‘Do you know the Irish language?’ Shamir asked with a smile. ‘It interests me. We had the same phenomenon with Hebrew, and now, as you see, it’s alive.’ He gave me another cordial smile and asked whether I was myself involved in the Republican movement. I shook my head. ‘You know,’ Shamir said, ‘when you are in the underground, the support of the community is most important.’ He gave me a slow twinkling grin, and it seemed for a moment that he was going to wink. ‘A lot of the British police in those days were Irishmen – and not all were very devoted to their service.’ After a slight pause for effect, he continued: ‘We have been very interested by the IRA. When I was in the underground, I read everything I could about the Irish confrontation with Britain, since Britain, at that time, was our common enemy. I read a lot about 1916, I read about de Valera and Collins. My pseudonym in the underground was Michael, you know, after Michael Collins.’ Shamir said, ‘They fought a long time, without result. All the Irish resistance movement was full of tragedies.’
6
Father … was a proud man and a high-principled one, though what his principles were based on was more than I ever discovered.
Frank O’Connor, An Only Child
Once, while horsing around at home in The Hague, my father grabbed my thirteen-year-old brother by the wrists and held him captive. ‘This is an old IRA trick,’ my father gloated; ‘I’ve got you now.’ My brother responded by simply banging his wrists together and bringing about a stinging collision between my father’s hands. My father let go with a painful howl that turned into laughter – at himself, and at his son’s devastating subversion of the mythic organization he’d invoked.
For my father to identify himself with the IRA, even jokingly, was unprecedented, and for an instant a connection – faint but nevertheless a little shocking – arose between him and the sinister body of men responsible for the bombings, kidnappings, robberies and killings which Dutch TV and BBC Radio brought to our attention. Aside from some incidents in Germany in 1978, the violence all took place in Ireland and Britain – that is, until 22 March 1979, when the British ambassador to The Netherlands, Sir Richard Sykes, and his footman were shot dead in front of the ambassador’s residence in The Hague. As in the Somerville shooting, two unknown gunmen ran away and were never caught. Even though Sykes was, at the time of his death, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of my school, the British School in The Netherlands – whose assembly hall was named the Sir Richard Sykes Memorial Hall – his killing quickly faded from my thoughts. Certainly, I didn’t in any way link my father to that event. I had heard my father once or twice call himself a republican, but he obviously used the term in a loose and private sense, because he certainly didn’t support the Provisional IRA or sing rebel songs or make anti-English cracks or go in for emotional recapitulations of Ireland’s sad history. He would sometimes heatedly point out the hypocrisy of British pronouncements on Ireland, but there his visible embroilment in Irish nationalism would end. There was nothing radical or revolutionary or unlawful about him. My father was not a rebel.
Then, nearly twenty years after his friendly scuffle with my brother, I learned that my father had, after all, been in the Irish Republican Army.
The revelation came towards the end of that drive we took together from London to Oxford in 1996, a couple of intimate hours during which my father – who was reflective and open about his day-to-day thoughts and feelings, but not a man prone to reminiscing – disclosed more to me about the early formative events of his life than he had in the previous thirty years. The disclosures began after I asked him whether he knew that his uncle Jack Lynch had been in charge of the bombing campaign in England in 1939. ‘No, I didn’t know,’ he answered, unamused. After a pause, he added, ‘Did you know that I was in the IRA?’ A silence fell in the car. We were south-east of Oxford, in a deeply English landscape of orderly fields and low, cultivated hills. The silence continued as I mentally circled the new information like a stroller who has happened on one of those old mines, buried for decades, that English beaches occasionally regurgitate. Then my father said, ‘Son, I’d like to talk about how I saw it, about my perspective; I’m afraid you might have a romantic view of the whole business. In reality, it was seedy and mediocre. There was no philosophizing, no discussion, no rational identification of objectives and how to achieve them. Plus, there was incompetence. The officer in charge of one meeting arrived half an hour late – and this was the guy in charge! I said to him, “How are we supposed to accomplish anything if we start half an hour late?” It was a shambles, it was amateurish. After about a month or so, I just stopped going to the meetings.’
I asked my father whether my grandfather had pushed him towards the IRA. He shook his head. ‘No. Nobody asked me to join, or even suggested it to me. I joined by myself, when I was seventeen or so.’ ‘What made you do it?’ I asked, looking straight ahead at the traffic. My father hesitated. ‘I was curious, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘Everybody else was involved, and I wanted to find out what it was all about. Also, there was a great upswell of support for Sinn Féin at the time, and I was an idealist, a bit of a dreamer.’ He added, ‘I was never attracted to the violence, though. Maybe I’d seen too much of it growing up.’
We drove on. Not long afterwards, the spires of Oxford appeared in the rainy distance. A few minutes later, we met up with my mother and my sister Elizabeth, and later still we watched my sister receive a postgraduate degree, in law, with others from her college, Somerville.
It was hard to say whether my father’s truest act of rebellion lay in joining the IRA or in quitting it. A story my grandmother told illustrated the depth, and longevity, of his exposure to republicanism. Eileen O’Neill gave birth to my father, her third son, in her bedroom on 26 April 1939. Two nights later, Jim took the baby to see the priest in a borrowed IRA brigade car that was entirely covered in mud and slush: my grandfather had been out that evening in West Cork, leading exercises in snow that fell even as blossoms showed on the apple trees. Father Sheehan was not at the church, so Jim went round to his house. ‘There’s no christening today,’ Father Sheehan said; but after Jim flashed him a wad of money, the priest agreed to perform a baptism. My swaddled infant father was taken from the brigade car to the font and quickly assumed into Christendom – but not, it might be said, before he had first been transported by Irish republicanism and set on a track that would lead, years later, to his presence in a car headed for the North, filled with guns and ammunition and men meaning to use them.
My father’s growth into political consciousness corresponded to his growing awareness of his father’s absence as an IRA internee. After Jim O’Neill returned to Cork in late 1944, when Kevin was five years old, the political clouds thickened still further in the domestic atmosphere – even though Jim, distraught by his experience of ostracism and infighting at the Curragh, did not rejoin the IRA and did not, in the face of his family’s financial crisis and the difficulties of returning to civilian life, have the means or will for activism. But my grandfather’s essential republicanism remained intact, and a couple of years after his release from the Curragh he began to support a party that promised to square the near-circle formed by his aversions for the institutional IRA, de Valera’s government, and British rule in the North. Clann na Poblachta, founded in the summer of 1946, was led by the barrister and IRA veteran (and future Nobel Peace Prize winner) Seán MacBride. Although the Clann recognized the governmental organs of Eire, with the consequence that membership meant expulsion from the IRA, it was dedicated to the unification of Ireland and the downfall of de Valera’s government, and for my grandfather this was enough. In 1948, to great general excitement, Clann na Poblachta had ten men elected to the Dáil and, in one of those bizarre hybrids generated by parliamentary pragmatism, formed a coalition government with the Blueshirt party, Fine Gael. In 1949, the Republic of Ireland came into being. The new State’s constitution laid claim to the whole of Ireland as the national territory, but in many repub
lican eyes the declaration of statehood poured juridical and symbolic cement on the border with Northern Ireland. Jim was confirmed in his bitter distrust of constitutional politics, and by 1950 or so, the link between the IRA and the O’Neill family began to revive.
The IRA, at this time, was still trying to recover from the destructive effect of the internment years. No military action of consequence had been taken for the best part of a decade and the membership was fragmented and demoralized. There was little for a volunteer to do other than to participate in commemorations, sell raffle tickets and political literature, and attend apparently pointless meetings. Then things slowly began to pick up. With the Dublin leadership exercising strict ideological control – the socialist activism that characterized pre-Emergency republicanism was no longer tolerated – the organization slowly regrouped. In June 1954, after the famous raid on Gough Barracks in Armagh, in which 250 rifles, seven Sten guns, nine Bren guns and forty training rifles were stolen from the enemy, the IRA once more caught the public imagination. In around August 1954, my uncles Jim (eighteen) and Brendan (seventeen) applied to join the IRA; in September 1954, they were duly sworn in. The brothers joined Cork No. 1 Brigade. ‘Because of who we were,’ Brendan said, ‘we had no problem getting in.’
Like my father, Jim and Brendan said they joined the IRA of their own accord, without their father’s prompting or knowledge, even. ‘But after we joined,’ Brendan said, ‘Father never discouraged us. He would drive us out to the training camps, where we would have theory and practical classes in warfare: dismantling weapons, bombs, unarmed combat, and so on. The poaching gave us good fieldwork experience. It was a very serious thing to do with your life at that age,’ Brendan said. ‘You were liable to be sent off at any moment.’
This was true. Moreover, the success of the Armagh raid was exceptional. In 1953, three volunteers received eight-year prison sentences after being caught in possession of a cache of weapons stolen from Felsted School in Essex; and in October 1954, a month or so after Jim and Brendan joined the IRA, a failed raid on a British army barracks in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, resulted in the capture of eight young volunteers. They were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Among them was Seán O’Callaghan, whose sister, Rosalie, Brendan would later marry.
The republican cause received a great boost in May 1955, when Sinn Féin, since 1950 effectively the civilian wing of the IRA, polled over 150,000 votes in elections in Northern Ireland and won two seats in the Westminster Parliament. This was followed, in June, by a good showing at local elections in the South. Republican exhilaration spread across Ireland, and Kevin O’Neill briefly joined his two older brothers in the IRA.
As for the boys’ father, he was (in Brendan’s words) one of the most reliable unofficial men the IRA had in Cork, someone who could be trusted to dump arms, transport people, raise funds, and quietly put his experience and contacts at the disposal of the movement. Brendan said that Tadhg Lynch, who had also denounced the leadership and placed himself at the periphery of the movement, was likewise able to do much valuable unofficial work.
In 1956, the IRA Army Council decided that the IRA was strong enough to embark on its first major military initiative since the 1939 English campaign. It was resolved that flying columns would penetrate the Six Counties and engage in a guerrilla war. The objective was to disrupt the occupying power’s centres of administration by cutting all its lines of communication – telephone, rail, road – and thereby force British withdrawal from the border regions of Tyrone, Fermanagh and South Derry. The designated enemy was the British army; the overwhelmingly Protestant Irish members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B-Specials (a civilian militia) were not targets and were only to be shot as a last resort of self-defence.
On Friday 7 December 1956, Jim and his brother Brendan received notification that IRA men were to present themselves immediately at a place in Mayfield, in the north of Cork city, for active service. The call-up came as a surprise, and Brendan had to ask Kevin, who lay sick in bed, to look after a dinner date that weekend. As Brendan and Jim were packing their things, their mother came up the stairs to the bedroom with a tray for Kevin. She said, ‘I know you won’t be back this time.’ Brendan said, ‘We will, Mother, we will, we’ll be back on Sunday night at the latest.’ My grandmother said, ‘I don’t care if you get ten years or twenty, but don’t come back cowards.’
However, Uncle Jim returned from Mayfield within a few hours, in tears: the Army would not allow brothers from the same family, or newly married men, to go up, and five such volunteers were sent home. Brendan, though, was one of around twenty Corkmen to leave on the night of 7 December in a truck filled with straw. They were driven to billets in Co. Meath, where they stayed until Tuesday 11 December. Then they crossed into the Six Counties and met up with columns from Limerick and Dublin. The combined forces numbered fifty or sixty men. They were split up into units of eight or nine under the command of men who’d already been planted in the North a month or two previously. They were to go into action that night.
Back in Cork, Jim and Eileen O’Neill waited for news. My grandfather, who knew nothing about the raid in advance, was very upset that his sons had not confided in him. ‘The worst time was the waiting,’ Grandma said. ‘Oh, that was terrible. Then the news broke on the radio of the first attack, and I felt relieved.’
The news was that, in the early hours of 12 December 1956, IRA units had attacked, with varying degrees of success, targets such as a transmitting station, a radar installation, a courthouse, a Territorial Army building, a B-Specials’ hut, a bridge, and an army barracks. The following day, the IRA issued a proclamation announcing that, ‘Spearheaded by Ireland’s freedom fighters, our people in the Six Counties have carried the fight to the enemy.… Out of this national liberation struggle a new Ireland will emerge, upright and free.’ The famous Border Campaign of the winter of 1956/57 had begun.
That first night, Brendan’s unit was given the job of attacking Lissanelly Barracks, which was to the rear of Omagh army barracks, and stealing arms. Brendan’s task was to take the guard room with a man called Bertie Murphy. In order to penetrate the barracks, a breach had to be blown in its wall, and two men drove off to a quarry at Mountfield, seven miles away, to steal gelignite. ‘But,’ Brendan said, ‘the two fellows never returned; and just as we were getting into position to attack, all hell suddenly broke loose: the attacks had started all over the North and the barracks had gone on the alert.’ Brendan’s unit withdrew into the Sperrin Mountains, near Gortin, Co. Tyrone, and waited for a few days and nights in the trees, frozen cold.
Brendan returned to Cork in February 1957. He and other young veterans of the Border Campaign were sent on an intensive training course and made training officers. They trained two nights a week and every weekend: the campaign in the North was still going on and replacements were needed for the large numbers of volunteers who were being arrested. The Border Campaign had not, as had been hoped, decisively swung public opinion behind the IRA, and the security forces in the Republic were proving to be assiduous in their pursuit of IRA men who came within their jurisdiction. To make matters worse, internment at the Curragh was reintroduced in July 1957 by Éamon de Valera, who’d been voted back into power in the March election. All but one of the IRA leadership was picked up in the sweep – Seán Cronin, the IRA Chief of Staff, avoided capture by holing up at the Dublin house of Tadhg Lynch.
A year after the introduction of internment, the Border Campaign was still dragging on – but not, in the view of uncle Brendan, anywhere near boldly enough. When a plan he’d devised to ambush an enemy patrol at the border near Belleek, Co. Fermanagh was not sanctioned, my uncle’s frustration led him to strike out on his own.
And so, in September 1958, three O’Neill brothers – Brendan, Jim (who had resigned from the IRA in sympathy with Brendan) and Kevin – drove up to Dublin with their uncle Jack Lynch and Brendan’s friend Jim Lane. The boot of the car was filled with weapons retrieved
from dumps in West Cork. The plan was to spend the night in Dublin with Tadhg Lynch and the next day drive on to the Six Counties, where Jim and Brendan O’Neill and Jim Lane were to engage the enemy. Kevin, who according to uncle Jim had been ‘roped’ into going along, was to drive the car back to Cork, even though he barely knew how to drive.
Tadhg was not home when the five men reached Dublin, so they stopped in O’Connell Street and had a meal at a pub called the Green Rooster. At midnight they got back into the car and headed back towards Tadhg’s. Driving through Dublin at that time of night was a hazardous business, since the laws against drinking and driving made an exception in favour of persons deemed to be travellers – i.e., persons returning home from their ‘bona fide’, a pub five miles or more from their home – and consequently the roads after closing-time were full of cars weaving their way homeward across the city. The O’Neills were driving along the Ballymun Road when a van suddenly cut across them. There was a smash. Jim and Brendan went through the windscreen, breaking their noses and, in Jim’s case, losing consciousness. The van driver immediately restarted his engine and drove away from the scene. Then guards appeared, asking questions and nosing around the scene of the accident. The Corkmen had no option but to keep calm and answer the questions asked of them and hope that the boot of the car was not examined. Eventually the guards completed their inquiries and set off after the hit-and-run driver. My father quickly removed the weapons from the boot and stowed them under the hedge of a nearby garden.
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