1999 (38 page)

Parting with Apollo was difficult for Barry, but when he traded it in to Paudie Coates his friend promised he would not sell the Austin Healey again. “There's no market for old sports cars in this country, to be honest,” he told Barry. “Sure we'll keep it here at the garage and if your missus ever wants it, she can take it out.”

“Séamus talked me into building an en suite for her,” Barry said laughingly. “Don't tell her about the car too, at least not for a little while. It might give her ideas above her station.”

“Your mother did that months ago,” Coates replied.

Before Barry left for Galway he urged McCoy to join him. “We can try out the new car, you'll enjoy that. We'll open her up on the N7. I'll be going by way of Ennis so we can call on Ursula.”

“Can't do it, I'm afraid.”

“And why not?”

“I've started work on that bathroom for your wife. The plumbing's in a right state and she will be too if I don't get it finished double-quick.”

“Barbara's lived this long without being able to step out of bed and into the shower, another week won't kill her.”

“I know, but I promised her I'd finish it so I will.”

“Séamus, is there some reason why you don't want to visit Ursula? Every time I go down there I invite you to come with me and every time you find some excuse.”

“Perhaps I don't want to say good-bye to her again. I said it once the day she left Harold's Cross, and that's enough.”

Barry was puzzled. “You don't have to say ‘good-bye' at all. She's not going anywhere, you can see her anytime you want to. If you don't drive down with me there's always the train.”

“I know.” McCoy gave his friend a long, thoughtful look. “You said good-bye to the Army years ago, Seventeen—for your own reasons, and I'm not asking about them—but would you like to have to do it again?”

 

The British Conservative Party announced it would hold its annual conference in the seaside resort of Brighton in early October. The Grand Hotel was to be the venue. Three weeks before the conference a member of the IRA, dressed as a workman, casually entered the hotel and planted twenty pounds of explosives behind a panel in the bathroom of room 629. Pat McGee set the timer for twenty-four days later, when the government's high command would all be in residence, and casually strolled out again.

The bomb went off at 2:54
A.M.
on the twelfth of October; the culmination of a bloody four-year campaign by the IRA on the “British mainland.” The massive explosion ripped open the hotel. One of the Grand's huge Victorian chimneys collapsed and went crashing through seven floors. Five people were killed and more than thirty were seriously injured.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped the assassination attempt, but the bathroom in which she had been only two minutes earlier was destroyed.

The IRA issued a chilling statement aimed directly at Mrs. Thatcher. “Today, we were unlucky. But remember—we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.”

 

“That was good work, that bomb,” Patsy said at the next meeting of the Usual Suspects. “I'd like to meet that fella and shake his hand, he's a hero in my book.”

Abruptly, Barry's brain presented him with a snapshot of Talbot Street, 1974. A yellow-haired man with a pockmarked face was sprawled on the pavement with his chest and belly torn open. There was a puzzled expression on his face, as if death were a door he had walked through by mistake.

Barry felt his stomach clench. “I was an engineer in the IRA,” he said, trying to keep all emotion out of his voice, “which means I built bombs for them. But don't call me a hero. Life isn't worth living if we don't face up to who we really are and what we really do. I may be many things, but I refuse to be a coward.”

Brendan cleared his throat. “While watching the battle of Fredericksburg, a glorious victory for the Army of the Confederacy, General Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible; we should grow too fond of it.”

Barry threw him a grateful glance. “You understand, then?”

“I understand that what's happened in Ireland since partition has done terrible damage to this country and its people, morally as well as physically. And it grows worse day by day. The old truisms are vanishing.

“When I was young the republicans were heroes and the British were the enemy. That is no longer a given. We have a partitioned country that calls itself a republic, but our government and a sizable percentage of the population remain cringingly subservient to Britain, and the republicans have become the enemy. We haven't changed, yet everything else has.”

“The republicans are changing too,” Barry told him.

“For good or ill?”

“It's too soon to tell.”

 

Recession was biting deep. Woolworth's closed its Irish branches. Women who had worked behind the counter at Woolworth's ever since they left school suddenly found themselves unemployed—and there were no jobs to be had.

Barry photographed the customers waiting for the doors of the main store in Dublin to open for the last time. Huge price reductions had been widely advertised. “One person's disadvantage is another's advantage,” one woman laughed as he was taking her picture.

The following day, Barry put an ad in the papers looking for a housekeeper.

America was static, dumbing down; drowning in its own excesses. By contrast, Europe as a single entity was a long-held dream finally on the verge of realisation and there was tremendous interest in its potential. The Old World demanded a nimble mind and a solid knowledge of history—and a Swiss passport was even more useful than an Irish one.

Barry Halloran was receiving more assignments than he could cover. “If we hire a housekeeper to be here all day, every day, you could go back to singing,” he told Barbara.

 

In the north, DUP councillor George Seawright said of educating Catholic children, “Taxpayers' money would be better spent on an incinerator and burning the whole lot of them. The priests should be thrown in and burned as well.”
⁵

 

Ronald Reagan was reelected as president of the United States in November.

The Sunday Press
published a story claiming that Margaret Thatcher had asked civil servants to draw up documents on repartition in Ireland, and they had refused.

On the seventeenth of November a two-day summit meeting between Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald on the question of Northern Ireland began. Barry flew to England to take photographs. Afterwards Thatcher told the press, “A united Ireland was one solution. That is out. A second solution was confederation of the two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out. That is a derogation from sovereignty.”
⁶

FitzGerald described her behaviour as “gratuitously offensive.”
⁷

 

Barry returned from the airport to find Barbara in tears.

“Séamus has left us!” she wailed, flinging herself into her husband's arms. “What am I going to do?”

Barry had a sense of déjà vu. “You mean he's gone back to the Army again? I don't believe it; I thought he'd given up after Long Kesh.”

“Not the Army, I only wish it were. He's emigrated.”

“He's what? Sweet Jesus; where to?”

“America,” Barbara sobbed. “He left here almost as soon as you did the other day, I'm surprised you didn't see him at the airport.”

“We would have been at different gates,” Barry replied automatically. “But why?”

“He didn't say. I saw him coming down the stairs carrying an old suitcase and when I asked where he was going, he said, ‘Boston.' He kissed me on the cheek and the next thing I knew he was out the door. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Barry was astonished. “I didn't even know he had a passport.”

“Would they let him enter America?” Barbara wondered. “With his background?”

“There are ways,” said Barry. “And I suspect our Séamus would know them all. Or know how to find out.”

The children were upset; they loved their “Uncle Séamus.” Barbara, surprisingly, was disconsolate. She had never realised how much she relied on McCoy until he was gone. “He was like the father I never knew,” she confided to Barry.

He understood all too well.

Christmas in the yellow brick house was subdued that year, only slightly cheered when a card arrived from America showing a snowy scene on Boston Common, and bearing a brief greeting from McCoy. “Miss you all and will write soon,” he promised.

On the eleventh of March, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.

With the encouragement of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, relations between the world's two superpowers began to improve.

Barry telephoned Ursula and read the letter to her. She was relieved and infuriated at the same time. Relieved that they had heard from Séamus at last; infuriated that he had not written to her first, or at least at the same time. With an effort of will, she kept both emotions out of her voice. “He doesn't say anything about his health,” she pointed out. “What will he do if he falls ill again?”

“Barbara tells me there are all sorts of health schemes over there that we don't have here, and Boston has superb hospitals.”

“But America's not a socialist country, Barry. They don't take care of simply everybody. An undocumented alien, and I'm sure that's what Séamus is, could have a hard time.”

That's just what I needed,
Barry told himself after he hung up the phone.
Something else to worry about.

 

An Air India 747 exploded off the Irish coast on the twenty-third of June. Search parties flocked to Ahakista, County Cork. Of the 329 people aboard, all were feared dead. Sikh extremists were suspected.

 

Ursula Halloran, who once rose before first light, now lingered in bed in the mornings, waiting for the little German music box whose rendition of “O Donnell Abu” opened the RTE broadcast day at six
A.M.
This was usually followed by a commercial extolling a remedy for fluke, a parasite in livestock.

When Barry drove down to see her he reported, “Now that his adult teeth have come in we took Pat to the dentist for his first checkup. You'll be pleased to hear that they're strong as granite and not a cavity. Of the three children, he's the only one to inherit yours.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Ursula.

She had been badly hurt by what she perceived as McCoy's defection, though she never admitted it. When she finally received a letter from him he sounded contrite.

“I guess you're mad at me and I don't blame you,” he wrote. “I should have talked to you before I left. But there wasn't anything to say. I did not tell anybody I was going but I had my reasons. You of all people understand them.”

At the end of the letter he gave a telephone number where he could be reached in case of emergency. “Over here they have fancy new telephone systems now, and phone calls cost pennies instead of pounds. But I know the Irish telephone still costs the earth, so don't ring me unless you have to.”

“It's about time that man wrote to you,” Breda Cunningham said indignantly. “Did he explain why he left Ireland?”

“It wasn't necessary.”

Breda shook her head. “I never did understand that man. I liked him, but I didn't understand him.”

“Many would not,” said Ursula. She folded up the letter and put it in the little tin box with the “Brownie” articles.

 

On the fourth of June a member of Sinn Féin was elected chairman of the Fermanagh District Council with the support of the SDLP.

June fourteenth was marred by the explosion of a thousand-pound IRA bomb in Belfast city centre, causing widespread property damage.

On the twenty-ninth of the month Patrick Magee, an Irish republican, was charged in London with the murders resulting from the Brighton bombing.

 

Barbara and Barry put the children on the train that summer to spend two weeks in Clare. Breda collected them at Limerick Station in Ursula's old car, which she referred to as “the Antique.” Drunk with freedom, the children squirmed like puppies during the drive to the farm. “Are we there? Are we almost there?” They burst into the house, into the parlour where their grandmother waited for them with open arms, like a gale of fresh air, and began jabbering excitedly to her about the train journey and school and friends and…

“Slow down there,” Ursula admonished. “My ears don't hear as fast as they used to.”

For a fortnight the youngsters dwelt in an Ireland which once had been home to the vast majority of Irish children. Cows, chickens, pigs, a well for water, an outdoor toilet (there was a lot of hilarity about that), stacks of turf to burn in the cavernous kitchen fireplace on chilly nights, trees to climb and streams for wading and long tall summer grass in which to lie and dream and make daisy chains. And chores to do as well; Ursula made certain they understood the responsibilities that went with freedom.

She personally introduced her granddaughter to every horse on the place, calling each one by name. It was not Trot who fell in love with the farm, however, but Patrick.

Dark, fey Patrick, who spent all of his time either with the horses or wandering alone through the countryside, listening to music only he could hear.

 

In July Bob Geldof launched Live Aid at Britain's Wembley Stadium. Barry Halloran was on hand to photograph the event, though he was almost lost in the sea of television photographers. But his pictures were important. Ireland proved to be the highest per capita donor for famine relief.

Viking artefacts found during the excavations at Wood Quay went on exhibition at the National Museum, attracting huge international attention. Barry photographed them too; trying not to think about the defeat they represented.

Cork City celebrated its five hundredth birthday.

French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace vessel
Rainbow Warrior
in Auckland Harbour.

As for Northern Ireland—a total of twenty-nine prison officers had been killed; ten men had starved to death in prison for their political beliefs; violence and sectarianism were still rampant.

Yet the horror chambers of the Maze had created the fragile key to begin unlocking a peace process. The secret channels for negotiation between all the parties involved remained in place.

 

July saw violent clashes between the police and loyalists in Northern Ireland over the loyalists' insistence on their right to march through Catholic areas.

At the end of the month the BBC refused to transmit a programme called “At the Edge of the Union,” which featured an interview with Martin McGuinness. Journalists went on strike over the decision. For the first time in its history, the BBC World Service went off the air.

In early autumn John Stalker submitted an initial report of his enquiry into the RUC's “shoot to kill” policy.

But the big international news story of the year broke on the first of September when the
Titanic
was found. The wreck of the huge luxury liner that sank in April of 1912 finally was located on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, some four hundred miles south of Newfoundland, by Robert Ballard and a team of explorers.

“My grandfather Ned Halloran was on the
Titanic
,”
^*
Barry told his fascinated children. “He was one of the lucky ones, he was rescued.”

“Did he see a lot of people die?” Brian asked eagerly.

Barry was amused. “You're a bloodthirsty scamp, aren't you?”

“Well, did he?”

 

On the fifteenth of November Barry was at Hillsborough Castle in County Down to photograph something that, for once, truly could be described as an historic occasion in the history of Northern Ireland. In spite of the obvious difficulties between them, Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald met to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving republicans the right to put forward their views and proposals for the future of Northern Ireland.

At an Ulster Clubs rally in Larne, Ian Paisley expressed his reaction: “If the British government force us down the road to a united Ireland we will fight to the death. This could come to hand-to-hand fighting in every street in Northern Ireland. We are on the verge of civil war. We are asking people to be ready for the worst and I will lead them.”
¹

 

The latest hit song was Paul Brady singing “The Island,” with the line “Up here we sacrifice our children to feed the worn-out dreams of yesterday.”

 

When the Anglo-Irish Agreement was debated in the Dáil, Fianna Fáil strongly opposed and voted against it. Yet ten years later, when he was party leader and
taoiseach,
Bertie Aherne would describe the Agreement as having been “a shaft of light in a time of despair.”
²

 

Séamus McCoy sent a Christmas package to Harold's Cross containing a small, carefully chosen gift for every member of the Halloran family and Philpott too.

In Clare, Ursula received the most beautiful Christmas card she had ever seen, accompanied by a new hardcover edition of
Julian
. Breda's gift was a box of Vermont Maple Sugar Fudge.

 

Desmond O'Malley, a former government minister, had been expelled from Fianna Fáil because he refused to support the party's policy on contraception. By the end of the year O'Malley was at the head of a new political party, the Progressive Democrats. More liberal than the Soldiers of Destiny, they promised a genuine republic that would encourage pluralism and free itself of the shackles of the Catholic Church.

With the typical Irish penchant for acronyms, overnight the party became known as the PDs.

O'Malley possessed a rugged integrity that seemed to augur well for his new party, but there was one problem. He was an intellectual. As fellow politician Michael D. Higgins stated from personal experience, “To be an intellectual in Irish politics is more of a handicap than being a pervert.”

 

On the tenth of January, 1986, Ian Paisley said, “No today, no tomorrow, no forever,” to the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

“I wish he would be more specific,” Ursula quipped during a telephone conversation with Barry.

 

While Paisley was inveighing against the Agreement, Father Alec Reid, a Redemptorist priest based in Belfast, contacted Charles Haughey to ask if he would meet personally with Gerry Adams. Haughey declined to do so at that time, fearing political consequences because of his role in the Arms Crisis.
³
However, he asked his adviser, Martin Mansergh, to keep in touch with Father Reid, and Haughey himself met with Cardinal Ó Fíaich at his home in Kinsealy to explore the possibilities for creating a peace process.

Another northern politician entered the picture when Haughey conferred with John Hume of the SDLP.

Meanwhile, Gerry Adams continued to push for an end to political abstentionism on the part of republicans. To succeed he would have to convince some of the most hard-line elements within the IRA; the real “hard men.”