1972 (24 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: 1972
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“What a great idea,” said Barry. “Who else knows about it?”
“No one—yet. I want to test the water and see if I can get enough support in the party before I announce. Party politics is a shifting bog at the best of times.”
“Not straightforward like the Army?” Barry teased. Both men laughed.
The next time they met, Thomas was deeply depressed. “My friend Tom Gill refused to support me for the presidency,” he told Barry, adding poetically, “so my dream's come to nothing. Sinn Féin will go on without me as its chief, I'll just be one of the Indians.”
B
ARRY soon slipped back into the university routine. As if planning a military campaign, he began establishing a network of contacts in the field of journalism. He was careful, however, to avoid anyone connected with
The Irish Times
.
“Why discriminate against
The Times
?” Dennis Cassidy wondered.
“Their pro-British policy gets up my nose.”
“Aha. Can it be that dear old conservative Trinity's harbouring a radical?”
I may not be a good judge of people
, Barry thought,
but I'm damned if I'm willing to go through life mistrusting everybody
. “Would you call a republican a radical?”
“The Americans might,” said Dennis. “Their current president's a Democrat.”
“I mean an Irish republican.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Are you one?”
“I am. Definitely anti-Treaty.” Barry could go that far; he did not have to mention the IRA.
“That's all right then,” said Dennis Cassidy. “My family's republican too.”
“I wondered. You never said anything.”
“It would take more courage than I possess to stand up in the dining hall and shout, ‘Throw out the unionists!'”
“You don't have to, Dennis. Remember the words of the Proclamation? ‘The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences, carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority.'”
“Whew! If I was wearing a hat I'd take it off to you, Barry. I'm republican because my parents are, but I can't quote the Proclamation. Realistically, though—it's part of the past, would you not agree? Ireland's moved on since 1916.”
O
N December 3, 1962, an auction was held at Dromoland Castle in County Clare to sell off the contents of the castle. The ancestral home of Brian Bóru's descendants had been purchased by an American.
B
ARRY went home for Christmas. He could not bear to think of Ursula rattling around in that empty house by herself. Even the Ryan brothers had kin with whom they would go to Mass and have Christmas dinner.
He hitched a ride from the train station to the foot of the farm lane, but walked the rest of the way to the farmhouse with no trace of a limp. Occasionally—usually when he least expected it—his damaged leg gave way, but most of the time he could stride as briskly as anyone else.
Dropping his suitcase at the door, he shouted, “I'm home!” This time he was not met with silence. Ursula came running
down the stairs like a young girl to meet him. “Now it will truly be Christmas!”
Barry's present for his mother was an antique print of a famous racehorse called Nestor. When Ursula unwrapped her gift on Christmas Eve, a proudly lifted head and a pair of huge liquid eyes looked out at her from a gilded oval frame. An unconquerable spirit glowed in those eyes. “It's the spitting image of
Saoirse!
” she gasped.
She rarely spoke of the horse she had named Freedom, her favourite mount for many years. All Barry knew was that Saoirse was buried somewhere on the farm.
Ursula was unable to say anything else for a while. She just sat looking at the picture. At last, however, she handed a package to her son. “Here, open your present. It's a little something I bought for you at the auction at Dromoland. Papa's father used to work for the O'Briens and they were very good to him, so this is a memento of sorts.”
The present was a steel engraving of a tree-crowned promontory viewed from the River Shannon. Beal Bóru.
Barry's heart leapt like a salmon rising from a deep pool. “How did you know, Ursula?”
“Know what?”
“How I feel about this place.”
“I didn't know. How could I when you never tell me anything?”
She has to get the knife in
, thought Barry. But nothing could spoil his delight in the gift. “Granda used to say you were fey, and I believe you are.”
“Maybe we both are,” she replied. “Maybe it's in the blood.”
The atmosphere between them improved after that. They went to Mass together, kneeling side by side while the solemn splendour of the old miracle was celebrated once again. Barry knew, or thought he knew, that his mother no longer believed, but it was not important. The shared ritual was reassuring.
When Ursula drove Barry to the train station he promised to come home again at Easter.
O
N Good Friday, 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led a large march of protestors against segregation through the
streets of Birmingham, Alabama, in direct defiance of the racist laws of the city.
The following day, Barry and Ursula watched the event rebroadcast on Irish television. The images on the small screen were in grainy black-and-white, yet they transmitted the intense excitement of the marchers; the sense that something momentous was happening.
Ursula was visibly moved. “They're having their own Easter Rising.”
“Except they're not a military force,” Barry pointed out, “they're just ordinary men and women. What we're seeing is a People's Revolt.”
“None of the protesters was armed,” the news presenter informed his audience. “Last year Dr. King paid a visit to India to study Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, and yesterday that philosophy was demonstrated on the streets of Birmingham.”
The camera panned to the ranks of grim-faced policemen lining the route of march. A close-up showed a holster on every belt and a gun in every holster. More than one man had his hand on the butt of his gun, ready to draw it as the marchers passed by, singing.
“Dr. King and some of his followers have been arrested,” the presenter went on, “but they've made their point before the eyes of the world.”
The eyes of the world. Watching through the lens of a camera!
Barry imagined himself behind a television camera, then discarded the idea. Television cameras were large and unwieldy and tethered by lengths of cable, and the scenes they shot were chosen by someone else. That would not suit Barry's temperament and he knew it.
He was eager to buy a still camera of a quality to replace the lost Leica. He planned to ask his mother for additional money before he left the farm, but on his last morning Ursula looked so grey and drained that he changed his mind.
“Would you not hire some additional men to help you?” he asked. “The Ryan brothers do all they can, but they're not young anymore.”
And neither are you, Mam.
“More men would cost money.”
“Surely you can afford it.”
“I can of course,” she agreed almost too quickly. “If I wanted strangers about the place, which I don't. We're doing fine just as is.”
Barry thought about offering to come home and help her himself, then discarded this idea too.
She
'
d be insulted
.
She
'
d think I was interfering in her business
.
We're getting along better now; leave it be
.
When the train pulled out of the station he looked back and saw her on the platform, waving good-bye—and wondered if he had made a mistake.
By the time Barry reached Dublin he had decided to join the ranks of university students who pored over adverts in the backs of newspapers and scoured the streets of Dublin looking for Help Wanted signs. A big, strong, able-bodied—
well
,
almost able-bodied
—young man should have little trouble finding work, Barry thought.
After several days he found early-morning employment as a trainee breakfast cook in the coffee shop at
Busáras,
the bus terminal designed by Michael Scott. The irony was not lost upon Barry, but his dreams of being an architect were like something from the remote past, an adolescent fantasy he had outgrown.
Like Claire MacNamara.
For some, the 1960s promised to be an era of hope and optimism. At last the economy was improving. Wages in a few areas were rising by as much as 25 percent. Irish fashion was a growth industry. Skirts were going up with the economy and there was a definite youth culture. Two lads in their twenties, Peter and Mark Keaveney, had opened a hairdressing salon in Grafton Street that was setting a new standard for contemporary style.
Alice Green worked on Saturdays in Switzer's Department Store. Dennis Cassidy was an usher in the Adelphi Cinema at night and on weekends. “Alice and I don't get to see much of each other these days outside of class,” he confided to Barry, “but we're saving to get married, so it's worth it.”
The times were not improving for everyone. Recently a tenement had collapsed in Dublin's inner city, killing two small children. Public housing was a disgrace, with both Church and State telling mothers that they could not get on a waiting list for housing unless they had at least five children. On the outskirts
of the city impoverished families lived in rotting wooden caravans where they were prey to every known disease.
Barry did not need to go to Northern Ireland to find subjects. Wherever he went in Dublin he took his camera with him; trying to capture the city in one specific moment in time.
O
N the third of June, 1963, one of the most popular popes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church died. The world mourned John XXIII, man of the people, genuine reformer, humble saint. In his will he bequeathed to the surviving members of his family less than twenty dollars each—which represented his entire personal fortune.
During John's papacy a thaw had begun in the relations between Catholics and Protestants in the north. A few unionist leaders had begun to discard sectarian slogans. Upon the death of the pope, Terence O'Neill, who had recently become prime minister of Northern Ireland, sent an unprecedented letter of condolence to the Catholic primate of Ireland. Protestant church leaders also expressed their condolences. The lord mayor of Belfast ordered the Union Jack flying over City Hall to be flown at half-mast.
One man chose to be mightily offended by these gestures of reconciliation. Ian Paisley was a fundamentalist preacher who had founded his own church, the Free Presbyterian. For years the Reverend Paisley had done his utmost to foment anti-Catholic prejudice. His thundering rhetoric appealed to the worst in a tiny minority of northern Protestants. In 1956 he reputedly was associated with the kidnapping and proselytising of a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl.
1
At a rally three years later he whipped his followers to such a frenzy that a mob attacked and destroyed a Catholic-owned chip shop on the Shankill Road.
In the death of Pope John, Paisley found an opportunity. At a meeting of the Ulster Protestants Association, a small group which he controlled, he called O'Neill and the Protestant church leaders “the Iscariots of Ulster,” and assured his audience that Pope John, whom he described as a “Romish man of sin,”
2
was now suffering the torments of hell. Spellbound listeners were treated to vivid descriptions of the pope's skin crackling as the flames licked his body.
The mesmerising performance was talked about for weeks afterwards. Like a stone dropped into a pond, the ripple of Paisleyism extended outward in concentric circles.
Unfortunately for Terence O'Neill, his Ascendancy background played into their hands. In Northern Ireland, symbol triumphed over substance. Had O'Neill been able to articulate his moderate policies in a populist style he might have carried the majority with him. But he spoke with an upper-class English accent guaranteed to alienate him from working-class Protestants—Paisley's growing power base.
At a moment when some of the old wounds might have been healed, instead they were exacerbated.
A dozen or so loyalists, most of them ex-British army, regularly met in the Standard Bar in the Shankill Road. Reacting to Ian Paisley's furious condemnation of Terence O'Neill's perceived “sell-out to the nationalists,” they decided to form a new militia. Taking the name of an earlier organisation that had been wiped out during World War One in the Battle of the Somme, they called themselves the Ulster Volunteer Force.
O
N the twenty-third of June, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led 125,000 people on a Freedom Walk in Detroit, Michigan.
O
N the twenty-sixth, John F. Kennedy arrived in Ireland. For four days he travelled around the country, receiving a rapturous welcome everywhere. There was great excitement at Trinity over the American president's visit. He was young, too, and intelligent and charismatic and
Irish!
Gilbert Fitzmaurice, who had vague connections with someone in government, was given two reserved seats in the visitors' gallery in Leinster House to hear Kennedy address Dáil Éireann. To Barry's surprise, Gilbert offered one of the seats to him.
“Do you mean it? You must have some friend who …”
“Do you want one or not?”
Barry did not need to be asked twice.
Maybe the poor wanker doesn't have any friends. Come to think of it, I've never see him with anyone.
“You're a good skin, Gilbert,” he said. “I appreciate it.”
Gilbert ducked his head. “'S nothing at all. Don't mention it.”
Why, he's embarrassed! I'll bet he's never done anyone a favour before.
Barry sat beside his roommate in the packed visitors' gallery. From his first words, John Kennedy had his audience in the palm of his hand. “Sure he's as Irish as the rest of us,” someone whispered.
Kennedy remarked that if Ireland had been as prosperous a hundred years earlier, his great-grandfather might never have left. In that case he could be sitting amongst the members of the Dáil today. His listeners smiled and nodded to one another. Kennedy went on to say that if the current president of Ireland had never left Brooklyn, it might be de Valera standing before them making the speech.
There was a gale of appreciative laughter.
From his place in the gallery Barry caught his first glimpse of the legendary Eamon de Valera. The man whose portrait hung on many Irish walls beside that of the pope. The man his mother blamed for so much that had gone wrong in Ireland.
At eighty-one de Valera retained the towering height that made him instantly recognisable. His broad shoulders had borne the burdens of the nation longer than any other living man. He wore old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles and carried his head slightly tilted forward, in a permanent attitude of listening. His deeply furrowed features appeared mask-like in repose, perhaps due to his near blindness, but when he smiled at Kennedy's remarks he smiled with his whole face.
De Valera doesn't look arrogant and vindictive
, thought Barry.
He looks like an old man who has survived
a
stormy life and come at last into safe harbour.

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