In the summer of 1994 I was back home for a commemoration service at the sagart a run’s monument. The Dookinella Memorial bagpipe band, a cultural legacy of those Scottish potato harvests, led a small procession down the narrow road through the village of my ancestors towards the sea. Behind the band marched Sean and Brendan, schoolchildren, local Republicans, villagers and their wives, and the local priest, whose first designated task was to re-bless the stone pillar.
At the monument, framed by the natural amphitheatre of the mountains and ocean, prayers were said, flags unfurled, the National Anthem played, and speaker after speaker rose to proclaim the greatness of this fallen son. The last speaker was a man in his mid-thirties.
Much of the history of Father Manus Sweeney is lost to us. We know he was born here and that he was hanged by the British in Newport on 8 June 1799. We know that he spent many years in France in exile and that he returned as a parish priest to Newport. And we know he was a rebel … In late August 1798, just after the landing of the French at Killala, Newport rose in rebellion. Peter Gibbons, a yeoman in the local Crown militia, planted a Tree of Liberty in the central market square. The Tree of Liberty, a simple pine festooned with green ribbons, was a symbol of the rebels’ desire to be free of their Crown masters … Rebel control of Newport was short-lived … The first thing local landowner Sir Neal O’Donel did after recapturing Newport and seizing the sagart a run was to burn the Tree of Liberty … Sweeney was hanged … the rebellion defeated.
The speaker’s voice carried above the sound of the waves of the great ocean crashing indifferently on the empty strand a few yards from the small crowd, much as those waves must have crashed indifferently in the same place at the birth and fate of Manus Sweeney two hundred years before.
But we know this also – the Tree of Liberty was not destroyed by Sir Neal, it was not burnt, it could not be destroyed. The physical tree might burn but the idea had planted itself in the hearts of Irish men and women and could never be removed. The flames, and Father Sweeney’s execution, merely scattered the seeds of resistance.… Our very presence here today vindicates Father Sweeney’s judgement and his sacrifice. His ideals, his purpose lives on in our minds and in our hearts and in every rebel heart.
The words slipped so easily from the mouth of the speaker that it was hard not to be swallowed up in the rhetoric. I, after all, was that speaker, invited by the republican organizers to render a historical account of the dead priest’s life. I believed in my speech and yet I was still troubled. The memories of long, painful interviews, the dead sons’ pictures on the wall, the visits to gravestones and prisons, and the weight of these journeys within the Republican soul kept flooding back to me. But it was impossible to describe such a complex chain of memory to the ruddy, fresh faces of the crowd. It was easier to slip into the certainties of a neatly reordered past, reclaiming the dead Sweeney as another patriot in an unbroken noble chain of resistance and forgetting the very real men who were still being selected out by their neighbours to be killed in their kitchens, or shot in their driveways, 150 miles away, to fulfil the destiny of a United Ireland. It was the final bitter contradiction of the Troubles; the justness of the political cause was invalidated by the cruelty of the murders carried out in its name.
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When I was nine I went to my first theatrical performance on the Sandy Banks, a patch of dunes close to the village of Keel just across the bay from Dookinella. A tiny cast of travelling players, probably Ireland’s last, visited televisionless Achill and on alternate nights staged plays or set up their projector and ran flickering Westerns. Their cinema and playhouse was a billowing tent, the seats, rough boards, and the nightly take derisory. But I never noticed, it was all magic to me. Like the black-hatted villain films, the company’s dramas were easy farces or melodramatic potboilers, with every member of the company playing three or four parts. Each night I and my cousins would stroll through the long Western evening’s light towards the players’ tent for what seemed fabulous entertainment. Through the distance of the past, I can now only remember the name of one play, a Victorian gothic drama entitled Murder in the Red Barn.1 The plot details escape me but it revolved around the usual woeful Irish tale of a servant girl, a lewd master, an illicit affair and the murder of a newly born bastard child, whose body was then buried somewhere near the Red Barn. It was a tale of betrayal, cold indifference and murderous revenge.
Irish history is an endless nightly rerun of Murder in the Red Barn. The exact plot details will always escape us and the locations may change – one popular variation is ‘Murder in Your Living Room in Front of Your Wife and Kids’ – but the core elements – betrayal, cold indifference and murderous revenge – like the final act remain an inevitable part of the script. The players only leave the stage after firing a number of bullets into another human body. The red blood is pumping out on to the carpet. The children are screaming. The curtain descends. As spectators we cannot be exactly sure if tonight’s victim is already dead or just mortally wounded, or of the precise reason why this particular person was selected out at this particular time.
My speech had been rhetoric. In parts but not everywhere in Northern Ireland the Tree of Liberty had withered away, like the wishing tree of Arboe in Tyrone, into a naked contest for sectarian dominance. The rebels’ cause had become immersed in murder and the flow of blood under the bridge had renewed rather than relieved loyalist and republican desire to go on killing. There was no moral foothold in such a landscape.
But I was saved from such savagery. The Troubles, as I discovered, were not my war. Many years before I was born, my parents had left their homeland and moved to Edinburgh, a city of cold winds, enlightenment and peace. No one threatened to burn my family’s home and I never felt the need, as Seamus Finucane did, to take up the gun. My brothers fought for better exam results, not Irish freedom. Instead of prison I went to Edinburgh University to study Philosophy and English. I became a journalist, a writer, not a gunman, a Volunteer, or a terrorist. I was brought up in a settled country not a troubled one and I never felt the need to murder a judge. My life, and the lives of those close to me, are utterly different from the lives of those depicted in this book. But that was an accident of geography not of history. I could so easily have been in the IRA.
It would be simple here to hedge and qualify the issue of the morality of the IRA’s struggle, but I won’t. A great historic injustice was perpetrated in Ireland in the seventeenth century – the blueprint for all future campaigns of conquest, dispossession and colonization by the Crown. Ireland was the first English colony and it will be the last. The natives always resisted their subjugation violently, savagely; the land was always troubled. Ireland remains troubled today, not just through the burden of this history but by the failure of the Crown to relinquish its final hold on the provinces of Ireland.
It is not the fault of any living person that the system of government in Northern Ireland is unjust. The forces that drove the Protestants of Ulster in the 1910s to demand their own separate state and threaten civil war if they failed were too deeply ingrained in their history, psyche and politics. Nor is it any individual’s fault that Protestants founded and maintained a Protestant state based on religious hatred and the politics of exclusion; everything in their history taught them that to compromise, to surrender, to accommodate the native Irish enemy, was destruction. When the natives again rebelled in 1969 the security forces of the state and its Protestant mobs could only react the way they had always reacted, with brutality, in a furious attempt to beat back down the rebel enemies who sought to overwhelm their citadel.
But equally it is not the rebels’ fault that the Protestants of Ulster refused and still refuse to learn the simple lesson of history: that all colonizers will one day be overthrown by those natives they hold in bondage. For there to be peace in Ireland the Protestants must make the great historical accommodation that another Protestant people, the Afrikaners, made with their historic enemy.
In 1652 Van Riebeck landed at the Cape on the southern tip of the African continent and began centuries of conquest and domination that only ended in 1994. The first Planters of Ulster landed thirty-two years earlier and their chapter in human history is not yet finished. But the lessons are no different. There can be no ifs or buts or appeals to artificially created majorities and demographically tailored boundaries. The Protestants of Ulster, born Irish for three centuries, must come to terms with their fellow Catholic Irishmen.
Since the Rebellion of 1969 the Northern Irish State has ceased, in the eyes of a third of its citizens, to be a legitmate state. It exists solely and absolutely by force of arms of the Crown and its authority would fall tomorrow if the supply of troops and monies from the British Exchequer ended.
Unlike the Afrikaners, the indigenous Protestant leadership were deprived of power when the Stormont Parliament was overthrown in 1972 and the Crown itself took over direct administration of its Irish province. There is currently no value or necessity in compromise from within the Protestant community or its leadership. It is therefore the duty of the Crown, by persuasion, guile and ultimatum, to force that historic accommodation on the Protestants.
The rebels have waged a brutal, prolonged campaign of resistance. They have inflicted considerable losses on the Crown’s soldiery and great suffering on both their own and the enemy community. Many innocent people have died for no good reason but none of that futile human misery will alter the inevitable political outcome.
There will be peace in Ireland and it will be a republican peace. It will be a peace that will accommodate both Catholics and Protestants and hence it will be hedged by safeguards, elaborate constitutions, dual symbols and the paraphernalia of laborious bureaucracy. But it will also be a peace, absolutely, that will entail, perhaps after a decent interval, the removal of the Crown from Ireland. And then and only then can the wounds of history heal and the Crown lay to rest the ghost of an old Empire which began in the provinces of Ireland hundreds of years ago and on which the sun will have finally set.
My journey in the rebel heart of Ireland has ended here. I cannot say I am truly an Irish Republican; I lack the intensity for it, I would not kill for it. I could never be the young man with the gun rushing towards the murder of Judge Doyle outside St Brigid’s. Ten years of journeys within the Irish Republican Soul have made me weary of such political passion and the sacrifice of lives for ideals. But I remain a Republican, albeit a constitutional Republican, both for Ireland and for my adopted country, England. I am a product of my people, I too remain possessed of a rebel heart.