Blood-Dark Track (33 page)

I was naturally struck, as Shamir told me his story, by the extreme contrast between the prison careers of Yitzhak Shamir and Joseph Dakak – a contrast that corresponded to the extreme differences in their personal qualities and in their relationship to the political world. On the other hand, Yitzhak Shamir did have much in common with another fearless, politically monomaniacal and possibly lethal military internee, Jim O’Neill – a similarity which even extended to membership of guerrilla movements that had friendly dealings with the Nazis.

In its anti-British zeal, Lehi attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, who were viewed as mere ‘persecutors’. Towards the end of 1940, the leader of Lehi, Joseph Stern, sent an agent, Naftali Lubenchik, to Beirut to meet with von Hentig, a German Foreign Office official based in Vichy Syria. The meeting apparently
resulted in Stern’s agreement to active participation in the war on the German side on the condition that the aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement were recognized. After the Allied invasion of Syria in June 1941, Stern decided on a second mission to the Germans; he had in mind the very possible scenario of the Germans invading Egypt, the Turks surrendering to Hitler, and the British as a consequence being forced to evacuate Palestine. But the mission failed. The Lehi agent despatched to meet the Germans in December 1941 was arrested near Aleppo, and a few days later Joseph Stern was killed. Yitzhak Shamir, meanwhile, had joined the Stern Gang at precisely the time when Stern decided to continue his pro-German orientation.

I put to Shamir a remark attributed to him:
A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe one thing and one thing only – that by his act he will change the course of history
. Looking straight at me, Shamir said, ‘Active people in the underground are convinced it’s their duty to fight. It is very dangerous, and when people expose themselves to dangerous missions they have to be doubly convinced they are right.’ ‘Was every single one of the killings perpetrated by Lehi justified?’ ‘Without doubt,’ he said unhesitatingly. Shamir’s eyes were fixed on mine in a steady, practically hypnotic gaze. ‘We would not be here without that. We had to
fight
for the recognition by the world of our right to be masters of this country. Nobody was going to
give
us recognition. And we got it. When I came here as a twenty-year-old student in 1935, there were 300,000 Jews here – now there are four million. We have made large progress in spite of the fact that the British army, then an imperialist army, was against us, and all our Arab neighbours attacked us. In spite of this, we won the war. It’s a miracle: this is our country!’ He gave me a happy smile. ‘It is written in the Bible that all would come back, and it became true.’

That was quite an accomplishment he credited himself with, I thought – and a quite stunning act of narrative to place himself, in effect, alongside the legendary protagonists of the Bible. I asked him about the Palestinians. ‘There are twenty Arab countries here,’ Shamir said calmly. ‘They are all full of Arabs. They are all part of
the Arab movement. If an Arab wants to live in an Arab independent country, he can go there. Jordan was a part of Palestine and now it is an independent Arab country with a Palestinian majority. There is not, therefore, a Palestinian nation without a state. But if they want to live here,’ Shamir said, ‘they have to live in a dignified way. We accept autonomy, and we propose self-government in a federal state, not an independent state. The Palestinians can handle their own rules and rights except for two issues: foreign relations and security matters.’ He leaned forward and gently battered the table with a closed fist. ‘This country belongs to us historically. We have the right to bring in Jewish people.’ Shamir leaned back in his chair. ‘We had a double aim: the independence and assembly of the Jewish people in this country. This has still not been implemented. We only have a third of the people. We
have
to bring in the other two-thirds’ – here he leaned forward and once more began thumping his desk – ‘otherwise we will not be able to resist. It is quite a mission, to bring everyone back. I believe in it. I believe we will get it done.’

I sensed what a formidable, single-minded adversary this octogenarian would still be. I was also struck by how seductive he was. I had never spent a morning tête-à-tête with a famous former head of state before, one who listened carefully to what I said and agreeably asked for my opinions from time to time. I didn’t feel like mentioning Lehi’s involvement with the Nazis, or pressing him about his strange ideas concerning the rights of Palestinians, whom he had once compared to cockroaches. It occurred to me that the last time a member of my family had been exposed to this brand of charisma was when Joseph Dakak had found himself with Franz von Papen.

‘Do you know the Irish language?’ Shamir asked with a smile. ‘It interests me. We had the same phenomenon with Hebrew, and now, as you see, it’s alive.’ He gave me another cordial smile and asked whether I was myself involved in the Republican movement. I shook my head. ‘You know,’ Shamir said, ‘when you are in the underground, the support of the community is most important.’ He gave me a slow twinkling grin, and it seemed for a moment that he
was going to wink. ‘A lot of the British police in those days were Irishmen – and not all were very devoted to their service.’ After a slight pause for effect, he continued: ‘We have been very interested by the IRA. When I was in the underground, I read everything I could about the Irish confrontation with Britain, since Britain, at that time, was our common enemy. I read a lot about 1916, I read about de Valera and Collins. My pseudonym in the underground was Michael, you know, after Michael Collins.’ Shamir said, ‘They fought a long time, without result. All the Irish resistance movement was full of tragedies.’

6

Father … was a proud man and a high-principled one, though what his principles were based on was more than I ever discovered.

Frank O’Connor,
An Only Child

O
nce, while horsing around at home in The Hague, my father grabbed my thirteen-year-old brother by the wrists and held him captive. ‘This is an old IRA trick,’ my father gloated; ‘I’ve got you now.’ My brother responded by simply banging his wrists together and bringing about a stinging collision between my father’s hands. My father let go with a painful howl that turned into laughter – at himself, and at his son’s devastating subversion of the mythic organization he’d invoked.

For my father to identify himself with the IRA, even jokingly, was unprecedented, and for an instant a connection – faint but nevertheless a little shocking – arose between him and the sinister body of men responsible for the bombings, kidnappings, robberies and killings which Dutch TV and BBC Radio brought to our attention. Aside from some incidents in Germany in 1978, the violence all took place in Ireland and Britain – that is, until 22 March 1979, when the British ambassador to The Netherlands, Sir Richard
Sykes, and his footman were shot dead in front of the ambassador’s residence in The Hague. As in the Somerville shooting, two unknown gunmen ran away and were never caught. Even though Sykes was, at the time of his death, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of my school, the British School in The Netherlands – whose assembly hall was named the Sir Richard Sykes Memorial Hall – his killing quickly faded from my thoughts. Certainly, I didn’t in any way link my father to that event. I had heard my father once or twice call himself a republican, but he obviously used the term in a loose and private sense, because he certainly didn’t support the Provisional IRA or sing rebel songs or make anti-English cracks or go in for emotional recapitulations of Ireland’s sad history. He would sometimes heatedly point out the hypocrisy of British pronouncements on Ireland, but there his visible embroilment in Irish nationalism would end. There was nothing radical or revolutionary or unlawful about him. My father was not a rebel.

Then, nearly twenty years after his friendly scuffle with my brother, I learned that my father had, after all, been in the Irish Republican Army.

The revelation came towards the end of that drive we took together from London to Oxford in 1996, a couple of intimate hours during which my father – who was reflective and open about his day-to-day thoughts and feelings, but not a man prone to reminiscing – disclosed more to me about the early formative events of his life than he had in the previous thirty years. The disclosures began after I asked him whether he knew that his uncle Jack Lynch had been in charge of the bombing campaign in England in 1939. ‘No, I didn’t know,’ he answered, unamused. After a pause, he added, ‘Did
you
know that I was in the IRA?’ A silence fell in the car. We were south-east of Oxford, in a deeply English landscape of orderly fields and low, cultivated hills. The silence continued as I mentally circled the new information like a stroller who has happened on one of those old mines, buried for decades, that English beaches occasionally regurgitate. Then my father said, ‘Son, I’d like to talk about how I saw it, about my perspective; I’m afraid you might have a romantic view of the whole business. In reality, it was
seedy and mediocre. There was no philosophizing, no discussion, no rational identification of objectives and how to achieve them. Plus, there was incompetence. The officer in charge of one meeting arrived half an hour late – and this was the guy in charge! I said to him, “How are we supposed to accomplish anything if we start half an hour late?” It was a shambles, it was amateurish. After about a month or so, I just stopped going to the meetings.’

I asked my father whether my grandfather had pushed him towards the IRA. He shook his head. ‘No. Nobody asked me to join, or even suggested it to me. I joined by myself, when I was seventeen or so.’ ‘What made you do it?’ I asked, looking straight ahead at the traffic. My father hesitated. ‘I was curious, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘Everybody else was involved, and I wanted to find out what it was all about. Also, there was a great upswell of support for Sinn Féin at the time, and I was an idealist, a bit of a dreamer.’ He added, ‘I was never attracted to the violence, though. Maybe I’d seen too much of it growing up.’

We drove on. Not long afterwards, the spires of Oxford appeared in the rainy distance. A few minutes later, we met up with my mother and my sister Elizabeth, and later still we watched my sister receive a postgraduate degree, in law, with others from her college, Somerville.

It was hard to say whether my father’s truest act of rebellion lay in joining the IRA or in quitting it. A story my grandmother told illustrated the depth, and longevity, of his exposure to republicanism. Eileen O’Neill gave birth to my father, her third son, in her bedroom on 26 April 1939. Two nights later, Jim took the baby to see the priest in a borrowed IRA brigade car that was entirely covered in mud and slush: my grandfather had been out that evening in West Cork, leading exercises in snow that fell even as blossoms showed on the apple trees. Father Sheehan was not at the church, so Jim went round to his house. ‘There’s no christening today,’ Father Sheehan said; but after Jim flashed him a wad of money, the priest agreed to perform a baptism. My swaddled infant father was taken from the brigade car to the font and quickly assumed into Christendom – but not, it might be said, before he
had first been transported by Irish republicanism and set on a track that would lead, years later, to his presence in a car headed for the North, filled with guns and ammunition and men meaning to use them.

My father’s growth into political consciousness corresponded to his growing awareness of his father’s absence as an IRA internee. After Jim O’Neill returned to Cork in late 1944, when Kevin was five years old, the political clouds thickened still further in the domestic atmosphere – even though Jim, distraught by his experience of ostracism and infighting at the Curragh, did not rejoin the IRA and did not, in the face of his family’s financial crisis and the difficulties of returning to civilian life, have the means or will for activism. But my grandfather’s essential republicanism remained intact, and a couple of years after his release from the Curragh he began to support a party that promised to square the near-circle formed by his aversions for the institutional IRA, de Valera’s government, and British rule in the North. Clann na Poblachta, founded in the summer of 1946, was led by the barrister and IRA veteran (and future Nobel Peace Prize winner) Seán MacBride. Although the Clann recognized the governmental organs of Eire, with the consequence that membership meant expulsion from the IRA, it was dedicated to the unification of Ireland and the downfall of de Valera’s government, and for my grandfather this was enough. In 1948, to great general excitement, Clann na Poblachta had ten men elected to the Dáil and, in one of those bizarre hybrids generated by parliamentary pragmatism, formed a coalition government with the Blueshirt party, Fine Gael. In 1949, the Republic of Ireland came into being. The new State’s constitution laid claim to the whole of Ireland as the national territory, but in many republican eyes the declaration of statehood poured juridical and symbolic cement on the border with Northern Ireland. Jim was confirmed in his bitter distrust of constitutional politics, and by 1950 or so, the link between the IRA and the O’Neill family began to revive.

The IRA, at this time, was still trying to recover from the destructive effect of the internment years. No military action of
consequence had been taken for the best part of a decade and the membership was fragmented and demoralized. There was little for a volunteer to do other than to participate in commemorations, sell raffle tickets and political literature, and attend apparently pointless meetings. Then things slowly began to pick up. With the Dublin leadership exercising strict ideological control – the socialist activism that characterized pre-Emergency republicanism was no longer tolerated – the organization slowly regrouped. In June 1954, after the famous raid on Gough Barracks in Armagh, in which 250 rifles, seven Sten guns, nine Bren guns and forty training rifles were stolen from the enemy, the IRA once more caught the public imagination. In around August 1954, my uncles Jim (eighteen) and Brendan (seventeen) applied to join the IRA; in September 1954, they were duly sworn in. The brothers joined Cork No. 1 Brigade. ‘Because of who we were,’ Brendan said, ‘we had no problem getting in.’