by Fergal Keane
Around Listowel there had been fewer Protestants to begin with and the majority belonged to the remnants of the old landowning class. By the time I was in my adolescence the vanishing of the Protestant community around the town was unstoppable. The story of St John’s church in Listowel Square is emblematic. Throughout the nineteenth century it had been the spiritual heart of the Church of Ireland community. Kitchener worshipped there. When Sir Arthur Vicars was killed his body was brought to St John’s under military guard. There were renovation works on St John’s in the early 1960s but these could not forestall the demographic reality. One Church Street neighbour of the Keanes’, Eamonn Dillon, remembered how the last Archdeacon, Reverend Wallace, a much-loved local character, pursued a congregant into his [Dillon’s] family shop in order to collect the parish dues ‘and hung around our shop for over an hour while she hid in the kitchen … I suppose that the congregation was so small at that stage that every contribution was valuable and necessary’.32 As the congregation faded away, the empty church became vulnerable to vandals. In 1975 St John’s windows were smashed, leading a judge to remark ‘we are living in unenlightened times where churches had to be closed during the daytime to protect them’.33 By 1986 the falling attendance numbers led the church authorities to lease the building to the local community. Two years later the pews were put up for auction and two years after that the building was sold and became the St John’s Arts Centre. In the process a wall that surrounded the church was knocked down, leading one churchman to lament the insult ‘to the Protestant heritage’.34
The arts centre attracted controversy in the 1990s when it put on a stage adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Protestant Rector of Tralee, Reverend Warren, described it as ‘insensitive to those who had worshipped there’35 – though it was not exactly ‘profane’ as the church had been deconsecrated. There was criticism too from a member of the Listowel town council who called it ‘insulting for the women of the town’.36 Today St John’s is thriving, a place of plural expression and cultural diversity. A new evangelical community has evolved and includes former Catholics among the congregation. Across rural Ireland small evangelical churches have attracted some who are disaffected with the scandal-ridden Church of Rome. And on the road to Ballydonoghue, not long after you pass the Famine graveyard at Teampallin Ban, there is the new evangelical church. In the old days there might have been a riot at such conversions. Today there is sublime indifference.
* General Eoin O’Duffy, 1892–1944, was a former IRA commander, general in the National Army and founder of the Gardai, as well as being the first leader of Fine Gael. His erratic political behaviour saw him finish his public life in obscurity. During the Second World War he offered to send an Irish legion to fight with the Nazis on the Eastern Front. His offer was disregarded
* It is likely John B. found the name in Dicken’s Bleak House, where ‘Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in’. Estimates of the crowd vary but around three thousand are thought to have attended the rally. Among Doodle’s other promises were to open a factory for shaving the hair from gooseberries and to plough the Rocks of Bawn which, being both mythical and rocks, were unploughable.
* In the years of the Revolution, between 1919 and 1923, somewhere between 2,000 and 16,000 Protestants left for what University College Cork historian Dr Andy Bielenberg calls ‘non-voluntary’ motives. In other words, they were scared or could no longer survive economically.
* The episode is one of the most contentious in the history of the period. See Andy Bielenberg and John Borgonovo with James S. Donnelly Jr., ‘“Something in the Nature of a Massacre”: The Bandon Valley Killings Revisited’, Éire-Ireland, Vol. 49, 2014, pp. 7–59.
14
Inheritance
So I say only: bear in mind
Those men and lads killed in the streets;
But do not differentiate between
Those deliberately gunned down
And those caught by unaddressed bullets:
Such distinctions are not relevant …
Bear in mind the skipping child hit
By the anonymous ricochet …
And the garrulous neighbours at the bar
When the bomb exploded near them;
The gesticulating deaf-mute stilled
by the soldier’s rifle in the town square
And the policeman dismembered by the booby trap
in the car …
Patriotism has to do with keeping
the country in good heart, the community
ordered by justice and mercy;
these will enlist loyalty and courage often,
and sacrifice, sometimes even martyrdom.
Bear these eventualities in mind also;
they will concern you forever:
but, at this moment, bear in mind these dead.
John Hewitt, ‘Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto’, 1972
I
At first I looked at the war they fought and asked if there could have been another way. Yes, of course, there could. At the outbreak of the Great War, Home Rule within the empire still defined the boundaries of political ambition for most Irish nationalists.
But Ireland was not a peaceful realm in the first decade of the twentieth century. Other possibilities shuffled for prominence. The forces of loyalist irredentism that arose in response to the Home Rule campaigns fuelled an atmosphere in which revolutionary violence could again become imaginable. Not inevitable. This is a critical distinction. Before a war breaks out there are always other choices. It is the power of events, the influence of personality at critical junctures, the decisions made or avoided, the chance encounter, the starting shot fired that ignites a fusillade that can tilt the public mood from passivity to epoch-changing fury.
In Ireland the actions of the rebel leaders in 1916 did not propel Ireland into insurrectionary warfare. It took the blunders of the executions and martial law, followed by the conscription crisis to move a critical mass of Irish people towards support for guerrilla war when it eventually broke out.
Deeper emotions were waiting to be stirred. The punitive nature of the state response after 1916, and the campaign of counter-terror in the War of Independence, accommodated themselves well into the narratives of British perfidy that slept in the inherited memories of so many Irish families.
In the course of this war my grandmother and her brother became involved in inflicting terror on members of the Crown forces. This also meant terror and sorrow for the families of policemen and soldiers. The terror of the Crown forces brought grief to thousands of Irish people. My forebears made a choice that might have led them to prison or an early grave. They were idealists and they had immense courage. They could have remained uninvolved or taken a less dangerous role. Nobody compelled them to take up arms and the majority of people did not engage in violence. My paternal grandfather confined himself to working in the cultural sphere for the Gaelic League, though his greater age may have been a factor in this. The family of my maternal grandmother avoided any involvement in the revolutionary war. Here a family connection might explain the choice: my maternal great-grandmother had been orphaned as a young girl and her much-loved guardian was a Major McCarthy, retired from the Indian Army. The man she married, my great-grandfather John Sexton, worked for a Protestant firm in Cork. These connections, to empire and to the existing order, might have made her daughter, my mother’s mother, less likely to follow the path of Hannah Purtill. Yet the man she married, Patrick Hassett, had grown up as the son of an RIC sergeant, a man every bit as dedicated to his job as Tobias O’Sullivan had been, and yet he ended up as an IRA man in the cauldron of Cork city. There was no absolute telling how the mood of the times and the circumstances of family, the generational shifts and, possibly, resentments could change the way in which young men and women saw the world.
I often thought about Hannah and Mick’s war when I lived in the north. Its echoes were there when I heard the bomb that killed fo
rty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cush – a van driver and former army reservist – at the Tomb Street post office one June day in 1987. I reported on his funeral and remember a boy, possibly a close relative, passing the corner where the media was standing, his eyes catching mine and looking straight through me. I heard the echoes again one night in November 1989, on the shores of Lough Neagh, at one in the morning, when a woman washed blood from the floor of a bar after loyalists killed Liam Ryan and Michael Devlin. I saw the shadows of the old war in the eyes of mourners at the funeral of Gillian Johnston, who was shot forty-seven times by the IRA as she sat in a car with her fiancée. A mistake, the IRA said later. That earlier war, the one that changed the lives of my grandparents, that created the country in which I grew up, would follow me through all the wars of my own reporting life.
I lived in the North for five years. I listened to bigots and absolutists on both sides. I learned how the British state had colluded with loyalist death squads in its war against the IRA. I met Republican politicians who I knew had given orders for atrocities that killed hundreds of civilians. I also met those who, by acts of omission or silent support, had enabled the killings. At weekends I would sometimes go to Dublin and listen to people in bars or at dinners declaim loudly and often ignorantly about the north. ‘I wish it would float away into the sea’ … ‘They are a shower of fucking whiners’ … ‘It’s sick, the whole society is sick …’ If they did take time to reflect on the past, they would act as if the Troubles had nothing at all do with our revolution. They forgot our own wars, the assassinations and disappeared civilians of the Revolution, the executions of the Civil War, the shrieking families with their mangled dead after Ballyseedy.
When de Valera retired from public life in 1974, after spending fourteen years as president, Jack Lynch, the leader of Fianna Fáil, said that ‘those who pursue their own misguided course of violence, can claim no identity with the man who fifty-seven years ago took up arms … and who fought for Irish freedom’.1 Well they could. And they did. The Provisionals’ claims of legitimate violence were rooted in the violence ignited by Pearse and his comrades, who had no electoral mandate for revolution when they struck in 1916 against a government they declared to be illegitimate; Collins had directed a campaign of terror against the government and so had Liam Lynch in the Civil War. Both claimed a legitimacy rooted in 1916 as well as the election victory of 1918. To the armed keepers of the sacred flame of Irish Republicanism, the people’s will was very much secondary to the will of the notional Republic declared on the steps of the General Post Office in 1916. The dissidents of today can find solace in the words Dev used after the Irish people elected a majority of pro-Treaty Dáil deputies: ‘The people have no right to do wrong’.
If it was legitimate for the IRA of my grandmother’s time to kill soldiers and policemen and to execute informers, the Provisionals asked, why should different rules apply today? The example of Collins’s war was freely quoted by the new IRA. In November 1985 the Provisional’s propaganda wing released a pamphlet that explicitly justified their campaign by referencing the IRA of the Revolution: ‘How did Collins deal with them? He had his men shoot them down without mercy; a bullet in the back, in the dark, on their way to or from Mass, when they were unarmed, or with their families – it mattered not to Collins. Many more native RIC men were killed than Black and Tans and Brits.’2
The Provisionals listed killings from the Tan war, among them that of District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan, repeating the claim that he was with his young son when killed. Sixty years after the killing, the policeman’s death was being used to justify the killing of a new generation of policemen. It was a logically alluring argument, this justification through retrospective comparison, but only if you believed that Irish people were incapable of advancing the progress of their hopes through peaceful means, and that the violence and grief of past wars offered an example to be followed, not avoided. This last is the essential point.
The cost to civilians in lives lost, maiming and psychological trauma during nearly three decades of the Troubles was immense: over fifty per cent of the casualties were civilians.* As with the revolutionary war, British blunders and cruelties helped swell support for the IRA and keep the war going. Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, internment without trial, curfews and midnight raids, beating of suspects, the intimidation of Catholics at roadblocks by soldiers – some of them Protestant neighbours – helped bring young men into the paramilitaries’ ranks. So did the threat from loyalist murder gangs, sometimes operating in collusion with the British state. The leadership of the IRA reaped the benefits. What began as a defensive campaign in support of Catholic communities under attack from loyalist mobs and paramilitaries was turned into an offensive war for a united Ireland. By the early 1970s the IRA had split into two factions with the Provisionals pursuing the military campaign for territorial redemption and the Official IRA beginning the political journey that led them away from violence. Peace invariably foundered on the opposition of hard men and bigots. The Sunningdale power-sharing Agreement between Catholic and Protestant in 1973 was wrecked by hard-line Unionist opposition and the continued violence of the IRA for whom militarism remained a sacred principle. Hannah and Mick Purtill’s wars lasted three and a half years. They reached a pitch of intensity and involved reprisals and security measures that would have been impossible in a modern democratic state. The modern Troubles spanned over three decades and took the lives of more than 3,600 people. There were many times in that later nightmare when the people who ordered the killing could have made a different choice. Politics was always an option. Always. There was no absence of a democratic alternative if the gunmen had been willing to work with it. Thirty years. The IRA persisted with the bloody folly of believing that they merely had to defeat the British troops and police to drive the Protestants into a United Ireland. When I arrived in Belfast in 1985, armed Republicans were still proclaiming the dream of victory through the gun and the ballot box, wilfully ignoring the reality that killing Protestant police and soldiers only deepened the hatred and mistrust between the communities. That year the IRA declared ‘confidently that it will successfully conclude the national struggle’.3 But the war ended without a united Ireland. A war-weary population, growing electoral success and belated acceptance that Protestants were not going to be abandoned by London and bombed into a united Ireland, brought the IRA leaders into a government under the auspices of the British Crown, minus any troublesome oath of allegiance. When peace finally came in April 1998 it was based on the power-sharing formula, prompting the prominent constitutional politician Seamus Mallon to call the Good Friday Agreement ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.
We in the Republic voted to abandon the territorial claim over the six counties of Ulster. North and south accepted the principle of consent: a united Ireland would only happen if the majority of people in the north voted for it. By the standards of the IRA who fought the Civil War, this was every bit as great a betrayal as Collins’s decision to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In the north they voted by more than seventy per cent for their politicians to do the sane and moral thing: give up the gun for good. Work together. In the Republic on the same day we also had a referendum asking if we would give up the legal constitutional claim to the North and replace it with the language of aspiration and consent. The result was over ninety-four per cent in favour. Like the rest of the country, Listowel returned an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote and shunted IRA dissidents to the margins. From there they still snarl and occasionally kill, but the gun has been largely removed from the politics of our island.
The nationalist electorate did not look back on thirty years of violence and reject Sinn Féin. On the contrary. The men and women who chose peace from the start – people like John Hume, who was made a Nobel Peace laureate and whose voice pleaded reason on our airwaves for decades – were sidelined and their party eclipsed by Gerry Adams and his supporters. For Sinn Féin was the party that got things done. It was better
organised; it spoke to needs of voters in deprived areas, north and south; its leaders were ruthless in ensuring that dissenters or those who threatened the party’s image were ostracised and, when possible, silenced. If this took threats and violent intimidation so be it. The party was united and exuded a muscular confidence. On the Protestant side the party of Ian Paisley overpowered the more moderate Unionism of David Trimble. The great divider and bigot, the man who did so much to advance sectarianism, ended up sitting in government with the former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness.
The media started calling them ‘the Chuckle Brothers’, and with barely a glance backward the island ‘moved on’. Except that history is rarely so accommodating. The peace walls in Belfast got longer and higher. The grieving and the traumatised were left to make their own way, just as they had been left after the Revolution ended, but in a society where sectarian alienation showed no signs of easing. Catholic and Protestant children still went to different schools. The power-sharing deal between Sinn Féin and the DUP broke down and remains broken at the time of writing. Direct rule from Westminster loomed. A slim majority of the British people decided to leave the European Union and in doing so raised the possibility of a physical or ‘hard’ border returning to the island of Ireland. Sinn Féin called for a border poll which they knew would not be granted. But Unionists were unsettled. Nobody thought the war would start again. But so much of our island history is about how unforeseen consequences play out over the long run that I cannot say violence will never return.
