1999 (20 page)

Morrissey also maintained good relations with the farm labourers, local men who had been with Ursula for years. They did not resent his supervision—or if they did, they did not show it. With typical Irish begrudgery they may have complained about him at their own firesides, but they did their work at the farm. Livestock was tended, buildings and fences were maintained. The wife of one of the men came every week to sweep and dust the empty house.

No matter when Barry arrived at the farm, he would find at least one of the Morrissey twins—leggy, dark-haired girls with gummy smiles and identical giggles—with the horses. Ursula's beloved animals had never been more thoroughly groomed.

“Some of the brood mares are used to being ridden,” Barry said to Dorothy and Eleanor on a bright day in early summer. “Why don't you take my mother's saddle out of the tack room and have a ride around the fields?” They did not have to be asked twice. Within minutes Dorothy was mounted on a placid bay mare while Eleanor sat on the fence, swinging her feet as she waited her turn.

Barry watched them for a while, then ambled away with no particular destination. And no awareness of time.

He enjoyed the same sense of peace he had felt that afternoon in the Phoenix Park. The smell of the earth, the green of the fields, the soughing of the wind, all contributed to easing his troubled spirit. As long as he was at the farm he could believe all things were possible.

When he drove away down the lane the world began to close in on him again. By the time he reached Dublin peace seemed very far away, like a fairy tale heard in one's youth.

Barbara was waiting for him with a new list of complaints. “Something's wrong with the washing machine, two of the boarders haven't paid their rent yet, I can't find the tax information for last year…”

At some point Barry stopped listening. In his head he went back to the farm.

That evening Barry opened a bottle of wine he had been saving—an exotic beverage in seventies Ireland. He hoped it would lighten the atmosphere. “The twins were really chuffed about being allowed to ride,” he told Ursula as he filled her glass. “We need another saddle so they can go out together.”

His mother laughed; the first time he had heard her laugh in weeks. “Do you not think one of those girls was riding bareback by the time your car reached the main road?”

Towards the end of the meal she began to reminisce about the Morrissey family. “A generation ago there was a huge tribe of them just across the fields,” she told Barbara. “When Barry was seven or eight he used to march the young ones up and down the lane while he shouted orders. Not Paul, of course; he was grown by then. But poor Eithne was always with them. I can still see her little bare feet and her runny nose.”

“Who was poor Eithne?”

Barry answered Barbara's question. “Eithne Walsh. She used to play with the Morrissey children.”

“Her people were poor even by the standards of the day,” Ursula interjected. “Lord love them, they had neither ‘in' nor ‘on.' But when Eithne grew up she married Paul Morrissey. Everyone said he was a great catch, but Eithne was the great catch.” The unaccustomed wine was making Ursula giddy. “Who would have thought that sickly-looking girl would bear four huge sons and two daughters and never a sick day amongst any of them? And she's a wonderful wife to him. Next to Uncle Henry and Aunt Ella, the Morrisseys are the happiest couple I ever saw.”

“What's their secret?” Barry wondered.

From observation Ursula believed there was only one area where Barry and Barbara had no problems. Feeling herself on safe ground, she replied, “Perhaps they have a wonderful sex life.”

Barbara put down her spoon. “Sex,” she said. “A subject men know nothing about.”

Barry raised his eyebrows. “Sorry?”

“Well, they don't. I mean they can
do
it, but they really have no comprehension of what's going on. At least as far as women are concerned. Have you read
Ulysses,
by James Joyce? Particularly the ending?”

“I have read
Ulysses,
” Barry assured her, “but I'm surprised you did.”

“That's what I mean, you just proved my point. Men have all these notions about women that come entirely from their own heads. Of course I've read
Ulysses,
I've read lots of books, Mr. High-and-Mighty Halloran. But how could you know that? When did you ever ask me?

“I'm talking about the final chapter when Molly Bloom is thinking about sex, letting it run on and on in her head with lots of asides and no punctuation. It's been cited as one of the most erotic passages ever written—cited by men, that is. I wonder how many women think so?

“James Joyce was depicting the way he thought women were. Men want to believe women have exactly the same sexual thoughts and responses they do. But we don't; ours are different. And men are too arrogant to notice.

“A man thinks he's a great lover if he asks the woman what she wants. If she actually tells him, he may even do it; once. Then he'll go back to doing everything his way. He'll be absolutely convinced, in spite of anything she might have said, that she's feeling just what he feels and is turned on by what turns him on. And he's so wrong!”

Ursula was staring at her daughter-in-law in astonishment.

“Are you trying to tell me you don't like the way I make love to you?” Barry said.

“I'm not trying to tell you anything. I never
have
been able to tell you anything.”

Ursula murmured, “You really shouldn't be having this conversation in front of me.”

“If I try to have it in the bedroom your son will get mad and turn his back to me. If I try to have it anywhere else he'll tell me it's not the right time or place. What am I supposed to do, Ursula? Suffer in silence?”

“Women of my generation did.”

“Did
you
?” Barbara shot back.

Barry stood up and left the room.

 

A few days later Ursula told Breda Cunningham, “I very much fear my son and his wife are in a deteriorelationship.”

“What's that when it's at home?”

“A relationship that's deteriorating. It's not my fault but I feel responsible in a way, because I've seen it coming and didn't do anything.”

“What could you have done?” asked the nurse.

“I don't know. I feel so helpless now.”

“If you were in the whole of your health it wouldn't make any difference. Husbands and wives row all the time, it's nature. Are you ready for your sponge bath?”

Ursula ignored her. “Barbara has never learned that happiness is a condition we create in ourselves. She expects someone or something else to do it for her.”

“Well, you can't, missus,” Breda said firmly. “So turn this way and I'll get on with the washing.”

 

Violence in the north continued to increase. Bullets and bombs were daily events. Protestant and Catholic alike were victims. Merlyn Rees claimed it was due to internal feuds within the paramilitary organisations on both sides. He insisted the truce was still holding.

July 31, 1975

MIAMI SHOWBAND SHOT DOWN BY UVF IN NORTHERN IRELAND

The Miami Showband had been performing at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, where they entertained between four and five hundred young people. At two the following morning the band was travelling back to Dublin when they were halted by what appeared to be a police checkpoint near the town of Newry. The musicians were ordered from their coach at gunpoint by members of the UVF wearing the uniforms of the Ulster Defence Regiment. The loyalists searched the vehicle, then started to put a bomb inside.

The bomb exploded prematurely. The blast killed two UVF men, Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville, and blew the showband's saxophonist, Des Lee, into a nearby field.

The UVF immediately opened fire on the rest of the group, killing lead singer Fran O'Toole, Brian McCoy, and Tony Geraghty outright, and inflicting serious chest wounds on Stephen Travers.

After the loyalists sped away, Des Lee, in spite of an injured leg, made his way to the road and succeeded in flagging down a passing motorist who took him to the Newry police station.

The massacre of the Miami Showband ended the showband era in Northern Ireland. Musicians would no longer travel across the border.

“How could anyone do something like that?” Barbara asked Barry. “They were entertainers, for God's sake! Young men without a thought in their heads except to make music.”

“You've never experienced the atmosphere that produces extreme violence,” he told her. “In Northern Ireland prejudice is endemic. It's a disease no medicine will cure. There are only two responses: derision or extermination.”

“Why doesn't someone just sit them down and talk calmly to them?”

Like you and I discuss our problems?
“Outsiders always ask that question,” he said aloud. “Those who think hatred should be amenable to reason don't understand the nature of hatred. Nor do they understand the nature of the human male—usually underprivileged and undereducated—who has more energy than peacetime outlets can absorb. He's bored and he's angry and he doesn't even know why. If he finds a leader, or a cause, he can become a lethal weapon.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

The luminous grey eyes looked past her, gazing down the haunted corridors of memory. “I was neither underprivileged nor undereducated,” Barry said.

 

Five people were killed in a bar on the Shankill Road on the thirteenth of August when it was attacked by members of the Provisional IRA. The bar was widely believed to be a UVF hangout.

 

On the twenty-ninth of August Eamon de Valera, founder of the Fianna Fáil Party, former
taoiseach,
former president of Ireland, principal author of the Irish Constitution—and the last republican commandant to surrender in 1916—died peacefully at the age of ninety-two.

 

In October Jane and Peter McKearney, the parents of five children, were in their home in Moy, Northern Ireland, when someone came to the house. Mrs. McKearney opened the door to find herself facing a masked gunman armed with a Sterling submachine gun. She was shot eleven times; her husband, eighteen times. Both died at the scene, the victims of loyalist gunmen.
¹
The McKearneys' only crime was being Catholic.

In November loyalists exploded a bomb in Dublin Airport, killing one man.

That same month Lenny Murphy, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, read details in the Belfast-based
Newsletter
of the shooting of four British soldiers by the IRA. That night Murphy summoned three other members of the organisation: a man from his own unit called Archie Waller, a carpet salesman known as Benjamin “Pretty Boy” Edwards, and William Moore, a former meat plant employee who now drove a taxicab. Murphy specifically requested that Moore bring the butcher's knives he had used in his former employment. The four spent the evening drinking together until after midnight, then went hunting a
taig
.
^*

Murphy already had a nasty reputation. While imprisoned in Crumlin Road Jail he had murdered a fellow prisoner and was considered extremely dangerous—yet he had been released in 1973.

The quartet drove to the Antrim Road in a Catholic area of Belfast. They found their first victim in Francis Crossan, a man they did not know and had never seen before. Crossan had spent the evening at a club and was on his way home. A new home, at least to him, since his family had been intimidated into leaving their former home the previous year. Crossan's route took him past the spot where his brother Patrick, a bus driver, had been the victim of a sectarian shooting several years earlier.

Moore stayed with the black taxicab while the other three leaped out and hit Crossan over the head with a wheel brace. When he sagged to the ground, they dragged him into the backseat and sped away. His abductors kept battering Crossan with the wheel brace until the taxi came to a stop in an alley off the Shankill Road—the Protestant district. The four men dragged their unconscious victim into an alleyway. Using one of Moore's butchery knives, Murphy hacked at Crossan until he was covered with blood and his head was nearly severed from his body.
²

After the murder Murphy cleaned the knife and returned it to its owner.

Crossan's killing was grisly even by Northern Ireland standards. The overworked detectives of the RUC's C Division made a serious effort to find the killers, but in a year that would see thirty-four murders and 153 attempted murders they made little progress.

The incident was not mentioned in newspapers in the Republic.

Barry only learned of it when he went to Belfast to do a photo essay on Catholic families who had been driven out of their homes by loyalist threats. A middle-aged woman told him of the terrible death of one of her neighbours: Francis Crossan.

“He was a nice man, a quiet man,” she said wistfully. “Never hurt nobody. When they chased him and his family out of their last place the police wouldn't do nothin' about it. Now this. And who benefits, I ask you. Who benefits?” She cast a nervous glance up and down the street, then retreated into her own home and bolted the door.

Barry sought out Crossan's former residence and took photographs of the little rented house with its broken door and boarded-up windows. It had been a pitiful enough hovel when occupied. Empty, it stood as a silent condemnation.

 

On November fourth Merlyn Rees announced that republicans taken into custody after the first of March, 1976, would not be granted Special Category Status. A month later Rees announced the end of internment. In future republicans would receive a trial in special courts known as “Diplock” courts, with specially appointed judges, many of whom were members of the Orange Order, but no juries. In a Diplock court republicans could be convicted on the basis of either written or oral statements, or the word of a member of the security forces.

 

Between August 1971 and December 1975 a total of 1,981 people had been indefinitely detained without trial. Only 107 were loyalists. The rest were republicans—but not only men. Republican women, equally as dedicated, were being beaten and abused in Maghaberry, Armagh, and prisons in England as well. When they attempted to complain to the authorities they were accused of having deliberately injured themselves to denigrate their guards.

 

Tuesday was laundry day. As Breda Cunningham started to change Ursula's pillowcase her hand encountered cold metal. She straightened up with a start. “What do you call this?” she demanded.

“A Mauser semiautomatic,” said Ursula. “It used to belong to my mother. And don't wave it around like that, it's loaded. It may be old but I keep it in good working order. Here, give it to me.”

The nurse surrendered the weapon as if it were hot to the touch. “Why was it under your pillow?”

“It's comforting to me,” Ursula replied, “so I had Barry bring it up from the farm. I've kept a weapon within arm's reach for most of my life, Breda. A woman alone needs protection. I remember the Black and Tans,
^*
you see.”

Breda was horrified. “That was fifty years ago! You're perfectly safe now and you have no need for that…that thing. Have your son put it away somewhere.”

“I will not be treated like a helpless old woman who doesn't know what she's doing.” While Breda watched, Ursula deliberately put the Mauser back under the pillow.

After that Breda insisted that Ursula change her own pillowcases.

Since August the O/C of Cage Eleven, Gerry Adams, had been writing a weekly column for the
Republican News
. The articles, written under the pen name of “Brownie,” had to be smuggled out of the prison.

It was not possible to subscribe to the
Republican News,
which could only be obtained by avidly watching the newsstands. Whenever he was able to get his hands on a copy, Barry brought it home to Ursula. She quickly became a fan of the Brownie articles.

Some of them were lighthearted and wryly humorous, a tribute to fellow prisoners making the best of their predicament. In others Adams was setting out his own theory for building the Republic that Patrick Pearse and the men of 1916 had fought and died for. Time in prison had meant time to read, and think. Adams had come to believe that political structures would have to be developed to go hand-in-hand with the armed struggle.

Ursula cut out all of the Brownie articles and kept them in a tin box that once held Jacobs' Biscuits.

 

When a UVF booby trap blew up under his car on the sixth of September, Michael O'Toole, a Catholic, was fatally injured. Five thousand mourners attended his funeral in the town of Larne, at which his brother, a former wing commander in the Royal Air Force, said the family did not want revenge, but justice.

On the twenty-second of September a Catholic woman, Margaret Hale, who was married and the mother of five children, lost her life in a UVF bomb and gun attack on McCann's Bar. The Catholic-owned public house was located between Loughgall and Portadown. Mid-Ulster was the UVF stronghold, based around Portadown and Lurgan.

 

Following the death of Mrs. Hale towns all across the Six Counties were jolted by IRA bomb blasts.

On the second of October four members of the UVF were killed when their car blew up two miles from the town of Coleraine. An inquest found that the car had contained between three and five pounds of commercial explosives. A car bomb was being armed in the front seat when it exploded prematurely.

A wave of UVF attacks would see a total of twelve northern Catholics killed on that same day.

Sometimes the violence reached across the border. In December two civilians in Dundalk, County Louth, died in the explosion of a loyalist bomb.

All four Hallorans signed the Christmas card they sent to Séamus McCoy. Holding a pencil in his chubby little first, Brian signed with a lopsided figure he called a star. The card arrived in Long Kesh together with a package containing yet another woolly jumper and a tin of Philpott's incomparable Christmas cake.