Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  But it never occurred to me, faced with Turkish, English, Dutch and French possibilities, to relinquish or even question my identity as an Irishman – not even when, walking as a teenager in The Hague, a couple of Dutch girls I’d never seen in my life shouted ‘Vuile Turk!’ (Filthy Turk!) at me. I stoutly refused, as a cub scout of 1st The Hague, to utter the pack’s ritual oath of loyalty to the Queen of England. I supported Irish national sports teams, fantasized about an all-Ireland soccer team – imagine McIlroy, McGrath, Whiteside and Brady in the same XI – listened to the Irish records I found at home and, of course, pored over books by Irish writers. Then, in 1980, my father’s work took him to Aughinish Island, Co. Limerick, as project manager in the construction of a huge alumina processing plant. In January 1982, he got me a job there, too, as an unskilled ‘general operative’. It was a political education of a kind. On my first morning at work I joined the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and on my first afternoon I went on strike: some welders had been dismissed by my father for refusing to work in the cold, bright weather, and the shop stewards had called on the men to ‘hit the gate’ in sympathy. So we did. When I got home that evening, I asked my father what I should do. ‘You’ll stay on strike until further notice,’ he said. ‘I’ll not have any scabs in this house. One more thing,’ he said, opening his newspaper as he sat down on the sofa. ‘You’re fired.’ A day or two later, everybody was reinstated and went back to work.

  My Ireland was six months spent in Limerick, a sidekick to Mick O’Sullivan, a mechanic, and Eugene Meaney, an electrician, kind and able men who tolerated the boss’ clueless son and patiently milked him at lunch-time poker. By day I lugged toolboxes up tanks, changed the tyres of cranes, and wandered around dazed by tanks, pipes, cables and the innards of malfunctioning machinery. By night, having travelled home in a pick-up truck full of muddied men who made the sign of the cross each time a church or graveyard was passed, I holed up with my father in the Old Rectory of a village called Askeaton. It was a beautiful Georgian house with stables, a faded grass tennis court in the garden, ancient meat-hooks hanging in the cellars, high walls, and a few acres of tall woods where dark birds roosted. My father rented it from the Church of Ireland. It was one of the imposing Anglo-Irish houses whose occupants had for so long thrown a fine net over all Ireland. It was as far away as you could get in Ireland from the Bogside, and I felt at home there.

  After Limerick, I went to Cambridge University (in narrow preference to Trinity College, Dublin, which my brother and sister later attended) to study law. Even though I had spent barely a month of my life in England, it was a natural move. My far-off affiliation to Ireland continued as before, and when John Hume came to Cambridge to talk about the need to create an inclusive Ireland (an Ireland that could accommodate a mongrel like me), I was there, cheering him on; and when the time came, in the spring of 1985, my final year, to write a dissertation on ethics and the criminal law, I solemnly set myself the task of answering the question, ‘Is the IRA justified in killing people?’ – thereby becoming the latest in the generations of O’Neills and Lynches to ponder the means and ends of Irish freedom.

  As is so often the case with political ideas formed early in one’s life, the conclusions I reached had a lasting influence on me. I concluded, first, that although nationalists in the North might be obliged to obey the laws of Northern Ireland, under no prominent and well-recognized liberal theory of political obligation – theories of social contract and consent (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc.), or rights theories, or justice and equality theories (Rawls, Dworkin, etc.), or theories of utility – were they obligated to. Second, that Northern Ireland was accordingly a morally wrong political entity. Third, it followed that the unionist devotion to the preservation of the status quo was, prima facie, morally wrong and nationalists had good cause to seek to change the status quo. Fourth (on the footing that nationalists were not racists and affirmed the equal right to autonomy of national groups), any change that failed to take account of unionist autonomy – for example, a Dublin-governed united Ireland brought about by force, without unionist consent – would substitute the oppression of one national group for another. Fifth, violence directed at bringing about the unification of Ireland by force rather than by consensus was accordingly morally wrong. Sixth, violence directed merely at disturbing the status quo so as to provoke change short of unification (i.e., change that would reduce the inequality in the autonomy of the two national groups in Northern Ireland) was also wrong, since it could not be demonstrated that non-homicidal methods would be inadequately provocative. This was the point I’d try to make to Brendan; but as things turned out, I was later to have very real doubts it.

  Of course, my analysis diverged from orthodox republican doctrine. Most importantly, it was a tenet not just of republicanism but of nationalism – the non-violent mainstream notion that a united Ireland is desirable and natural end – that the Protestant population did not really form a separate national group; and that, although they perceived themselves to be different from the nationalist Catholic majority (when I wrote my dissertation, only 8 per cent of Protestants identified themselves as ‘Irish’) and strongly asserted the same – on classic grounds: religion, ethnicity (Anglo-Scottish), political history (loyalty to the Crown), language (their national tongue was not Irish) – their self-perception was at bottom the product of false consciousness ‘carefully fostered’, in the words of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence, ‘by an alien government’. This notion might have had some credence in 1916, but in modern times it was so obviously fantastical that, it seemed to me, no rational person could in all honesty subscribe to it – or inhabit the ideological construct it underpinned.

  For a long time I believed that the strength of my analysis was that it was rational, deductive, and non-protagonistic. It didn’t well up from inherited feelings of loss and outrage about the division of Ireland or from a received sense that the armed struggle for freedom was prima facie virtuous or evil. Nor did it bother me that I’d never been to the North, because the convictions of many, if not most, Irish people on the subject of the North crystallized before they had set foot there (Jim O’Neill was a case in point). But in the course of my visits to Ireland, I began to have second thoughts. First of all, I realized that the views I’d fastidiously held for a dozen years were inductive and proceeded, in reality, from a gut feeling that the violence I’d observed was for the worst – a gut feeling that could easily have resulted from my participation in British culture; and second, I wondered if I had taken sufficient account of the fact that the virtues of long-term political violence are rarely immediately apparent. What if I had overlooked something – missed, in my narrow rationalism, some wider truth? After all, why should my gut feelings be any more reliable than those of the republicans I’d met? It was not simply that these republicans were obviously kind and good people: it was, as I saw it, that they were undoubtedly superior to me as moral agents. They were conscientious and possessed of a sense of societal duty that was much stronger than mine. My grandmother and my uncle Brendan, for example, had spoken up and acted in relation to apartheid and to the rights of workers and ethnic minorities. I, meanwhile, had followed the self-serving, morally unvigorous paths of the business lawyer and novelist; I had enacted no change, done no good, made no effort on behalf of others. What it came down to was this: if their ethical intuitions were so accurate in civilian life, who was to say they had not got it right in relation to the question of political violence in Ireland?

  Sitting in the car with Brendan, stewing on our disagreeable exchange, I gradually calmed down. It didn’t require much of an imaginative leap on my part to see that there was something fundamentally enraging about having foreign soldiers in your country, pointing guns at you and interrogating you and making you account for your movements; and, anxious to mend fences with my uncle – and sensing that it was somehow my place to give ground – I said as much to him.

  We drove on to
wards Dublin and checked into a hotel in Rathmines. We ate dinner together, drank a bottle of wine, and played a couple of games of snooker. Towards the end of the evening, Brendan said, ‘Joseph, I didn’t answer your question today. The truth is, I don’t want the unionists to suffer like nationalists have done; I don’t want to force them. What I meant to say was that there is a foreign army in my country, and I think I have the right to take on that army and to seek to repel it. I claim a right to do that. It’s that basic.’ His eyes were wet. ‘When my father was dying, he told me he’d like to be propped up on a car seat with a machine gun in his hands and to charge that way into British soldiers. He wanted to die like that, usefully, killing as many as he could.’

  ‘I blame the Camp for his sickness,’ Grandma said to me when I got back to Cork.

  The trouble started two years before my grandfather’s death. At first, he thought it was an ordinary stomach ailment and he went to see Dr O’Connor, who was retired. He examined Jim, put him on tablets, and told him to see Dr Barker, my grandmother’s physician. Dr Barker referred Jim to the hospital, and there his true condition was diagnosed.

  Jim continued to go to work through his illness, even though the doctors had ordered him to rest. In February 1973, while in lodgings in Tarbert, Co. Limerick he was too unwell to eat the pig’s head and onions served by his landlady. My uncle Terry, who had work to do in Limerick, caught a lift up from Cork and met his father for a drink. Terry took care to prolong his drink with his father until the last bus and train for Cork had gone. ‘How are you getting home?’ Jim asked his son. ‘You’ll have to drive me down,’ Terry said. Then he came out with it: ‘I came to bring you back, Dad. I’ll tell them tomorrow that you can’t work.’ ‘OK, then,’ my grandfather said quietly; which wasn’t like him.

  It wasn’t long before Jim was being treated in hospital for days at a time. My father offered to fly him to a hospital in Switzerland, but Jim stayed on at the South Infirmary, in Cork. He spent the last five weeks of his life there, for a while sharing his private room with his youngest child, Fergus, who also needed medical attention. He fought against his illness to the last. On the morning of the day he died, my father proudly told me, my grandfather summoned the will to shave. He also received a visit from, of all people, a former guard at the Curragh Camp named Dan Daly.

  My grandfather died on a Wednesday. He had never once uttered the name of his illness – cancer of the pancreas – and neither, out of solidarity with her husband, had my grandmother. On Friday, his body was removed from the hospital mortuary, where the family accepted sympathies. The funeral was on the Saturday. After Mass was said at Our Lady of Lourdes, Ballinlough, he was taken in a hearse to St Michael’s Cemetery, Blackrock. His sons shouldered him through green fields that are now lost under a housing estate. My father was not there, though. Coming from Abu Dhabi, where he’d driven a jeep across the desert to catch the first flight back, he was greatly upset to miss the funeral by hours.

  My grandfather’s coffin was swathed in the customary pall of the patriot, the green, white and gold flag of Ireland. It was a sunny day, and people threw crisp shadows. An IRA guard of honour marched in step alongside the coffin; they wore berets, tricolour armbands, jackets and ties. Behind them walked my grandmother in a blue dress and a hat. She led a procession of many hundreds of people. There was a great turn-out for the funeral of James O’Neill.

  Among the mourners was Dr Barker, who was attending a patient’s funeral for the first time. ‘I was very disappointed,’ she said afterwards to my grandmother, ‘to see that nice man was implicated in the IRA.’ The security services, by contrast, knew all about Jim O’Neill’s republican connections. Expecting IRA men to make an appearance, they were present in offensive numbers, taking photographs and hanging from the trees bordering the cemetery. Somebody made a joke about the Special Branch in the branches.

  My grandfather was buried in a plot he had acquired – a double plot. From the grave, the view is of the sky, the water of the estuary of the Lee, and green Cork hills. The headstone carries the statement, IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF JAMES O’NEILL, DUN ARD.… 1ST BATTALION, 1ST CORK BRIGADE. IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY D. SEPT 1973 AGED 63.

  An obituary of my grandfather appeared in a republican publication:

  In the month of September another Veteran Soldier of Oglaigh na-Eireann passed to his Eternal Reward without seeing freedom coming to Ireland for whom he sacrificed so much. He was Jim O’Neill of Briogaid A h-Aoin Corcaigh.

  To his Wife and Family Cumann Briann O’Diolluin tender their Deepest Sympathy in this their Hour of Sorrow. Their loss is Ireland’s loss also because few of her sons have served her better than Jim O’Neill.

  I first met Jim O as he was known to us, in the early Nineteen Thirties when I was a young lad in Fianna Eireann. He was even then a Veteran in Ireland’s Fight for Freedom. When I joined Oglaigh na h-Eireann in 1937 I served with him in No 3 Company Briogaid A h-Aoin Corcaigh. I served in this Company until I left the Cork area, but I was to meet him again in the Hell Hole of Tintown in 1940. Who can ever really understand what he and his Wife and young Family suffered during those years or the years following his Release while he fought to Re-Build their lives.

  In the years that followed he was ever willing to play his part in Re-Building the Republican Movement. When Ireland called her sons to Arms for the present and final fight for Freedom Jim O was one of the first to answer her call. Although now in Failing Health no task was too great for him. He was to the fore in organizing Collections for Northern Aid and An Cumann Cabrac. His car was available at any time it was required. One of his last acts before entering Hospital for the last time was to help Cumann na mBann in Cork to Organize and Run a Bazaar.

  His one regret in his final years was that Age and Ill-Health did not allow him to join in a more active way with the young fighting Volunteers in Occupied Ireland, it was with them that his Heart always lay.

  Unfortunately the time has not yet come when the full story of the part he played in Ireland’s Fight can be written, but please God the day is not far off when it can.

  Go ndeanfaid Dia Trocaire ar Do Ainnaim A Seamus.

  I was moved by this obituary and by the esteem in which my grandfather was held by his comrades, and saddened for him that even they regarded his life as essentially tragic. But I soon realized that the obituary did not really operate as a sorrowful assessment of Jim O’Neill’s life: by casting him in a tragedy, a dramatic mode in which the individual’s catastrophic fate is typically the work of an irresistible and often divine force, my grandfather was being granted a form of absolution. His tragic fate was, moreover, provisional, because his full story could only be told once we, the living, had completed his life’s unfinished business: and I was reminded of Robert Emmet’s patriotic cry from the dock, in 1803, that his epitaph should only be written when Ireland took her place among the nations. Thus suspended in a narrative limbo, my grandfather became a soul whose redemption lay in our hands, a ghost.

  But did the full story of Jim O’Neill involve the killing of Admiral Somerville? I had a clue to go on. In the course of our trip together, Brendan had told me that I should speak to Peig Lynch, the widow of my grandmother’s brother Jack Lynch.

  7

  It is quite natural that we should adopt a defensive and negative attitude towards every new opinion concerning something on which we have already an opinion of our own. For it forces its way as an enemy into the previously closed system of our own convictions, shatters the calm of mind we have attained through this system, demands renewed efforts of us and declares our former efforts to have been in vain.

  – Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

  A few months after my return to London from Israel, I fixed another appointment with Sir Denis Wright to discuss the Gandour file. Wright had no opinion on Gandour, whom he hadn’t known, but he was able to speak about Norman Mayers, his predecessor as consul in Mersin. ‘Mayers was a good chap,’
Wright said, ‘and I admire his guts in the Gandour business. But he was an isolated fellow – a bachelor in his forties, somewhat wet and fussy in his habits – and it may be that loneliness led to his over-friendliness with the Syrians, who were always throwing lavish parties. The Turks became very unhappy about it and in the end Mayers had to be pulled out. I was a vice-consul in Trebizond at the time, and my assignment was to take over from Mayers and clean up the mess.’ When Wright arrived at his new post, he saw immediately that he had to be extremely careful. ‘Mersin was a nest of intrigue and gossip. All sorts of strings were being pulled – by the Turks, by our people, by the Syrians, by others – and one was in the middle of it all, which was somewhat exhausting. I decided from the beginning to keep the Syrians at arm’s length,’ Wright said. ‘I created quite a stir by not turning up at a garden party held by one of them on Empire Day, and as a result my stock with the Turks rose sharply. It helped a lot, I think, that Iona and I spoke some Turkish.’ He glanced out at his large and beautiful and sunlit garden, where his wife was working on the vegetable patch in which she and her husband grew rhubarb, parsley, potatoes, lettuce, beans and gooseberries. ‘Iona,’ he added, ‘couldn’t really bear it in Mersin. She didn’t make any chums, and after a few months she returned to Britain. I think she got fed up with the endless tea parties and bridge parties and the silly chatter of the Syrian women.’

  So the Turks didn’t like the Syrians? I said. I could not get used to this tag.

  ‘They greatly disliked them,’ Wright said. ‘The feeling was probably mutual, particularly after the Varlik Vergisi.’ Seeing that I needed further explanation, Wright continued: ‘The Varlik Vergisi was a wealth tax which came into force in late 1942 or early 1943, and, quite frankly, was used to destroy the minorities. The Turkish authorities assessed the wealth of Jews and Christians in sums that were often many times greater than their actual wealth; and if they reckoned you were dodging payment, you were liable to be sent to break rocks on roads in eastern Turkey. It was a disgraceful episode.’ Wright reached over and pulled out some papers from the pile of documentation that he’d prepared for my visit. ‘Here, I think you’d better have a look at this.’