Blood-Dark Track (37 page)

Brendan drove on along the bending, tree-darkened road that took us through the Monaghan countryside. After a long silence, he said slowly, ‘Joseph, did you have to do military service in the English army?’

‘How do you mean?’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s right,’ Brendan said, still looking ahead, dawning comprehension in his tone, ‘you wouldn’t.’

Another silence descended. Now I was fuming, too, furious at the questioning of my patriotism – of my Irish nationality, even – and of my right to speak on the national question. Wasn’t my opinion as valid as anybody’s? Wasn’t it my country, too?

Then, looking at it from Brendan’s point of view, I could see why he might have reacted in the way he had. There are few things more provocative to Irish ears – even ears attached to a person of very mild views – than the sound of a voice in an English accent pronouncing on Ireland, a voice that packs into its drawling vowels centuries of racial condescension and seemingly ineradicable and wilful misconceptions about the rights and aspirations of the Irish people. For an Irishman, it can sometimes seem that there is no arguing with a voice of that kind, because it is precisely the voice of prejudice against arguments made by an Irishman. Did it lie in my English-sounding mouth to question Brendan? Why should he be confident that I was capable of understanding his viewpoint, that I was not regarding him through the eyes of a blinkered, indoctrinated member of the English establishment?

The fact was, I had spent no more that a year of my adult life in Ireland. As soon after my birth as they were able to, my parents removed me from Cork and set off on a global journey that took the family to Africa and Asia and finally, when I was six years old, continental Europe. When my father’s project in Rotterdam came to an end in 1975, the family stayed put while he worked in the fjords of Norway, the Borneo jungles and the Arabian deserts, flying back as often as he was able. Aside from a couple of years at the French Lycée in The Hague, I was educated at the British School in The
Netherlands, an expensive yet unpretentious day school, where uniforms were worn and the English educational curriculum was followed. The students were mainly the children of diplomats and of scientists and technocrats working for large enterprises like the European Space and Technology Centre, Shell Oil, and Unilever. It was a multinational set-up: I had British, Italian, Gambian, Australian, Portuguese friends. We were all in the same boat, pleasantly adrift from our native land. Necessarily, our relationship with that place was, to a greater or lesser degree, fantastical. For the non-British, the matter was doubly complicated, since in addition to cultivating an expatriate conception of our place of origin we had to construct a relationship with England, whose culture and educational qualifications we were acquiring at school and whose universities and jobs beckoned. For those of us from two different non-British countries, things were triply unstraightforward; quadruply so if, like me and my siblings, you spoke Dutch and hung out for many years with Dutch friends; and, finally, quintuply tricky if, on top of the aforementioned complexities, you spoke French at home.

But it never occurred to me, faced with Turkish, English, Dutch and French possibilities, to relinquish or even question my identity as an Irishman – not even when, walking as a teenager in The Hague, a couple of Dutch girls I’d never seen in my life shouted ‘
Vuile Turk!
’ (Filthy Turk!) at me. I stoutly refused, as a cub scout of 1st The Hague, to utter the pack’s ritual oath of loyalty to the Queen of England. I supported Irish national sports teams, fantasized about an all-Ireland soccer team – imagine McIlroy, McGrath, Whiteside and Brady in the same XI – listened to the Irish records I found at home and, of course, pored over books by Irish writers. Then, in 1980, my father’s work took him to Aughinish Island, Co. Limerick, as project manager in the construction of a huge alumina processing plant. In January 1982, he got me a job there, too, as an unskilled ‘general operative’. It was a political education of a kind. On my first morning at work I joined the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and on my first afternoon I went on strike: some welders had been
dismissed by my father for refusing to work in the cold, bright weather, and the shop stewards had called on the men to ‘hit the gate’ in sympathy. So we did. When I got home that evening, I asked my father what I should do. ‘You’ll stay on strike until further notice,’ he said. ‘I’ll not have any scabs in this house. One more thing,’ he said, opening his newspaper as he sat down on the sofa. ‘You’re fired.’ A day or two later, everybody was reinstated and went back to work.

My Ireland was six months spent in Limerick, a sidekick to Mick O’Sullivan, a mechanic, and Eugene Meaney, an electrician, kind and able men who tolerated the boss’ clueless son and patiently milked him at lunch-time poker. By day I lugged toolboxes up tanks, changed the tyres of cranes, and wandered around dazed by tanks, pipes, cables and the innards of malfunctioning machinery. By night, having travelled home in a pick-up truck full of muddied men who made the sign of the cross each time a church or graveyard was passed, I holed up with my father in the Old Rectory of a village called Askeaton. It was a beautiful Georgian house with stables, a faded grass tennis court in the garden, ancient meat-hooks hanging in the cellars, high walls, and a few acres of tall woods where dark birds roosted. My father rented it from the Church of Ireland. It was one of the imposing Anglo-Irish houses whose occupants had for so long thrown a fine net over all Ireland. It was as far away as you could get in Ireland from the Bogside, and I felt at home there.

After Limerick, I went to Cambridge University (in narrow preference to Trinity College, Dublin, which my brother and sister later attended) to study law. Even though I had spent barely a month of my life in England, it was a natural move. My far-off affiliation to Ireland continued as before, and when John Hume came to Cambridge to talk about the need to create an inclusive Ireland (an Ireland that could accommodate a mongrel like me), I was there, cheering him on; and when the time came, in the spring of 1985, my final year, to write a dissertation on ethics and the criminal law, I solemnly set myself the task of answering the question, ‘Is the IRA justified in killing people?’ – thereby becoming the
latest in the generations of O’Neills and Lynches to ponder the means and ends of Irish freedom.

As is so often the case with political ideas formed early in one’s life, the conclusions I reached had a lasting influence on me. I concluded, first, that although nationalists in the North might be obliged to obey the laws of Northern Ireland, under no prominent and well-recognized liberal theory of political obligation – theories of social contract and consent (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc.), or rights theories, or justice and equality theories (Rawls, Dworkin, etc.), or theories of utility – were they
obligated
to. Second, that Northern Ireland was accordingly a morally wrong political entity. Third, it followed that the unionist devotion to the preservation of the status quo was, prima facie, morally wrong and nationalists had good cause to seek to change the status quo. Fourth (on the footing that nationalists were not racists and affirmed the
equal
right to autonomy of national groups), any change that failed to take account of unionist autonomy – for example, a Dublin-governed united Ireland brought about by force, without unionist consent – would substitute the oppression of one national group for another. Fifth, violence directed at bringing about the unification of Ireland by force rather than by consensus was accordingly morally wrong. Sixth, violence directed merely at disturbing the status quo so as to provoke change short of unification (i.e., change that would reduce the inequality in the autonomy of the two national groups in Northern Ireland) was also wrong, since it could not be demonstrated that non-homicidal methods would be inadequately provocative. This was the point I’d try to make to Brendan; but as things turned out, I was later to have very real doubts it.

Of course, my analysis diverged from orthodox republican doctrine. Most importantly, it was a tenet not just of republicanism but of nationalism – the non-violent mainstream notion that a united Ireland is desirable and natural end – that the Protestant population did not really form a separate national group; and that, although they
perceived
themselves to be different from the nationalist Catholic majority (when I wrote my dissertation, only 8 per cent of Protestants identified themselves as ‘Irish’) and strongly
asserted the same – on classic grounds: religion, ethnicity (Anglo-Scottish), political history (loyalty to the Crown), language (their national tongue was not Irish) – their self-perception was at bottom the product of false consciousness ‘carefully fostered’, in the words of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence, ‘by an alien government’. This notion might have had some credence in 1916, but in modern times it was so obviously fantastical that, it seemed to me, no rational person could in all honesty subscribe to it – or inhabit the ideological construct it underpinned.

For a long time I believed that the strength of my analysis was that it was rational, deductive, and non-protagonistic. It didn’t well up from inherited feelings of loss and outrage about the division of Ireland or from a received sense that the armed struggle for freedom was prima facie virtuous or evil. Nor did it bother me that I’d never been to the North, because the convictions of many, if not most, Irish people on the subject of the North crystallized before they had set foot there (Jim O’Neill was a case in point). But in the course of my visits to Ireland, I began to have second thoughts. First of all, I realized that the views I’d fastidiously held for a dozen years were inductive and proceeded, in reality, from a gut feeling that the violence I’d observed was for the worst – a gut feeling that could easily have resulted from my participation in British culture; and second, I wondered if I had taken sufficient account of the fact that the virtues of long-term political violence are rarely immediately apparent. What if I had overlooked something – missed, in my narrow rationalism, some wider truth? After all, why should my gut feelings be any more reliable than those of the republicans I’d met? It was not simply that these republicans were obviously kind and good people: it was, as I saw it, that they were undoubtedly
superior to me as moral agents
. They were conscientious and possessed of a sense of societal duty that was much stronger than mine. My grandmother and my uncle Brendan, for example, had spoken up and acted in relation to apartheid and to the rights of workers and ethnic minorities. I, meanwhile, had followed the self-serving, morally unvigorous paths of the business lawyer and novelist; I had enacted no change, done no good, made
no effort on behalf of others. What it came down to was this: if their ethical intuitions were so accurate in civilian life, who was to say they had not got it right in relation to the question of political violence in Ireland?

Sitting in the car with Brendan, stewing on our disagreeable exchange, I gradually calmed down. It didn’t require much of an imaginative leap on my part to see that there
was
something fundamentally enraging about having foreign soldiers in your country, pointing guns at you and interrogating you and making you account for your movements; and, anxious to mend fences with my uncle – and sensing that it was somehow my place to give ground – I said as much to him.

We drove on towards Dublin and checked into a hotel in Rathmines. We ate dinner together, drank a bottle of wine, and played a couple of games of snooker. Towards the end of the evening, Brendan said, ‘Joseph, I didn’t answer your question today. The truth is, I don’t want the unionists to suffer like nationalists have done; I don’t want to force them. What I meant to say was that there is a foreign army in my country, and I think I have the right to take on that army and to seek to repel it. I claim a right to do that. It’s that basic.’ His eyes were wet. ‘When my father was dying, he told me he’d like to be propped up on a car seat with a machine gun in his hands and to charge that way into British soldiers. He wanted to die like that, usefully, killing as many as he could.’

‘I
blame the Camp for his sickness,’ Grandma said to me when I got back to Cork.

The trouble started two years before my grandfather’s death. At first, he thought it was an ordinary stomach ailment and he went to see Dr O’Connor, who was retired. He examined Jim, put him on tablets, and told him to see Dr Barker, my grandmother’s physician. Dr Barker referred Jim to the hospital, and there his true condition was diagnosed.

Jim continued to go to work through his illness, even though the doctors had ordered him to rest. In February 1973, while in lodgings in Tarbert, Co. Limerick he was too unwell to eat the pig’s
head and onions served by his landlady. My uncle Terry, who had work to do in Limerick, caught a lift up from Cork and met his father for a drink. Terry took care to prolong his drink with his father until the last bus and train for Cork had gone. ‘How are you getting home?’ Jim asked his son. ‘You’ll have to drive me down,’ Terry said. Then he came out with it: ‘I came to bring you back, Dad. I’ll tell them tomorrow that you can’t work.’ ‘OK, then,’ my grandfather said quietly; which wasn’t like him.

It wasn’t long before Jim was being treated in hospital for days at a time. My father offered to fly him to a hospital in Switzerland, but Jim stayed on at the South Infirmary, in Cork. He spent the last five weeks of his life there, for a while sharing his private room with his youngest child, Fergus, who also needed medical attention. He fought against his illness to the last. On the morning of the day he died, my father proudly told me, my grandfather summoned the will to shave. He also received a visit from, of all people, a former guard at the Curragh Camp named Dan Daly.

My grandfather died on a Wednesday. He had never once uttered the name of his illness – cancer of the pancreas – and neither, out of solidarity with her husband, had my grandmother. On Friday, his body was removed from the hospital mortuary, where the family accepted sympathies. The funeral was on the Saturday. After Mass was said at Our Lady of Lourdes, Ballinlough, he was taken in a hearse to St Michael’s Cemetery, Blackrock. His sons shouldered him through green fields that are now lost under a housing estate. My father was not there, though. Coming from Abu Dhabi, where he’d driven a jeep across the desert to catch the first flight back, he was greatly upset to miss the funeral by hours.