Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  The police caught up with the driver of the van, Connolly, and brought charges against him. At the trial, a barman gave evidence that Connolly had been drinking at his establishment for many years and customarily drank a few whiskies and five or six pints in a night; Connolly’s counsel accordingly submitted that his client, with such a pedigree and experience as a drinker, could not have been intoxicated on the night in question, during which his consumption of alcohol had not exceeded his regular quota. The submission was accepted by the judge, and the accused was acquitted of driving whilst drunk and convicted of the less serious charge of dangerous driving. My uncles Jim and Brendan, and great-uncle Jack Lynch, who had broken a wrist, received compensation for the injuries they suffered in the crash, though it was not until 1977 that Brendan discovered that in flying head-first through the windscreen he had fractured his neck in four places.

  Despite their injuries, Brendan and Jim checked themselves out of hospital on the night of the accident. Jim was too hurt to travel on and spent three days recuperating at Tadhg’s place before returning to Cork by train; Kevin also turned back for Cork. Brendan and Jim Lane, meanwhile, continued north in a hired car. But the car turned out to be defective and would only go in first gear, and the two guerrillas were forced to dump their weapons and return home.

  After their exploits became known, the IRA issued a statement disassociating itself from Brendan O’Neill. When my grandfather raised the matter with an IRA man at a republican commemoration, the IRA man, a cigarette dangling from his lip, answered with an insolent air; and the next thing he knew, an open hand had slapped him across the face and knocked his cigarette from his mouth. The hand belonged to my grandmother.

  On Christmas Eve of 1958, only three months after the crash in Dublin, Brendan and Jim Lane set off to the North once more, determined to carry out the Belleek ambush the next day. ‘But it was a white Christmas,’ Brendan said, ‘and the action had to be aborted because the snow cracked underfoot like glass and the target would have been alerted to our approach. We walked the seventeen miles back to Kinlough, hoping for another day. That day never came, and we headed back to Cork.’

  Brendan and Jim Lane did not give up there, though. They returned to the North the following year, and, with their friend Charlie Ronayne, participated unofficially in the IRA’s Border Campaign. All told, Brendan said, he went up three or four times. Aside from a reference to setting fire to a Territorial Army building in Garrison, Brendan was not inclined to detail the actions his unit had taken. A lot of time was spent subsisting, he said, moving from house to house. When the IRA officially abandoned the Border Campaign in January 1962 (the number of fatal casualties of the campaign – eight IRA men; two civilians; two men from the republican splinter group Saor Uladh; six RUC men – said something about its relatively ineffectual nature), Brendan joined another group and continued his underground activities until 1963. He was involved in securing control of arms that others proposed to give away to Welsh nationalists, and, finally, in a fruitless scheme to capture the newly appointed Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O’Neill (no relation).

  My father’s flirtation with the armed struggle against the British ended with the disastrous venture with his brothers, an episode that afterwards took shape in his mind as pure comedy. As for Uncle Jim, although he never re-enlisted after his resignation from the IRA in 1958, he remained a republican, and when the violence in the North began he sympathized with the Provisional IRA. He never became involved with the Provos but supported them in parades, commemorations, and collections for prisoners’ dependants. Then something happened that changed his political outlook. Jim – a gentle man who, after retiring from a long career as a quality controller for Ford, drove a van for disabled people – told me his story when I visited him and his wife, my aunt Kitty, at their house in Cork. My uncle, who began by telling me that Kitty’s uncle, Billy Horgan, was shot dead by the Black and Tans, spoke softly and fluently, at dictation speed.

  ‘In 1984, when I was hospitalized for three days for a minor matter, Jim said, I learned from Kitty that the wife of a neighbour, John Cochrane, was looking for me. John was forty-five and a father of eight; he belonged, I knew, to some republican organization – either the IRA or the INLA. When I came out of hospital on Thursday, Eileen Cochrane (who neither supported nor objected to John’s politics) said John had been missing since Tuesday. She asked whether I could find out if he was away on IRA business. So I tried to help, and was up till 2 a.m. trying to contact people in the movement; but to no avail. The following day, I went to another contact, who put me in touch with another fellow, who put me in touch with the No. 2 of the Cork Brigade. I met the No. 2. I told him we were worried because John Cochrane suffered from epilepsy. He said he’d look into it. “I’ll call you when the Angelus bells stop ringing,” he said. At six o’clock, the phone rang. The voice said, “There’s no match this weekend, and even if there was, the man you’re looking for wouldn’t even be a sub.” I passed this on to Eileen, and then I accompanied her to the Gardai station at Union Quay. We asked whether John Cochrane was being held; they assured me he wasn’t. So we went to the Cork Examiner offices with a photograph of John and took out a missing person’s notice. The next day, at lunchtime, I heard screaming outside the house. It was Eileen, screaming that they’d found a body on the silage heap at Ballincollig; and straightaway we were fairly sure. By this stage, I’d learned that John had been an IRA information officer for two years but that he’d been relieved of his post because of his epilepsy. On Sunday morning, the guards came round to ask whether I’d identify the body at the morgue. John’s father and brother-in-law came with me. They were not allowed into the morgue, where Dr John Horbison, the State pathologist, was still working on the body. I went in alone. There was so much damage to the head that I had to walk out of the mortuary to compose myself. Then I went back in and identified John. He’d been shot through the temple. They had shot him as an informer. I went back to my contacts to throw a few fucks into their faces and tell them what I thought of their organization. They tried to reassure me that they knew what they were doing, but I later found out that it was a fellow called O’Callaghan from the North who was the informant and to cover his tracks he’d fingered John Cochrane. It was a crowd from Belfast that came down to shoot Cochrane. All the while, the OC here continued to insist that Cochrane was the informer.’ Jim paused. His arms were crossed and resting on the table. He said, in the same measured tone he used when reminiscing about his childhood, ‘I heard that on Tuesday John was seen running through a department store, running through coat-racks. They left him on a pile of dung and tyres. And that’s why I think my father’s five years at the Curragh were a waste of time.’

  I wondered a little about my uncle’s disillusionment, because in the context of the war in Ireland the shooting of a man wrongly believed to be an informer was not a novel or especially atrocious occurrence; indeed, since practically no lethal military campaign can limit its fatalities to enemy combatants, the killing of John Cochrane, taken in isolation, could even be said to be of little significance in the cold business of deciding whether or not the war, as a whole, was justified. But for Jim, republicanism was not a cold-hearted, unemotional business. And although he gave up supporting the IRA, he did not give up his dream of a united Ireland – literally. My uncle said to me, in a tone of slight amazement, ‘When I was in my teens, I had a very vivid dream that the Six Counties were united with the Twenty-six, and that we were marching in the North on a dead straight, undulating road, and there were throngs of people lining the road. When I finally went to the North, in 1985, on holiday, I came across a place that was intensely familiar. It came to me: these were the roads I’d dreamt of, and these were the throngs, with bands and banners.’

  ‘Blow him off the road!’ Brendan shouted as a dawdling car in front of us failed to make way. ‘Go on, overtake him now! Go on, Joe!’ But I held back, unsure about the onco
ming traffic and all the while anxious to maintain a prudent distance between our car and the one ahead. ‘Keep up, keep up!’ Brendan cried in disbelief, ‘keep up or somebody’ll slip in!’ He shook his head in despair. ‘Ah, Joe, you’ll never make a getaway driver.’

  We were on a road trip, heading for the north of the island to revisit some of the places where Brendan had been active, as he put it, in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties and finally in 1969. When I finally overtook the car ahead of us, Brendan’s arm suddenly shot out and his hand slammed on the steering wheel to produce a terrific blast of the horn. ‘You’re nothing but a dirty bastard!’ he furiously yelled as we passed the car, his head thrusting out of the window. I started laughing. My uncle, I had discovered, was a comically bad car passenger.

  That this trait in him came as a revelation showed up the limits of our previous acquaintance. I only knew Brendan, the brother with whom my father had maintained the closest and most enduring bonds, in an innocent, avuncular context: as a collector and cracker of terrible corny jokes; as an ex-hurler for Cork (a hard player, not beyond skulduggery); as a runner of marathons (including the New York City marathon); and, especially, as a very useful golfer playing off around a four handicap at the age of sixty and still able to drill a 3-iron a couple of hundreds of yards into the wind blowing through the links of Ballybunion Golf Club, where he was a life member. More recently, I had started to catch sharper views of another, more political life. It turned out that Brendan had been a republican activist from the age of eleven or twelve, when he helped his father campaign for Clann na Poblachta by putting up posters and handing out leaflets. At fourteen, he left school: he found a summer job as a time-clerk on a building site, and when the time came to go back to North Monastery he was determined to stay on. My grandparents, very doubtful about the idea, eventually relented. Brendan’s life came to be dedicated to trade unionism and political action of one kind or another. He went to jail for principled non-payment of service charges imposed by Cork Corporation, and he spent the night before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison stitching a banner of the African National Congress, of which he’d been a member for twenty years. When dawn broke, the banner’s fluttering colours trespassed on the flagpole of Cork County Council. Of course, these stories were irresistible to an establishmentarian and politically sedentary – and politically guilt-ridden – person like me. They revealed my uncle as a driven and adventurous radical who, by his actions, constantly evinced his commitment to the value of political resistance and his distance from the bourgeois conception of life as an economic adventure. So I wasn’t surprised when Brendan said that the old IRA campaigns, and in particular the internment experiences of his father’s generation of IRA men, should be more widely known and written about, or when he suggested that the two of us embark on outing to the North. ‘I’ll show you round, introduce you to a few people,’ he said, ‘and you’ll make of it what you want.’

  Setting up the trip was a tricky affair: when I arrived in Cork, in late May 1997, campaigning in the national elections was in full swing, and Brendan was heavily involved on behalf of Paddy Mulcahy, a teacher contesting the impoverished constituency of North Cork Central as an independent candidate. Mulcahy’s platform – ‘DON’T BE SOLD OUT AGAIN – ELECT A PROVEN FIGHTER FOR THE RIGHTS OF ORDINARY PEOPLE.… If you want to hit back at the corrupt political establishment vote for Paddy Mulcahy, the anti-establishment candidate with the best chance of taking a seat in Cork North Central’ – was set out in a leaflet which also contained an endorsement from Brendan O’Neill:

  Having given a lifetime of service to workers whether employed or unemployed, I am now calling on all my friends and colleagues to come out on election day and give your number one to Paddy Mulcahy. Paddy Mulcahy has always been a great ally and comrade of mine. He went to jail rather than surrender. Put Paddy in the Dáil – he will be a forceful ally to the labour movement and will fight conscientiously for social justice and the rights of the people.

  Brendan was particularly concerned about the welfare of travellers, who, he said, had long been the object of discrimination and prejudice in Ireland, ‘probably one of the most racist countries in the world’. When I met him after he’d paid a canvassing visit to a travellers’ site in North Cork, he was fuming. ‘It’s a disgrace. The conditions they’ve to put up with are a fucking disgrace. I can’t leave it at that. We’ve got to do something about it: keep pushing for their recognition as an ethnic minority, keep at them to organize into committees to enable them to decide what they want.’

  A few days after the election (at which, not unexpectedly, Paddy Mulcahy failed to win a seat), I drove round to Brendan’s house in Blackrock, an affluent neighbourhood in south Cork. The tone of the house – an attractive modernist structure of glass and wood that gave on to a large communal lawn – was an appealing mixture of the zoological and the political. Pets (a cat, a dog, a turtle) milled about, their presence largely due to my animal-loving aunt Rosalie; and, as ever, the exposed brick walls were hung with Brendan’s photographically accurate black and white portraits of some of his heroes: Che Guevara, Mandela, Lenin, James Connolly. Brendan’s attachment to political father-figures extended to Jim O’Neill. ‘My father was a socialist,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised he never joined the Communist Party.’ ‘I’m not surprised at all,’ Rosalie commented sharply. ‘It would have meant excommunication from the Church.’

  It was early morning. We were heading north that day. The first question that arose was whose car to use – mine, with English number-plates, or Brendan’s, with Republic of Ireland plates. From a security viewpoint, driving in English plates – which closely resembled Northern Ireland plates – was probably safer. A few weeks before, two Catholics had respectively been shot and beaten to death, and it was possible that another loyalist campaign of random sectarian killings had started. On the other hand, in the year since the Dockland and Aldwych explosions in February 1996, violence by republican paramilitary groups had increased dramatically. In June 1996, a huge IRA explosion in the centre of Manchester injured over 200 people; a month later, a bomb blew up an Enniskillen hotel; in September, raids of London houses (in the course of which an IRA man was shot dead) uncovered ten tons of explosives; in October, two large bombs exploded inside the British army’s headquarters in Northern Ireland, injuring thirty-one; in November 1996, a 600lb bomb was discovered outside the RUC headquarters in Derry; in the run-up to the British general election in April 1997, motorway and airport traffic in England was disrupted by bomb warnings; and in May, an RUC officer was shot dead as he drank in a Belfast bar. The IRA was not responsible for all of these actions. The Irish National Liberation Army claimed the killing of the RUC man, and the Enniskillen hotel bombing and the attempted bombing of the Derry RUC headquarters was the work of a republican faction – the ‘Real IRA’, it came to style itself – which disapproved of Sinn Féin-IRA’s continuing attempts to reach a settlement that fell short of a definitive commitment to a united Ireland. It was becoming clearer that the Sinn Féin leadership, whose principal figures were the Provisional IRA veterans Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, was located at the flexible end of the spectrum of militaristic republicanism.

  In the end, it was decided to travel in Brendan’s car, not only because it was more roadworthy than mine but because Brendan – although he didn’t say so in such terms – was uncomfortable with the connotations of entering the Six Counties in an English vehicle. His sensitivity to symbolic acts was evident as soon as we set off, when he switched on the radio to a pre-set Irish language station; and later, to pass the time as we drove through the counties of Limerick, Clare, Mayo, and Sligo, we listened to tapes of various artists singing songs in Irish about emigration and drinking and the Great Famine. Brendan was himself full of snatches of lyrics and verse that he uttered from time to time with emotion that contrasted with the dry and precise tone he liked to use in speaking about his unusual life. He was emphatically intell
ectually independent and unafraid to challenge orthodoxy. The 1957 Border Campaign, for example, he coldly described as ‘dumb. The strategy was to create no-go areas, so that the British would sue for peace and settle. We had too much manpower – there must have been a hundred of us up – and we didn’t involve local people. And I always had difficulty with the narrowness of the republican outlook. There was a lack of socialist policy, and the movement often gave the impression that it was only interested in getting the Brits out and handing the North to the employing classes.’

  During the Border Campaign, Brendan said, it was a very difficult for outsiders not to be conspicuous. The IRA men had to move from safe-house to safe-house, where they might stay for days or even weeks, subsisting and only sporadically carrying out discreet reconnaissance work. One of these safe-houses was a farm near Kinlough, a village in that wild, littoral sliver of Co. Leitrim that insinuates itself between the counties of Sligo and Donegal. That was the first place that Brendan was taking me.

  Leitrim is perhaps the poorest county in Ireland, and it is a saying that even the crows in its skies go hungry. Brendan, relying on topographical memories that were decades old, drove the car along a series of long, forgettable lanes flanked by trees and bushes. The soil was more fertile here than near Sligo, where the fields were separated by rocks unearthed from the land, but there was barely a house to be seen, and no traffic. We drove on, the sense of remoteness increasing as the presence of the Dartry Mountains, bleak, flat-topped heights, grew to the south-east. Then we stopped by concrete gate-posts set into a low hedge that served as a boundary of a farm. ‘This is it,’ Brendan said.

  We got out of the car. There was a closed gate; a field of coarse grass with a black cow and a white cow; a pair of gravel wheel-tracks that led crookedly into a copse about a hundred and fifty yards away, where two small stone cottages could be glimpsed; a looming table-mountain rising behind the farm; and, in the dim far distance – it was an overcast, colourless afternoon – another flat-topped mountain, Ben Bulben, on the far side of which was the grave of W.B. Yeats. There was no sign of anyone at the farm. Brendan said that the brothers – if they were still alive – might be out in one of the fields.