1999 (31 page)

On the eleventh of October Dr. Rose Dugdale was released from jail in Limerick, having served six years of a sentence for involvement in the Beit art theft.

“I wish Barbara and I liked each other,” Ursula remarked to McCoy, “so I could be more of a friend to her. She's so edgy and tense I wonder she doesn't take it out on the children. She certainly takes it out on Barry.”

McCoy said, “What makes you think she doesn't like you? When she thought you were being kidnapped she went to your rescue without a moment's thought, even though for all she knew she could have been shot dead. If that's not liking, I don't know what is. It's exactly what your son did for his pals at Brookeborough.”

Ursula considered his words. Then she put pen to paper and began writing letters to old acquaintances; reestablishing connections she had allowed to fade away over the years.

They might be useful sometime, and Ursula never wasted anything.

 

Since his latest release from prison Gerry Adams had become politically active again. The republican movement was a complex one with a number of strands. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the president of Provisional Sinn Féin, was also on the Provisional Army Council, the governing body of the IRA. The political wing and the physical force element were almost inextricably interlinked by the number of people who belonged to both organisations.

Most mainstream republicans agreed that the need for arms against the British was indisputable. Others hearkened back to the foundation of Sinn Féin, which Arthur Griffith had intended to be a constitutional political party peacefully achieving its goals in the political arena. The two visions of Irish republicanism appeared on the surface to be irreconcilable, yet men and women from both strands worked together for the sake of a free Ireland.

Stresses and strains were inherent in the situation. To make matters worse, with the appearance of more dissident groups calling themselves “republican,” the difference between paramilitarism and banditry was disappearing from the public perception. Support was dwindling fast.

The primary concern of the Army Council was to maintain the military momentum that had been building up since Bloody Sunday, and to retain the structures and tight discipline that had evolved through trial and error over many years. The Army Council mistrusted politics, fearing it would corrupt the movement.

Gerry Adams, and a few others who felt as he did, such as Danny Morrison, the editor of the
Republican News,
hoped to see the republican movement restructured through Sinn Féin in order to reach more people. They recognised that they were in a long war, and a long war must always be a people's war. The work to win the hearts and minds of ordinary civilians began. In the meantime the bombing and shooting continued. On both sides.

On the twenty-seventh of October seven H-Block prisoners began a hunger strike. They had five demands, which if met would effectively restore their status as political prisoners: 1. no prison clothes 2. no prison work 3. permission for one weekly visit, one letter out, one letter in, and one package in every week 4. free association with fellow prisoners 5. entitlement to remission of sentences where appropriate.

The strike was not ordered by the Army Council but was determined by the men themselves. Deprived of everything that gave human existence dignity, the prisoners felt that all they had left to fight with was their lives. Among them was Brendan Hughes, the current Officer Commanding.

Because the strike might incapacitate Hughes, Bobby Sands took his place as O/C.

Conditions in the northern prisons had been deteriorating all year. Sinn Féin had initiated a campaign known as the H-Block/Armagh Committee, which comprised a coalition of interested groups and attempted to ameliorate the situation. With no support from Dublin they made little headway against the British government.

Gerry Adams was not in favour of using hunger strikes as a tactic, fearing it would not be effective and lives would be lost. Two male republicans had died on hunger strike in England in 1974 and 1976. Two republican women had almost died from force-feeding after months of self-imposed starvation.

 

On the fourth of November Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the United States presidential election.

Late that month three women in Armagh Prison joined the hunger strike. In the Republic the news was relegated to the back pages, though Barry bombarded the national dailies with photographs of the prisons taken from every angle he could think of to stress the grimness of the situation.

It had long since been decided that he would be allowed no photographic access to the interiors.

 

Gerry Adams was in almost daily contact with Bobby Sands. The two men were good friends and had much in common. Sands was by now an old hand in the prison system, but he also was familiar with Sinn Féin, having worked as a community activist at one stage. As the O/C Sands was kept informed of all developments. The authorities thought they had the H-Blocks locked up tight, but they could not imprison information.

The republicans were resourceful.

In December another thirty H-Block prisoners joined the strike. The international community was beginning to take interest—until the eighth of December, when John Lennon was shot dead in New York.

The murder of the enigmatic and arguably most talented of the Beatles engaged the news media to the exclusion of everything else. Little notice was taken the following day of the first Anglo-Irish summit meeting, held in Dublin between Margaret Thatcher and Charles Haughey. Thatcher acknowledged Britain's “special relationship” with Ireland and agreed to continue with biannual meetings to discuss “the totality of relationships within these islands.”

The Irish government hailed the occasion as a historic breakthrough.

 

Barry went to Leinster House, photographed the two prime ministers shaking hands as Thatcher departed, and went home in a bad mood.

“They didn't talk about a damned thing that's really important,” he told McCoy.

“How do you know?”

“They were smiling.”

As he was getting ready for bed that night Barry began softly humming “Imagine,” his favourite of Lennon's songs. Barbara started to sing the words, but they were so painful under the circumstances that he asked her to stop.

She understood at once. And he loved her for it.

Had anyone asked, Barry would have said he loved America. America as he remembered it. Shiny and full of confidence.

What he really loved—as so many Irish people did—was the
idea
of America. Or more specifically the United States: the world's largest democracy and last best hope. Now the man whose songs had epitomised so much of that hope had been shot dead by an American with no hope at all.

 

In Northern Ireland other people who felt they had no hope at all continued with the hunger strike. The commitment having been made, all of republicanism rowed in behind them. Personal misgivings were set aside. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, president of Sinn Féin, announced, “We must bend every muscle, strain every nerve to support the hunger strikers. This is a showdown with imperialism.”

Known only to the participants, a secret line of communication code-named “Mountain Climber” was opened between the British government, working through the Foreign Office, and the republican leadership. It involved reactivating a channel first used during the ceasefire of '74–'75. In spite of their public protests that no quarter would be given, the British were growing anxious to end the strike. The international fallout could be horrific if it went on too long.

On the fifteenth of December twenty-three more republicans joined the hunger strike. One of the first strikers, Seán McKenna, was losing his sight and reported to be approaching death. He was wrapped in a blanket made of tin foil to conserve his falling body heat and transported to an outside hospital. Supporters set up a vigil outside the hospital.

 

Barry photographed the scene. Flickering candles, pleading placards. Kneeling women fingering their rosaries and sombre men standing with downcast eyes.

Time slipped; slid.

It was a cold, dark November morning in 1920, during the War of Independence, and he was standing outside Mountjoy Prison. Within those walls Volunteer Kevin Barry, only eighteen years old, was about to be hanged for taking part in an attack on a bread lorry delivering rations to British soldiers. He personally had not shot anyone, but he was the only member of the attack party to be captured.

Over two thousand people had gathered outside the jail to pray for him. Tenement women with ragged shawls tightly drawn around their thin shoulders; local businessmen in their dark suits; Maud Gonne MacBride, beloved of William Butler Yeats. Some carried flickering candles. Women knelt in the muddy road fingering their rosaries. Sombre men stood with downcast eyes.

A warder came out and pinned a typewritten notice on the wall: “The sentence of the law passed on Kevin Barry, found guilty of murder, was carried into execution at eight
A.M
. this morning. By order.”
¹

According to his executioners young Kevin had died calmly, almost cheerfully, praying for both his friends and his enemies as the hangman pulled the hood over his head.

Afterwards Michael Collins grimly promised there would be “no more lonely scaffolds.”

Barry Halloran shook his head, trying to clear it. When he looked around he was in Belfast again.

What the hell just happened?

 

On the following day seven more republican prisoners joined the hunger strike.

Cardinal Ó Fíaich issued a personal appeal to Margaret Thatcher, asking her to intervene. He also called on the protestors to give up their strike, in the name of God.

Through the Foreign Office, the British government suggested that a compromise could be reached. They promised that a document setting out the details of a proposed settlement, which would at least partially meet the strikers' demands, would be sent to the men inside the prison as soon as they came off the strike. The outside leadership had dealt with the British government in this way before and had little reason to trust them. But time was running out. They passed the word along to the hunger strikers and their families. Believing that a deal was on its way from London, Seán McKenna began accepting nourishment in hospital.

On the nineteenth of December the hunger strike was called off.

When the British were sure the strike was over, they reneged. The concessions that had been promised to the republicans were withdrawn in a major, and ultimately tragic, breach of faith.

Bobby Sands summed it up. “Next time we'll have to go all the way.”

 

At the end of the year the northern death toll for the Troubles was two thousand and rising.

 

Through December and into January Bobby Sands did everything he could think of to persuade the British to go ahead with their commitment. It was no use. London had gone deaf. At last he sent word to Gerry Adams that he intended to initiate a second hunger strike. Adams tried hard to dissuade him. On behalf of Sinn Féin he wrote, “We are tactically, strategically, physically and morally opposed to a hunger strike.”
²

But he was not in the H-Blocks.

Anyone who was not in the H-Blocks at the time could not fully understand just how terrible it was.

 

In 1981 the rural quiet of County Tyrone was ruptured by gunfire on the sixteenth of January when Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and her husband Michael were seriously wounded in a loyalist attack on their home at Derrylaughan.

Five days later the IRA killed Sir Norman Stronge, former speaker of the Stormont Parliament, and his son, then bombed his house, Tynan Abbey.

On the sixth of February Ian Paisley took five journalists to a remote location in County Antrim. There Paisley addressed five hundred followers whom he described as “The Third Force,” which was prepared to resist to the death the process of a united Ireland. Speech concluded, Paisley returned the journalists to Belfast to spread the word.

 

On the night of February thirteenth the Stardust Nightclub in Artane was hosting the final of a disco-dancing contest. Although all of the dancers and most of the audience would be considerably younger than she was, Barbara was eager to go.

“I have an assignment down in Waterford that will take some time, so I probably will stay overnight,” Barry told her. “But there's no reason why you can't go to the club on your own. When Ursula could walk she went everywhere on her own.”

“Well, that's Ursula, isn't it? If I went by myself people would think I couldn't get a man to go with me.”

“Then why not ask Séamus?”

“You must be joking. They'd think I'd come with my father, and I'm not
that
desperate.”

“Why do you care what people think?”

“Don't you?”

“Not particularly,” said Barry.

 

Harold's Cross was too far from Artane for Barbara to hear the shriek of the fire sirens.

The Stardust had been packed to capacity when a fire broke out behind the stage. As the frightened crowd tried to escape they found most of the exits had been locked to keep anyone from coming in without paying. Panic broke out. People were trampled. Bodies piled up at the doorways.

In the early hours of St. Valentine's Day the Stardust was totally destroyed. Forty-eight young people died and over two hundred were injured. Some parents lost more than one child in the inferno. Friends and families were devastated.

Barry had returned home in the morning to find Barbara in near hysterics. “I rang and rang the Cassidys but no one's home. Were they at the Stardust, Barry? Were they?”

He put his arms around her. “Of course not, sweetheart. I'm sure they're all right.”

He was not sure at all.

They were both hugely relieved when Alice rang a few minutes later from her mother-in-law's house, where they had been visiting overnight. When she heard Barbara's voice Alice exclaimed, “We were afraid you might have gone to the Stardust!”

Barbara, caught between laughter and tears, replied, “We were afraid you had!”

Not everyone received such good news. The nation's newspapers put out special editions listing the names of the dead together with dramatic pictures of the burnt-out club and rows of sheet-covered bodies in the morgue. But no photograph could adequately express the agony of desperate parents who rushed from one hospital to another, only to discover that the face they sought was under one of those sheets. Nor could a camera convey the horror of the smell that lingered over the ruins of the Stardust.

Barry Halloran did not join the other photographers covering the story.

Barbara might have been one of those charred bodies under a sheet.

 

Fianna Fáil was holding its Ard Fheis that weekend. Party leader Charles Haughey ordered an adjournment as a mark of respect. But this was Ireland; there was never a shortage of political commentary. Several newspapers carried a quote from Ian Paisley: “The
taoiseach
will never get his filthy venomous hands on Northern Ireland!”
³

 

On the first of March a second hunger strike began in the H-Blocks, led by Bobby Sands.

The five demands of the protestors were the same as before. Although there were some private misgivings among
taobh amuigh
—the outside republican leadership—about the tactic, they gave the strikers their support. The willingness of the men in the H-Blocks to sacrifice themselves if necessary for the greater good of their fellow republicans was recognised as the ultimate symbol of solidarity.