by Fergal Keane
I read them now and shiver. After nearly three decades reporting conflict I recognise in the words of Pearse a man who spoke of the glory of war only because he had not yet known war: ‘We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people,’ he wrote, ‘but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.’7
In Ireland they were still shooting the ‘wrong’ people a hundred years after Pearse’s death. The dissident Republican gunmen who swore fealty to his dream, and the criminal gangs who killed with weapons bought from retired revolutionaries, were at it still.
The following year, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, my father played the lead role in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, a melodrama set during the Fenian struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. Early in the play one of the characters speaks of the dispossession of her people by the English and swears vengeance: ‘When these lands were torn from Owen Roe O’Neal in the old times he laid his curse on the spoilers … the land seemed to swallow them up one by one.’8 Eamonn played a roguish poacher who outwits the devilish oppressors. During the play he was shot and seemed to be dead. I had been warned that it would happen but the impact of the gunfire, the sight of him falling, apparently dead, was still traumatic. Afterwards I found him alive backstage. My first experience of the power of the gun ended in smiles and embraces.
I was sent to Scoil Bhríde, an Irish-speaking school in the city which had been founded by Louise Gavan Duffy, a suffragist and veteran of the 1916 Rising, and built on land where Patrick Pearse first established a school in 1908. Michael Collins reputedly hid there during the guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland. We children read aloud the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic and memorised the names of the fallen leaders. ‘We stood twice as tall,’ Bean Uí Cléirigh, my old teacher, told me years later. ‘We felt we could stand with any nation on earth.’9 All I had to do was breathe the air of the place to feel pride in the glorious dead.
I learned that heroism in battle came from a time before the wars with the English. My father read to me the legend of Cù Chulainn, our greatest hero, who loomed out of the mythic past dripping in the gore of his enemies. Pitiless and self-distorting violence runs through the narratives:
The first warp-spasm seized Cú Chulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front … The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.10
Cù Chulainn met his end strapped to a stone, sword in hand, facing the corpses of his enemies piled in walls around him, a raven perched on his shoulder as he faced his last reckoning with the enemies of Ulster. He died gloriously, of course.
My father was of a generation schooled in classical literature. He could read in ancient Greek, in which he came first in Ireland in the Leaving Certificate exams, and as a boy heard his father read Homer’s Iliad aloud, until he was old enough to read it for himself. In the previous century, Irish peasant children had listened to the stories of Achilles and Ulysses from roadside teachers. A German travel writer visiting north Kerry in 1842 discerned a more dutiful reason for the prevalence of Latin speakers among local shepherds, recording that it was ‘generally acquired in reference to the church … it has not been purely for the sake of the aesthetic enjoyment to derived from it or simply for the cultivation of their minds’.11 But such rich cultural reference did influence minds, and it took no vast leap of the imagination to see in our own Cù Chulainn a hero to compete with Achilles.
For Sunday outings my parents would sometimes take us to Tara, seat of the ancient kings, or to nearby Newgrange, where each December the winter solstice illuminated the tombs of our ancient Irish ancestors. I did not need heroes from American films or English comic books. I was a suggestible child, borne along by my father’s passion, my teachers’ certainty and the vividness of our native legends. History and mythology, one blending seamlessly with the other. I was now acutely conscious of my father’s alcoholism. And so I learned the consolation of stories. I escaped the painful present by entering into the heroic past.
In that same year, 1966, events were beginning to unravel in the north that would change all of our lives. The sight of marching nationalists in the Republic unsettled the working-class Protestants of the north, where a Unionist government maintained all power in the hands of the Protestant majority. In the north, the commemoration of the Easter Rising had been a muted affair, but it took little in the way of nationalist self-assertion to prompt a return to the old habit of sectarian murder in Belfast. The Ulster Volunteer Force, named after an earlier Protestant militia, shot and killed two Catholic men in May and June. A Protestant pensioner died when flames from a burning Catholic pub spread to her home. The UVF followed up with a general warning that foreshadowed the murderous years to come. ‘From this day, we declare war against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups,’ it announced. ‘Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid, then more extreme methods will be adopted … we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.’12
Violence permeated the memory of the Republic. It pulsed through the everyday reality of the north. IRA membership was not an essential qualification for murder at the hands of loyalists. At times any Catholic would do. But the early Troubles did not impinge on my life. The north was far away. In 1968, as the first big civil rights marches were taking place, I went on a trip to Belfast with my mother’s school. I remember the surprise of seeing red pillar boxes, a Union flag flying at the border, the model shop on Queen Street where I bought toy soldiers, the coach stopping on the coast at Newcastle on the way back so that we could hunt under the stones for eels and crabs. It was a brief moment of calm. The following year catastrophe enveloped the six counties. It lasted for decades, long enough for me to grow to adulthood and eventually move the hundred or so miles north to work as a journalist in Belfast.
The Troubles confounded my father. He and my mother had visited Belfast the year before I was born. They’d stayed in a theatrical boarding house on Duncairn Gardens in the north of the city. It was run by Mrs Burns, a kind-hearted Protestant woman who had welcomed generations of actors. But less than a decade later, the district had become a notorious sectarian flashpoint. Near where my parents had once walked freely, a ‘peace’ wall would be erected to keep Protestants and Catholics apart. My father’s romantic nationalism could not survive the onset of the Troubles. He veered between outrage at the British and outrage at the Provisional IRA. When IRA bombs killed civilians he would insist that these new guerrillas had nothing in common with the ‘Old IRA’, in which his mother Hannah and her brother had served. My father believed in the story of the good clean fight. He denied any kinship between the IRA Flying Columns of north Kerry and the men in balaclavas from the Falls Road and Crossmaglen. By then, the rebel in him had vanished.
How could he rhapsodise about the glorious dead of long ago while we watched on the nightly news the burned remains of civilians being gathered up on Bloody Friday? Neither my father nor my mother, or any of my close relatives, understood the north. Until 1969 it had had no practical impact on their lives. They watched from Dublin as curfews were declared and the first British troops arrived. Then came refuge
e camps in the south for embattled Catholics: 10,000 crossed into the Republic in 1972 – the year of Bloody Sunday, and Bloody Friday;* the year my parents broke up; the year we escaped my father’s headlong descent into alcoholism. The north was burning and blowing up but I was lost in the small room of my own sorrow. Nothing made sense.
The refugees were kept further north. But I remember a group came to the seaside in Ardmore, County Waterford, one weekend in August in the early seventies. They were hard kids from the streets of Belfast and they scared us. An Irish government file from the time gives a good indication of how many southerners felt about the new arrivals: ‘Refugees are not always frightened people who are thankful for the assistance being given them. Some of them can be very demanding and ungrateful, even obstreperous and fractious – as well as, particularly in the case of teenage boys, destructive.’13 Oh yes, we in the Republic had moved a long way from the destructive impulses of war. When crowds clashed with police outside the British embassy in Dublin, a Garda told the Guardian newspaper that ‘We didn’t know what was happening in the North until this lot attacked us.’14
The Provisional IRA became active in the Republic, training and hiding and, very occasionally, shooting at our own security forces. We had army patrols outside the banks, special courts to try IRA suspects and a ‘Heavy Gang’ of policemen who battered confessions out of prisoners. The word ‘subversive’ entered our daily vocabulary. To a middle-class boy like me, Republicans were aggressive young men in pubs selling the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht, a different and dangerous tribe whom we needed no encouragement to shun. In universities and schools we were now being taught a different history. The story of relentless English awfulness – and let there be no doubt, there had been plenty of it – was replaced by a more nuanced narrative in which the past was complex and sometimes confounding.
I realised by the mid-1970s, as the death toll from shootings and bombings in the north moved towards the thousands, that history was a great deal more than the stories my father had told me. It lay in the untold, in the silences that surrounded the killing in which my own family had been involved, and in the Civil War that had divided family members from old comrades. But for all the new spirit of historical revisionism we were not encouraged to ask the obvious contemporary question: What did the violence of our own past have to do with what we saw nightly on our televisions? What made the violence of my grandmother Hannah’s time right and the violence of the ‘Provos’ wrong? Why was Michael Collins a freedom fighter and Gerry Adams a terrorist?
Interrogating these questions did not suit the agenda of the governments that ruled Ireland during the years of modern IRA violence. They were dealing with a secret army that wanted not only to bomb Ireland to unity but overthrow the southern government in the process. Both our main political parties had been founded by men who put bullets into the heads of informers, policemen and soldiers. By the time I was a teenager the last of them was long gone from public life. Their successors, the children of the Revolution, demanded that violence be kept in the past where it could do no harm. In short, we had had enough of that kind of thing.
In this ambition they were enthusiastically supported by the mass of the population. Whatever it took to keep the Provisional IRA and other Republicans in check down south was, by and large, fine with the Irish people. There might be emotional surges after Bloody Sunday in 1972 or the Republican hunger strikes at the Maze prison in the early 1980s, but the guns of Easter 1916 or the killers in the ‘Tan war’ were not who we were now. The Provisional IRA on the other hand took their cue from the minority within a minority who had declared an All-Ireland Republic with the Easter Rising of 1916, and as long as there was a republic to be fought for they claimed legitimacy for killing in its name. Down south they were hounded and despised, an embarrassing, bearded fringe who occasionally added to the store of public loathing and mistrust by killing a policeman or soldier in the Republic. Any attempt to contrast and compare with the ‘Old IRA’ was officially discouraged for fear of giving comfort to the Provos.
The northern slaughter helped to shut down discussion of the War of Independence and the Civil War – what we now call the Irish Revolution – in families too. I knew only that my paternal grandmother and her brothers, and my maternal grandfather, fought the ‘Black and Tans’, the special paramilitary reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Given all we had been taught as children about the old oppressor it was easy for us, who had no knowledge of blood, to accept that the IRA of the War of Independence would shoot the English to drive them out of Ireland. I was not aware that many of those shot were fellow Irishmen wearing police uniforms. In this reading the Old IRA followed in a direct line from the rebels who faced Elizabeth’s army at Listowel Castle. They killed the invaders.
Nobody spoke to me of the dead Irishmen who fought for the other side; much less of the fratricidal combat that engulfed north Kerry after the British departed in 1922. In my teens I was not inclined to enquire about the long-ago war. It did not interest me much then. I was already looking abroad to the stories of other nations. In Cork City Library, after my family had moved to Cork from Dublin, I devoured biographies of Napoleon and Bismarck. It was the big sweep of history that had me then. The relentless drumbeat of bad news from the north only pushed me to look further away from all of Ireland.
There was another, more painfully personal reason. When my parents separated in 1972 contact with my father’s family, with my grandmother and her people, dropped away. I would see her a couple of times a year at most. Even if I had had the inclination, and she had been willing to speak, there was never the time to ask Hannah the questions. In my mother’s family a similar silence prevailed. Although their father had fought in the War of Independence, my maternal uncles and aunts, with whom I spent most of my time, were largely apolitical. They bemoaned the tragedy of the north but felt helpless; their daily lives and ambitions were circumscribed by an attachment to family and to place, to Cork city where we lived a comfortable middle-class existence far from Belfast and its horrors.
It was only much later that I began to ask the questions that had been lying in wait for years. But by then those who might have given me answers were dead or ailing. Paddy Hassett, my maternal grandfather who fought in Cork, was long gone. He had told his own children nothing of his war service. My aunts and uncles knew only slim details of what had happened in north Kerry during the Revolution. It was only thanks to an interview broadcast in 1980, a year after I entered journalism, that I became aware of the darker history that had engulfed my family in north Kerry.
It took an English journalist, Robert Kee, to produce the first full television history of Ireland. Kee interviewed Black and Tans and British soldiers. He spoke with IRA men who described killing informers and ambushing soldiers. The combatants were old men now, sitting in suburban sitting rooms in their cardigans, calmly retelling the events of nearly sixty years before. It was also the first time I had heard any participant speak of what happened after the British left in 1922, and of how those who rejected the negotiated Anglo-Irish Treaty turned on the new Free State government. Men and women who had fought together against the British became mortal enemies.
I remember a sense of shock because the episode on the Civil War focused on an incident in north Kerry where my family had taken the Free State side. I knew the Free State army had carried out severe reprisals for IRA attacks during the Civil War, but the sort of blood vengeance of ‘Ballyseedy’ evoked the stories my father told me of English massacres. Not on the same scale, of course, but with an unsettling viciousness. In March 1923, in retaliation for the killing of five Free State soldiers in a mine attack, nine IRA prisoners were taken from Tralee barracks to the crossroads at Ballyseedy. One man survived the events that followed.
I listened avidly to the story Stephen Fuller told Robert Kee. He began by recalling the moment the prisoners were taken from jail in Tralee:
He gave us a cigarette and said, ‘Th
at is the last cigarette ye’ll ever smoke. We’re going to blow ye up with a mine.’ We were marched out to a lorry and made to lie flat down and taken out to Ballyseedy … the language, the bad language wasn’t too good. One fellah called us ‘Irish bastards’ … They tied our hands behind our back and left about a foot between the hands and the next fellah. They tied us in a circle around the mine. They tied our legs, and the knees as well, with a rope. And they took off our caps and said we could be praying away as long as we like. The next fellah to me said his prayers, and I said mine too … He said goodbye, and I said goodbye, and the next fellah picked it up and said, ‘Goodbye lads’, and up it went. And I went up with it of course.15
The flesh of the butchered men was found in the trees overlooking the road. The interview with Fuller was for me a moment of revelation. He told his story without emotion or embellishment. I had grown up conscious of the bitterness that followed the Civil War. I knew that our main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, had grown out of the conflict and that my own family were ‘black’ Fine Gael. Die-hard Collinsites. The side that blew up Fuller and the others at Ballyseedy. Now, in the words of Stephen Fuller, I could begin to glimpse the lived experience of the time rather than surmise the truth from the shreds of political rhetoric.
Irish men killed Irish men in the war of 1922–23. They killed each other in the war that went before it: Irish killing Irish with a fury that shocks to read of decades later. Did it shock them, I wondered, when in the long years afterwards they sat and reflected on the war?
