1999 (47 page)

“If we described a person as gay we meant they were the life of the party. Grass was something to mow and pot was what our mothers cooked in. Coke was what people kept in the coal shed. As for heroin…well, Constance Markievicz was a heroine. Or Maud Gonne.

“Were we deprived? We didn't think so, we thought we were the modern generation. We didn't have most of the things our children think are essential these days.”

Barbara put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “But you could drink the water without putting chemicals in it,” she said. “And the air you breathed was clean.”

 

In January of 1995 John Bruton and Dick Spring of the Labour Party held their first formal meeting with representatives of Sinn Féin. The two sides were wary with one another. Shortly afterwards, a meeting between Sinn Féin and officials of the Northern Ireland Office was cancelled when Sinn Féin learned the room had been electronically bugged.

A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland
was published by the NIO in February, proposing a Northern Assembly consisting of about ninety elected members representing all the political parties.

The unionists reacted with horror. John Major made a conciliatory speech in the House of Commons. Sir Patrick Mayhew subsequently repeated the unionists' demand for IRA decommissioning.

In March the Ulster Unionists announced that they rejected the framework document in its entirety.

Yet progress continued, like grass growing through broken pavement.

The White House announced that Gerry Adams would be allowed to raise funds in the United States. He was also invited to attend President Clinton's St. Patrick's Day reception, which outraged the British prime minister.

 

And the Millennium drew closer.

A bomb outside a government building in the U.S. state of Oklahoma killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested and charged with the atrocity.

Irish poet Séamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Irish pop group Boyzone had a chart topper with “Love Me for a Reason.”

 

Time was telescoping. Barry was increasingly aware of the fact. The many things he had once planned to do with his life had faded into distant dreams. He was able to drive past the house on Mountjoy Square—which now housed two insurance agencies and a charity that wanted to keep its location secret—without feeling any pangs.

From time to time he visited his apartment on the top floor and looked out at the city stretched below him. Wondering what Brian Boru would have made of it all.

One morning he stayed in bed longer than usual, wondering where his energy had gone. When he finally dressed and went down to the kitchen he found Barbara laughing.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“I was just listening to one of those morning chat shows,” she told him. “A feisty little old lady rang in to take the Dublin postmaster to task because the tricolour doesn't fly over the General Post Office on the weekends. She was very exercised about it. She said, ‘If JCPenney right next door can fly the flag on Sunday why can't the post office? Men and women died for the right to fly that flag.' The presenter asked her if she had people in the GPO in 1916, and you know what she said? She said, ‘We
all
had people in the GPO!'” Barbara laughed again.

Barry did not laugh. “She was right, Barbara. Every person enjoying the benefits of living in Ireland today ‘had people in the GPO in 1916.'”

She started to say something; met his eyes; thought better of it.
Sometimes it's easier to let it go,
she told herself,
than fight over every tiny little thing.

 

In July Sinn Féin pulled out of talks with the British government when the subject of decommissioning was brought up, pointing out that it had not been on the table when the IRA called their ceasefire.

A second divorce referendum was put to the Irish public. In spite of dire predictions by the Church that farmers would lose their land and the family as a unit would be destroyed, the referendum narrowly passed.

“Ireland just entered the twentieth century,” Ursula Halloran commented. “A little late, that's all.”

In the autumn David Trimble of the UUP met with President Clinton in Washington to put forward the unionist view.

Back in Ireland another version of what had come to be known as “the way forward” was proposed. Invitations were issued to all parties to participate in intensive talks about the future of the north, with former American senator George Mitchell in the chair.

On the thirtieth of November Bill Clinton became the first serving president of the United States to visit Northern Ireland. Accompanied by his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea, he arrived in Ireland to a rapturous welcome. They spent a day in Northern Ireland before moving on to Dublin, where eighty thousand people jammed into College Green to cheer the man who had taken a hand in the Northern Peace Process.

His obvious interest in and understanding of the situation impressed northern nationalists, but the unionists were dismissive.

As if his recent visit to Washington had never taken place, David Trimble stated, “We are not prepared to negotiate the internal affairs of Northern Ireland with a foreign government.”

 

Although very little appeared to change on the surface, those who kept statistics observed that in the year just past only nine deaths in Northern Ireland had risen directly from the Troubles.

“How can it be 1996 already?” Barbara asked indignantly. She was sitting at her dressing table, staring into the looking glass at a largely imaginary spiderweb of wrinkles. “Look at me,” she said to Barry. “I'm old.”

He looked.

She was not.

“Don't be ridiculous,” he told her. “And what difference does changing the calendar make anyway?”

“It makes a lot of difference to a woman. When she's young a day is a year. When she's old a year is a day.”

“That sounds like something my mother would say.” He expected Barbara to take offence but she did not.

“Your mother's a wise woman, Barry.”

“If she were wiser she would come and live with us instead of insisting on living at the farm. She really is old, you know. We figure she was born around 1910, so…”

“I can count.” Barbara kept studying her reflection. “When I'm that old do you suppose one of our children will want me to live with them?”

“You'll never be old,” said Barry. He knew the lines expected of him by now.

“Yes, but if I
was
.”

He took her in his arms and showed her how young she was.

 

The Mitchell Report was published in January of 1996, specifying six principles of nonviolence for entrance into all-party talks. British prime minister John Major rejected the report. Irish republicans were bitterly disappointed that the British government had failed to live up to its commitments.

The IRA ceasefire came to a violent end on the ninth of February, shortly after the leadership released a statement that said in part, “The cessation created an historic challenge for everyone. Óglaigh na hÉireann rose to the challenge. The British prime minister did not.”

At seven that evening bombs in Canary Wharf, London, destroyed part of the financial district and killed two people.
¹
The very fabric of the city had become an unstable geology where massive buildings might suddenly leap out into the street.

IRA violence was back on television screens in a very big way.

In March Bill Clinton bluntly refused to meet with Gerry Adams, who was in the U.S. on a six-day visa.

 

May saw elections held in Northern Ireland to select representatives to all-party talks. Sinn Féin polled a record vote. The following month, after increasingly hostile demands from the DUP, Sinn Féin was barred from the all-party talks.

“Sometimes the bullies win,” Barry regretfully told his children. “With people like that it's all duck or no dinner.”

 

Gerry Adams announced that Sinn Féin would agree to the Mitchell Principles, but gave no indication of a renewed IRA ceasefire.

 

Veronica Guerin, an investigative journalist for the Sunday
Independent,
was working on a series of articles exposing the leaders behind Ireland's rapidly expanding drug gangs. On a bright June day Guerin was driving home after an appearance in court connected with a traffic offence of her own. When she stopped at a red light on the Naas Road a motorcycle pulled up beside her. Seconds later the crusading journalist was shot dead at point blank range by the cycle's pillion passenger.

 

When Teilifís na Gaeilge, the Republic's first Irish language television channel, began transmission from Galway, Ursula Halloran sent three dozen red roses.

 

An increasingly confident Republic was gathering in its lost children. The immigrants were coming home. In spite of the hysterical denials of the unionists a united Ireland was indisputably the future, if only as a result of demographic change.

Yet both the British and the Irish media continued to complain about terrorists. IRA terrorists, as if there could be no other kind.

In a highly polarised Northern Ireland there was more than enough terror to go around. People were dying again.

 

“Why can't someone stop the terrorists?” Barbara moaned when the latest northern atrocity was splashed across the evening news.

“Stop the terrorists?” Barry shook his head. “You've got it wrong way round. People don't suddenly wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I'll go plant bombs and shoot civilians.' What you call terrorists act out of desperation resulting from injustice and oppression, Barbara. It takes a long time for the rage to boil over, but as long as those causative factors remain the problems will continue. Remove the causative factors, work with sincerity and honesty to develop trust, and you will eliminate terrorism.”

To his surprise he realised she was really listening to him rather than arguing with him.

 

Barry still took the requisite photographs and compiled the stories that interested him. But it was an act of self-preservation to distance himself to some degree from the political arena. He could not keep on breaking his heart over every false hope, every crushing collapse.

Éamonn MacThomáis understood. Since his last time in prison Éamonn had tried to build a new life for himself. He now conducted guided tours of the old Irish Parliament building—Barry Halloran's bank—across from Trinity College.

“You're one of the few people in this country who's actually making a living out of the past,” Barry told him with a touch of envy.

“Someday it will all be valuable. We'll grow up and start caring about who we were and where we came from.”

“You're still an optimist, Éamonn.”

“Perhaps I am,” the other agreed. “But not as much as I used to be.”

 

In her sixties Ursula had thought often and sometimes obsessively about death. In her eighties the subject rarely crossed her mind.

“As soon as I faced the fact there was going to be no reprieve for wonderful special Me, I was able to concentrate on living,” she told Breda Cunningham while the two were in the kitchen, doing the washing up together.

The other woman laughed. “So here you are at my mercy.”

“If you think about it, we are all at one another's mercy,” said Ursula. “What sort of life is it for you, being a paid companion?”

Breda laughed again and wiped her hands on her apron. “Och sure, it's the other way round. You're my companion, Ursula. I'd rather be here with you any day than sitting in some drab little room in Dublin.”

“Barry's trying to get me to move back there, you know.”

“I know. He tells me. But I tell him, ‘As long as the two of us rub along so well together and we're both in the whole of our health, why change?'”

 

The latest Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont, which had been established in 1973 and collapsed and restored more than once in the interim, was in trouble again. In the June elections the balance of power shifted somewhat, with the nationalist parties—Sinn Féin and the SDLP—gaining votes, though not enough to make a major difference. But it was enough to arouse the ire of the DUP. Their foremost representative took to the airways to hurl a number of vague but vicious charges at the nationalists.

Programmers in radio and television did not invite his victims to come in and defend themselves.

 

There were deep divisions in the unionist electorate in general. The only thing they could agree on was that they all hated Sinn Féin—which kept on winning more votes among the plain people of the north.

 

Among the loyalist paramilitaries in the north an on-and-off ceasefire condition had existed for some time. It was off when the IRA was quiescent; it was on again the moment the Army looked about to retaliate.

 

Barry Halloran drove north again in September to photograph David Trimble and Gerry Adams having the first official meeting between a Unionist and a Sinn Féin leader in more than seventy-five years.

Afterwards Barry parked his car on the long avenue leading up to Stormont and waited for a heavy bank of cloud to pass away. He wanted a sunlit photograph of the huge statue of Sir Edward Carson, founder of the Ulster Unionists, which dominated the avenue. Arms outstretched as if he would embrace and control the north for a thousand years.

While Barry waited he noticed a small black figure on one of those arms. He quietly got out of his car and walked closer. The figure resolved itself into a tiny robin, watching with cocked head as he approached.

Barry went back to his car, installed a telephoto lens on one of his cameras, and took a picture of the robin instead.

It made him feel better.

 

That autumn the British government received a fresh set of proposals from Sinn Féin. The party asked that its representatives be allowed immediate admission to all-party talks in the event of a ceasefire.

The words “in the event of a ceasefire” sounded hopeful.

The DUP immediately announced that a ceasefire would not be enough. They now demanded full decommissioning.

 

Barry rarely called in to the Bleeding Horse anymore. The years were taking their inevitable toll. Brendan had quietly died in his sleep, Luke had gone to Manchester to live with his married daughter, and Patsy had Alzheimer's disease and did not recognise himself, much less an old friend.

Occasionally Barry met Éamonn MacThomáis in one of the other republican pubs, or even outside the Bank of Ireland, and they talked about whatever the current situation was. It was always the same and yet it was not, and both men knew it. They were waiting.

Ireland was waiting.

At least once every time they met, Barry asked Éamonn, or Éamonn asked Barry, “Do you think we'll live to see a united Ireland?” And the other man always replied, “We will of course.”

By now neither believed it. The years were taking their toll on them too.
Life is such a lonely battle,
Barry thought,
with the absolute certainty that in the end, you lose. But doesn't that make the battle itself more important? Real heroism lies in taking the blows with head held high, fighting on with all the courage one possesses in a doomed but valiant cause.

Neither man ever said the reunification of Ireland was a doomed but valiant cause. Neither man could afford to believe that.

 

In spite of her lion's heart, Ursula was aware that her body was increasingly frail. As frost blurs the view through a windowpane, the passage of time was beginning to blur the sharp edges of the world around her. Her memories were a scrapbook bulging with clear, unfading snapshots. Compared to their bright reality the present seemed less important.

When she realised this was happening she gave herself a good talking-to.

One of the Clare newspapers sent a features writer to the farm to request an interview with Ursula. He explained, “I'm doing an article on people whose lives have spanned the twentieth century, and I know my readers would be interested in your story.”

“I don't have a story, young man,” she said with asperity. “I have a
life.
”

The next day she ordered a computer and arranged to be connected to the Internet.

Looking back across the span of her life, she was surprised she had not recognised its unifying theme long since. Like links of a chain, one element joined the distant past with the breathtaking present.

Morse code had been responsible for the rescue of Ned Halloran from the
Titanic,
so he subsequently could rescue her from dire poverty and, undoubtedly, a short and miserable existence.

Journalism had educated and defined Henry Mooney, who in turn had given Ursula an education that sustained her throughout life.

An early career in radio had allowed her to go far beyond provincial boundaries. Television had extended her horizons still farther. With the advent of the Internet her world would enlarge beyond all imagining. The twentieth century would be remembered as the Age of Communication.

And Ursula Halloran was truly its child.

Ireland was, in many ways, a totally different country from the one into which she had been born. Even the people were different. Ursula remembered when the so-called hard men were truly hard, scrawny from undernourishment in childhood; wiry and sinewy with the need to fight for existence on a very basic level. “You'd see more meat on a seagull,” was a comment applied to them. Now little rolls of fat marred the waistlines of those who thought of themselves as hard men.

Barry had begun collecting a new photographic archive. He was photographing and interviewing those same hard men, talking about the peace process.

“I fully appreciate how much you want action,” Barry would say to them, “and how little faith you have in the British government. Your deepest desire is for us to go back into battle until Ireland's united again once and for all. But that's not going to happen—at least not through physical force. Don't look at me like that; I'm just being realistic. The time for violence is over, if there ever was an appropriate time for violence. We have no choice now but to go the political route.

“The Sinn Féin leadership won't always be able to say what you want them to say. Given their relationships with the various parties involved, not least the IRA, there are times when they have to be…ah…
muted
in their responses. In politics a man can't always tell the truth, or not the whole truth, even if he wants to. That's just how it is. We have to keep all the balls juggling in the air without dropping any of them. And it's damned hard to do.”

He always finished by saying, “No matter how hard it is, we have to get tomorrow right.”

 

Beside him in the passenger seat, Barbara was laughing. “Where are you taking me, Barry? Why do I have to wear this scarf over my eyes? Is this some sort of game, or what?”

“Just a little farther now, there's something I want you to see and we mustn't spoil the surprise.”
Remember that life is very short, and of all wounds, regret most lacerates the heart.

“Here we are. You can take off the blindfold now.”