take Ursula to the event, but she declined. “I was there for the papal visit in 1932 and that was enough. I have memories I would not like to overwrite with new ones.”

“What memories?” Barry had asked. He did not expect her to tell him.

Ursula never lost her ability to surprise. “Of your father. I fell in love with him that day in the Phoenix Park.”

 

At the end of the Mass the pope made a heartfelt plea for an end to violence.

During the 1970s an internal police reform programme in Britain, code-named “Operation Motorman,” had uncovered appalling levels of corruption in the Metropolitan Force. Public confidence in the police took a nosedive. The entire criminal justice system came under scrutiny as doubts began to be raised about individual convictions. Prominent campaigns around such cases as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six gained momentum.

 

Barry made several trips to England to photograph protests there.

Patrick James Halloran made his appearance that autumn. For once Barry was present at this child's birth; literally present, as Barbara suddenly went into labour one morning while he was still in the house and the baby arrived before anyone could ring for a doctor. Breda officiated at the birth. Ten minutes later she emerged smiling from the bedroom to put Barry's son in his arms.

He stared down in awe at the little face. Red from crying but startlingly adult in its lineaments. “He looks almost like a grown man,” he said to Breda.

She laughed. “Newborns do that sometimes. Folks used to say you could see the grown-up in the infant, but just for the first few hours. By tomorrow you'll have no doubt he's a baby.”

“I want to hold him!” Barbara called from the bedroom.

“In a minute.” Barry continued to study Patrick James. Everything about him was a marvel. A tonsure of dark hair plastered against his skull. Slightly pointed ears, like his father's: faun's ears. Milky blue eyes staring blankly at a world they could not yet focus upon.

Or were they blank? Barry peered more closely. Caught a glimpse of fading cognizance.

Is he still seeing the world he came from? Is that why he appears so old and wise?

 

Brian had his father's big bones and bright colouring. Grace Mary was a coltish girl with her mother's hazel eyes. From the beginning Patrick had a dark Celtic look about him: not wild, perhaps, yet definitely not tame. A creature born to mountains and forests.

“He's a changeling,” was Ursula's comment.

Barbara took umbrage. “What an awful thing to say about a baby! He's mine, mine and Barry's, and nobody else's. Besides, I didn't know you were superstitious.”

“
Super
-stitious? I'm not even average ‘stitious.' I only believe in what my senses tell me. My
six
senses,” Ursula added.

Christening, First Holy Communion, Confirmation—each child in turn would undergo the prescribed rituals. Ursula approved. Long ago she had ceased believing in the institution of the Church but she had never denied it to others. Barry had been raised a good Catholic; a bulwark against the vicissitudes of life, should he choose to employ it.

With three small children in the house Barbara's hours were filled to the brim. Her hours were filled but not the essential Barbara, the woman inside who was composed of dreams and ambitions. Even when she was physically exhausted part of her mind continued to race like a squirrel caught in a cage, frantically seeking a way out.

There must be something else,
she told herself again and again.

There was no one to whom she could express her feelings; certainly not Barry, nor any other man. Her only real female friend was Alice Cassidy, whom she had known before she married. Since then she had focussed on Barry and the house—
this awful old house
—and then the children, while life went on without her. It was different for Alice, who had worked for years in Switzer's Department Store in O'Connell Street and expected to be promoted to buyer someday.
She'll have a real career,
Barbara thought enviously.
Travel the world buying clothes and going to fashion shows, while I'm stuck here.

 

Changes were in the air. In December Charles J. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as
taoiseach.

 

The seventies had been a decade of tension, terror, and transformation. With a new
taoiseach
in charge, on New Year's Eve the citizens of the Republic looked hopefully towards a better future.

During the first month of 1980 Charles Haughey appeared on television to inform the Irish people that as a community they were living way beyond their means. This came as a shock to the many who were just barely getting by. Haughey proposed to take a firm hold on the fiscal reins by introducing stringent economic measures. The programme he laid out was punitive but made sense; the first solid economic sense the electorate had heard in years. Even Fine Gael, the party now in opposition, put the national interest ahead of party politics and announced its support. The Church also commended the plan.

Obedient as ever, the Irish people set out to tighten their belts still more. If it was what their priests wanted it was what they would do.

Roman Catholicism still was intrinsic to the Irish in the early eighties. After being central to their society and culture for almost two millennia it was embedded in their genes. Elsewhere organised religion was beginning to lose adherents, but not in the Republic of Ireland.

On the seventeenth of February an amateur archaeologist using a metal detector in County Tipperary found the eighth-century Derrynaflan Chalice with a hoard of other gold and bejewelled ecclesiastical objects. The medieval craftsmanship was of a very high degree, as was the religious devotion that had inspired it.

When the story hit the newspapers Barry immediately put in a request to be allowed to photograph the hoard before any restoration was attempted. It soon became obvious, however, that a protracted battle over possession of the rare objects was under way. The State claimed them as part of the national heritage. The landowners claimed them as private property. The owner of the metal detector claimed them as treasure trove.

 

Because 1980 was an Olympic year and Ursula was keenly interested in the equestrian events, Barry bought a television set.

“You did that for your mother but you never would for me,” Barbara complained to him.

“I would have, if you had not kept on and on about it.”

“How can I know that now?” she asked reasonably.

 

U.S president Jimmy Carter announced a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Britain and Ireland refused to join the boycott.

 

Barry photographed the small but hopeful group of Irish competitors. In spite of having such great riders as the brilliant Eddie Macken, the nation's show jumping and three-day event teams would not be going to Moscow. Bord na gCapall, the Irish Horse Council, had suffered a huge budget cut and could not fund them.

“I could have saved the money I spent on the telly,” Barry lamented.

 

One afternoon Barbara left Breda and Philpott in charge of the children long enough to have a quick lunch with Alice Cassidy. The two women ate in the café of the department store where Alice worked. The sandwiches were fresh, the tea was hot. Shoppers—mostly mothers with small children—sought a brief respite from trying to stretch too little money over too many necessary purchases, while their youngsters played at their feet and overturned their shopping bags.

Alice eyed the toddlers wistfully. “Aren't they dotes?”

“You might not think so if you spent all day every day with them.”

“Oh, I would think so, Barbara, I'd be in absolute heaven. I do wish Dennis would push for a pay rise. Sub-editors at
The Irish Press
don't make enough to support a family. If only he had more ambition I could give up my job and have a baby.”

“Ambition isn't everything in a man,” Barbara assured her. “Look at Barry. At last he's making money from his photography but he's never home anymore, and then when he is we never go out together, no matter how many times I ask him. Sometimes I feel like I'll scream if I…I don't know. I just don't know.”

“God love you,” Alice said sympathetically as she spooned more sugar into her tea. She was genuinely fond of her friend, though Barbara had married the man she used to dream of marrying. Barbara was beautiful and talented and exotic, all the things Alice Cassidy longed to be. Barbara was a blazing sun while she was a pale moon, but at least in proximity to the other woman she could shed a little reflected light.

Besides, Barbara could be fun. She had a wicked sense of humour and loved a laugh. What a pity that with all her assets, she did not have the companionship of her husband; the one gift Alice took for granted.

After a few moments she said brightly, “Listen here to me, Barbara. Dennis and I go dancing at least once a week. I'll have him ring Barry and invite the pair of you to meet us at the Stardust one evening. You have built-in child-minders at home. The Stardust's the most popular nightclub on the northside and they always have great music. You know how lads are; Barry won't refuse if the invitation comes from Dennis. The pair of them can natter away about journalism while you and I find some fellas to dance with.”

The two women conspired by telephone until the timing was right. Barry came in one Thursday afternoon and remarked that he did not have another assignment until Monday. “I'll be taking pictures for myself this weekend,” he told his wife.

Barbara ran to the telephone.

When it rang an exact fifteen minutes later she called out in her sweetest voice, “Will you answer that, Barry? I'm up to my elbows here and Philpott's gone out to the shops.”

 

The Stardust Nightclub was in the working-class neighbourhood of Artane. The locale was immaterial; as soon as Barbara heard the music she was in her element. Barry's reluctance to dance was no handicap. Barbara appropriated Dennis just long enough to demonstrate her skills on the dance floor, and after that she never lacked for partners.

As they were driving home in the small hours of the morning Barbara began humming to herself.

Barry smiled. “You really enjoyed that, didn't you?”

“It was wonderful.”

“Then would you do something for me?”

“What?”

“If you're in a mood to hum, how about singing?”

“What would you like to hear?”

“Something beautiful,” said Barry.

 

On the fifth of May a crack SAS
^*
team stormed the Iranian Embassy in London, ending a six-day siege by terrorists demanding the release of political prisoners in Iran. Nineteen surviving hostages were freed. Four of the five gunmen who had taken over the building were killed.

 

Barbara persuaded Barry to take her back to the Stardust Nightclub several times that summer. He really did not want to go; it seemed a frivolous waste of time and the music was too loud. But it was a small price to pay to keep his wife happy.

“Anything for a peaceful life,” he remarked to Philpott.

The other observed, “A lot of married men say that. Perhaps it's why I've never married.”

Barry bit the inside of his lip. He thought he knew why Philpott had never married. The little man genuinely did not like women. For a long time Barry had assumed he was sexually attracted to men, yet he never gave any evidence of it. He appeared to be one of those rare asexual beings whose life was composed of other elements. In an earlier era Philpott might have been an ascetic living in a beehive hut on the Blasket Islands. In the twentieth century he cooked like a professional chef and collected foreign coins.

Barry envied his apparent inner peace.

Most of the crowd who frequented the Stardust were younger than Barbara but she did not care. Their youthful energy was a tonic shot straight into her veins. She would dance with anybody and dance better than anybody. If Barry was watching she danced provocatively to make him jealous.

Eventually they quarrelled about it, of course. But any subject would do. When Barbara bought an abstract painting and hung it on the wall above Lord Nelson's stone nose, Barry asked what the picture was supposed to represent.

“It doesn't ‘represent' anything, it's modern art. You wouldn't understand,” she added loftily.

“Jack Yeats once said that painting was tactics, not strategy.”

“That doesn't make any sense, Barry. Who was Jack Yeats anyway?”

“Only one of the greatest Irish artists, and William Butler Yeats's brother.” Barry, who was beginning to lose his temper, could not resist adding, “Don't you know anything?”

“I don't have to when I'm married to a man who knows everything!” she flared.

 

Alone in his darkroom after a row with Barbara—yet another row with Barbara—Barry cast his memory back in search of a time when he had neither a simmering anger nor a clenched gut. At first he found nothing to give him comfort. Only years of conflict and struggle. The Struggle. But perhaps earlier…the years unrolled like cinema film run backward…

…to his childhood in Clare.

Ursula when he was small and she was tall. Granda and Auntie Eileen and the Ryan brothers. The fragrance of freshly dug loam in the kitchen garden; the hens clucking about Eileen's feet as she scattered corn from a metal pan; his own small self toddling home across the fields after a day's adventures and finding his mother at the door waiting for him, trying to pretend she had not been anxious about him. His own small self tucked up in his bed at night, snug under quilts frayed by generations of use, listening to the house go to sleep around him. Safe and warm. Eager for tomorrow, when it would all start over again.

Why did I not realise that what I had was as good as it ever would be? But children never do. Perhaps it's human nature to want to escape from Eden.

 

The slaughter went on in the north. Catholics and Protestants, civilians and soldiers, students and pensioners. Elsie Clare, a fifty-six-year-old shop worker, died of a heart attack after learning that a close friend of hers had been shot. Her friend recovered.