1972 Read online

A hundred yards away was the red lorry with the back wide open. Grouped around it was a motionless tableau, halted in the act of lifting a man into the truck. Then Barry realised they were moving. Scrambling into the lorry in the same way he was running: in a nightmarish slow motion.

  Conlon revved the engine for a getaway.

  An eternity passed before Barry reached the lorry. He vaulted over the tailboard just as the truck lurched forward. Conlon was trying to turn and go back the way they had come.

  Light streaming from the barracks cruelly illuminated the interior. A final snapshot burned into Barry’s brain, a scene from a slaughterhouse.

  Inside the bullet-riddled lorry, blood was splashed as high as a man’s head. Seán South sprawled motionless across the Bren. Beside him lay Paddy O’Regan, gasping with pain. Phillip O’Donoghue sat cross-legged with his face bathed in blood. Seán Garland’s trousers were soaked with it, but he was still standing.

  Barry slipped in a puddle of blood and almost fell over Feargal O’Hanlon. The young footballer from Monaghan was lying on his back. A bullet had smashed his femur. Blood fountained in spurts from a severed artery.

  “Feargal?” Barry dropped to his knees. “Feargal! Can you hear me?”

  Feargal’s eyes opened. “You missed it again, Seventeen,” he said in a whisper.

  Vince Conlon cursed through gritted teeth as he struggled with the gears. The lorry was all but unmanageable. Two tyres had been burst by gunfire and the undercarriage was damaged. When the vehicle started forward, the rear end tipped up violently, throwing men about. Seán Garland sat down hard beside Phil O’Donoghue.

  A lone constable ran after the lorry, shouting, “Come back, you fuckin’ Fenians!”

  KNEELING beside his friend, Barry saw Feargal’s eyes go blank.

  IT was no longer about making the British give back the Six Counties. Or protecting northern Catholics or getting even for eight hundred years of oppression. Everything dwindled down to Feargal O’Hanlon’s face with the light going out of it. Barry gave a terrible cry and leapt to his feet. Somehow he had the rifle in his hands. Just beyond the tailboard was a figure in an RUC uniform.

  Do it do it do it do it do it!

  He pulled the trigger he shot the bolt he pulled the trigger he pulled the trigger he pulled the trigger and the thunder of the rifle rang through his living bones.

  Chapter Eight

  AT the top of the street Vince Conlon slowed just enough to allow the lookouts to clamber aboard. “What the hell happened!” cried Mick O’Brien. After one horrified glimpse of the truck’s interior, Mick Kelly threw his hands over his face. Conlon tromped on the accelerator. The lorry leapt forward.

  Barry cradled Feargal’s head in his lap and tried to brace them both against the vehicle’s wild gyrations.

  Somehow Conlon managed to keep the lorry on the road until they were five miles out of town. There it juddered to a stop and refused to start again. With a groan, Garland got to his feet and began examining the wounded. His electric torch shook in his hand. His other hand was pressed over a gaping wound in his thigh.

  “What’s our condition, Seán?” O’Connell asked.

  “South’s gone, God have mercy on him. O’Regan’s been shot at least twice but he’s still conscious. O’Donoghue’s got a deep graze in his forehead and …”

  “And I’ve taken a feckin’ bullet in my feckin’ foot,” Conlon called from the cab.

  “Feargal’s gone too,” Barry reported in a choked voice.

  “Are you sure, Halloran?”

  “I am sure.”

  Paddy O’Regan coughed, spewing blood.

  “Ssshhh,” Garland hissed. “I thought I heard a motor.”

  The Volunteers held their breath. Kelly said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You will, they’ll be after us soon enough.”

  “Here, give me that torch.” Dave O’Connell got out and walked up the road. The earlier clouds had blown away to reveal the moon. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could make out the hunched shoulders of the Slieve Beagh mountains. He turned on the torch and swept it slowly around, then went back to the lorry. “There are farms on both sides of us,” he said, “but up ahead are the mountains. If we can get to them we have a chance.”

  “And leave our dead lying here for those bastards to find?” Barry asked indignantly.

  “There’s what appears to be a cow byre about thirty yards off the road. We can put South and O’Hanlon in there for now. With any luck the RUC won’t find their bodies because they’ll be too busy chasing us.”

  “Leave me there too, Dave,” Garland pleaded. “This leg is a mess, I’d only slow you down. Give me a Thompson and leave me with my men.”

  “Not a chance. Do you know what they’d do to you if they found you? You’re coming with us.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Barry saw O’Connell retrieving his pack. Before leaving the lorry Barry picked up his own pack and slid Ned’s rifle under the straps.

  They carried Seán South and Feargal O’Hanlon to the cow byre. The bodies were laid side by side behind bales of straw. Barry shrugged out of his pack and removed his coat so he could use his shirt to cover his dead friend’s face. All that effort, to end in this. This terrible waste. And for nothing! That was the worst of it: the sheer futility.

  The Volunteers stood with heads bowed in prayer, then spread more straw over the bodies to conceal them. Having done all they could for their dead comrades, the dazed, bloodied party staggered out into the night. Hobbling and limping and biting back the pain.

  Ashamed that he had no wound, Barry offered Garland his arm to lean on. The sound of motors in the distance was unmistakable. “Land Rovers,” Garland muttered. “The bleedin’ RUC has Land Rovers.”

  Dave O’Connell led the way to a brightly lit farmhouse, where he pounded on the door with his fist. A small, bespectacled man in his sixties opened the door and peered out. Deliberately looming over him, O’Connell told him there were two bodies in his shed and demanded that he send for a priest. “They’re to have the Last Rites, do you understand? If they don’t we’ll know, and we’ll come back and do you. If you tell the RUC about them we’ll come back and do you anyway!” The wide-eyed farmer nodded strenuously and backed away from him.

  The drone of motors drew closer. The Volunteers fled from the farmhouse and made for the foothills of Slieve Beagh. As they ran, stumbled, fell, got up and ran on, they heard machine gun fire rake their abandoned lorry.

  At last the hills enfolded them. They slumped onto the ground, exhausted. After a quarter of an hour Garland roused himself with difficulty. “Dave?”

  “Over here.”

  “Listen to me. These men have to be across the border by dawn, because come morning they’ll be looking for us with helicopters. Halloran, you still have that compass?”

  “I do.”

  “Hand it here and we’ll take a bearing.”

  The officers consulted Barry’s compass by the light of the electric torch. After a few calculations O’Connell said, “Even going at a snail’s pace for the sake of the wounded, we should reach the border in four hours.”

  “You will, I won’t,” Garland told him. “I can’t go any farther whether you carry me or not. This time it’s an order: Leave me here. The bastards won’t find me, I’ll go to ground like a badger.”

  As the Volunteers were dragging themselves to their feet flares began exploding in the night sky.

  O’Connell had underestimated the time it would take to reach the border. Almost five hours passed before they were certain they were in Monaghan. They collapsed again and lay unmoving while the dawn slowly broke around them.

  True to Garland’s prediction, two British Army helicopters took to the air as soon as there was enough light. Four hundred members of the RUC, together with B-Specials and British Army units, joined in the ground search.1

  THE priest who administered the last rites to Seán South and Feargal O’Hanlon had gon
e straight from the farm shed to the nearest telephone. Within a matter of hours the bodies had been collected and their families notified.

  Washed and dressed in fresh clothing, the corpses were wrapped in blankets and inconspicuously returned to the Republic in the back of a small delivery van.

  Two hearses were waiting at the border with members of the IRA, accompanied by Seán South’s brother. He was openly hostile to the Volunteers, whom he blamed for misleading and destroying an exceptional man.

  The Volunteers tenderly placed the blanket-wrapped bodies in coffins, then covered them with the Irish tricolour. The sombre procession set out. Soon clusters of people began to appear along the roadside. Men uncovered their heads as the hearses passed. Women wept.

  South’s brother observed the tribute with amazement.

  At midnight on the fourth of January, the lord mayor of Limerick and twenty thousand mourners came out to meet the hearse bearing the man from Garryowen. The next day an estimated fifty thousand followed the casket to Mount Saint Laurence Cemetery, where a Celtic Cross was to be erected over Seán South’s grave.

  Within days his brother joined the republican movement.2

  Feargal O’Hanlon also was given a huge funeral and a graveside eulogy befitting a martyred hero. The Monaghan lad had been extremely popular; his many friends crowded the cemetery. Anonymous amidst the ruddy footballers was a tall young man wearing a woollen cap pulled over his bright hair. There were tears in his eyes, but no one paid any attention. Many were weeping that day.

  IN spite of the nationwide outpouring of emotion, Operation Harvest brought an end to any support by the Irish government for the anti-partition campaign. Speaking in the Dáil on January 6, Eamon de Valera said, “To allow any military body not subject to Dáil Éireann to be enrolled, organised and equipped is to pave the way to anarchy and ruin.”3

  Many Irish people agreed with him. “At best,” one veteran of 1916 told another in the Bleeding Horse Pub in Dublin’s Camden Street, “the border campaign was an exercise in bravado. At worst it was damned irresponsible.”

  The taoiseach, John Costello, spoke with great sadness on Radio Éireann about the lives that had been lost at Brookeborough. Ireland could have but one government and one army, he stressed, adding that the police had been instructed to round up all known republican activists under the Offences Against the State Act.

  URSULA Halloran was a light sleeper. She claimed to keep one ear open so she could hear her animals. Swollen like ripe fruit, broodmares and dairy cows were dreaming milky dreams and awaiting the miracle of birth.

  On the night of January seventh Ursula retired earlier than usual, worn out with tension. All week the broadcasters had kept up a steady drip-feed of items about the Brookeborough raid. Ursula did not need anyone to tell her that Barry was involved. She simply knew.

  Sometime after midnight she heard a startled whinny in the broodmare barn nearest the house. She rolled off the bed in one smooth motion, flung her coat over her nightgown, put her pistol in the pocket, and ran barefoot down the stairs. When she switched on the electric light bulb in the barn the mares blinked in their loose boxes. Only one did not stretch her neck over the half door in greeting. The big bay mare stayed at the back of her stall, apparently watching something out of sight below the door.

  “Who’s there?” Ursula called. “I warn you, I have a gun.”

  “So do I,” said a voice.

  Barry stood up with the rifle in his hands.

  Ursula gave a sharp intake of breath. “Home safe, thank God,” she murmured.

  A faint smile flickered across Barry’s face. His mother’s hands were shaking. To steady them she unlatched the door and swung it open. “Come out here and let’s have a look at you.”

  When the tall young man stepped from the stall she reached out to hug him, then hesitated. His face had changed more than she would have thought possible in so short a time. The boyish softness had melted away, revealing an aquiline nose, jutting cheekbones, and a strong chin. Wind and weather had scoured his freckles. His eyes were set deep in their sockets.

  In the shadowy barn Barry looked dangerous.

  Ursula drew an unsteady breath. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

  “I thought the house might be watched.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I just know.”

  Barry nodded. Within the family Ursula was famous for “knowing.”

  She gingerly took him by the arm—half expecting him to pull away from her—and drew him into the cobbled yard. “You can see for yourself, there’s no one here but us. Why, you’re shivering! You’re as cold as well water. Come into the house and I’ll light a fire in your room. Quietly now, we don’t want to wake Eileen. You know how nosy she is.”

  In his bedroom Barry leaned the rifle against the wall and sat down heavily on the bed, watching while his mother lit a fire in the grate. When the blaze took hold she asked Barry, “What are those stains on your coat?”

  “Just stains.”

  “They look like … they are, they’re blood. You tried to wash them off, didn’t you? Then smeared them with dirt?”

  He made no effort to deny it.

  “Take off your coat and we’ll have Eileen give it a proper cleaning.” Barry removed the coat. Ursula’s eyes widened. “No wonder you’re cold! What’s become of your shirt?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  After Barry was in bed with quilts piled over him and a hot water bottle at his feet, his mother lingered in the doorway. “You were at Brookeborough, were you not?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “There’s been hardly anything else on the wireless. They said an RUC man was killed, and the northern authorities insisted the raiders be arrested if they tried to enter the Republic. The taoiseach gave in—I don’t know what pressures were brought against him—and the gardai, the Army, and Special Branch were all alerted. Then we heard that some wounded fugitives were captured in a house just this side of the border.”

  Barry wriggled his toes against the hot water bottle but could not feel its heat. He knew she would never give up unless he said something. “We left those men there while we went for medical help,” he told her. “Instead we ran into an Army patrol. My pals surrendered quietly, as we’d been taught. But I still had Granda’s rifle and I wasn’t about to give it up, so I scarpered.”

  “A good thing too!” said Ursula. “The wounded were taken to hospital but the rest are being held in the Bridewell Garda Station in Dublin. Twelve of them altogether, awaiting trial. God knows what they’ll do to them.”

  Twelve. That must mean they haven’t found Seán Garland yet.

  Barry faked a huge yawn to encourage his mother to leave. She stayed where she was. He rolled over so his back was to her and pulled the covers over his head. At last, and reluctantly, she turned out the light and left the room.

  He burrowed deeper under the covers. He longed for sleep but it eluded him. Whenever he closed his eyes it was not Feargal’s dying face he saw. Like a strip of film projected on the inside of his eyelids, he was forced to watch, over and over again, as the RUC man threw up both arms and pitched backwards onto the road.

  BARRY might be unwilling to talk about Brookeborough, but Ursula was not naive enough to believe that her son could escape the consequences of whatever had happened there. Sooner or later someone would come looking for him.

  The next morning she tucked her pistol into the waistband of her trousers before leaving the house. From that day on she carried it everywhere.

  Like Ned’s Lee-Enfield, Ursula’s Mauser had a history of its own.o

  WHEN Barry looked at his grandfather’s rifle he saw, superimposed over the weapon, the RUC man running toward him. Heard the crack of the rifle. Watched a human face explode into red mush.

  He shoved the Lee-Enfield out of sight under his mattress.

  F
ormerly he had equated violence with action, the magnetic pole to which boys were drawn. At Brookeborough he had learned the true nature of violence. The passion of patriotism had exploded in a shower of blood. Barry had taken life and seen life taken, and none of it was the way he had imagined when he was a small boy playing soldiers.

  Yet underneath everything the passion was still there. Or rather, the need for the passion was still there. Without an intense, thrilling focus such as the Army, what was the point of existence?

  I killed a man who wanted to live as much as Feargal. Yet that man or someone like him killed Feargal.

  I killed a man. And for one brief moment … Barry forced himself to be honest … the sense of power was tremendous. Like nothing I ever experienced before. Then he was just a heap of clothes lying in the road.

  The same as Feargal lying in the lorry.

  Bit by bit, in fractured thoughts and tormented dreams, the pain began to work its way to the surface. When his mother chided him for ignoring something she said, he replied, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

  “Am I boring you?”

  “It isn’t that. It’s just … Feargal’s dying the way he did and … and everything … it’s pulled me up by the roots.”

  “Feargal O’Hanlon?”

  “He was my friend. And the first person I ever saw die.” Barry’s voice faded away; returned: “I wanted to fight for a united Ireland. I just never thought it would become so … personal.”

  “Sooner or later,” Ursula said sadly, “all wars become personal.”

  BY government order, known or suspected republicans throughout the country were being arrested. On the thirteenth of January several prominent members of the IRA were seized during a raid on Charlie Murphy’s house in Dublin. By the end of January the staff of GHQ and most of the Army Council were in the Bridewell, from which they soon were transferred to Mountjoy Prison.