It was an overcast Sunday morning in January and the Irish Republican Army was waiting at the end of the lane. The victim, a man in his fifties, left noon Mass a few minutes early to avoid the crowd of fellow church-goers blocking the narrow road outside St Brigid’s. He walked over to his car with the old lady to whom he had offered a lift, helped her into the passenger seat, walked round to the driver’s door, got in and was turning the key in the ignition when two young men in duffel coats, with hoods up, walked over to the Mercedes. One drew a gun and fired five bullets through the driver’s window. The first round hit High Court Judge William Doyle in the face, the others in the head, the last in the chest; seventy-two-year-old Mrs Convery was hit by a ricochet in the leg. Women in the emerging congregation, hearing shots and seeing murder, began to scream. The two killers turned, running through the church-goers towards their getaway car parked down the avenue. Two doctors in the crowd, one of them the Judge’s brother Dennis, ran to the car and vainly tried to resuscitate the Judge, but it was over, he was dead. Canon Patrick McAlister, who had just celebrated the Holy Sacrament of Mass, administered the Last Rites on the roadway outside his church.
I arrived about half an hour after the Judge had been murdered. The green Mercedes was still by the kerb, just opposite the entrance to St Brigid’s, in a tree-lined street off Belfast’s prosperous Malone Road. Already, the car was isolated by the white plastic police tape. The Mercedes had ceased to be a car and had become an exhibit of death. A few stragglers gaped but the majority of the congregation had gone, leaving flak-jacketed policemen, armed with M1 carbines, shifting their weight from foot to foot to keep the circulation going, guarding this evidence of Sunday morning murder.
Soon the SOCO men, Scene of Crimes Officers, would arrive to paw their way through the Mercedes’ ashtray, the side compartments, the detritus of another’s life, and bureaucratically record the last forensic moments of someone else in Northern Ireland. They would dust for the fingerprints that everyone knew would not be there – the gunmen were wearing gloves – and record photographically the exact position of the car and its contents for the file of evidence at the trial of Doyle’s killers, who everyone knew would never be caught and whose trial would never happen.
Glass fragments littered the seat and the ground outside the driver’s window, and the tan leather seats were covered in drying blood. Aside from the stains, the upholstery on the driver’s seat was unmarked – all of the IRA’s bullets were still inside Judge Doyle, the body already declared ‘dead on arrival’ at the Royal Victoria Hospital a couple of miles away. High Court Judge William Doyle was already on the conveyor belt for a post-mortem that would slit him open and extract the bullets that might just match those of other bullets extracted from other IRA victims now or in killings to come. Next week Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) men would come to noon Mass at St Brigid’s with clipboards to interview members of the congregation in search of the eyewitnesses they knew they would never find and who everyone knew had seen nothing. At the far side of the tape, down the avenue of trees and out on the main road, the light Sunday afternoon traffic circulated unmolested by the immediacy of this death.
I peered in through the shattered driver’s window: supposedly a reporter but really a voyeur. On the shelf at the back lay the Sunday tabloid papers. I knew in that moment that I had reached the right place at the right hour. I was in Belfast for this: for death and killing and violent republicanism.
Doyle was a servant and officer of the British Crown, the British Government, in Ireland. He sat in judgement on IRA suspects. He had power and wielded authority. He was a living symbol of the Crown and therefore an enemy of the rebels, the IRA, and they killed him for it. For in Northern Ireland power, authority and legitimacy were in murderous dispute.
Judge Doyle was also the enemy within. He was a Catholic on a Protestant/Unionist judicial bench which asserted the authority of the British Government. He blurred the lines of an ancient struggle but made himself an easy ‘stiff’ (murder victim) by his regular attendance at Mass at St Brigid’s. During the week the Judge was escorted everywhere by armed RUC bodyguards and was invulnerable. But at weekends, perhaps tired of the oppressive security, he shed his judge’s robes, dismissed his guards and reverted to domestic routine amidst the Victorian mansions of the Malone Road. He must have thought he was safe; he must have thought the Malone Road with neat gardens, Mercedes cars and money was immune from the Troubles. He was wrong. Someone in the congregation at St Brigid’s had recognized him and told the IRA, and they came on the right Sunday to kill him.
There was an awful Irish intimacy about his death, murdered at Mass in front of the congregation, fingered by someone who was part of that Catholic congregation. The IRA did not need to travel to kill Doyle. Their supporters were already there in St Brigid’s, also dressed in suits and Sunday best on the Malone Road, hidden amongst the smiling schoolgirl choir or walking back down the aisle slyly staring after Holy Communion. I wondered what were the passions that allowed, perhaps compelled, someone to kill in that way in that place.
* * *
Judge Doyle’s killing was somewhere in the middle of what was known as Ireland’s Troubles. For twenty-five years a little sniping war has been fought in the north-western corner of Europe; Doyle was victim two thousand and something. The exact number does not matter; there was a lot of killing before and a lot of killing after. And there is still some, a little, killing to come. The death toll is three thousand and something now.
It was called the Troubles because the exact nature of the conflict was difficult to define. It was not a war in any conventional sense. There was no artillery, no tanks or fighter planes, the electricity worked and so did the telephones. There were no set-battles, no definitive front-lines, no victories and no total defeats. Ninety-nine per cent of the time the land was at peace. You could have lived and worked in Ulster and never have seen a soldier, never heard a word spoken in anger. You could have had a holiday in Northern Ireland. A tourist driving round in a hired car would have seen small sleepy villages, lush green fields, the prosperous Victorian-built city of Belfast and the impressively preserved medieval walls of Derry. The good people of Ulster, inured to sectarian slaughter and terrorist bombing, would have been shocked and appalled if a visitor was mugged. Crime levels in Ulster were ridiculously low. The Troubles were not general anarchy, mayhem or chaos. It was rare for the innocent, the unaligned, or the uninvolved to get killed in the crossfire. All the killing was directed, pinpointed, reserved for special occasions and special places. You had to seek out the Troubles; you had to know where the strata of conflict erupted into public view.
The word itself, ‘Troubles’, vague and ill-defined, was a euphemism, but it suited the vague and ill-defined nature of the war in Ireland. It has many sub-definitions: a thing that causes distress; an occasion of affliction; a misfortune; a calamity; public disturbance, disorder or confusion. The Troubles disturbed life – they did not destroy it. Most of the time, for most of the people, nothing untoward happened. The pursuit of capitalism, the rearing of children, the growing of crops, the manufacture of industry, were unaffected. At other times, usually in certain specific places, there were riots, disturbances, threats, beatings, car hijackings, men in masks, fear, and murder. The Troubles, and this is important to remember, were acts of rebellion rather than revolution. No one had a plan to proclaim a ‘liberated’ Northern Ireland a Marxist state.
The euphemism of the Troubles was useful because it was hard to classify these events, these troubles; the grounds and nature of the conflict mutated even within the small confines of Northern Ireland, which is just over five thousand square miles and has a population of one and a half million people. In Belfast, the capital of Britain’s Irish ‘province’, the urban Catholic unemployed in the IRA plotted murder from their British-taxpayer-built council houses, ambushing British soldiers, firing rockets at police jeeps and ‘stiffing’ vulnerable targets, like Judge Doyle, whilst their Protestant adversaries hijacked cars, drove into Catholic districts and shot ‘taigs’ (Catholics) at random. In Derry, seventy miles away, the IRA had no such opponents but the organization had long been substantially penetrated by the British security forces. Both sides waged an intelligence war against each other that revealed itself in the dead bodies of IRA informers found in plastic bags along the border with the Irish Republic if the IRA succeeded, and the dead bodies of blown-up soldiers if the British security forces failed. In the countryside of Tyrone and Fermanagh, the IRA’s soldiers, known as Volunteers, fought a more traditional guerrilla-style campaign, sniping at armed soldiers, blowing up barracks and crossing from the immunity of farmhouses in the neighbouring Irish Republic to assassinate lone members of a British Army militia, the Royal Irish Rangers (RIR). In the ‘Provisional Republic of South Armagh’, just sixty miles south of Belfast, the IRA controlled the ground and the British Army were safe only in their concrete bunkers or high up in the sky protected by circling Vietnam-style helicopter gunships.
The Troubles were spasmodic. Their public history was a roll-call of the high points of atrocity and outrage: fifteen killed by a Loyalist bomb in McGurk’s Bar in Belfast in 1971; thirteen civil rights marchers killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972; nine civilians dismembered by IRA car bombs on Bloody Friday in Belfast in 1972; twenty-one disco-goers blown up by the IRA in Birmingham in 1974; thirty-three shoppers blown up by Loyalist car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974; twelve diners burned to death by an IRA fire-bomb in La Mon restaurant in 1977; ten IRA hunger-strikers dead in prison in 1981; eight IRA Volunteers killed by the SAS at Loughgall in 1987; eleven civilians blown up by the IRA at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen in 1987; five civilians shot dead in a bookie’s shop by Loyalists in Belfast in 1991; and two children killed by an IRA bomb in Warrington in 1992, and on and on and on. The gaps between significant acts of collective murder were filled by a steady drumbeat of individual whackings (murders) or stiffings.
People often tried to explain the Troubles in terms of other conflicts, but this was not Cuba, nor Algeria, nor South Africa nor Vietnam. It was Ireland and the tenacity of the struggle between the rebels and the Crown was older than all the ‘isms’ of the twentieth century. The Troubles were an endless series of small military skirmishes. The objective was to go on killing the enemy wherever you could find him, and thereby wear out his will to fight on. The ultimate goal was fairly clear. Ireland was and is divided; six of the nine historic counties of the province of Ulster are under British rule, the other twenty-six counties constitute the Republic of Ireland. The IRA were fighting to remove the British Crown from what they regarded as Irish soil and reunite Ireland. The British Government were fighting to defend the Northern Irish state and the desire of the 850,000 strong Northern-Irish-born Protestant population to remain separate from the rest of Ireland. It is the longest war the world has ever known.
* * *
I was still standing next to the Mercedes when it began to rain, soft flicks of water sat on the skin of the Judge’s car, a breeze got up, and it grew colder. I walked back through the empty streets of the Malone Road district to my rented room. I sat down next to the gas fire, drank some tea and tried to write down what I had seen and what I had felt. I tried to remember a clear point, a moment of origin, that would explain why I was in Belfast, why I was fascinated by the IRA and their violent struggle, why I too was a Republican, but I could not. There never is a discrete, documentable moment of beginning in any story of this nature; there are just moments of departure.
I was ten years old when Ireland’s Troubles broke out again in 1969. I was born the sixth of seven children to Irish emigrant parents who had settled in Scotland. In Edinburgh my parents, the seven children and the lodger who attached herself as a permanent addition to the family lived packed into a large stone tenement apartment on the fringes of the half-demolished Irish quarter, the Pleasance. When the sixties civil rights marches in Northern Ireland erupted in violence on our newly acquired colour television set we believed that our fellow Catholics in Ulster were standing up for their rights. We admired people who ‘stood up for themselves’ and refused to be cowed, even if we were not really sure what they were standing up for. We disliked the occasional marches of sectarian Protestant Orangemen through the streets of the Pleasance.
My first school was St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Primary in the heart of the Pleasance. Our most famous old boy was James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born Irish Republican leader executed by the British for leading the 1916 Easter Rising. This fact was never mentioned by the teachers – perhaps they were not even aware of it themselves. As Catholics we were different from the majority Protestant population; we could not take part in what we were told was the heresy of worshipping the Queen of England as the head of our faith. St Patrick’s did not play the National Anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ and we never prayed for her longevity.
But I never thought of myself in Scotland as Catholic with a capital ‘C’. If, as teenagers, we had allegiances it was an allegiance to pop groups, the Who or Genesis or Led Zeppelin. I changed schools to Holy Cross Primary, the junior offshoot of a prestigious grammar school from which the aspirant Catholic middle classes launched themselves. I did not know it, but I was changing class. Saving up to buy an Afghan coat and sleeping, or attempting to sleep, with the daughters of Edinburgh’s more prosperous burghers soon occupied far more of my energies than concern for the civil rights of Catholics in Ulster or the re-emergence of violent Irish republicanism. I stopped going to confession when I was twelve after I discovered girls and masturbation and was too embarrassed to tell the priest. At fourteen I stopped even going to Mass and sneaked off to the movies instead. At fifteen I was more inclined to Communism, being a hippy, smoking marijuana and losing my virginity. The Troubles in Ireland were news from a distant country.
Neither of my parents was Republican. My father, Patrick Toolis, worked as a building foreman and never voted for anyone other than the British Labour Party all his life. He was one of the most gentle men you could ever meet and he loved to sing for his exhausting brood of children. His songs were always love ballads; only rarely would he sing rebel songs that commemorated the glories of a lost republic. My mother, Mary Gallagher, was more animated; her fiery personality ruled our household, but she too had little time for a country in which she had only known poverty and hardship. Ireland was her past and Edinburgh, where she worked as a nurse, raised her children and prospered, was her daily life.
But we had another place, another identity in the world. Every summer my father would borrow his firm’s noisy diesel workmen’s van, pack it with a dozen children and aunties, and drive the four hundred miles to our real ‘home’ in Achill Island, County Mayo, on the extreme west coast of Ireland. Every year in the sixties and seventies as Northern Ireland was engulfed in communal violence we drove the same route from Edinburgh to the Stranraer ferry on Scotland’s west coast, past the farms where my mother worked picking potatoes as a thirteen-year-old girl, and sailed across the Irish Sea. As the ferry docked at Larne we grew anxious and drew into ourselves. We believed that the North was populated by hate-filled Orangemen who would foam at the mouth at the sight of our Catholic flesh. We were as convinced as anyone that the whole of Northern Ireland was a war zone. We had no real understanding of what was taking place there and no desire to tarry and find out.
As the van hurtled through the North, I would look out of the windows at the blue- white- and red-painted kerbstones and the Union Jacks on flagpoles in private gardens that told us this was Protestant territory and a hostile land. During the early days of the Troubles we drove through Belfast and saw the soldiers, barricades and rolls of barbed wire of a city at war. It looked too much like the television reports for comfort. Father found a new route and for the next twenty years we skirted around the far side of Lough Neagh to avoid Belfast and any potential contact with the hostile natives.
In all those years we were rarely stopped and never once searched by the British security forces. Once the British soldiers saw our British-registered number plate and heard my mother’s carefully enhanced Scottish accent, they relaxed – this vanload of Scottish children was not the enemy. At one of these infrequent roadblocks, my mother once gave a couple of Scottish soldiers some tins of beer as we waved and pretended we liked ‘our boys’ while secretly believing them to be oppressors of Catholics like us. The few security checks that did occur made us tense, and I have had a lifelong aversion to customs posts and immigration officials ever since. At the border we all breathed exaggerated sighs of relief as we drove into the ‘real’ Ireland, which we called the South. My aunties, safely out of earshot of the last custom post, complained about the apparent lack of security and declared that we could have smuggled tons of bombs underneath the already luggage-crammed seats. The IRA smuggled bomb material into the North and we were driving in the opposite direction but everyone nodded in rigorous agreement, happy to be clear of dangerous territory. In reality every adult, and probably every child, in that van would have been aghast at the thought of risking themselves to help the IRA.
In the South the roads quickly decayed into potholes as we drove deeper into a world that was ten or fifteen years behind the material wealth of urban Scotland. Cows and men on bicycles were masters of the road. Unkempt vegetation burst out from the hedgerows; there were always makeshift road-works, old oil drums and loose chips, crooked bends and juddering ramps. Our lumbering vehicle slowed to a crawl as we negotiated the choked main streets of middle Ireland, past the shops whose outsides were festooned with big yellow gas bottles and compressed turf briquettes. There were shrines to the Virgin Mary by the roadside and strange sweets and bottles of apple-flavoured Cidona, shaped like artillery shells, with teeth-breaking bakelite stoppers. This was also another country.
As the long journey neared its end we stopped for some last-minute shopping in the small town of Newport in County Mayo, buying a huge slab of freshly slaughtered cow or lamb from the local butcher who stayed open to ten in the evening. If we were lucky we would catch the first peaty smoke of turf fires – indelibly imprinted on my mind as the smell of ‘home’. We plunged on into the West. In the van, the squabbling children, finally exhausted, gradually fell asleep, leaving the adults to contemplate the last twenty miles in peace.
At last we crossed over on to the island. The moment I grew to savour was when we drove into the driveway of my grandfather’s house. My father turned off the noisy van engine and we tumbled out into the darkness. Above us the stars shone like a great silver reef and our ears were filled with the dull thunder of the surf pounding on the three-mile-long beach just yards away that marked the very fringes of the European Continent.
Home was the tiny depopulated village of Dookinella, a hamlet of four households perched on the rim of the ocean, bound on one side by the Atlantic that stretched to America and on the other by two two-thousand-foot mountains, Minuan and Slievemore. Home was an elemental place of soaring cliffs, lashing rain, incredible storms, thatched cottages, tiny fields, drystone walls, brilliant sunshine, and relentless struggle. Home was our place in the world, the place from where all the Toolises had come, the place where we had land, where we were burrowed so deep into the earth that our name was written into it: the ancient townland title for the area is Dookinella Thulis. There had once been thirty households in Dookinella and the clan of Toolis big enough for my great-uncle’s mother and father, both Toolises but only distantly related, to marry. Now the drystone houses had collapsed and the descendants of their inhabitants were scattered across America and Australia. We were the last Toolises in Dookinella. It was an end of the earth, our end of the earth, a place where passing traffic was so unfamiliar that the dogs of the villagers continued to attack and drive off cars as if expelling a foreign enemy.
In my childhood the village was dying, as poverty drove the remaining families on to the boat for England, but my aunts and grandparents still clung to the land. To us children, their toy farms, with the three or four cows they owned, seemed like ranches. My maternal grandfather, Patrick Gallagher, had one pig and four cows and a horse called Dolly, who kept escaping from the field and whose mane and tail hair he sold to the tinkers who passed through the island from time to time.
Home was also a place of tight family bonds, neighbours, kinship and community; I was related in some fashion to everyone in the village and in the village beyond and the village beyond that. Regardless of the fact that I had not been born in Achill, I was always greeted by Sean, the aged farmer who lived across the road, and welcomed ‘home’. Great-uncle Edward, a few houses along, born in Manhattan but whose family re-emigrated back to the island, told stories of hardships on the docks in New York during the Great Depression. Brendan, a shepherd with jet-black Spanish hair and beautiful blue-eyed sheepdogs, was always buying me ‘minerals’ – fizzy drinks – in the local bars, discussing sheep, the state of the North and the world beyond our island.
Home was also a place where from the age of nine I was conscripted as another pair of hands. I learned all about the boredom and relentless labour of peasant farming. The summer months were dedicated to saving hay for winter fodder for the cows. There were no machines, only human bodies. The fields of grass were cut by my grandfather with a scythe. Each individual swathe of grass in the four or five acres of fields was then turned by hand, using long wooden rakes to aid the drying of the wet green underside. After a couple of days of good weather the yellowing grasses were shaken with hand pitchforks and again left to dry. Only then could the hay be gathered into haystacks or tramcocks, and if it rained you had to start all over again. If the weather held, the tramcocks were taken by donkey cart to the farmyard and made into a reek – a hay house with a thatch roof to protect it from rain.
‘Bringing in the reek’ was a great day. The labour was long and arduous, all the neighbours came to help, but by evening the hay was saved and the adults, particularly my grandfather, were happy. As a boy I was set different tasks; sometimes I would be sent through the still heat of the summer’s day down the beach-pebble road to the dank bar of the Crossroads Inn, a mile away, to order bottles of beer or Guinness for the men; sometimes I was a donkey cart driver, holding the donkey still by the halter as the hay was loaded into the cart or driving the full cart back to the farmhouse; and sometimes I was a tramper – jumping up and down in the hay as it was being built into a reek to compress it. At the end of the day everyone sat around the kitchen table and ate huge mounds of potatoes boiled in their skins with hunks of roasted lamb. Grandfather Gallagher had a special way of peeling the skins off the potatoes by spearing the potato with his fork and stripping off the skin with his knife. He then dipped the edge of the blade into the salt dish and tapped the salt over his food. Even in his early seventies he was a physically powerful man, over six foot tall, who could heave huge weights of hay above his head and pile them on to a cart. He had different coloured eyes, one blue and one blue-grey.
I was taken to my first wake when I was nine after a distant relative of my father succumbed to one of the cancers that seemed to ravage the island. The corpse was dressed in the man’s best brown suit and laid out in an open coffin placed in the cramped front sitting room of the wake house. The islanders believed that the prayers of the sexually innocent, children, went ‘straight up to heaven’, so I was encouraged to sit and pray at a small makeshift altar next to the wooden casket. Groups of adults were sitting chatting; plates of snuff and cigarettes, taken out of their packets and arranged in a circle, were being passed around; other guests were being fed in the kitchen and the men offered bottles of beer. I knelt down and looked at the waxy figure, the mouth wedged shut and the bloodless hands knotted together with rosary beads. At the urging of my mother, I kissed its forehead; I was disgusted and revulsed but also shocked – the coldness of this dead thing was far from human life.
* * *
My grandfather Patrick Toolis, born in 1885, had like my father spent most of his life in working exile. He had been a ganger, an overseer, on the potato squads that had been conscripted every summer for generations from the island to harvest potatoes for the farms of the west coast of Scotland, returning to the island in the winter. Grandfather had a reputation as a hard man, frugal and tight with money. He had ruled his tattie squad with an iron rod – he had given my mother a job at thirteen when she first visited Scotland as a ‘tattie-hawker’ in 1940 – and acquired the taste for Scots whisky and two twenty-packets of cigarettes a day that he harboured into his eighties.
Grandfather Gallagher, also Patrick, had also spent most of his working life on the farms and building sites of Scotland and England as an itinerant labourer, moving with the work from job to job and returning to the island in late summer when the harvest needed to be saved, or in March, around St Patrick’s Day, to cut the turf. Leaving and coming ‘home’ with hard-earned wages was life.
On the other side of the bay from Dookinella, just beneath Slievemore Mountain, lay the graveyard where all the Toolises were buried. We buried Grandfather Toolis there in November 1979 and returned in the spring to bury Grandfather Gallagher on a storm-lashed day when the only colour on the mountain was the women’s headscarves. Hours before, in the company of my sister-in-law, I had buried the ashes of one of my brothers, Bernard, as was his wish, on top of Minaun Mountain, which overlooks Dookinella. A decade later we would all return to bury my father Patrick Toolis, as one day they will gather to bury me.
Grandfather Toolis’s father, Padraig na Páidrin – Pat the Rosary – also Patrick Toolis, who died in 1929, was buried there too, but his grave, the simple inscription hand-hewn, was lost to us, obliterated by lichen and storms. Sean, our neighbour, remembered his wake and told stories of how Pat the Rosary was known as a devout man who could lead the prayers of the local people at funerals and other rituals involving the dead; he was a kind of holy man, a semi-official priest. But there was also a hidden meaning in his nickname: Padraig na Páidrin, after 1844, on the eve of the Great Famine, was the first man amongst the villagers of Dookinella to read. He had been educated by Protestant missionaries from the Achill Mission established in the 1830s on the island. The missionaries had built a school in Dookinella as a means of winning converts. No trace of the school remains, and no one remembers those who turned their faith, but Padraig na Páidrin was infamous long after amongst the villagers for his love of the written word, often abandoning the vital tasks of haymaking at the approach of a newspaper.
Beyond Padraig na Páidrin lay great-great-grandfather Martin Toolis, whose grave site was utterly lost but who was probably born some time in the early 1800s. We, my family, my community, had been living in Dookinella for generations. We were there in the summer of 1838, six years before Pat the Rosary’s birth, when His Majesty’s Royal Engineers Captain Stotherd and Lieutenant Chaytor undertook the first ordnance survey of the island and named Dookinella Thulis after us, the people who lived on the land. We had been living in this place of Dookinella, between the ocean and the mountains, far beyond the limits of human memory.
Like my ancestors I grew to love the land, love the lost place-names. I braved the dangers of carraig na leim, the terrifying ‘rock where you jump’ which stood as a lone pinnacle in the ocean and required the hardy and the foolish to jump on to its slippery surface before jumping again to safety on nearby fishing rocks. It was a test of manhood and I took several attempts before I managed it. I climbed high up on the side of the mountain to grua na gcapall, the ‘green on the top’, a strange marshy tract on Minuan. I spent hours in the treacherous coves beyond the slippy rock, where the Atlantic roared and where it was possible to walk for two or three miles on headlands cut off by the powerful turning tides. This was our place, my place, my home.
* * *
In truth we were a defeated people. Dookinella had become our haven and our home as the last refuge in the long war of dispossession waged by the Crown in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How my family came to arrive in Achill from their native Ulster is unknown. According to the epic seventeenth-century Irish poem The Annals of Four Masters, a section of the O Tuathalain (ancient Gaelic version of Toolis), a clan of the powerful O’Donnel family, had fled to Achill in 1602 in the aftermath of the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 when the power of the last great Gaelic chieftains was destroyed by the forces of the Crown.
Another branch of the sept, or clan, stayed behind in Ulster, but were dispossessed of their lands in the 1640s as the Irish natives futilely rose against the English colonizers and the hated Plantation. The natives slaughtered Crown loyalists but whatever savagery the Irish inflicted upon their masters, His Highness the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell repaid the debt of blood in full many times over in his savage 1650s campaign of conquest which crushed all Irish opposition to English rule. According to the Cromwellian Army’s Physician-General, Dr William Petty, half a million natives out of a total Irish population estimated at one and a half million perished by the sword, plague, famine, hardships and banishment between 1641 and 1652.1
Under the 1652 Act of Settlement the entire Irish nation was deemed guilty of rebellion and their lands subject to forfeiture. After all possible military opposition was removed, the Government of the Commonwealth of England turned to plunder, and confiscated Irish lands, parcelling out native estates to those soldiers and financiers who had supported the army of conquest. The native Irish were expelled and transported to what amounted to designated reservations in the recesses of Ireland’s most barren province, Connaught, in an early example of what later centuries would know as ‘ethnic cleansing’. The orders for removal and transportation of a nation were recorded by Cromwell’s Commissioners in fifty-six bound volumes known as The Books of the Commonwealth.2 On 2 July 1653 Matthew Thomlinson, President of the Council of State in Whitehall, issued instructions to the new English ruler in Ireland, Commander-in-Chief Charles Fleetwood:
It is thought fit and resolved that all and every of the persons aforesaid [natives of various designated categories] shall before the 1st day of May, which shall be in the year 1654, remove and transplant themselves into the Province of Connaught … and that whatsoever person or persons aforesaid shall after the said first day of May 1654 be found inhabiting or remaining in any part of the Provinces of Leinster, Munster or Ulster without a pass from you shall be reputed as spies and enemies and shall for the same offence suffer death.3
Commissioners were appointed to oversee the administration of the edict, taking care to disperse and break up historic septs or clans to prevent them forming new alliances in exile. The great work of transportation proved tedious and lengthy. A committee of Commonwealth Army colonels met in Dublin on 12 February 1655 to finally assign the transported native populations of specific counties into designated ancient baronies in Connaught: ‘The inhabitants of the Province of Ulster (except Down and Antrim) to be transplanted into the Baronies of Muckmullen … and into the Baronies of Moyrisk, Burrishoole and the half Barony of Erris.’4
Achill Island is in the ancient barony of Burrishoole. Somewhere in those annals of Plantation my ancestors met their dispossession and were cast out. There was nothing passed down, no family heirlooms, no bible, no glorious past remembered; we were the victims of history not its protagonists. We were driven west into the poorest fringes of Ireland’s most barren, depressed county, Mayo, in its most depressed province, Connaught. We were driven until there was no place further west to go.
We did not even own the land to which we were exiled. We were tenants, the last peasants of Northern Europe, of the various landowners who over the following centuries bought and sold the land my forefathers came to cherish.
The Toolises were but one strand on the island. Grandfather Gallagher’s family also came from Ulster, maybe at the same time, and many of the island’s surnames show that they too suffered the same fate. Grandfather Gallagher was heartbreakingly proud of his horse Dolly and his few green fields, but his land was only fit for hardy mountain sheep; his ‘fields’ were mere paddocks carved out from stony earth and barren bog-land. For centuries the land on Achill had been unable to sustain its population for more than four or five months of the year. The accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers testify to Achill as a place of famine and penury, where disease-ridden islanders lived crammed into drystone houses that were little more than hovels. At the time of the Great Famine, Padraig na Páidrin was just one amongst the thousand island schoolchildren who were saved from starvation by the proselytizing charity of Protestant missionaries. In this century, in 1921, my father was born in a drystone thatched cottage whose design had not changed in hundreds of years, in a village devoid of every basic necessity. When my brother was born on the island in 1949 it was in a house that, like every other house on the island, had neither electricity nor running water; Grandfather Gallagher did not receive a mains water supply until the 1970s.
The only thing that Achill produced in quantity was people. Each and every generation for the last 150 years has learned to bear the same lesson, to shed its sons and daughters to the wider world. It was normal for husbands to leave their wives and children for six, nine or twenty-four months at a time, work in England, live in squalid digs and only ever return home for short holidays. Men and women might marry, beget and rear a handful of children, and yet never live together for more than two weeks a year. Even today the island is still a reservation of generational unemployment, thwarted lives and despair. This was home. Hell or Connaught was the slogan of Oliver Cromwell when he drove the Irish rebels from their lands. The elemental wastes of Achill were as close to hell as Connaught could provide.
* * *
On the edge of Dookinella, close to the foreshore, stands a small monument. Surrounded by low stone walls, a twenty-foot-high upright stone pillar commemorates a son of the village. I often remember seeing the monument as I walked to the pub with the order for beer or went beachcombing along the wild strand at the back of the houses, but I cannot recall when I first started asking about the sagart a run (beloved priest) hanged by the British as a rebel. There were stories told of the priest’s flight from his pursuers after the last rebel stronghold at Killala was retaken in late September 1798. With his brother-in-law James Toolis, on the flight from Killala to Achill, the priest is purported to have seen a dead fish on the strand and to have warned his companion: ‘Iompuigh abhaile, a Sheumais, beidh mise gabhtha’ (Return home, James, I shall be captured). Or it was related how the priest, hidden in the thatch of a house in a nearby village, was discovered by chance after a yeoman fired a musket round in frustration through the roof and an old woman was heard to cry out in Gaelic: ‘The priest is dead.’ His name was Father Manus Sweeney and he was hanged in Newport on 9 June 1799 for ‘being concerned in rebellion and levying money for the French’ in the 1798 rebellion against the Crown.
The monument had been erected after Irish Independence on the spot old villagers insisted was the priest’s birthplace. The priest was still a hero to the people of Dookinella. He had resisted, stood up to the Crown, joined the rebels, fought for Irish freedom against the English. Father Sweeney had been executed but the seeds of resistance had been scattered further with his death. Those seeds lived on in the fireside stories and on, too, in the hearts of those who applauded or committed themselves to resistance. Rebellion and republicanism were in the blood of this defeated people. Perhaps it was there one night as I sat by the turf fire listening to old Sean, with the wind howling a gale, or to Brendan, who had worked in the North and after Bobby Sands died in 1981 was never seen in public without his Sinn Fein badge of the hunger-striker on his lapel, that my journey to Belfast and the taped-off street, the bloody seat and the dead judge had begun. I had come back to find out about this thing, this resistance, to explore my own rebel heart.
* * *
Judge Doyle was buried two days after his murder. The Requiem Mass was held in St Brigid’s and a few of the then powerful men in Northern Irish politics, the deputy British Secretary of State Lord Gowrie, the British Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham and the Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Lowry attended the funeral as if to mark the burial as an occasion of state. There were wreaths from the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Prior, the Lord Mayor of Belfast and the Circuit Judges of England and Wales. In his sermon Dr Cahal Daly, Bishop of Down and Connor and later Primate of Ireland, brought all the force of his rhetoric down on his fellow Catholic perpetrators of this ‘unspeakable evil’. ‘For we suffer at what is being done to our society and by members of our own community; for having come from us, they are not of us. By their words of hate and their policies of murder, they cut themselves away from the community of love which is the Christian Church.’
The church was packed, the occasion solemn, but in the end hollow. The Bishop’s words would soon be overtaken by other sermons and fresher deaths. Judge Doyle’s assassination did not shift the balance of power towards the British or the IRA. It was not a milestone, just a marker on a long road. Judge Doyle was just another stiff amongst the numerous, more anonymous casualties on a road that stretched back into the bowels of Irish history and forward into the same repetitious landscape of kerbside murder.
Doyle was not the first nor the last British judicial figure to die in Ireland. One of his predecessors, Resident Magistrate Alan Bell, met much the same fate on a Dublin tramcar. Bell was sitting reading a newspaper when two young men tapped him on the shoulder: ‘Come on Mr Bell, your time has come.’ His assassins pulled him off the tram and killed the Magistrate like a squealing pig in the road. The date was March 1920. Like Doyle’s killing it was just another encounter in the endless war between Irish rebels and the Crown.
Bell’s killing and that of Doyle were conducted in accordance with the Troubles’ contradictory but rigid rules of engagement. The principal protagonists were the IRA and the British Government. The loyalist Protestant groups, like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) or the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), were little more than murder gangs and came a poor third. Each of the protagonists were constrained to work and fight within a quasi-civil framework. The IRA could bomb, shoot and murder but there were strong political restraints against the use of indiscriminate terror and the killing of large numbers of civilians. The British could have gunned down the IRA leadership in one afternoon on the streets of Belfast, Derry and Dublin, but did not do so for fear of widening political support for the republican struggle in the adjacent Republic.
Because it was not a big war, the British Government said it was not a war at all but a battle against a criminal terrorist conspiracy. To sustain that belief, one had to ignore the thirty thousand combat troops in Ulster, the squadrons of helicopter gunships and the extensive network of military bases along the three-hundred-mile border with the Irish Republic designed to withstand hundred-pound flying bombs. The IRA said it was a real war and their soldiers, their Volunteers, were fighting against a colonial regime. But that did not stop Republicans complaining about human rights abuses perpetrated by British soldiers, or attempting to sue, often successfully, the British Army in the British Northern Irish courts for compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Nor did it stop the IRA’s Volunteers and their families from claiming British welfare state benefits every week. Ulster’s Protestants constantly proclaimed their loyalty to the British Crown and their desire to be treated as any other British subject, but when it came to accepting the democratic will of the British people in ways perceived to be contrary to their interest they had no hesitation in pulling out guns, hijacking cars and killing people.
If you had walked through the streets of IRA strongholds in West Belfast and Derry you would have seen, amidst the mothers wheeling baby buggies, fifteen-strong patrols of British Army soldiers in combat gear armed with assault rifles and general purpose machine-guns. But those khaki patrols were just walking targets; this ‘Green Army’ hardly ever shot anyone. The real armies of the Troubles had no uniform apart from a gun and remained indistinguishable from the civilian population until they materialized at the killing zone. The two men who killed Judge Doyle were, a moment before, just faces in a crowd, a moment after, a couple of duffel coats fleeing through a congregation. Minutes later they abandoned their hijacked vehicle and disappeared into the streets of Belfast. The soldiers who killed for the British were members of their special forces unit, the SAS, and their most common camouflage was denim jeans and trainers.
The IRA talked up the Troubles and described them in the terminology of military warfare, labelling their convicted Volunteers as ‘prisoners of war’. In contrast, the British Government talked the Troubles down and constrained itself to appear to act within a civil framework so that every action by the State’s security forces had the protection of a legal statute. The British therefore amended the Northern Irish legal system to enable the State to use criminal law statutes as their principal instrument of repression. IRA members were arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal offences under a judicial system which had few of the constitutional standards prevailing in other Western countries. But as in their past dealings in Ireland, the Crown also operated a small secret state that utilized a vast electronic surveillance network, hundreds of paid informers and small groups of SAS assassins to track and in certain circumstances kill individual IRA opponents.
Clausewitz said that war is politics pursued by other means. In Ireland, murder was politics pursued by other means. The IRA, a clandestine grouping within the nationalist Catholic community, did not have the firepower, forces or money to openly defy the British State. But the IRA did have enough resources to find and murder the Crown’s messengers on their days off. Shooting Doyle was a denial of British authority and an assertion of the power of the IRA and its political aspiration for the removal of the British presence. It was an act of physical militant defiance, an act of rebellion against what was perceived to be an illegitimate state.
* * *
The Troubles are almost as old as Irish history itself. They wax and wane with different historical epochs but they have never ceased in eight hundred years. In Tudor times the Catholic Gaelic tadagh (natives) resisted the Anglo-Norman conqueror. In the seventeenth century the Protestant Planters fought the dispossessed Catholic kernes (rebels). In the eighteenth century the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys attacked at dawn, murdering the enemy in their beds, whilst the Catholic Defenders came upon the enemy on the road and smashed their heads into the dust. It was colonialist Protestant Planter against Catholic Irish native. It was Prod against Papist. It was Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary policeman against Catholic Irish Republican Army guerrilla. It was the British Crown versus the Irish. It was a creeping war of submerged hatreds that ran back into history and was explosively fuelled by contemporary political events. The objective was always the same – to remove the British Crown presence from Irish soil.
The key protagonists of the Troubles were the rebels, for without their unflagging commitment to fight on against overwhelming odds the conflict would have withered. The current rebels, known as the Provisional IRA, were drawn principally from the ranks of Ulster’s working-class Catholic communities. Most IRA members were poorly educated and only a handful of the Movement had a university degree. The Provisionals’ ‘army’ was estimated to be six hundred active IRA Volunteers with an annual budget of between three and five million pounds. These IRA soldiers were poorly trained and poorly equipped, with a limited ill-assortment of smuggled weapons. Each Volunteer was outnumbered sixty to one by the better armed, better trained and professionally salaried forty-thousand-strong security forces of the Crown, whose annual budget was estimated to be in excess of one billion pounds. Nearly four hundred IRA Volunteers have been killed and countless others injured, often in their own premature explosions. Almost every IRA Volunteer has been arrested and at some stage imprisoned, often for decades, by Northern Ireland’s emergency power courts. Hundreds of IRA prisoners are still serving record life-terms in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, hundreds of others have already left decades of their lives there. There was no monetary reward in joining the IRA and, by necessity of its clandestine nature, limited social status in membership. But despite the odds the IRA were never short of Volunteers.
The IRA are a minority political force within the 640,000-strong Catholic community, but not an insignificant one. The IRA and their political party, Sinn Fein, command about thirteen per cent of the total electoral vote in Northern Ireland or about forty per cent of the Catholic/Nationalist vote. Thirteen per cent or 83,000 votes is a substantial figure when one considers that Sinn Fein’s electoral platform endorsed blowing up cities, shooting policemen in the head and punishing local criminals by dropping concrete blocks on their legs.
As a philosophy, Irish Republicanism is the unqualified belief that a United Ireland is an intrinsic good, and the demand for Irish national self-determination so pressing, so overwhelming, that this goal must be pursued at all costs but principally and immediately by force of arms. Ireland must be reunited and the illegitimate British Crown Government forced to leave that portion of the country, Northern Ireland, over which it rules and claims jurisdiction. All other political questions and struggles in Ireland are secondary and inferior to the resolution of the ‘national question’.
But what is unchallengeable doctrine for Republicans is not so self-evidently true for the mass of the Irish people. The 850,000 Protestant population of Ulster, the majority within the Northern Irish state, are utterly opposed to a United Ireland. More importantly, the mass of the southern Irish population, who constitute four million out of the total Irish population of five and a half million, although paying lip service to the concept of a United Ireland, express little urgency about their desire to see an all-Ireland state established. The burning urgency of the Irish electorate’s demand for Irish reunification, as measured by votes for Sinn Fein in the Irish Republic, is felt by less than two per cent of the population.
Economically there is no merit in any of the republican arguments for the reunification of the island. Northern Ireland is a poor country beset with decaying, unprofitable industries and sustained by massive subsidies from the British taxpayer. The total annual net cost of maintaining the Crown’s Irish province is £3.4 billion, £2,200 per annum for each and every one of Her Majesty’s Irish subjects. The Irish Republic is poorer still and it is beyond the economic means of any foreseeable Dublin Government to sustain such a level of public investment. If Britain is a colonial oppressor, then it is a peculiarly benign and indulgent overlord.
Outside their Ulster strongholds, the IRA were universally reviled as a terrorist organization guilty of some of the bloodiest acts in recent political history. In the British, Irish and American media, the IRA’s leadership were frequently portrayed as a ‘criminal godfather conspiracy’ in charge of a membership of bloodthirsty fanatics.
But far from weakening the Republican cause, these obstacles merely make it all the more formidable and more profound. It is a faith shared by a band of brothers against impossible odds. No other Western political movement is so tenuously grounded in political reality, so consciously espouses a doctrine of self-sacrifice, promises so much pain and death for its followers and offers so little in return.
After the collapse of Soviet Communism, political language lost use of the notions of sacrifice, martyrdom, millenarian generational conflict and historical destiny. But the Volunteers of the IRA did not. In an obscure rain-sodden corner of north-western Europe there was still a small group of believers who were prepared to lay down their lives for a cause. All the troops, the barracks, the fortifications, the billions of pounds spent on security, the informers, the intelligence networks of Special Branch, Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, and the world’s best equipped anti-terrorist police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, failed to destroy the IRA or mitigate its ambition of forcibly bringing into being a United Ireland. The Republican credo has exhausted the will, the bribes, the threats and the retributions of countless Crown rulers. It has endured the twenty-five years of military occupation by British soldiers, the never ending procession of its own black-bereted coffins, the cruelties inflicted by its own Volunteers, the hundreds and thousands of lost prison years of its sons and daughters, the stalemates, the setbacks, the grinding poverty. It cannot be bargained with, bought, sold, traded, appeased, cajoled, repressed, diverted, destroyed or rationalized away by economic argument. It is ultimately an ideal, a religion, and its supporters will not stop until they achieve that goal. In a world of broken ideologies Irish Republicanism is the last great political passion in Europe.
* * *
In the winter of 1982 I was home for Christmas. Christmas Day was clear and mild, and I left grandfather’s house alone and walked back along the shore towards the monument of the sagart a run. The memorial plaque carved in granite shows in bas-relief the side view of a handsome man and an inscription in Gaelic. I could not read it, I have never learned the language of my forefathers, but I understood that it declared the priest to be a ‘noble and patriotic’ man who had died for Ireland. I could not read Gaelic but I could feel the language of resistance. It asserted itself in his act of will in striking rebellion and in the simple and profound belief of my neighbours that resistance to tyranny had not ended just because of defeat. It asserted that the human spirit could not this side of death be entirely quenched and that even if an individual was lost there would always be someone, somewhere, amongst the apparently cowed people who was prepared to carry on the struggle. I was determined to undertake a journey to find the priest, to find myself, to find the rebel heart that beats somewhere in part of every human breast. A few days later I left home for Belfast.
There should be a word of warning at this point of departure. This is not a history book or a chronological account. The last thing Ireland or the Irish or English need is another history book to explain the past. Ireland already suffers from too much history; in that country history is a disease, a canker from the past that poisons the present. History is a weapon, a poker you keep in your pocket to beat the present senseless and so reorder its alignment to the past and justify present murder. Nor have I sought here to order, arrange, direct or sanitize my journeys in Ulster or my encounters with Republicans. When I went to Ulster I was not seeking history but a sense of my self. If anything this book is a haphazard travel guide to the Republican Soul, to the rebel heart.