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  NINETEEN fifty-four was designated as the Marian Year. Throughout the Republic of Ireland special events were held in honour of the Virgin Mary. Thousands of children bedecked her altars with thousands of flowers and sang hymns in praise of Christ’s gentle mother. Barry took part with skinned knees plainly visible below his short trousers, and afterwards he eagerly returned to playing soldiers with his friends.

  He was always the general.

  When he pointed his finger at someone and went “Bang,” they obediently fell on the ground and rolled around moaning and groaning. In the end everyone walked away.

  IN March, Ursula was furious to read in the papers that Northern Ireland Catholics on their way south to take part in the Marian celebrations had been savagely assaulted by sectarian thugs in a village called Portadown.

  Chapter Two

  ON the sixth day of April, 1954, Ursula Halloran had carried a long, bulky parcel into the kitchen and set it on the table. Her fifteen-year-old son, Barry, wearing long trousers by now, had watched in fascination as she unwrapped layers of oiled cloth.

  His mother took a long look at his plump cheeks and rounded chin, as if it was the last time she would see her son as a child. Then she unfolded the final layer of fabric.

  Barry caught his breath.

  The rifle was old but not neglected; the stock was still polished, the barrel still gleamed. Ursula lifted the weapon and cradled it against her body for a moment, then handed it to Barry.

  The thrilling war stories the late Ned Halloran used to tell came flooding back to the boy. “Is this the rifle Granda carried in the IRA? The one he called his Fenian gun?”

  Ursula nodded. “It’s a short magazine Lee-Enfield .303 made during the First World War. Papa wanted me to give it to you on your fifteenth birthday, because that’s when boys in ancient Ireland took up arms.”

  Barry examined the rifle with fascination. “Winchester Repeating Arms Co., New Haven, Connecticut,” he read aloud from a small brass plate. “This was manufactured in America! How did Granda get it?”

  “One wouldn’t know.” Ursula’s lips tightened over her teeth. Barry recognised her expression; it meant she knew but would not tell.

  “Is there any ammunition to go with it?”

  She retrieved a cartridge box from among the wrappings. “So much time has passed, these may not be any good. Leave them in the box.”

  Barry sighted along the barrel and swung it slowly around the kitchen. “Granda’s rifle, and now you’re mine,” he murmured to the stock pressed against his cheek. “All mine. What shall we do together?”

  The answer sprang to Ursula’s lips—fight for a united Ireland—but she choked the words back. The trumpets still sounded in her blood, but she was not prepared to give Barry to the cause. Not yet, when he was so young. Not yet, when he was her only child. She caught hold of the rifle barrel and pushed it toward the floor. “You’re not going to do anything with this rifle, young man! That’s history you hold in your hands. Pack it away and take good care off it so you can pass it on to your own children someday.”

  Barry was always obedient—to the degree that suited him. He took very good care of the rifle. He, who usually was as quick and impatient as any other boy his age, painstakingly disassembled the weapon, thoroughly cleaned and oiled every part, and then taught himself to put it back together again. But he did not pack the Lee-Enfield away.

  A few weeks later one of the hired men discovered him in the farthest corner of the farthest pasture, shooting pebbles off the top of a field wall.

  Gerry Ryan ambled over to watch.

  A short, thickset man in his sixties, Ryan had a huge nose that sprawled at random across his face. He and his brother, George, had worked on the Halloran farm for many years; Barry had grown up under their avuncular gaze. “You make those pebbles dance for sure,” Ryan commented. “First time I took you bird huntin’ with my old shotgun I knew you had a keen eye. What else you plannin’ to shoot with that rifle?”

  “Vermin,” Barry said without taking his eye off the target.

  Ryan raised an elbow and gave his armpit a satisfying scratch. “That’s Ned Halloran’s old rifle, I’d know it anywhere. He carried it in the war against the Tans,e and then against the Free Starters.f Could tell some stories itself, that gun could.”

  “You won’t say anything to Ursula about my firing it, will you? She told me not to.”

  Gerry Ryan looked offended. “I know how to hold my whist. Always have done. Never told all I knew about your granda, neither.”

  “Did you know a lot?”

  “Happen I did. I saw things, heard things. Nothing he told me outright, mind. He always played his cards close to his vest.”

  “Exactly what do you know about him and those days?” Barry asked eagerly.

  “Why you askin’?”

  “I’m curious about, well, about what makes people the way they are. People like my mother, and Aunt Eileen, and you, and …”

  “Get your nose broke,” Ryan said curtly, “shoving it into other people’s business.”

  IN 1955, twelve thousand members of the anti-Catholic Orange Order staged a triumphalist march through a solidly Catholic area in south County Down. Jeering at terrified residents, beating a relentless tattoo on massive Lambeg drums. The march was led by Brian Faulkner, a member of British Parliament, and protected by three hundred armed policemen of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Better known as the RUC, that organisation saw itself as both a police constabulary and a paramilitary force answerable to the unionist majority.

  The following day The Boys went looking for their rusted guns.

  MEANWHILE the Republic of Ireland was being admitted to the United Nations. The Irish delegation avoided any mention of the rampant sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The government, now led by Taoiseach John A. Costello, was making a concerted effort to attract American tourists and did not want to call attention to violence anywhere on the island. The image being sold was one of thatched cottages, leprechauns, and forty shades of green.

  BARRY Halloran, who did not live in a thatched cottage and knew better than to believe in leprechauns, was aware of at least forty shades of green. Maybe more. He loved the land unthinkingly. The shape of the hills, the weight of the wind, were dear to him. He never said anything so fanciful to his friends, though; boys did not talk like that.

  STUDENTS in Hungary initiated an uprising in 1956, rebelling against the oppressive Soviet regime that had occupied their country since the end of World War Two. Lacking sophisticated weaponry, the would-be revolutionaries hurled invective, paving stones, and Molotov cocktails. The Hungarians called them freedom fighters. The Soviet Union called them terrorists.

  That year Irish audiences were flocking to see a documentary titled Mise Éire.g The film was made up of newsreel footage from the 1916 Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. No leprechauns here, only stark reality in monochrome. Legendary men and women straight from the history books came alive again on the screen, ready to sacrifice their lives for their country’s freedom.

  With the film’s transcendent musical score, composer Seán O Riada redefined Irish music. His majestic, luminous vision of Ireland made people fall in love with their own country.

  Ursula took Barry to see Mise Éire at the cinema in Ennis. “That’s where Papa fought in 1916,” she whispered when the General Post Office appeared on the screen. “Mama was with him. It was the adventure of a lifetime.”

  Spellbound, Barry watched as the GPO collapsed in flames and the centre of Dublin was demolished by British artillery.

  These horrific scenes were followed by grainy images of the Irish rebels being marched to jail at gunpoint, grimy and smoke stained and staggering with weariness. Ursula clutched Barry’s arm. “There’s your grandfather! The thin lad in shirtsleeves.”

  As if he could hear her across the years, a young man with a bloody bandage wrapped around his forehead turned and gazed straight at the camera. A shiver r
an up Barry’s spine. He’s looking at me!

  When Barry Halloran stepped from the darkness of the theatre into a blaze of afternoon sunshine, he felt the entire weight of republican tradition like a hand on the small of his back, propelling him forward.

  THE big radio in its highly varnished case glowed and crackled in the parlour. Many people kept their wireless machines in the kitchen, the heart of the Irish house, but Ursula would not allow domestic noises to drown out news broadcasts. The news was sacrosanct.

  Besides, the kitchen was Great-aunt Eileen’s territory. Therefore Ursula claimed the parlour.

  When it was announced that Irish representatives had, for the first time, taken seats in the General Assembly of the United Nations, Ursula gave a cry that was heard throughout the house.

  “Robert Emmet!” she cried gleefully.

  Barry came running into the room. “What’s wrong?”

  “Emmet’s famous speech in the dock! Surely Papa taught it to you. Before the British hanged Robert Emmet he said, ‘When my country takes her place amongst the nations of the earth, then, and not’til then, let my epitaph be written.’1 Now’s the time, Barry; now someone can write Emmet’s epitaph.”

  Her eyes were shining. Her enthusiasm was contagious.

  ON the fifth of November, 1956, Soviet tanks were rumbling through the streets of Budapest. Ursula and Barry listened together to the final desperate transmission from Radio Budapest.

  “Help Hungary … Help … Help … Help …”2

  Then silence.

  Mother and son looked at each other. “That’s the story of Ireland,” Ursula remarked. “Since the sixteenth century every desperate attempt to regain our freedom was crushed. Until—”

  “Until 1916 inspired the War of Independence in 1921,” Barry interrupted. “And now we’re free.”

  “Almost free,” his mother replied. “There’s still a way to go.”

  That evening Barry went upstairs and took Ned’s rifle from under his bed. Breathlessly balanced between boy and man, he sat looking at the weapon as a cold blue twilight filled the room.

  IN the halcyon years of Irish nationalism, the patriotism and fervour of the people had been a model for the rest of the world,3 The policies of early nationalist governments, however, had not lived up to the dream of an egalitarian republic. Economic and social disaster resulted.

  The 1950s were grim years in the Republic, blighted by chronic unemployment and endemic tuberculosis. America’s post-war technological boom had not reached Ireland. Over one hundred thousand homes had telephones by 1953, but vacuum cleaners were unknown. A motorised farm vehicle was an object of envy. On countless small farms hay and grain were still being harvested with a scythe as they had been since the Bronze Age.

  A married woman was expected to devote all her energies to home and family. She could not buy property or open an account in the local market without her husband’s signature. If her husband failed to support her economically—even if he abused her physically—there was little she could do about it under the law. This attitude toward women was not unique to Ireland. In 1954, Commander Hatherill of Scotland Yard remarked, when assessing the annual crime figures in London, “There are only about twenty murders a year in London and not all are serious—some are just husbands killing their wives.”

  In Ireland a labourer was lucky to earn five pounds a month. Eamon de Valera, the dominant Irish political figure in the first half of the twentieth century, had envisioned a Celtic utopia, but young people found his frugal pastoralism stifling. Lack of employment and social stagnation drove them to seek their futures elsewhere. Emigration soared as more than twenty-five thousand a year left the country for America, for Australia, for England. For jobs. Neither the government nor the Church made any effort to stop them. The Republic of Ireland was hemorrhaging the generation that should have been its future.

  A common sight was a single gardah cycling along an otherwise empty road where nothing ever happened. In the garda station his sergeant would be doing what shop owners and cottage owners were doing in every town: standing in the doorway gazing idly out on streets where nothing ever happened.

  This was the Ireland young Barry Halloran knew, and it was not good enough; not good enough by half.

  THE day after the Hungarian revolution was crushed beneath the treads of Red Army tanks, Barry slipped out of the house before dawn. His mother was still asleep when he tiptoed past her door, carrying his boots in his hand. I’m not a child anymore so I don’t have to ask her permission. She’d approve anyway, no one’s a more ardent republican than Ursula.

  As he strapped the rifle to his bicycle only the last stars were watching. Are you up there too, Granda? Can you see me?

  In addition to his grandfather’s rifle, Barry carried something else of Ned Halloran’s. Ned had rarely been found without a book of poetry in his pocket, a habit he had inherited from his own father. As Barry set out on his new adventure, a copy of the poems of Francis Ledwidge was in his back pocket.

  He cycled to a farmstead east of Ennis that rumour identified as a secret IRA camp. No sentry was on duty. Barry searched several outbuildings before the sound of snoring led him to a dilapidated cowshed. From the doorway he made out several dim shapes lying on the ground, wrapped in blankets. Abruptly one of them sat up. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded as he reached for his pistol.

  “I’m Barry Halloran and I wannabe a Volunteer!” Barry’s words tumbled over one another in his haste to get them out.

  Séamus McCoy glowered at him. McCoy was short in stature but stronger than he looked. A little weary, a little worn; a hard man with some of the hard edges rubbed off. “I’m the officer in charge,” he told Barry, “and you nearly got yourself killed walking in here like that. We don’t like surprises and we don’t welcome uninvited callers.”

  “I’m not a stranger, I’m Ned Halloran’s grandson. I’ve even brought his rifle with me. It’s out of ammunition but I thought you’d be able to …”

  “Stand over there,” McCoy snapped, “and keep your gob shut. I won’t talk Army business’til I have my boots on.”

  Barry self-consciously shifted his weight from one foot to the other while McCoy and the three men with him dressed. Because they slept in their clothes, dressing consisted of putting on footgear and coats. One man then went outside to build a fire and make tea. Another opened a canvas backpack and took out some bread and hard cheese. “Give the lad a wee bit too,” McCoy said. “He must be hungry.”

  Barry observed that the man’s accent, with its flattened vowels and rising inflection, was not local. Northern Ireland? “Thank you, sir. I didn’t have any breakfast before I came away.”

  One of the other men sniggered. Barry heard him whisper derisively, “Sir!”

  McCoy said, “You’d best eat hearty before you go.”

  “Go?” Barry’s heart sank. “But in Ennis I heard you were looking for recruits.”

  “Aye, you heard right. GHQ sent me down here to find a couple of good Clare men. Men, mind you, not lads with fuzz on their faces.”

  “But I’m eighteen.”

  McCoy looked sceptical. “And I’m the pope’s daughter. When’s your eighteenth birthday? The truth, now.”

  “Ah … next April.”

  “Think seventeen’s old enough to be a soldier, do you?”

  Barry felt his ears redden. “In ancient Ireland boys were warriors at fifteen.”

  “I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there myself.” McCoy busied himself with lighting a cigarette while he covertly assessed the potential recruit. Although the newcomer had a boy’s unfinished face, he was well over six feet tall. Broad shoulders, big feet; he’s probably still growing, McCoy concluded. Might make a hell of a soldier. Scare ‘em to death with his size anyway.

  A tin cup brimming with black tea was thrust at the officer, interrupting his ruminations. He scowled down at the brew. “No milk, Martin?”

  “No cow.”

&nbs
p; “But this is a farm, damn it.”

  “No sugar, either,” Martin said. “War’s hell, ain’t it?”

  Between puffs on his cigarette and swallows of scalding tea, McCoy told Barry, “We’re opening a new campaign in the north, mostly along the border. It’ll be called Operation Harvest. You know what flying columns are, Seventeen?”

  Barry’s knowledge of Irish history had been acquired at Ned Halloran’s knee. He could hardly wait to show how much he knew. “They’re mobile attack units consisting of two dozen men. The original flying column was developed by an American-born Fenian, Captain Mackey, who used it against the British in Cork in the last century.4 Michael Collins took up the idea and ran rings around the British in the War of Independence.”

  When McCoy smiled, the baring of teeth in his unshaven face gave him the expression of a jovial wolf. “Fair play to you, lad; that’s one less lesson the Army’ll have to teach you. We want our people to know Irish history. It explains why we’re fighting and what we’re fighting for. We’ll be at war against Britain until they finish giving our country back.

  “But for your information, Collins wasn’t the only one responsible for forcing them to the truce table in 1921. He operated mainly in Dublin. The lads down the country ran their own war and a good fist they made of it.

  “As for the future, initially this new campaign will employ four flying columns: Pearse, Clarke, Teeling, and Lynch. We plan to develop more later. The overall size of a column’s been reduced to fifteen or so, but those fifteen have to be choice. We’re waiting for units from Cork and Limerick to join us to make up the Lynch column.”

  “Named for Liam Lynch?”

  McCoy squinted at Barry through a veil of cigarette smoke. “Aye. Commander of republican forces during the Civil War. Well, tomorrow I’ll be taking the Lynch column north for a period of training. Then I’ll turn them over to their permanent O/C for active service.