by Fergal Keane
In north Kerry peace delivered a dividend for Sinn Féin with the election of former IRA commander Martin Ferris as a local TD.* By contrast Fine Gael, the party of the Purtills, lost the Dáil seat held by a close family friend, Jimmy Deenihan. There had always been a lingering Republican support in north Kerry but the election, and subsequent re-election, of Martin Ferris was not decided on the basis of Civil War antagonisms. Sinn Féin appealed to those who were excluded from the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger years and to many who were angered by the corruption and clientelism that brought the country to the brink of economic ruin in 2008. Money. Who made it. Who squandered it. Who paid the bill. Who promised to clean up the mess. Money, not memory, was the heart of the matter now.
II
For the first time I see you rising,
Hearsaid, remote, incredible War God,
How very quickly the terrible action has been sown
Among the peaceful fruits of the field, action
grown suddenly to maturity.
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Hymn One’, 1914
Towards the end of the 1980s my father came to visit me in Belfast. He was ill and nearing the end of his life. Alcoholism had ravaged his body and spirit. It was his first visit north since the beginning of the 1960s and on the road from Dublin he asked me if he would be safe. ‘You’re fine with me,’ I told him. ‘I’m living in a grand safe place.’ I did not know what memories he held of this place when, as young actors with a touring company, he and my mother stayed here in the early days of their courtship. Belfast was a sleepy provincial city then. An IRA campaign along the border in the late 1950s had petered out and the Unionist monolith, with its tweeded elite and militant working class, seemed destined to endure forever. Eamonn was not ready for the army patrols on Great Victoria Street. I took him on a tour of the city’s ‘Troubles landmarks’: up the Falls Road, across the peaceline to the Shankill via Lanark Way, down past the paramilitary murals, across the Lagan to the east and the gantries of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and then back again to drive up the Antrim Road to Duncairn Gardens where he had stayed as a young man. He was silent. The street had become one of the worst flashpoints of the conflict, divided between Protestant and Catholic districts at either end, with boarded-up houses and empty spaces where buildings had vanished; there were abundant weeds, broken glass and masonry, sectarian slogans and swear words scrawled by kids. The house where my parents had stayed was gone along with its owner Mrs Burns who had treated the young actors to hearty Ulster fries and late-night sandwiches when they returned from the theatre.
With my father in Belfast in 1988 on his first visit back since the Troubles began (Author’s Private Collection)
We drove up and down several times, my father shaking his head. It was later, after we had returned to the southern suburbs where middle-class Catholics and Protestants coexisted contentedly, that he started to talk. This man whose stories of the mythic Irish past had fired my child’s imagination was shocked by what he had seen. He was thinking of his own beginnings, about the stories handed down and the silences around our own family’s violent past. ‘Look how long it’s taken us to get over that,’ he said. ‘This will take longer. How will people ever get on again after what’s happened?’
On this evening in Belfast my father realised that he would not live to see the united Ireland for which the revolutionary leaders had fought. But it was less this that troubled him, than suddenly facing the human mess made in the long decades of war in Ireland. Born in 1925, in the bitter aftermath of Civil War, he died in January 1990, eight years before the Good Friday Agreement that brought the long struggle to an end. I wish he had lived to see peace. Even this imperfect and troubled peace. He would have rejoiced in it.
* Of the civilian casualties the full breakdown is: forty-eight per cent killed by loyalists; thirty-nine per cent by Republicans; ten per cent by the security forces. The Republican paramilitaries were responsible for sixty per cent of Troubles deaths.
* Martin Ferris served three prison terms relating to his IRA activity, including a ten-year sentence for attempting to import seven tonnes of arms, explosives and ammunition. When the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe, shot by the IRA in County Limerick in 1996, were released from prison, Ferris was present to greet them. Jerry McCabe was a fellow Kerryman and came from Ballylongford. He was guarding a post office van carrying cash when three IRA men arrived and opened fire.
15
Afterwards
When I was single I wore a black shawl
Now that I’m married, I’ve nothing at all
Still I love him, I’ll forgive him
I’ll go with him wherever he goes.
Still I Love Him, nineteenth-century ballad
I
In the year the Civil War would end Hannah Purtill became Hannah Keane. She was married in Ballydonoghue church near her father’s farm and where her brother Mick and Con Dee had hidden from the Tans. The wedding took place on 5 September 1922, as the Civil War raged across Kerry. Less than a week later came the Republicans’ attack on Tarbert barracks where Mick Purtill and Con Brosnan, and their comrade from Ballylongford, Brian O’Grady, were stationed. The IRA pumped petrol into the building and fired incendiary bullets to start a fire. This was the same tactic used against Tobias O’Sullivan in Kilmallock turned now against Irish soldiers. Eventually the remaining defenders, no more than seven men, were forced to surrender. In the following weeks, the first of my grandmother’s married life, the National Army, humiliated by the Tarbert attack and another in south Kerry, swept the countryside. There were dozens of arrests. Hannah moved to the Keane house on Church Street, where her husband’s parents, his sister and brother had determined to spend the rest of their days. It was not in Bill Keane’s generous nature to ask them to move. Nor would Hannah have dreamed of encouraging him. Others in rural Ireland acted differently. The mental hospitals and county homes, successors to the workhouse of colonial times, were full of bachelors and spinsters pushed out by a married brother.
Within two years of their marriage the first child, a son, was born. As one child followed another – there would be nine altogether, one died as a baby – the pressure of space became acute. The only money was my grandfather’s schoolmaster’s salary and whatever his brother Dan could earn at cattle fairs. This was the time of the Great Depression and of de Valera’s economic war with Britain.* Rural communities were hard pressed.
Yet Hannah did not rebel against the status quo. She had grown up in a family that had gained a crucial footing on the land late in the previous century. The Purtills had everything to lose if radical redistributive politics gained ground. Three years before, as the war against the British was starting to escalate, farm labourers around Listowel had gone on strike demanding to be given an acre of land each. The strike failed but it would have unsettled the Purtills and other landowners.
Paternalism was an abiding legacy. The colonial rulers had not trusted the Irish peasantry. Somebody further up always knew what was best. Power was pulled to the centre, into the maw of the great bureaucracies of Dublin Castle and Whitehall. The two big parties and the clerical establishment easily slotted into the vacant space left by the British. Why give political or intellectual autonomy to the people when ministers in Dublin, and the bishops in their palaces, could do their thinking for them?
A handful of brave souls tilted against this hegemony and suffered exile, censorship or the penance of irrelevance in a society that seemed content with the status quo. My auntie Anne remembered the power of the Church in Listowel: ‘The canon and priests in the town were put on pedestals to be revered. No one dared question its authority.’ My bluff great-uncle Dan was a lonely exception. He was attending the mission one day when the priest began to summon up visions of the fires of hell.
‘No such thing,’ bellowed Dan from the congregation.
The priest focused on the insolent countryman.
‘Be quiet,’ he shouted, ‘or I’
ll turn you into a goat. I’ll put two horns on you!’
To which Dan replied: ‘If you do I’ll fuckin’ puck you with them.’
Dan Keane might cause shock but he could be written off as an eccentric. In the land where Hannah Keane raised her children, girls and young women were constantly reminded of the need to maintain their purity. The priests railed from the pulpit against dancing and any co-mingling of the sexes. Sex was ‘the deed of darkness’, as one visiting mission priest told the Listowel congregation. Our Church Street neighbour and a celebrated writer, Bryan McMahon, wrote of the 1950s that ‘in the Ireland of today the conception of sin is everywhere’,1 and he quoted from the catechism being taught to Catholic children:
The chief dangers to chastity are: idleness, intemperance, bad companions, improper dances, immodest dress, company keeping and indecent conversation, books, plays and pictures.2
Young women were urged to emulate the example of the Virgin Mary. Piety. Suffering. Forbearance. The cult of domestic martyrdom. The old joke: how many Irish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. Sure I’ll just sit here in the dark.
A woman learned to put up with her lot. A woman who fell from grace in the eyes of the Church became an exile in her own community. One of the saddest stories I heard growing up concerned the short life of Peggy McCarthy. Peggy had become pregnant out of wedlock in the mid-1940s. In her own brother’s account, she ‘was refused admission to three hospitals in north Kerry and died giving birth on the side of the road … In death the gates of Listowel church were closed against her coffin.’3 Something of a rebellious spirit emerged in the aftermath when a large crowd of local men followed the coffin to the church gates in support of the McCarthy family. But the mood passed and the traditional order reasserted itself.
The Church controlled access to most education and health care, willingly subcontracted out by a state that had neither the immediate resources nor inclination to do the job on its own. There was no strict national ideology; instead the Irish people were corralled by a mishmash of clerical authoritarianism, instinctual conservatism and safe, gun free, nationalism. Books were censored, contraception and divorce denied, and abortion unthinkable. English building sites absorbed our unemployed and England’s doctors carried out the abortions banned at home. But the people did not rebel against the impositions of the Church. My grandmother remained devout until her death. She could make disobliging remarks about certain priests in private, and was scathing about the crony politics of the time, but would never have dreamed of rebelling in public.
Why did this woman of the Revolution accept a society that shunted her back into the kitchen? The power of Church and state acting in malign congress does not explain it all. The answers come from Hannah’s life and personality and from her immediate community, as well as from the larger forces that created the post-revolutionary nation. I come back again to the desire for stability. Hannah longed for it at home and in the country. Most of the families on Church Street, or on the farms around Ballydonoghue, would have shared that ambition. There had been enough chaos. A stable social order meant that your children could hope to inherit a thriving farm, or go to college or get a job in the civil service. It meant food on the table. For this, above and beyond the historic attachment to their faith, people were willing to tolerate a great deal. The empire of the Church could never have survived so long without the cooperation of its subjects.
Hannah and Bill’s sons, my father and uncles, went to a local school presided over by a notorious brute. Father Davey O’Connor beat the boys in his care savagely and did so in the full knowledge that their parents would never confront him. He sat at the apex of power in Listowel, free to warp the lives of the boys and young men in his care. I know of him because my father spoke of his brutality repeatedly. Others in the family endorsed his accounts.
John B remembered being called on to recite a poem by O’Connor and decided to perform his own poem about Church Street.
‘“Who wrote that?” he asked when I had finished.
‘“I did father!” … there followed the worst beating of all and ejection from the class … What made the beating worse was that there was no explanation for it, but it was this beating which contributed more than anything to my being a writer.’4
‘That was how it was. That was the way in those days,’ Hannah would say. She had risked her life to fight the Tans but drew back from confronting a priest. ‘That was how it was. That was the way in those days,’ a relative told me. Everybody in the older generation I asked said the same thing. That was how it was. Violence was normalised. The child who complained was a liar. Or they must have done something to deserve what they got.
My grandfather made a symbolic protest. Some time afterwards he encountered O’Connor in the street and walked straight past without a salute. The priest ran after him and demanded: ‘Why don’t you salute a priest when you see one?’
To which Bill Keane responded: ‘When I see one.’
Change came in the next generation. My father left for Dublin in his late teens without telling a soul, simply vanishing one morning. True to a childhood dream, he made his way as an actor, arriving at the Abbey Theatre in the late 1940s and going from there to work with the national radio station Radio Éireann. In the process he became involved in a public fracas about culture with a narrow-minded government minister and lost his job. The Fianna Fáil minister Neil Blaney had criticised the drama department of RTÉ, the national broadcaster, where my father worked. An official memo from 1957 said my father had ‘hurled offensive epithets across the table at the Minister and had to be forcibly removed from the hall … Keane came very deliberately to the place where he knew the Minister would be and … he did not appear to have much, if any, drink taken’.5 (Knowing him as I did, I would be inclined to dispute this last sentence.) My father was suspended and put on a boat to England and told to stay out of the way until the scandal died down. That was how things were handled in those days. More than a decade later, Blaney lost his own job, accused of plotting to send arms to the IRA in Belfast.
John B. The most independent-minded man I ever knew (Domnick Walsh)
Eamonn was allowed to return and resume his acting career after a sojourn in England, during which he picked hops in Kent and worked for a furrier in Covent Garden. John B, meanwhile, wrote plays that captivated Ireland with their raw evocation of rural life: child marriage, murder over land, the struggle of women for control of their lives, were his great themes. Some of his finest characters – women made weary by the world men had made, but women who endured – were based, to a greater or lesser degree, on Hannah Keane.
My grandmother was ambitious for her children. Education and exam results were her abiding preoccupation. To the neighbours on Church Street she became known as ‘Hannie Honours’ for her habit of enquiring how many honours a child had received in their Leaving Certificate examinations. This was more than petty boasting. Education gave her children access to opportunities undreamed of in the age of the Revolution. What was her fight for if her children could not live lives of ambition and prosperity? Her youngest son Denis went to university in Dublin and became a maths teacher. Her daughter Peg joined the new national airline as a stewardess, marrying a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia who built his own successful business selling agricultural machinery to Irish farmers. Another daughter, Kathleen, became a nun and later a liberal-minded reverend mother, loved by the girls whose lives she shaped. In my auntie Kathleen’s compassionate Catholicism I saw a rejection of the judgemental morality of the Church in which she had been raised. Hannah’s children all went on to lives that offered infinitely greater prosperity than she had known in her youth. The trajectory of the family in the late 1950s reflects a country on the cusp of profound change: two of her children, William and Anne, emigrated – among nearly a sixth of the population (more than 400,000 people) who left the Republic between 1951 and 1961. They found better lives in England and America.* Auntie
Anne remembers how many of her friends in Listowel were leaving and how ‘the influence of American cinema painted a very rosy picture’.6
Hannah ran the household, hoarded the pennies and disciplined the children. Her husband often sought refuge from reality in alcohol. Sometimes Hannah struggled to pay the bills when he spent much of his pay in the pub. There was shame in this for her. Hannah was a Purtill with the fierce pride of those country people who had never depended on charity. Her relatives in the countryside saw her distress and sent in meat and vegetables from the farm.
Hannah and Bill loved each other. It was the dreamer in him, the reciter of poems and teller of stories, that she was drawn to in the first place. So she left him to his books, his pipe and whiskey and struggled on. I have turned again and again to the writing of my uncle to glimpse the grandparents whose inner lives were hidden from me. John B wrote a poem about his father that lovingly captured the complex truth of life in Church Street.
Hannah Purtill (Keane Family, Listowel)
He was inviolate.
