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  “That’s what my mother says,” Barry whispered to the man sitting next to him.

  McCoy cleared his throat. “How much do any of you actually know about republicanism?”

  The men glanced self-consciously at one another. The moment lengthened, became uncomfortable. At last Barry spoke up. “My grandfather went to Saint Enda’s College and studied with Pádraic Pearse, so he knew all about Irish republicanism. He told me it began way back in—”

  “Don’t be making a show of yourself, Halloran,” one of the veterans interrupted.

  Barry was forcibly reminded of one of Ned Halloran’s favourite sayings: “A man never learns anything with his mouth open.”

  He said nothing else that evening. But he listened—avidly. One of the older veterans made a comment he committed to memory: “Wars are like women. They’re all the same yet every one’s different.”

  When I know enough women I’ll test that theory, Barry promised himself.

  A few days later he overheard McCoy remark, “That Seventeen’s a deep one. Doesn’t talk much, but you can tell he’s thinking underneath.” Although it was flattering, the comment made Barry vaguely uncomfortable. It placed him under an obligation to be more serious than he felt.

  Because the Army was fun.

  The Boys often sang to pass the time. While they were trudging across a ploughed field in County Roscommon, painfully negotiating the cart over the broken earth, a tenor from Cork led a rendition of “Four Green Fields” that brought a lump to Barry’s throat. My fourth green field will bloom once again, said she.

  Séamus McCoy broke the mood by demanding, “Don’t you lads know anything livelier?”

  With a receding hairline and permanently bloodshot eyes, McCoy seemed old to Barry. He was all of thirty-eight. But a common saying was, “It’s the old dog for the hard road.” The campaign in the north promised to be a hard road indeed. Séamus McCoy was determined to have his men well prepared before handing them over; prepared spiritually as well as physically.

  He insisted they attend Mass. “Slip quietly into church and stand at the back. Attract no attention and leave before anyone else does, lads. As for confession … best not. For the sake of your fellow Volunteers say nothing to outsiders.”

  URSULA Halloran was a rebel. From time to time she tried to shock Eileen Mulvaney out of her unquestioning Catholicism. “Institutionalised religion is a poor substitute for spirituality, Eileen. People should listen to the spirit within themselves, that’s the voice of God. It doesn’t come from some male spinster in a long dress.”

  “Och now, that’s not fair.” The older woman knew she could not debate Ned’s educated daughter. Her defensive technique was to let her lips quiver and her eyes fill with tears.

  “I blame Eamon de Valera,” Ursula countered, warming to the topic. “He fought to free Ireland from England in 1916, only to hand the country over to the Church as soon as he got into power.”

  “Sure we’ve always belonged to the Church,” Eileen said.

  “That’s what’s wrong. The Church is supposed to belong to its people. But for centuries the English forced the Irish to be deferential until it became part of our nature. Now that quality has delivered us to McQuaid’s theological terrorism.” Ursula liked that phrase. She said it again, savouring the words: “Theological terrorism. McQuaid’s policies are designed to protect the institution, not to enhance the life of the spirit. Anyone who doesn’t agree with them is publicly condemned from the altar.

  “Fear and abnegation, that’s what the Church in this country demands of us. It’s not like that in other countries. I’ve been to Europe, I’ve seen with my own eyes what Catholicism is like in places like Italy and Switzerland. It’s joyous! Not here, though. In Ireland people are not only frightened of the clergy, they’re even afraid of their own bodies. And who taught us to be that way? The priests!

  “Do you think it’s natural for men to sit on one side in the church and their wives on the other, as if they didn’t sleep in the same bed at night? Or for boys and girls to have to enter the school by different doors? Is it an act of Christian charity when the priest reads out in public how much each family gave to the collection, shaming those who could not afford to give enough—in his opinion? The Church does everything it can to keep us terrified.”

  Ursula had proved that she was not afraid. She had borne a son out of wedlock and raised him in defiance of both the Church and social convention. When she met a priest in town she held her head up proudly and looked him right in the eyes.

  Usually it was the priest who looked away first.

  Yet Ursula had insisted that Barry have a Catholic upbringing. At first the Church was glad to have him, seeing him as a sort of token penitence on the part of his mother. He had even spent a year as an altar boy in surplice and soutane—until dismissed by the parish priest. “Your nephew has too much energy to serve on the altar,” the priest told Eileen. “It’s like trying to contain a whirlwind in a bottle.”

  “Don’t think this means you can get out of Mass and midweek Benediction,” Ursula had warned Barry. “We live in a Catholic country. Whatever about me, I don’t want you to grow up feeling like an outsider.”

  Yet Barry, fatherless in a patriarchal country, an only child in a land of large families, a dreamer given to wandering off by himself, did feel like an outsider. Until the moment when he stood on a frozen hillside in County Leitrim and Feargal O’Hanlon punched his shoulder.

  WHEN the column moved off from the deserted village, Feargal and Barry walked together. Feargal, two years older than Barry, was a merry young man with a lopsided smile. His unfailing good nature had already made him popular with the rest of the column.

  As the pair strode along he asked, “D’ye play much football, Seventeen?”

  “Some. You?”

  “Senior for Monaghan,” O’Hanlon said proudly. “We were almost unbeatable last year.”

  “Good on you. Actually I’m more of a hurling man myself.”

  Feargal glanced sideways at his companion. “You have that look about you. Clever and quick for such a tall fellow. But …”

  “But what?”

  “To tell the truth, you have the oddest ears I ever saw.”

  Barry took no offence. “Inherited’em from my father. His ears came to a peak at the top too, or so I’m told.”

  “Is he dead then?”

  “He is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Feargal murmured. He said no more on the subject. A person never pried into another’s grief.

  As a small boy Barry had simply accepted that his father was dead, in the way young children accept everything adults tell them. When he grew old enough to ask questions Ursula’s replies were unsatisfying. “What was my father like?” elicited only, “He was a good man.”

  That was not enough of a description. “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, do I look like him?”

  “A little.”

  “How?”

  “You have his ears.”

  “What else?” Barry persisted. “What about his hair?”

  “Redder than yours, with less gold in it.”

  “Was his name Halloran too?”

  The flesh around Ursula’s eyes tightened. “His name was Cassidy. Finbar Cassidy.”

  “So you’re Mrs. Cassidy?”

  “I was never Mrs. Cassidy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I did not choose to marry.” She clamped her mouth shut. There was to be no further discussion.

  Barry questioned both Ned and Eileen but could not reconstruct his father from their memories. Neither had ever met Finbar Cassidy. “Leave it be,” Ned had advised. “Your mother will tell you what she wants you to know.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk about him.”

  “Then you must respect her wishes. Perhaps someday she’ll change her mind.”

  BRILLIANT in black and white plumage, a magpie ali
t on the path of the two Volunteers and strutted along ahead of them, puffed with its own importance. “Hello, Mr. Magpie!” Barry called. A lone magpie was said to bring bad luck unless spoken to respectfully.

  Feargal snorted. “That’s just an old piseog.k You’d best fly away,” he warned the bird, “or you’ll be the one with the bad luck. I’ll pluck your feathers for my girl’s hat.”

  “Your girl?”

  “A little sweetheart back in Monaghan who I see at the dances sometimes. You know how it is, Halloran. One of the show bands comes ‘round and we all go to the parish hall. Fellows on one side, girls on the other. Lads talking to lads, girls giggling and pretending not to look at us. Us pretending not to look at them. Someday I’ll ask her for a dance, though.”

  TREAT all women like you would the Virgin Mary,“the priests said. But they didn’t say how that applied to the thoughts that came to a boy at night in his bed; the thoughts that burned and thrilled … and shamed.

  So far Barry’s only experience of the opposite sex had been with a shopkeeper’s daughter in Ennis, who stood with her back against the wall in a narrow laneway off Parnell Street. Afterwards Barry had wondered, Is that all? Weeks of covert glances and sweating every time he saw her had resulted in a brief explosion that left his knees trembling, then faded before he could savour it.

  The girl had darted anxious glances left and right while she pulled up her knickers. “Do ye love me, Barry? Say you love me so.”

  What has this to do with love? At that moment Barry had wanted only to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

  As he strode along beside Feargal O’Hanlon, Barry was in high spirits. Childhood playfellows were behind him, as were the days of Montague and Capulet. His companions were real soldiers now. Bending, he seized a stick from the ground and used it to slash the dead meadow grasses. “Here’s a sword for our enemies!” He laughed aloud.

  “Up the IRA!” cried Feargal.

  The column continued northward in no particular order. All that was required was that they keep going until they reached their destination. A few more miles would take them to the border. Beyond the border lay Northern Ireland. The fourth green field of Erin; in strangers’ hands, as the song said.

  “Why’d you join the Army, Feargal?”

  “It was that or get a job, and work for Catholic boys in Monaghan is thin on the ground.”

  “I mean why did you really join?”

  Feargal hesitated for a moment. “To finish what they started,” he said soberly.

  Barry did not need to ask who “they” were. Their bodies lay in quicklime in Arbour Hill cemetery but their names were engraved on Irish hearts. Pearse, Plunkett, MacDonagh, MacDermott, Connolly, Clarke, Ceannt.

  The signatories of the 1916 Proclamation had been inspired by the Gaelic Revival and fired with the romantic nationalism that swept the world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Like most Irishmen of their generation, they were avid readers. Several were poets of considerable merit. Intelligent and idealistic, they had dreamed of a nonsectarian Irish Republic where all children were cherished and all citizens equal.

  Ned Halloran had insisted that Barry memorise the entire Proclamation.

  The men with Barry and Feargal came of a different generation from that of Ned Halloran. The Great War had put paid to romantic nationalism. The Irish Civil War had changed Ireland’s image of herself, fragmenting her politically. The Second World War with its concentration camps and atomic bombs had provided a foretaste of hell. People were more cynical now and far less sentimental.

  Yet in spite of all this. Ireland’s unfinished revolution went on.

  WHEN the column came to the border there was no sign to indicate that they were entering a foreign country. Fifteen men snaked along the southern bank of a stream until they came to a wooden footbridge closed off by two strands of rusty wire. Lifting the top strand, McCoy said, “Duck under, lads. Anyone entering the Six Counties from the Republic is required to have a passport, or at least a document signed by the authorities, but we have our own ways of getting in. And out.”

  Almost at once Barry could see a difference. The unkempt countryside in the Republic was a patchwork of irregularly shaped fields bounded by tangled hedgerows teeming with wildlife. Fields in Northern Ireland were neat, geometrically precise, and divided by well-maintained walls and fences. Yet the air was the same on both sides of the border. The earth was the same too, even if the enemy insisted it was part of Britain.

  The Enemy. Barry knew who they were. Everything was simple, black and white. Like the magpie.

  The column trudged along a country road. From a farmhouse chimney came a whiff of burning turf. The haunting fragrance reminded Barry of home. And Mam.

  He called her Mam only in his thoughts. Aloud she was always Ursula, a preference she had expressed long ago.

  A mile farther on brought them to a meadow in the lap of sheltering hills. “We’ll camp here for the night,” McCoy said. “There’s a farm up the road that belongs to some of our crowd, so we’ll ask them for spades and a pickaxe. It’s time you had practice making dugouts for yourselves.”

  At first building dugouts was fun. The men made jokes as they worked. Later Barry thought he was too excited to sleep, but between one thought and the next the world slipped away and he knew nothing until he awoke cold and stiff in the predawn dark. McCoy was prodding the sole of his foot with a rifle. “Crawl out from under that blanket, Seventeen. Things are about to get serious.”

  Barry leapt to his feet while his mind was still cobwebbed with sleep. From that day on he made sure to be the first one up. Eyes open, brain alert, ready to learn.

  It was easy to tell the difference between Catholic and Protestant areas. In Protestant areas the houses were better, the roads were better, the schools were better. There were other, more subtle differences as well, such as the fact that northern Catholics said they went to chapel rather than church because church was the Protestant term.

  During the next two weeks the column was constantly on the move, roving the Six Counties and learning their way around while simultaneously practicing guerrilla tactics and avoiding the police. At night they gathered around tiny campfires and talked. Talked politics and war.

  McCoy explained that the IRA had a long-standing tradition of political abstention. “Politics is a waste of time. Britain became an empire through force of arms, and that’s all the British respect. There’s no way for Ireland to end the injustice of partition except through the armed struggle.”

  A recruit chimed in, “That means the IRA, since the current government are too cowardly to fight for the country that was taken away from them.”

  “Right you are,” said one of the veterans. “Furthermore, we’re fighting a monster with two heads. One is the government at Stormont, and the other’s the government at Westminster that props it up. That’s why the Army needs to carry the war to England.”

  Stories were told, in voices hushed with admiration, of brave men who crossed the Irish Sea to attack the enemy on their own home soil. Planting bombs in Britain was a tactic that dated from the preceding century. There was rarely any real damage due to incompetence on the part of the bombers, but it served to keep the British public aware of “the Irish problem.”

  Chapter Four

  OUTSIDE Derry City the Volunteers came upon a ramshackle community known as Tin Town. Rusting Nissan huts that had been used during World War Two for housing troops in transit to Europe were filled to overflowing with impoverished Catholic families. The place was a sea of mud, stinking of cesspools and running with rats. Amidst scenes of appalling squalor, parents struggled to raise their children as best they could.

  “If you ever wonder what this war’s really about, here’s your answer,” McCoy told his men.

  Two-thirds of the north’s population were staunchly unionist in their views. Learning how to make contact with nationalists who wanted to see their fractured country reunited was an essential part of a V
olunteer’s training. “You’ll be relying on the locals for intelligence and supplies,” McCoy said. “Some of the most dedicated republicans are in the north; it’s their home ground they’re fighting for. Be careful, though. The Brits have paid informers everywhere, often the person you’d least expect. The wrong word in the wrong ear and you could wake up in one of Her Majesty’s holiday hotels.” The wolfish smile flickered.

  “Were you ever arrested yourself?” a recruit wanted to know.

  “I’ve been lifted once or twice. Can’t say I’d recommend royal hospitality. Being kept in a darkened cell for weeks on end plays hell with your eyesight.”

  Suddenly Barry understood McCoy’s constant squinting.

  In spite of his damaged vision, McCoy usually saw the bright side. He often said, “Don’t worry, lads, everything will come right in the end.” And made them believe it.

  Such optimism was essential. The winter of 1956 was cold. Rain fell almost every day, turning overnight to frozen mud. Physical discomfort was a constant and hunger was never far away.

  Training sessions did not include weapons practice because the sound of gunfire could draw the RUC,l but McCoy directed mock attacks and ambushes, advances and retreats. The men memorised maps and practiced infiltrating areas under cover of darkness. During the day they hid out in dugouts in the woods.

  Barry and Feargal usually shared a dugout. Sitting side by side in a damp, dark hole that smelled of earth, they used conversation to ease the tedium. They told each other silly things and serious things, laughed at jokes that had meaning only for themselves, and exchanged dreams and hopes and fears they would admit to no one else.