1972 Read online

  They enjoyed comparing their childhood foibles. “I would do just about anything for the pure divvil of it,” Barry admitted without shame. “And I was a fearful dreamer. I spent more time gazing out the window than I ever did learning my lessons.”

  Feargal said, “I was sports mad. Mitched school every chance I got to play ball. Used to steal a few coppers from the old man’s pocket to buy bits and pieces of equipment. He never even noticed.”

  Barry began to boast, “My mother never knew what I …” then stopped in mid-sentence as a more mature realisation dawned on him. “I thought my mother never knew what I was up to,” he amended. “But looking back now, I believe she did.”

  EVERY move the Volunteers made carried an awareness of imminent danger. “Even the dogs in the street are watching you,” McCoy stressed. “Up here the IRA’s the enemy.”

  At a rural crossroads in County Tyrone, McCoy raised his hand to signal a halt. “At ease, lads. We’ll be waiting here for Commandant Garland, if the bloody RUC haven’t picked him up. He’ll be your permanent O/C.”

  McCoy sat down by a signpost that gave directions in English only, and in imperial miles rather than the longer Irish mile. Grunting with pleasure, McCoy scratched his back against the signpost while his men lounged along the verge at the side of the road. The recruits began removing their shoes to examine their feet for blisters.

  Barry was unlacing his boots when Seán South put out a staying hand. “I wouldn’t,” he advised. “Wait until we camp for the night. If you take them off now your feet will be too swollen to put them back on.” Barry tried to pass the warning on to Feargal but the young man from Monaghan was too involved in a discussion about the fine points of Gaelic football to hear him.

  Barry took out the slim volume of Ledwidge’s poetry and began to read. By now he knew all the poems by heart, but revisiting them was like talking with old friends.

  McCoy smoked a cigarette until it burned down to his fingers, then got to his feet and brushed off his pants. “Listen up, lads.” Barry put his book back in his pocket. “Seán Garland’s a good skin,” McCoy went on. “He has an orderly mind and a good eye for the lay of the land. A few years ago GHQ decided to send a member of the Dublin brigade up to Armagh to enlist in the British Army, and they chose Garland. He made a very convincing recruit, and the Brits accepted him into the Royal Irish Fusiliers without question. Almost at once he began passing valuable information to GHQ. Documents, maps, even photographs taken with a mini-camera.

  “The intelligence Garland provided was responsible for one of the most successful arms raids we ever had. Our lads lifted two hundred and fifty new rifles, thirty-seven Stens, nine Brens, and a bunch of training rifles from the Armagh barracks and got them safely back across the border. The British Army was left with egg on its face.”

  Several Volunteers sniggered. “I wish I’d been there to throw the eggs,” Barry whispered to Seán South, who nodded agreement.

  McCoy continued, “Eventually the IRA withdrew Garland from the British Army before they could sniff him out. Now he’s going to be in charge of you lot, and I expect you to make me proud of you.

  “Your second in command will be David O’Connell. Dave’s only nineteen but don’t let that fool you. He joined Sinn Féin in 1955 and then the Volunteers. He was appointed over Vincent Conlon, the former quartermaster general of the IRA, so that tells you how highly he’s regarded at headquarters.”

  The Volunteers waited with heightened anticipation. For a long time nothing happened. At last a redheaded man on a motorbike appeared around the bend in the road. A second man was riding pillion with his knees drawn up to keep his feet from dragging the ground.

  Séamus McCoy gave a relieved shout: “Hullo, you two! I was beginning to think you’d got lost.”

  The bike growled to a halt. The pillion passenger unfolded himself and nimbly stepped aside so the driver could dismount.

  The redhead strode up to McCoy. “Shay, you old rogue,” he said in a hard Dublin accent. “What d’ye have for me?”

  “You’re looking at them, Seán. This unlikely lot sprawled all over the road.”

  Seán Garland gestured toward his former passenger. “This is—”

  “Dáithí Ó Conaill, in the Irish,” the man interrupted, stepping forward. “My friends call me Dave.”

  O’Connell had a domed forehead and receding hairline that gave him the appearance of a much older man. But this was not the reason the Volunteers were staring at him.

  Dave O’Connell was six and a half feet tall.

  “They must feed’em good where he comes from,” Feargal murmured in awe.

  SEÁN Garland took over the column with smooth professionalism. “We’re getting you out of sight as soon as possible,” he told the men. “I don’t want to lose you to the RUC before I’ve had time to learn your names. Down the road now, and on the double.”

  Barry cast a pitying glance at Feargal, who winced as he crammed his swollen feet back into his shoes.

  Within an hour the Volunteers were snugly billeted in a barn belonging to a republican family. “From now on you’ll take your orders from me or Dave,” Garland told them, “and no one else. Each column is relatively autonomous. The Army wants to keep them as separate as possible because the less one group knows about another, the less chance there is of an informer giving out valuable information.”

  The mention of informers gave Barry a jolt. His vision of the Irish Republican Army was pure and noble. Ned Halloran had never said anything about informers within.

  “Our primary mission,” Garland continued, “is to disable and demoralise the enemy. That will involve cutting their communications, obstructing roads and railways, and putting their facilities out of commission. In short, making matters as difficult as possible for the occupying forces. We’ll use explosives to gain entry to their military installations and …”

  “And blow open the odd prison door?” McCoy suggested.

  Garland gave him a wintry smile. “The only explosives we have right now are gelignite and paxo. Paxo’s made from potassium chloride and paraffin wax and it’s pretty volatile stuff. Of course we can always make Molotov cocktails with glass bottles and petrol,” like the freedom fighters in Hungary, thought Barry, “but they’re almost as dangerous to the man who throws them as they are to his target.

  “Our friends across the pond are buying American war surplus for us—anyone with dollars can buy American war surplus—but we don’t have any mortars. Other weapons are coming on stream, though. We’ll take whatever we can get. So let’s have a look at your ordnance.”

  Frowning, Garland had examined the column’s small stock of rifles and pistols. “Is this all you brought, Shay?”

  “It’s everything GHQ sent us, plus one old rifle and a sawnoff shotgun that two of the lads brought with them.”

  “What, no pitchforks?”

  “Not unless we steal some from this barn.”

  Garland chuckled. “We won’t need to, thank God. Every attack group’s being supplied with machine guns. We’ve two Thompson submachine guns and a Bren tucked away a few miles from here.”

  “What’s a Bren?” asked one of the recruits.

  “An infantry weapon really, and more reliable than the Thompson. Thompsons have a tendency to pull to the left unless you know how to allow for it. You fire a Thompson standing up and spray the bullets around, but the Bren’s mounted on a bipod and you lie on your belly to shoot. It’s much steadier, and can take the same ammunition as the Lee-Enfield .303.”

  “I have a Lee-Enfield .303!” Barry cried. “I could handle a Bren.”

  Garland slanted a look in his direction. “Keen as mustard, are you? Ever used any class of machine gun?”

  “Not yet, but I can …”

  “Halloran’s quite a marksman with his own rifle,” McCoy commented. “He could be a sniper.”

  Sniper. Me! I told Gerry Ryan I was going to shoot vermin. That’s what the enemy does to
our crowd, kills them like vermin. It’s only fair they get back what they give.

  Sniper. Barry liked the sound of the word. Adventurous and heroic.

  Seán Garland was saying, “In the finish-up, we can’t hope to defeat the enemy through conventional warfare. Britain will always be able to supply more men and more weapons. But we can do what Michael Collins did: we can break down the machinery of administration until the British are unable to govern. Then they’ll have to withdraw from Northern Ireland.”

  “However long it takes, we’ll get our country back,” Séamus McCoy added. His voice rang with conviction.

  This is for real. Sitting on a barrel in a barn. Legs aching. Stomach rumbling. Adrenaline prickling beneath the skin. However long it takes, we’ll get our country back.

  The barn smelled of hay and chickens.

  “One more thing,” said Garland. “Up here labels are a matter of life and death. Keep that in mind. You have Catholics and nationalists and republicans; Protestants and unionists and loyalists. Those are, broadly speaking, the two sides, with the government soundly on the latter. Within those two divisions there’s a lot of crossover. All Catholics aren’t nationalists; many are just people who want to work and bring up their families in safety. Nationalists may or may not be practicing Catholics, but they want to see this island reunited.”

  “A nation once again!” whooped one of the recruits.

  Garland suppressed a smile. “Exactly. I don’t have to explain who the republicans are: that’s us. We want the Irish Republic we fought for in 1916 and again in 1921, not some diluted version like the Free State.

  “Now about the unionists: Only a small percentage are members of the Ulster Unionist Party, but the vast majority of northern Protestants would describe themselves as ‘unionist’ because they want to remain within the United Kingdom. ‘Loyalist’ refers to an extremely sectarian group that’s developed in the Protestant working class. You could call them supremacists, like the Ku Klux Klan in America. Loyalists bash and bludgeon Catholics and claim they’re doing it to protect their Protestant heritage. Many loyalists belong to the Orange Order, one of the most virulent anti-Catholic organisations in the world. They consider themselves above the law with some justification, since the RUC lets them get away with murder. Sometimes literally. A lot of RUC men belong to the Orange Order too, you see.”

  O’Connell spoke up. “I think it’s important to make a point here. The real divide in Northern Ireland is more economic than religious. One reason unionists are adamant about remaining part of the United Kingdom is because their financial wellbeing depends on it. When the British controlled this entire island they located all the heavy industry in the northeastern corner of the country to benefit the Protestant majority there. The rest of Ireland, ‘Catholic Ireland,’ was left with a largely rural and impoverished economy.

  “After World War Two a lot of formerly profitable industries in the north began to have to tighten their belts as well. But Britain is subsidising the Six Counties, so the unionists still have jobs. They don’t want to find themselves thrust into a united Ireland because the south has nothing comparable to offer them.”

  “Even if it did,” said Séamus McCoy, “it wouldn’t make any difference. As far as the unionists are concerned the Republic is a foreign country like darkest Africa. Some of the younger ones are unaware that this island was partitioned less than forty years ago. They assume there’s always been a Northern Ireland, a place where the best land and the best jobs are theirs practically by divine right.”

  A man sitting near Barry muttered, “Damn the Prods.”

  Dave O’Connell silenced him with a frown. “In fairness,” O’Connell said, “the vast majority of Protestants are decent people who have no desire to persecute anyone. The problem is with the sectarian bigots like the Orange Order. Unfortunately, they control just about everything in the Six Counties, including the parliament at Stormont.”

  Before Barry fell asleep that night he thought about what he had heard.

  The face of the enemy was becoming more specific.

  In the morning the column lined up to bid farewell to Séamus McCoy. McCoy and the other training officers were being recalled to Dublin to brief GHQ. A Morris Minor driven by a middle-aged woman who looked like a schoolteacher was waiting to take him across the border. McCoy tossed his pack inside the car, returned the salute of the column, and settled himself in the passenger seat. The door slammed with the sound of finality.

  “There goes a good man,” said Feargal O’Hanlon. “We’re going to miss him.”

  As the car began to pull away Barry shouted, “Slán leat, m Séamus!”

  McCoy thrust his arm out the window and waved his hand. “Slán,” he called. But he never looked back.

  Half an hour later a creamery wagon drove up. While O’Connell and the driver were tying the motorbike to the bumper, the other Volunteers clambered onto the flat-bed wagon and tried to find space for themselves among the metal milk cans. A jolting ride along rural byways terminated at an abandoned flour mill. The old red brick walls were slimy with moss; the wooden millwheel was gently rotting.

  Standing outside the mill were two men in shabby overcoats. Garland introduced one as Charlie Murphy, a member of headquarters staff with extensive experience in the north. Murphy, a short man with blunt features and no interest in small talk, brought further instructions from Dublin. He stared off into space while Garland read them. The other man went into the mill and brought out a cardboard box filled with sandwiches.

  Garland looked up. “Get that food inside you in a hurry, men. We’re pulling out soon.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “To set up a base camp for the first phase of the campaign. It’s better if you don’t know exactly where until we get there. That way if you’re lifted, you can’t tell them anything.”

  I wouldn’t tell them anything anyway, thought Barry. Not even if they tortured me like they did Kevin Barry in 1920!

  Chapter Five

  December 10, 1956

  HUNGARY PUT UNDER SOVIET MARTIAL LAW

  Soviet Army once again threatens to turn its guns on the people.

  THE second week of December found Seán Garland and his men encamped in a secluded valley just south of the Armagh border. The area was strongly republican. Instead of dugouts the column had the use of an old barn, and the village at the head of the valley kept them supplied with food and cigarettes. The men took turns cooking meals with the ingredients provided. When Barry solicited comments on his contribution, Paddy O’Regan said, “It’s marginally better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

  “I inherited my cooking skills from my mother.”

  “God have mercy on your family, then,” O’Regan replied in sepulchral tones.

  The village women thought having the IRA camped nearby was incredibly romantic. “We could stroll over there and give the girls a thrill,” Feargal suggested to Barry. “What d’ye say?”

  “Sounds good to me. Do you have a comb? I’ve lost mine someplace.”

  Seán Garland overheard the exchange. “You two Romeos leave the local girls alone. We’re here to be a plague to the British, not to decent Irish women.”

  Target practice was held in an empty field amidst wintergrey stubble. The Bren was assigned to Seán South while the officers kept the Thompsons for themselves. “I don’t mind about the Bren,” Barry lied to Feargal. “My chance will come.”

  It will, I know it will. It must.

  Waiting for the call to action was the hardest part. Being Irish, they filled the time with talk. Still, and always, talk of politics. The addition of Garland and O’Connell added depth to the conversation.

  “England’s been our enemy from the beginning, taking the best we had and leaving the dregs for us. The English never paid a blind bit of mind to how we felt.”

  “You can’t blame the ordinary punter in the streets for that. It’s their bloody government that
’s responsible.”

  “I’ve often wondered how a people as essentially decent as the English can tolerate a succession of governments which habitually practice deceit in domestic policy and use genocide as a tool of foreign policy.”

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “You think so? Ask the Boers in South Africa. For that matter, ask the Irish. Doesn’t Britain realise those sins might come home to roost someday?”

  “Ah, you forget—every government has a finite life and acts in its own self-interest. Which isn’t necessarily the national self-interest.”

  “Please God the sins of the Free State government will come home to roost someday too, and we’ll have a true republic on this island.”

  “Up the Republic!”

  “Can anyone spare a pair of dry socks?”

  On the afternoon of the tenth, Seán Garland announced, “There’s a major attack scheduled for tomorrow night. The flying columns will hit enemy installations all across the north. Seán Daly’s men are going to join us in an attack on Gough Barracks. The Royal Irish is my old regiment, so I know the place.”

  The next morning Garland and O’Connell went to the nearby village and returned laden with bulky parcels wrapped in butcher’s paper. They were unwrapped to reveal a number of military uniforms. Barry recognised both British and American, but there were also a couple stolen from the Irish Army.

  The Free State Army, Barry mentally corrected.

  “We’re going to wear these as disguises,” Garland said. “They won’t fool anyone for long, but they may add to the confusion and that’s what we need.”

  Dave O’Connell and Barry Halloran were the tallest men in the column; only the American uniforms would fit them. Everyone shied away from the British outfits until Barry picked up one of the jackets. “I dare you to wear this,” he said, tossing the garment to Feargal. “Surely to God a bold lad like you isn’t afraid of a bit of cloth.”