Chapter V

The fools, the fools, the fools!

They have left us our Fenian dead.

And while Ireland holds these graves,

Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

Pádraig Pearse, at the grave of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, 1915

Janey Mack’s bar in Cricklewood, where Brennan found himself on Thursday, was no cathedral. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but many bars were like that in Ireland itself and in places across the seas where the Irish diaspora met to drink and socialize. Inside, the walls were covered with posters and photos celebrating the GAA, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and cartoons with captions in the Irish language. Janey Mack’s had everything on tap and in a bottle that one could find in Ireland, and the offerings on the menu were familiar fare as well: bacon and cabbage, shepherd’s pie, lamb stew, boxties, spuds in every conceivable form — floury, waxy, boiled, baked, champ, ­colcannon — and everything came with a side order of mushy peas.

The plan for the evening was a family dinner, and Brennan, Molly, and Terry were the advance party; they arrived early enough to grab a table for six. The younger relations were expected within the hour; then they would all eat, lift a jar, and enjoy the craic. No point in waiting for the lifting of a jar. They ordered their drinks of choice and returned to their table.

“I’d love to have a place like this,” said Terry.

“Give you something to do when you’re on the ground between flights, I suppose,” his sister said. “Never mind that you have a wife and children to attend to. How are Sheila and the kids? I’d love to get over to New York and see everybody.”

“They’re grand altogether. I talked to them this afternoon. They wish they could be here. I like to think they miss me, but I suspect it’s London shopping they’re pining for. Anyway, I told them about all the sights I’ve seen, and the ones I intend to cram in while I’m here.”

“Tell me this, Terrence: do you ever just sit around and read a book? Listen to music? Gaze at the moon?”

“Those activities, if they can be called activities, Molly, don’t account for a large portion of my time, I’d have to say.”

“That kind of activity accounts for most of my free time, I’m happy to report.”

“But seriously, I’d love to have a bar. Brennan, you could work the place for me when I’m thirty-five thousand feet up and unavailable to pour the pints. Can’t you see him working a bar, Molly?”

“I have no trouble with that. After all, they call barmen ‘curates’ in Ireland. There’s got to be something in that. I could design the place for you.”

“No need. It would look exactly like Christy Burke’s in Dublin.” Their grandfather’s pub was a landmark on Dublin’s north side. Finn, their uncle, had taken it over after Christy’s death. “I’d move from Queens to the mainland just so I could call it Christy Burke’s in the Bronx.”

“Grandda would be smiling down on you from above,” said Molly.

“If,” Brennan put in, “he made it that far up. I’ll have to read up on the theology of the Irish struggle.”

“Oul Christy got quite the send-off,” Terry remarked. “I sat with Conn at the funeral. He was just a kid then.”

Dublin

November 5, 1970

Christy Burke lived to be seventy-seven years of age. Nobody expected that. And the cause of death was unexpected too: natural causes. But the throngs of people who jammed Our Lady of the Rosary church and the grounds outside weren’t there to send off the kindly publican who had died quietly at home following a stroke. To be sure, there were many in the crowd who knew and loved him in his role as the owner and barman of Christy Burke’s bar. But most of the two thousand souls in attendance were there to remember him for the battles he had fought for the Republican cause, beginning with the Easter Rising of 1916.

Terry was in the U.S. Air Force; he viewed his military service as a training program for a future career in civil aviation. His brother Brennan was a priest, four years out of the seminary in New York. They had flown in to Dublin two days ago. Now, on a grey day in November, Brennan would soon be up on the altar, concelebrating his grandfather’s funeral at the invitation of the other two priests, and Terry was sitting in the church waiting for the funeral to begin. All around him were members of his extended family: his sister, Molly, and brother Patrick, his uncles, aunts, greats, and cousins. Notably absent was Terry’s father, Declan, and his mother, Teresa. Twenty years earlier, they had bundled up the children and hustled them out of their house on the Rathmines Road, stuffed them into the family’s Cork-manufactured Ford Prefect, roared down the motorway to Cobh, abandoned the car in the county of its birth, and boarded a midnight ship out of Ireland. Declan had never again set foot on Irish soil. There was a story behind that, but it was a book that lay closed to Terry, perhaps for all time. Declan Burke was a man well able to keep his own counsel.

Beside Terry in the second row of pews was a young cousin, Conn Burke, son of Declan’s brother, Finn. The young fellow appeared to be around thirteen, with auburn hair and brown eyes; his eyes were rimmed with red. Not one to remain silent when there was the possibility of conversation, Terry said to him, almost in a whisper, “I wish I’d known our grandfather better. Not much chance of that after we immigrated to New York.”

That was all it took. Terry soon recognized a kindred spirit, another fellow in the family with the gift of gab.

“Grandda and I were really close,” Conn said. “I was just after seeing him the day he died. I liked to walk over to his place and pay him a visit. He told me I put him in mind of himself when he was a lad. And you know the bar. You’ve been there.”

It would not occur to anyone that a member of the Burke family had not spent time in Christy Burke’s bar, and they’d be right enough.

“Well,” said Terry’s young cousin, “that place was a hideout for our boys in the time of the Tan War, when we booted the Brits out of the Twenty-Six Counties. There’s a tunnel under there, where the fellows used to hide and make their escape from the Brits and their toadies in the police force. Michael Collins himself used Christy’s as one of his hiding places.”

“That’s right,” Terry said. “Collins was a legend. A man with a ten-thousand-quid price on his head, riding around the city on his bicycle. One of the most successful guerrilla fighters in the history of the world.”

“‘Bollocks of steel, had Mick,’ that’s what Grandda said to me about Collins. And Grandda knew him well. They were together in the prison camp in Wales. The Brits fecked all our lads into the same camp together in ’16 after the Rising. So they all came out determined to fight even more. And that’s what they did. Three years later, they went at it again.”

“Yeah, they took on the mighty British Empire. But then Collins signed the Treaty. The Brits would pull out of the Twenty-Six Counties, which would now be the Irish Free State, but the North remained in British hands. We all know how that worked out!”

The expression on young Conn’s face spoke volumes about how that worked out. “Right,” he said. “Irishmen still had to swear an oath to the English king! Well, the IRA weren’t buying that, after all the shite they’d been through.” The young fellow seemed to remember where he was and made a hasty sign of the cross. “So then it was the Civil War, the new Free State government against their old comrades in the IRA. Can you imagine what that was like, Terry?” Conn twisted around and looked at the crowd gathered in Our Lady of the Rosary church, men and women, young and old, all togged out in their Sunday best. “It would be like half the people in this church getting up and killing the other half. Brother against brother, friend against friend. I’m going to study history when I get to the university.”

The lad would ace his history courses, Terry predicted. And if he was this good a talker at thirteen, he might be head of the history department at thirty.

“But I know a lot of this stuff already,” Conn was saying, “from my father and from Grandda. Republicans believe we have to keep up the fight for a united Ireland, completely independent of the Brits. Otherwise, all those fellows died for nothing.”

Terry added another career to his imagined future for Conn Burke: politician.

“Back in the early twenties, when I’m telling you about, it was hellish.”

“Right,” Terry said, “you had IRA men attacking soldiers of the first Irish national army in eight hundred years. And you had the Free State government fighting and jailing its old friends in the IRA. Christy was one of those who ended up making war against Collins and the Free State.”

“Yeah, and Christy got sent to jail again, this time in Kilmainham, along with hundreds of other Republicans. Some of them probably here today.” Conn turned again to the mourners pouring into the church to honour his grandfather, who had lived the history his grandson intended to study. “Grandda spent hours with me, telling me all about those days, when I’d go over to his house, or I’d sit up at the bar in the off hours. And do you know what he told me about the day Collins died? It was August in 1922. The news came into Kilmainham Gaol that Michael Collins, General Collins, had been assassinated in County Cork. And Christy told me he came out of his cell and what he saw was seven or eight hundred men, enemies of the state, fellows who were in there because they were on the other side from Michael Collins. And those very men were all down on their knees, saying the rosary for Collins.”

Conn looked away from Terry then, as if to compose himself. Terry found himself unable to speak, a rare event indeed for him.

After a long moment of silence, Conn returned to his story. “You’ve heard of Tom Barry, yeah? He’s one of the most famous men from the Old IRA. Well, he was there and he tells the story too. I don’t think I’ll ever get that picture out of my head, but I guess I wouldn’t want to: the man’s former brothers, now his sworn enemies, down on their knees when they heard he died.”

That is when a lone piper at the back of the church began to play a lament on the uilleann pipes. Terry remembered what Brennan had said when discussing the funeral arrangements: “There is no instrument in the world that can evoke loneliness and loss like the uilleann pipes.”

Everyone stood and turned as the pallbearers brought the body of Christy Burke into the church. In the usual course of things Terry’s brother, Father Brennan Burke, considered any language other than Latin a travesty for the Mass. But he had been perfectly happy with the plan to have Christy Burke’s funeral Mass As Gaeilge, in the ancient language of Ireland. This was the way the old man would have wanted it, so that was fine with Brennan. The two senior priests were obviously fluent in Irish, Brennan less so, but he had been learning some of the old tongue in his spare time in New York. Terry found himself deeply moved by the sound of the old language resonating throughout the church.

The sermon, given by Father Sean Murphy, was not supposed to be a eulogy; liturgical rules forbade it, apparently. But Father Murphy ignored the rule, and the sermon was all about Christy Burke. About his fighting at the age of twenty-three in the General Post Office during the Rising in 1916, his incarceration in a prison camp in Wales, the execution of sixteen of his brothers in arms, executions that turned the tide of Irish opinion against the British after long years of complacency on the part of the Irish people. The priest then spoke of how Christy fought during the Old Troubles in 1919 to 1921, the War of Independence. And then there was the horror of the Irish Civil War, which many could not bear to speak of even to this day. There were oblique references to Christy’s activities over the ensuing decades, the priest careful to place the dead man’s actions on behalf of the IRA in the context of a Catholic’s dedication to a Catholic Ireland. There were a few references to the new Troubles in the North, the sectarian and political violence in Belfast and Derry and other centres, and the return of the British Army to Irish soil. Father Murphy hinted, without saying as much, that Christy had played a role in the recent struggle not long before his death.

When the Mass ended, and the priests and the family began their procession down the aisle with the coffin, a woman Terry recognized as a second cousin rose to sing a solo in Irish. No, it was not singing; it was keening, and the powerful lament seemed to go beyond the church, to fill the whole world. Many of the mourners in the churchyard and the street outside were in tears. If ever there was a cry to heaven, this was it.

The mourners got into their cars for the funeral procession along the Harold’s Cross Road and over to Mount Jerome Cemetery. The gate to the graveyard was flanked by grey stone pinnacles looking like miniature spires. Dozens of gardaí, police officers, stood by, watching the crowd as it arrived. When the people got out of their cars and started walking towards the grave, the guards went with them, walking along on both sides of the funeral cortege. A new element emerged then from the back of the throng, a group of men and women in tunics, berets, and dark glasses. Some had their faces covered by scarves, a few were in balaclavas. Civilians stood aside and made room as the IRA honour guard, under the watchful eyes of the police, formed behind the coffin.

The procession went on with stately dignity, except for a small interruption by a young auburn-haired boy who tore himself from his mother’s grasp and made a beeline for the honour guard. Conn Burke. His mother started after him, looking dismayed. Terry followed her gaze and found himself looking at Conn’s father, Uncle Finn, whose expression was unreadable behind a pair of sunglasses like those of the paramilitary contingent. Finn made no move to stop his son from wriggling into the honour guard and marching with the Irish Republican Army. The marchers made room for the boy without missing a step.

When they reached the graveside, the crowd shuffled into place, the honour guard stood at attention, and the pallbearers made ready to commend Christy’s body to the earth. Father Murphy said the requisite prayers and the coffin was lowered into the ground. Then everyone’s attention was caught by something on the other side of the cemetery. A white van was approaching slowly along a pathway, its engine nearly silent. There were no markings on it. This was not out of the ordinary, Terry knew, given that the Burke family ran its own transport company. On occasion, unmarked vehicles came in handy for reasons not always noted in the company’s paperwork. The eyes of the gardaí locked onto the vehicle, and several of the police officers began to move towards it. The van then reversed, turned, and approached the grave from the opposite direction. As soon as it came to a stop, six men hopped out. They wore camouflage tunics, berets, sunglasses, and heavy scarves covering their mouths and noses. Each held a rifle down by his side. The men walked up to Christy’s grave, stood side by side, raised their rifles, and fired a volley of shots into the air.

†

Now, in Janey Mack’s bar, Molly was nodding her head, remembering it all. “Conn falling in step with the honour guard. His mother didn’t look too happy. My boy would have done the same thing. Finbarr. What a handful he is! He thinks the sun rises, shines, and sets on Conn Burke. Boys! What can you do? Why do you suppose the guards let it go, the volley of shots?”

“Thought it best not to aggravate things, maybe,” Terry said. “I’ve heard of that before. And they probably had more than enough people to lean on in the future, given all the pictures they snapped of the mourners, civilian and otherwise. And, remember, a lot of the guards shared Christy’s politics.”

“Or were dedicated drinkers at Christy Burke’s bar,” she smiled, “allowing the man to be honoured.”

“Maybe that too.”

“That was the funeral. But I’m thinking about the night before. Do you fellows remember the wake?”

“I recall being there at the house,” said Brennan. “Spent a lot of time catching up with the family.” Terry nodded. That was his experience as well.

“Of course,” said Molly, “but there was something else going on.” She took a leisurely sip of her pint and sent her mind back in time.

Dublin

November 4, 1970

Molly’s grandfather, Christy Burke, lay in his coffin by the front window of his sitting room on Dublin’s north side, and the room was jammed with mourners. It had been a long day for Molly, who had travelled from London with her one-year-old baby, Shelmalier. Brennan, Patrick, and Terry were here from New York. Brennan, the family’s unlikely priest, was in deep conversation with their grandmother, Sadie. Molly immediately chastised herself for thinking of Brennan as an unlikely priest. He was a wonderfully dedicated priest; it’s just that he was a holy terror in his younger years, and he always had a woman hanging off of him. He was the last person anyone would have expected to see wearing a collar and living a life of celibacy. Now, at thirty, he cut a dashing figure in his sister’s opinion, with his black hair and black eyes, and his air of self-possession. The two younger brothers had the lighter colouring and sky blue eyes of their father. Patrick had recently finished medical school and intended to go into psychiatry. Molly could see that. Even in his mid-twenties, Pat was able to console the members of the family, young and old, without any of the stiffness that sometimes marred such efforts. Her youngest brother, Terry, was standing by the coffin, uncharacteristically silent. Molly did not want to intrude on whatever her normally gregarious brother was feeling.

Shelmalier, nicknamed Shelley, was just starting to walk, and Molly decided to take her for a tour around the house. The child was delighted and grinned up at everyone who watched her toddling through the crowd. There was a group of men standing in the hallway smoking and chatting. One of them looked towards the front door of the house, which had just opened to admit a priest in collar and coat; he removed his fedora upon entering the house. Molly thought a couple of the men looked familiar.

One of them began to sing, “Father Murphy from the County Wexford sweeps o’er the land like a mighty wave.”

That was it. She had seen their much younger selves, a couple of them at least, on the trip to Wexford, the visit to the ruined abbey, in 1949. Now several of the men raised their voices in song, and it was a song well known to Molly. She often sang “Boolavogue” to her daughter at bedtime, because her name was in it: “the bright May meadows of Shelmalier.” The little girl’s eyes were gleaming, recognizing the piece. The boys of Wexford wound it up with a flourish:

God grant you glory, brave Father Murphy,

and open heaven to all your men.

For the cause that calls you may call tomorrow

in another fight for the green again!

“May God bless all who gather here,” the priest said. “And I thank you for that kind tribute.”

“Did yeh come in on the train, Father?”

“I did. Thought I’d be here before now but there was a delay.”

“Ah but sure, you should have rung me. I came up in my car. I’ll give you a spin home afterwards.”

“Thank you, Geroid. I’ll be happy to take you up on it.”

“Go on in, Father. We’ve all paid our respects. The man is nicely laid out. They did a good job on him. Looks as if he wasn’t sick a day in his life.”

“He wasn’t. Stroke felled him, just like that.”

Shelley toddled after Father Murphy into the sitting room, then plunked herself down just inside the door. Molly gently eased her over to the side a bit and took an empty chair beside her. She reached into her bag and pulled out a bright yellow rubber duck and handed it down. Shelley grabbed it and stuffed its head into her mouth, then marched around the room, looking for all the world like a self-satisfied little cat carrying her prey from the field. Everything the child desired in the world at that moment was right there.

The crowd from Wexford, who had been quite boisterous up to now, began speaking in hushed tones out in the hall. If there is anything guaranteed to attract attention, it is a shift from a shout to a whisper. Molly saw her uncle Finn get up from his seat near the coffin and go out to join the visitors. She tuned in to the conversation, straining her ears to catch what she could.“Things have changed over the last twenty years.”

Since the plotting in 1949? They had indeed.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same. British troops are on our soil again.”

“So we have to take them on here. And we have to do a better job than we did in the border campaign!”

“Kind of hard to do a good job when our lads were lifted and dumped in internment camps on both sides of the border.”

That campaign was a series of attacks by the IRA operating out of the South, Molly remembered. Flying columns — units of IRA men — conducted arms raids and hit police barracks in the Northern towns in the late 1950s and early ’60s. But the governments on both sides of the border interned so many of the men that the campaign fell apart.

“And,” another fellow said, “it’s time to go into action against the Brits on their own turf.”

“Fight them on two fronts, you’re saying.”

“If we don’t, they won’t give a fuck. So what if people die in the streets of Belfast or Derry? As long as things are cheerio in London, the British people won’t care and won’t make their politicians care. Only way to get their attention is to hit them where it hurts.”

“By doing what?” That was Uncle Finn. “Are we going to commandeer the Rosslare ferry? Land an army on the coast of Wales and march in and occupy Great Britain? What have they got? Three or four hundred thousand men in uniform — land, sea, and sky? And even if they didn’t, they could nuke the entire lot of us!”

“So what do we do, Finn, sit on our arses and let them keep sending more and more battalions into the North?”

“I’m not saying we don’t operate on English soil. All I’m saying is that we stick with what we decided all those years ago. That is going to hold us in good stead now that the Brits are directly involved again.”

“Ah but sure, we need to do more. We saw your oul fellow at Bodenstown in June.” The annual gathering of Republicans at the grave of Wolfe Tone, a martyr to the cause in 1798; Molly had attended a few times herself. “And Christy was asking us what we were going to do about the new situation.”

“Oh, I can tell you my father and I had lots to say about the new situation. And I’m not telling tales out of school when I say he and I both saw it firsthand on more than one occasion. But as for the Wexford plan, Christy was satisfied that the scheme was a good one. He knew its time would come. And that time is now.”

“Good to hear, as I know we’d all agree. But I still say it’s time for some fireworks over there. Time for a new campaign in England. But only the kinds of places we talked about back then.”

“Will you keep your voice down, Geroid. Don’t be listening to him, Finn. He hasn’t seemed to grasp the fact that innocent people die in … that sort of campaign. If we end up killing non-combatants we’re just as bad as Cromwell himself, when he slaughtered women and children in my town and in Drogheda.”

“So you’re saying, Fergus, that I want to go over there and kill innocent women and children, is that what I just heard?”

“That’s not what you want, Geroid, but it’s what you’ll get. I say we fight this war like the soldiers we’re supposed to be. Our targets are military targets, and I know Finn agrees.”

“Anything else is unacceptable.” Finn’s voice was clipped in reply.

“So we need soldiers and we need intelligence,” Fergus added.

“No thicks need apply, you’re saying,” another man chimed in. “Don’t bother applying, Geroid.”

“Fuck the lot of ye.”

“Show some respect, would you, Ger? A man’s lying dead out there, and we’ve a priest in our midst.”

“Begging your pardon, Finn. And yours, Father Murphy.”

“Te absolvo, Geroid.”

Father Murphy’s next few words, sacramental or otherwise, were lost to Molly as her daughter emitted peals of laughter over some kind of in-joke between child and rubber duck.

When Molly tuned in to the priest’s conversation again, she heard, “And I see I’m not the only sagart in the house. Young Brennan in there would be Declan’s son, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right,” said Finn. “He has a parish in New York.”

“Seems to me I met him when he was just a boy. Didn’t we see him somewhere, Dermot?”

“Not that I remember. But then again, some of my recollections have been dimmed by drink!”

“No, you’re right. You weren’t there. I was thinking of that little council of war we had, us and the Delaneys. And you, Finn. You, Declan, and Christy in Wexford town. That’s where I first saw Brennan Burke. Declan had brought the family to Wexford for a visit. Thought he’d leave them to a bit of sightseeing while he joined us for our meeting in the Cape Bar. But young Brennan banjaxed it for him. Saw Christy’s old auto parked in the street outside the bar. Christy looked out and spotted him, and what could he do but bring the little lad inside?”

“Kind of hard to hide a bullet-riddled car with Dublin plates on the streets of Wexford.”

“True enough. The poor little fellow was wicked cross about what Cromwell and his men had done to Selskar Abbey. ‘Where are the monks doing their chanting now? Are they hiding somewhere?’ Just as if it had happened that very day.”

“Are the monks hiding somewhere?” one of the men said. “Remember how that got us thinking? Easier for them to hide than the rest of us, wearing a robe and a hood. What do they call that, Father? It covers the monk’s head.”

“A cowl.”

“Right,” one of the other men said. “Delaney told us he’d ask the wife to run a dozen of them up on her sewing machine, that they would come in handy for our —”

“Dry up, for fuck’s sake, Dermot. Consider yourself under a vow of silence starting now.”

The hushed tones hushed completely then. Molly entertained herself with a vision of a group of her countrymen, talkative by nature, forced to spend hours in a cold, dark monastery, peering at each other under their cowls, the faces just about exploding off of them from the effort to stay quiet.

But silent they were at present, so Shelmalier decided to fill the void by singing out at the top of her lungs. Then Molly heard Geroid, or maybe Fergus, exhort his comrades to return to the wake and pay respect to the dead.

†

“That’s all I heard,” Molly told the family table in Janey Mack’s, “so I never did figure out what was going on, aside from some loose talk about a campaign, which I took to mean another in a series of bombing campaigns that have been launched in England over the last century. We all know that came to pass, but whether these fellows had something to do with it or not is anyone’s guess.”

“Well, if they’ve had something to do with the sort of bombings that started up three years later, it was without Finn’s blessing, thanks be to God,” said Brennan.

“The fellow said ‘only the kinds of places’ they had discussed before. I remember thinking they were going to target old churches and abbeys and the like. But, as I said to you earlier, that may just have been my own interpretation. Whatever it was, they didn’t elaborate on it at Christy’s wake.”

“But it sounds as if they had something else going on, dating back to that same meeting in ’49, the one I crashed into after spotting Christy’s car.”

“They certainly didn’t go into details about that, whatever it might have been.”

Brennan had just got up for a fresh round of drinks when Shelmalier and Finbarr arrived, so he took their orders as well. They were all raising their glasses in a toast when Conn appeared, so they waited for him to be seated with his pint and then the six of them toasted each other and drank deep.

“How’s the Dante paper coming along, Shelley?” Brennan asked.

“Slowly, Brennan. I’m getting bogged down in the various dialects of mediaeval Italy.”

“Don’t get him started on mediaeval Italy, Shel,” her mother warned her. “You’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I stole one of Shel’s papers once,” said Finbarr, “and it took me years to hear the end of it. Not a paper, actually, a music assignment. I love music, always have done, but anything other than punk or hard rock was beyond me back then. We had regular assignments in composition and this time it was a hymn. I put it off till the night before, as usual, and didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. So I rooted through Shelley’s assignments and found one she had done for her course years before. It was called ‘All God’s Creatures Today.’ It was for several instruments, and all the voices did was ‘oooooooo.’ The master had given her top marks and had written on it ‘Strikes exactly the right note, Shelmalier — bravo!’ So I couldn’t lose. I spent all night transposing the notes onto my own music sheets and passed the thing in. The school band and choir performed all our pieces. I could hardly wait to hear what ‘mine’ sounded like. Could hardly wait for the applause.

“Turned out it sounded like a bunch of barnyard animals. Grunts from the tuba, quacking noises from something else, and the choir part, when I looked at Shel’s original later, was really ‘mooo.’”

“That’s right,” said Shelmalier, enjoying the memory, “I’d written a parody of modern dissonant music and song cycles. My music master was of the old school and hated all that, so he loved my composition.”

Brennan could identify with that. One of the things he detested most in the world was a “choir having fun,” singing jolly work songs and making all kinds of goofy noises. Same for bands having fun.

“But,” Finbarr said, “my music master was a modernist. He’d actually composed rubbish like this himself. I was fucked and nearly failed the course!”

Everyone laughed at his tale, and he raised his glass to them in acknowledgement.

“I wrote a paper once,” Terry said, “about ants. Flying ants. I called it ‘Pissmires on the Wing.’ The teacher said it’s p-i-s and I’d spelled it wrong because I had a dirty mind. And it was worse when she got to the part where I added in brackets that the males existed only to breed with the females and were so dumb they couldn’t even feed themselves. Molly read it and said that sounded like half the guys she knew.”

“That sounds like you, Mum!” Shelley laughed.

“But anyway your mum said the paper was good. My teacher didn’t like it, though, and said she didn’t want to read anything about bugs from me ever again. She gave me a forty-nine on it.”

“He wrote about the physics of flight, using the flying ant and other insects as examples,” Brennan explained, “and the school principal intervened and gave him a grade of ninety-eight percent.”

“I went to the Christian Brothers,” said Conn. “They marked me down because I wrote on a test that Eamon de Valera was a towering figure in our history but had always been self-serving and a bit of an arsehole personally. Well! Brother Canavan gave out to me in front of the class. What would my father say if he were shown that disgraceful document? I was not Republican enough to be a true son of Finn Burke, and not Republican enough for the Brothers! Canavan declared, ‘A man is not an arsehole until I say he’s an arsehole. And Dev was not an arsehole until 1936.’”

“What happened in 1936?” Terry inquired.

“De Valera outlawed the IRA and started throwing them in prison. Years later I saw Brother Canavan at the annual commemoration at Wolfe Tone’s grave, and Canavan said that would earn me time off Purgatory. And he …”

Conn picked up his pint, drank from it and did not resume the tale. All Brennan heard him say under his breath was “shower of shites!”

Glasses were raised and stayed in the air. Conversations were abruptly concluded; the place fell silent. Three young men had come in the door and walked to the middle of the pub. They stood, looking around. Brennan saw a party of four quietly rise from their table and move off. The new arrivals took the table without comment. Two of the new lads had longish dark hair; one had a beard. One wore a jersey bearing the insignia of the Celtics football club; the other wore blue for the Dubs. Their attention was focused on the third member of the group, an intense-looking man of around thirty with cropped, light brown hair and high cheekbones topped by narrow grey-blue eyes.

Finbarr watched the newcomers make their entrance, then leaned towards Conn and whispered something in his ear. There was no response from Conn; he had all his attention on the men who had just arrived and altered the temperature of the room.

The youngest of the three went to the bar and put in the order, “Three pints for Mr. Kane’s party,” and returned shortly afterwards with the goods. He put them on the table, then picked one up and placed it before the fellow with the cheekbones, so that must have been Kane. The lad stood and waited while Kane took a leisurely sip. Kane put his glass down and glanced up at the cup-bearer, who returned to his seat and pushed one of the pints to the other fellow, and brought the third to his lips and downed half of it in one go. This brought a disapproving look from Kane, but the drinker missed it.

Kane eyed the television set on the wall, then turned to his sidekicks, and whispered something Brennan couldn’t hear. The young man in the Celtics jersey called out to the barman, “D’yez get Ulster TV on that? Put it on, would yeh? Something me and the lads want to look at.”

The request was for Ulster news, but the voice was pure Dublin. Well, “pure” might not be the word; Kane’s companion spoke with a skanger accent that would have you looking about for the nearest peeler, just in case. But you wouldn’t want to be caught looking.

The barman switched the channel, and everybody in the bar stared at the screen, waiting for the news, expecting it to be bad. And it was. Two members of a Loyalist paramilitary group and an off-duty British soldier had been killed by a remote-controlled bomb detonated by the Provisional IRA.

The scene switched to Government Buildings in Dublin, where reporters had cornered a number of politicians from the governing party, Fianna Fáil, emerging from their business in the house. A member of the cabinet decried the violence committed by both sides and called for a negotiated settlement to the Troubles in the North.

Contrary views were given expression at the Kane table. “Fuckin’ Free Staters. What do they know about it? Get off your arse and go up there and take a UVF bullet in the face, and then give out to us about ‘both sides’! Fuckin’ maggots!”

The Irish Free State had become the Republic of Ireland forty years ago, Kane’s native land, and Fianna Fáil was still known not as the Free State party but as the Republican party, but things were not quite Republican enough for the true Republican.

Then it was a member of the Fine Gael party who was asked for a statement. “There is no justification for violence, for bombings, for terrorism. By any side in the conflict. Period.”

“Go and burn in hell, you and the rest of the Blue Shirts! Go up and take your message to the boys in the Shankill Road. See how much justification you’ll find when the Loyalists shove a grenade up your hole!”

The newscast turned to other matters, and Janey Mack’s bar was quiet once again. The only conversations were whispers at the tables; there was none of the cross-room banter that had been going on only minutes before.

Terry took up the slack with an amusing tale about a dustup between the Italian and German members of a flight crew en route from Frankfurt to Rome, but even he was subdued in his presentation. Brennan tried to catch Molly’s eye but she seemed intent on doing the same with her son, and Finbarr was ignoring her and trying not to look as if he were doing it.

Then Kane rose from his seat and his two sidekicks did the same. Kane gazed around the room and said, “Lads?” His gaze had taken in Conn, and Conn, looking none too happy, got up from his chair. Finbarr did the same, and Brennan saw Conn’s hand go down to Finbarr’s knee and press. Finbarr sat down hard, and his face was red with anger.

Conn and a handful of other men followed Kane and his group to the rear of the building, and they headed down a set of stairs. Finbarr remained at the table, seething.