by Jason Wilson
Breege saw Paul for the last time the night before. She came home from an evening with friends and he was in the kitchen eating cereal. She said goodnight and went to bed.
Au revoir, Paul said.
Jim McAllister meets me at McNamee’s Bakery, a few blocks away from my bed-and-breakfast.
Jim helped start the Quinn Support Group, a loosely knit organization of Cullyhanna and Crossmaglen families intent on maintaining pressure on the authorities to find Paul’s killers. Jim and Stephen Quinn have known each other since the early 1960s, when they were both about sixteen or so. They met in a pub, something like that, Jim says.
As a young fellow, Jim had Republican feelings. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly as a Sinn Féin candidate in 1982. But over the years he drifted away from the party, and he finally left it in 1996. He saw Sinn Féin becoming everything it had once despised—leaning away from its core beliefs to get votes.
A few years ago a schoolgirl asked him, When was Bobby Sands shot? Bobby Sands died in the hunger strikes, Jim explained. He wasn’t shot. That’s when he knew his day was past. He remembered his grandparents talking about the 1916 uprising like it was clear in their minds, but it was history to Jim, just as Jim and Bobby Sands were history to that girl. It’s all relative. It depends what side of the years you’re on, aye.
When Paul died, a friend rang him, Jim says. A young man been battered to death. He didn’t know his name. Just that he was a Quinn. The county is full of Quinns. A moment later another man called and told him who it was.
The next morning he drove to the Quinn house. About twenty people were already there, and more were coming. When somebody dies in these parts, families gather around from all over to pay their respects. That’s how we deal with death here, he says. They all talked about what happened. Not a wee beating, they agreed.
Paul had a reputation, of course. He fought. As a Sinn Féin counselor, Jim had dealt with antisocial behavior: boyos breaking windows, stealing, making a ruckus. That kind of thing. Years back some young lads, sixteen, seventeen years old, were in a gang called Hard Core. They’d assemble, drink beer, get loud. People were afraid. Jim asked to speak with them. Five or six lads showed up at his office one night. He told them they were scaring people. Those five or six boyos never came to notice again.
Two other lads, however, didn’t meet with Jim. They continued to cause problems, and when he caught up with them they were made to wear placards: I’M A THIEF, something like that. Made to stand in a public place where everyone saw them. They never did anything after that. They became good men, so they did. Better to wear a placard than to be taken to a shed and killed, aye.
If it was smugglers who killed Paul, why would they want to bring attention to themselves? Jim says. Smugglers don’t kill. If they have a problem with someone, they either hit them in their wallet, ignore them, or set them up to be caught by the police. They don’t fight. No one has named specific smugglers as suspects. No one’s come forward to accuse smugglers except for Sinn Féin.
Why’s that, you think? Jim asks.
Paul would get involved in pub brawls, his father tells me, but he never talked about it. Nothing to tell. As far as he was concerned, once the fight was over, it was finished.
One time, however, he had a fight with Tomas McCabe. Tomas was the son of Frank McCabe, who police allege is an IRA man. Young McCabe would often get into rows with the other fellows. He lived in a political home and felt entitled to rule the roost, so he did, Stephen said.
The fight happened in Newry, a forty-minute drive from Cullyhanna. A car driven by Tomas blocked Paul’s car outside a disco. They both got out, and Paul landed a punch. He wouldn’t be bullied. A second boyo, one of Tomas’s friends, told Paul he would see him shot.
Later that evening, Eileen McCabe, Tomas’s mother, stopped outside a chippy where Paul was ordering food. Clad in only a nightgown, she threatened Paul with a hammer. You’ll be found in a black bag, she told him.
About the same time, Paul had another fight: this one with Vincent Treanor, an alleged senior member of the IRA. Paul confronted Treanor after his sister Cathy accused Treanor of insulting her.
How long was this before he was killed? I ask.
Three weeks, maybe, Stephen tells me.
This man biting his nails to nubs sits across from me in a cluttered kitchen strewn with newspapers and dirty dishes.
He tells me to refer to him as an ex-IRA volunteer from Crossmaglen. He served in the organization from his midteens to his late forties. A farmer now, he fears the consequences of the IRA finding out he’s spoken with a journalist.
Now ask your questions, he says.
If the man were younger, he would leave Northern Ireland. He loved it once because the people were all united, but he feels shame today. If it had been Loyalists or Brits who killed Paul, he could stomach it. But not one of your own. The IRA takes anyone now. Before, they would cherry-pick. Before, a man could fight with an IRA man, have a bit of a pub row, and it was forgotten. Not now. The boys about today have recruited hoods, psychos, money-grabbers.
They’re as bad now as the police were during the Troubles. Worse. In the old days, if the police stopped you, they’d shoot you. They didn’t play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, but they never battered you to bits.
The people in rural areas know what’s going on. They watch who’s moving what and where. Groups of men assembling would be noticed. Someone saw something when Paul was killed. They had to. But after thirty years of war, people know not to give the police information on IRA activities. The bodies of informers have been dumped in public places. Reason enough for the living to keep silent, aye.
Paul would have been just a wee thing during the 1994 ceasefire, the man says. Barely a teenager when the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was signed. A child of the peace process, so he was. Some peace, wha?
Had Paul survived, his beating would have been forgotten. It would have been considered housekeeping. An internal IRA thing. But he didn’t survive, did he?
To know one of your own did this is soul-destroying.
A month after Paul’s death, Ulster Unionist peer Lord John Laird asserted parliamentary privilege in the House of Lords to accuse Slab Murphy of approving Paul’s killing. He said Murphy had ordered Nationalists in the area not to cooperate with the police. Laird named Vincent Treanor as the man who planned the killing.
Both Murphy and Treanor denied any involvement.
In 2008, Northern Ireland’s Independent Monitoring Commission issued a report attributing the murder to local disputes. Some IRA members, or former IRA members, may have been involved, the report said, without naming the assailants. But the IMC insisted that there was no evidence that IRA leadership was linked to the incident.
Some of the killers, the commission’s report concluded, were “accustomed over a substantial period of time to exercising considerable local influence, collectively and individually. This would have led such people to expect what they would consider as appropriate respect from others, [including] being able to undertake their activities—including criminal ones—without interference. They would find it very difficult to accept any waning in this influence and respect.”
Stephen Quinn and I stand in the St. Patrick’s Church cemetery, beside Paul’s grave. He lies buried next to a friend who drowned while he and Paul were on holiday in Greece. Just eighteen, both of them. Paul brought his clothes home afterward. Another friend buried nearby died by suicide.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR DEAR SON AND BROTHER PAUL
SAVAGELY BEATEN TO DEATH 20 OCTOBER 2007 AGE 21
Stephen folds his hands and closes his eyes and tells Paul about his day. How he took his seven head of cattle to the market in Newry. It rained something awful. Gave them a good feed the night before, aye. Last supper. He gives a short laugh. He tells Paul to help him catch his killers and then pauses, his face a weather of hurt.
A nurse leads the Quinn family into the su
rgery room on the evening of October 20, 2007. They see the ventilator tube protruding from Paul’s mouth. They see the swollen left side of his head. His right earlobe torn off. One of his front teeth cracked. Gray face beneath the bright ceiling lights. Eyes with no color, not completely closed. The rest of him covered in a sheet. Beaten so badly Breege is not allowed to put rosary beads in his hands. Still so young-looking.
Paul’s girlfriend, Emma Murphy, saw trouble coming three months before he died. Paul lived in Silverbridge at the time, a village near Newry. He told Emma the IRA didn’t like him. Living on his own, he worried they’d come and get him. He decided to move back home.
Stephen Quinn remembers the night Paul returned. He came into the kitchen and Stephen asked him, as a joke, Are ye back home, aye?
I am, Paul said, and laughed a nervous laugh.
Before he came in, Stephen saw him outside the house in a car with three or four fellows. He didn’t know if they were friends or not. He didn’t ask.
I try to contact Anthony and Connor, but they won’t talk.
I call Sinn Féin every day for three weeks, asking them to comment on the status of the Quinn investigation. I’m told someone will call me back, but they never do. Finally a secretary says, We’ve got all your messages. Stop calling. There’s no point for you to call anymore.
I call back anyway, but this time I leave a message for Slab Murphy. I never hear from him.
I call Vincent Treanor and leave a message with a woman I presume to be his wife. She’s decidedly cool when I explain the purpose of my call. She takes my number, but I don’t hear from him.
I call Patrick John Quinn, owner of the shed where Paul was killed and no relation to his family. A former IRA man, according to the police. The man who answers refuses to identify himself and tells me not to call the family again.
I call Frank McCabe, father of Tomas McCabe. His wife, Eileen, answers, and I ask to speak to her husband. Just a minute, she says. I hear her call for him in the next room. She gets back on and asks, Who’s calling? I tell her, and explain that I want to speak to him about the Quinn murder. He’s not here, she says, and hangs up.
I call the press office of the Democratic Unionist Party. In 2007, Sinn Féin and the pro-British DUP entered into a power-sharing agreement to govern Northern Ireland. The DUP went into government with the Republicans on the strict understanding that the IRA had ended all its militant activities. Proof of IRA involvement in Paul’s murder would endanger the very existence of the administration. The DUP refuses to comment.
Finally, I call Peter John Caraher, a senior South Armagh Republican listed by the Northern Ireland police as a veteran IRA member. I met him on a reporting trip in 1993, when he spoke to me about his son Fergal, who was shot dead in 1990 by a Royal Marine.
I can still see Peter John’s wife handing me a framed photo of Fergal, her pale face lost in sorrow, her sunken eyes staring through me. Not a word exchanged between us. Just the silent offer of Fergal’s photo. Surely, I thought, Peter John would understand the Quinns’ need for answers.
Peter John remembers me and agrees to a meeting. On the day of our appointment, however, he changes his mind. He explains that he has the flu. He expects to be sick all day and the following day. And the day after that and the day after that.
Good luck, he says.
It took Stephen Quinn twelve months to visit the hulking red shed where Paul was beaten to death. He refused to look inside. He thought about the beating and the bastards who did it and was sickened looking at it.
I am quite convinced the IRA killed Paul, Pat McNamee tells me.
He cites the black military-style clothing the killers wore, the planning required to lure Paul to the shed, and the manner in which the shed was cleaned after the beating, leaving no weapons and little forensic evidence.
It’s the modus operandi of the IRA, Pat says.
We are sitting at a long table in his Crossmaglen house, with pictures of his daughter and his grandchild looking out at us. Pat has a professorial air about him. Blue dress shirt, gray slacks, tie. Gray hair, trim goatee. An urban planner. But years before, he was a member of the IRA.
In 1978 he was jailed for kidnapping and possession of arms and ammunition. Four years later he was tried in a special criminal court in Dublin. He served six years in Portlaoise Prison. In 1996 he was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum for peace negotiations as a member of Sinn Féin.
As time went on, he began to disagree with the party’s policies. Like Jim McAllister, he believed the real issues had been shoved aside to promote electoral success. He left Sinn Féin in 2005.
I knew Paul’s family in the sense I’d know most families in the area, he tells me. In the IRA it was important for me to know who was who and where people lived. I would have seen him as a young fella knocking about. When I saw the pictures of him later, I remembered him. Quite a big lad. Bit of a terror. He did what young fellas do. He had a car. A bit of a racer.
He drove oil for people, Pat continues. He ran afoul of the IRA. When the Republicans stopped their military activity, they occupied themselves by making money. Some members worked in legitimate ways. Some got into smuggling.
Paul was a competitor, he says.
They would have been at the shed an hour before Paul arrived, Pat says. Some of them would have watched the road. At least twenty others would have been waiting nearby. For that many people, the operation had to have been authorized by the IRA leadership in South Armagh.
Do him, they would have decided.
Easy enough.
Get a line on his mates.
Easy enough.
Get his mates to lure him in.
Easy enough.
Why not just shoot him? I ask.
That would have involved firearms. A violation of the ceasefire and the decommissioning of weapons.
So they beat him to death instead?
Yes, Pat says.
I consider a billboard that stands above a closed Sinn Féin office in Crossmaglen.
MURDER!
Beneath the word is the smiling face of Paul Quinn, striped shirt open at the collar. Short hair combed forward. A relaxed smile. The shape of his nose, the blue of his eyes that will be passed on to another Quinn.
PAUL QUINN REFUSED TO BE BULLIED
AND FOR THAT HE WAS BEATEN TO DEATH
The billboard has faded from the rain and sun and the days that have turned into weeks, months, years. No one has been charged. Perhaps someone will decide to talk to the police. For their peace of mind, if nothing else.
YOUR COMMUNITY IN THE GRIP OF MURDERERS
IS THIS THE “PEACE” YOU SIGNED UP FOR?
On my last night in Crossmaglen, Stephen Quinn picks me up for dinner.
One last story before you leave, he says.
A year or so before he died, Paul was driving down a road with a farmer, a good Republican he worked for time and again.
Your man sees a picture of Bobby Sands and blows the car horn.
Why ye beep every time ye pass the wee picture of Bobby Sands? Paul asks the farmer.
To say hello to him, your man says.
Paul laughs. He doesn’t have time for that.
The fighting’s done.
The war is over.
PAUL THEROUX
The Wicked Coast
FROM The Atlantic
WHEREVER YOU LOOK on this coast, you see a Wyeth vignette. It was an icy diamond-bright day in late winter in midcoast Maine, under a cloudless sky, the tide ebbing from the ice chunks that encrusted the rocky shore like blocks of salt, the north wind whipping whitecaps across the bay. This stretch of water, the lower end of Penobscot Bay, known and charted and fished by Europeans for more than four hundred years, once teemed with cod as it now teems with lobsters. As for the particular details of seaside granite and tangled kelp and white clapboard houses and driftwood washed smooth by waves, it is clearly Wyeth country. The man known locally as Andy once lived and worked j
ust down the peninsula, at Port Clyde. His painting The Patriot depicts the father of the man who still runs the nearby sawmill.
I was visiting a lobsterman friend to ask a favor. This man greeting me would himself suit a Wyeth portrait. He was warmly dressed, a heavy coat over a down vest, cord trousers, rubber knee-high boots, and a fisherman’s thick rubber gloves. He was crouched in the sun on his own dock, surrounded by tall stacks of lobster traps.
“What are you doing here?” And he laughed, because he’s used to seeing me in the summer. I laughed too, hearing “doo-in hee-yah.”
I said I needed him to run me out in his boat to an offshore island where I had to transact a little business. Of course he said yes, no problem, did I want to go right now before the tide ebbed away?
We were soon on the water, the wind cutting my face, the islands glittering around us. The last ice age carved this coast, created the narrow south-trending peninsulas and lumpy granite islands, all of it now softened by tall spruce trees, “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” as one of its literary chroniclers described it. In summer these trees perfume the coast and support osprey nests. My friend was telling me how this had been an awfully snowy winter. It was not a complaint—for months it had been perfect for snowmobiling up near Rangeley. Oh, yes, very cold, but he had warm gear and added that one day (“I am serious”) a few years ago on that trail, the temperature was 37 below zero, Fahrenheit. And he laughed.
