1999 (42 page)

Ireland experienced its hottest summer in years. Sunny days uninterrupted by even a hint of rain brought people out in the thousands. Many had to be treated in hospital for sunburn and heat exhaustion before the rain returned, melting the burning sky and pouring ozone-scented rain over the thirsty land.

 

Paul Morrissey continued the practical management of the farm, but Ursula was increasingly involved in its day-to-day operations. The electronic lift installed in the stairway gave her slow but reliable wheelchair access to every part of the house, and a ramp had been built to allow her to take the chair outside.

There were days when she could forget, for a while, that she was handicapped. But not at night. And not first thing in the morning. Those were the times when she fought to regain what had once been hers.

 

In Dallas, Texas, Isabella Kavanagh was killed in a car crash. The telephone shrilled in the hall of the yellow brick house late at night. Barry was not yet home and Philpott had long since gone to bed. Barbara was alone when she took the call.

“Mom would have hated dying on the Lyndon Baines Johnson Expressway,” she said to Barry later. Much later, when he finally came home. Long after the first shock; after the silent, lonely tears. “She always voted republican, you know. I mean American republican, not Irish republican,” Barbara added hastily.

“I knew what you meant,” said Barry. With his arms around her.

He accompanied his wife to Dallas for the funeral. The city had changed almost beyond recognition since his visit in the late fifties. Numerous skyscrapers rose from the flat prairie to stab the innocent sky. Some of the buildings appeared to be gold-plated.

“I have to go back to Ireland after the funeral,” Barry said, “but you can stay on here for as long as you want. I'm sure you and your sister have some catching up to do.”

“Not much, we were never that close and our lives are very different now. I think I'd rather go home when you do, Barry. People in America talk too loud.”

Once they were back in Ireland Barbara resumed her life as if nothing had happened. The children grieved more for the grandmother they had never known than Isabella's own daughter appeared to do. She, the drama queen who made huge emotional issues out of trivia, kept her pain hidden.

Sometimes Barry glimpsed it in her eyes. When he tried to comfort her she shrugged him off. “Nothing's wrong, just leave me alone.”

The songs she sang to herself when she sat at her dressing table brushing her hair changed. No longer the latest pop hits, but the operatic arias which had first captivated Barry. They belonged to a time when her mother was still alive and love and success were a promise waiting in the future.

Trot loved hearing her mother sing. “Teach me the words,” she pleaded.

“It's opera, and it's Italian.”

“I don't mind, I can learn it. Please teach me!”

Barbara tried, but her heart was not in it. Opera was hers, had always been hers. She was not ready to pass on what she considered her greatest gift.

Trot began teaching herself from the radio. Ráidió na Gaeltachta, transmitting from Galway, did not always come through very clear, but she was a persistent child and loved the Irish ballads they often played. The first time Barry heard his thirteen-year-old daughter sing “My Lagan Love” she stopped him in his tracks. Trot had her mother's voice.

 

In August the UDA shot dead twenty-eight-year-old Loughlin Maginn and then boasted about it, claiming he was a member of the IRA. To support this they produced classified British Intelligence documents in their possession that identified Maginn as a “suspected” Volunteer.

The media scented blood. Investigative reporters, a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, began developing networks. By late autumn thousands of British Intelligence documents would be uncovered in the hands of loyalist paramilitaries.

On the seventeenth of October it was announced that corruption proceedings were being instigated against the police involved in the convictions of the Guildford Four. Two days later three of the four were released. One remained in jail because he was still implicated in another case; his conviction was subsequently quashed.

 

Because Barbara was not using her bereavement to make emotional claims on him, Barry felt more tender towards his wife than he had in a long time. He began coming home earlier and trying to find conversational topics that would be of interest to her.

He was not aware there had been a chill between them until it began to thaw a bit.

Barbara loved to talk about her career. She always referred to her job in RTE as “my career.” Only once did Barry make the mistake of reminding her, “My mother had a career in RTE too.” Several days passed before Barbara was responsive again. Barry thought seriously about telling her of the house in Mountjoy Square but decided against it. The house was too big a bargaining chip. It must be saved for the future.

 

The news story of the year took place in November.

On the ninth of the month the partition of Berlin came to a end. The infamous Berlin Wall separating the two halves of the divided city was breached after almost three decades.

Since 1961 the Wall and the 860-mile-long border shared by East and West Germany had allowed the development of two dissimilar Germanys; one prosperous, the other struggling under Communist dictatorship. People caught trying to escape East Germany were shot dead by border guards.

When the changes taking place in the Soviet Union began to affect its satellites, Hungary had been amongst the first to reflect them. A new, more liberal regime had opened the border between Hungary and Germany.

Once walls started coming down the momentum was hard to stop. Czechoslovakia was the next country to grant free access to West Germany through its border.

East Berlin's Communist Party spokesman announced that East Germans would be allowed to travel directly to West Germany. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl hailed the decision as historic and called for a meeting with the East German leader.

The plain people of Germany would not wait. Hundreds converged at crossing points along the Berlin Wall. Bowing to the inevitable, the Communists gave permission for the gates to be opened from the eastern side. Eager crowds surged through to be embraced by jubilant West Berliners on the other side. Within hours huge chunks had been torn out of the wall. Berlin then gave itself a week-long party of fireworks and champagne.

 

“If it can happen there it can happen here,” the Usual Suspects told one another. “It's only a matter of time.”

“Time,” Barry wrote to McCoy on New Year's Eve, “is doing two things simultaneously. When I look at the kids it's whizzing by. Ursula would be furious to hear me call them kids, but that's what everyone calls children now so I do too. We have to move with the times. Just look at Germany.

“Yet time is standing still when it comes to Northern Ireland, Séamus. I used to pop into the car and drive up there two or three times a week, but I don't bother anymore. How many pictures of bloody people lying in the street does anyone need to see?”

 

The salient events in the northern struggle were taking place more and more out of the glare of the media. Barry was aware of many of them and followed them with acute interest, exchanging each scrap of information he obtained with Éamonn MacThomáis, but there was nothing he could cover with his camera. No photograph could illustrate the struggle of men fighting their prejudices. Men who, on the republican side at least, were trying to imagine the impossible: moving the armed struggle into the political arena.

Yet tiny step by tiny step it was happening. Guided by progressive thinkers such as Gerry Adams, the republican movement was beginning to focus less on what it was against and more on what it was for.

 

“How do you really feel about going the political route?” Barry asked Mac-Thomáis. The two had met in a republican pub—not the Bleeding Horse—close to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Barry sometimes visited the cemetery for his mother's sake and his own. Laid flowers on the graves of Ned and Síle Halloran in the republican plot. Tried not to think of Milltown.

“The same way you do, I suspect,” MacThomáis replied to his question. “I'm torn. I have no faith at all in politics but the bomb and bullet don't seem to be getting us anywhere either.”

Barry said, “There are a lot of hard-liners in the Army who can't accept anything else.”

“I know that. According to the experts they'll never come around.”

Barry raised a cynical eyebrow. “The people who claim to be experts on republicanism are the very people the republicans don't talk to.”

 

Nineteen ninety was Ursula Halloran's putative eightieth birthday, and a banner year for news.

In May Cardinal Tomás Ó Fíaich died in France of a heart attack during a visit to the Marian shrine at Lourdes. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness attended his funeral, as did Taoiseach Charles Haughey; Peter Brook, secretary of state for Northern Ireland; and Hugh Annesley, chief constable of the RUC.

That same month David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party won the Upper Bann by-election with a majority of fourteen thousand votes. Barry drove north to take his photograph.

In the larger world there were other major news items, including the official reunification of Germany and Mikhail Gorbachev receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace.

 

In the Republic the media campaign against the IRA, encouraged by politicians in both major parties who feared any resurgence of genuine republicanism, was intensified. “IRA” had become a blanket term for any violent or criminal individual or group, with the result that the acts of such individuals or groups were automatically assumed to be politically motivated. Any member or suspected member of the IRA was a criminal. Any member of Sinn Féin was an evil person intent on destroying democracy and replacing it with the Communist conspiracy.

By now the plain people of Ireland had become so conditioned to this characterisation that they accepted it without question.

Almost.

Thousands of file photos were searched to insure that pictures of known republicans presented the worst possible image, depicting them as “shady” or “dangerous.” Only those that lived up—or down—to a certain standard were shown to the public, either in newspapers or on television.

When a civil servant arrived at Barry's front door with a request to examine his archives he slammed the door in the man's face.

 

During a press conference in New York, Nelson Mandela was asked about the IRA. The vice president of the African National Congress replied, “Every community is entitled to fight for its right to self-determination.”

His statement was denounced by every political party in Ireland—except Sinn Féin.

 

Barry's income had reached a level where it grew almost without his help. Rental income still formed a substantial portion, but no week went by without requests for material from his extensive archives. He taught young Brian his filing system and put the boy to work filling requests and mailing out invoices. Brian thrived on the responsibility. Soon he began contacting papers and periodicals on his own, with suggestions for photographs they might like to use.

Barry was able to speed up the restoration process on the Mountjoy Square house. The work had been much more extensive than he originally anticipated. A new roof had been essential, which had led to taking down and rebuilding the chimneys. Then the floors with their rotting timbers had needed replacing. Every job took at least twice as long as it might have because the work was done a bit at a time, but now the structural repairs were complete.

Replumbed and rewired, the old Georgian girl was internally healthy again.

Another year at the most for the cosmetic work,
Barry thought,
and it will be ready for us. Barbara will want to choose the interior colour scheme herself, so the final painting will have to wait until she sees the place.

Sometimes at night he lay in bed beside his wife and tried to imagine the look on her face when she saw her new home for the first time.
It's too bad her mother will never see it.

 

In the Irish presidential election Mary Robinson, barrister and member of Seanad Éireann, was selected by the Labour Party as its candidate. “A woman for president? Ridiculous!” the Usual Suspects scoffed. But she touched a chord with the people. In November she became Ireland's first woman president and invited the world to “Come dance with me in Ireland.”

When she took up residence in Arras Uachtaráin, the President's House in the Phoenix Park, Mary Robinson gave orders that a lighted candle must always be burning in the window. Its purpose was to guide the children of the Irish Diaspora, the exiles to Britain and America and Australia and New Zealand, back home.

On the second of August Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. In Aspen, Colorado, U.S. president George Bush was conferring with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Mrs. Thatcher told him, “Remember, George, I was about to be defeated in England when the Falkland conflict happened. I've stayed in office for eight years since that.”
¹

 

That autumn Barry was in his own home, busy in the darkroom, when Philpott knocked timidly at the door one morning. “Can I come in?” he asked in an odd voice.

“Is the red light on?”

Philpott looked up at the bulb over the door. “It is not on.”

“Then come in of course. What's wrong?”

The little man was actually wringing his hands. “The police, I'm afraid,” he stammered. “They're here.”

Barry brushed past him and went out to the hall.

They had not waited for an invitation. Three men in plainclothes were already entering the parlour while two more were on their way up the stairs.

“What the hell do you think you're doing!” Barry shouted.

The power in his voice and the sheer size of him made them pause.

They were all big men themselves, though a little thick around the middle. Barry automatically assessed his chances against them. The physical activity of working on the Mountjoy Square house was keeping him very fit.
I could take down a couple at least, even if I am out of practice. And if my leg would hold up.
He had no real intention of fighting them, but the knowledge was satisfying.

Years of experience resurfaced in an instant. Barry knew just what to do in this situation and how to do it. Standing very still, he folded his arms and waited with a closed face. Just waited. Letting them read him; his quiet intensity, his total self-confidence.

The officer in charge briefly produced his identification, then put it back in his pocket.

“Special Branch,” Barry confirmed.

The man nodded.

“That gives you no right to search my house.”

“We do have the right to search your house, or anywhere else that may pertain to terrorist activities.”

“Terrorist? You must be joking; I'm a photojournalist.”

“We know what you are,” the officer replied evenly. “Do you have chemicals on the premises?”

“I do of course, I just told you: I take photographs for a living and develop them myself. In fact I was in my darkroom when you burst in here.”

“Perhaps you had best take me to your darkroom, Halloran.”

Barry did not respond. Did not move the slightest muscle, nor bat an eyelid. Just waited. The big clock in the hall ticked on.

Beneath Barry's flinty gaze the officer felt like an insect pinned to a cork. “Mr. Halloran,” he amended.

 

The Special Branch operatives remained in the yellow brick house for over four hours, while Barry alternated between icy anger and grim amusement. He laughed outright when one of them asked him about the stone nose under the bell jar. “It's a phallus,” he lied.

The policeman looked blank.

“Phallus. Latin word; it means a penis.”

“Oh.”

“My grandfather modelled for it,” Barry claimed.

The other man stared at the piece of stone.

“Big man, my grandfather,” said Barry.

When Barbara came home from work he met her at the door.

“Special Branch is in here,” he told her in a low voice. “Don't say anything to them, I'll deal with it. Just sit down in the parlour and wait until they leave.”

“But the children will be home from school soon!”

“I'll send them to their rooms. They'll be all right, we'll all be all right. Just do as I tell you.”

Barbara was less upset than Philpott, who was distraught. “Never in my life,” he kept repeating. “Never in my life! I'll have to give my notice, I can't stay here. I can't stay here.”

“You can of course,” Barry assured him. “This has nothing to do with you.”

The men from Special Branch would not tell him what they were looking for. They found nothing that would link him to the IRA—neither his weapons nor Ned Halloran's notebooks.

All the while they were searching the house Barbara sat on the couch in the parlour, except for two brief excursions to the bathroom. At first Barry was impressed by her composure. Then he noticed the guilty way she glanced at him when she thought he was not looking.

When the police finally left the house, he faced her. “You know something about all this, don't you?”

“Of course not! I was as surprised as you were.”

“You may have been surprised, but not as much as I was. You'd better tell me what's behind this, Barbara.”

By the way her pupils dilated he knew he was right. He took a step closer, looming over her. It was not a tactic he had employed with the men from Special Branch because it would make no difference, but it had a profound effect on his wife.

She would not meet his eyes. “Well, I may have said something I shouldn't have.”

“Said what? To who?”

She chewed her lip. “Inside in RTE. You know how it is, we all got to talking…”

“I do not know how it is, Barbara. Tell me.”

“Well, I mean…you know how hard I've been trying to make an impression. I just couldn't get anyone important to notice me. Not really, not as a person who might be important in her own right. Then one day in the canteen when a couple of the higher-ups came in I happened to mention your notebooks.”

“You
what
?”

She was instantly defensive, pulling her shoulders forward as if to protect herself from a blow. “I told them about your notebooks with the lists of IRA contributors. They were really impressed.”

A muscle jumped in Barry's jaw. “Did you bother to explain that those notebooks were fifty years old or more?”

“I don't remember; I suppose I did.” Wide-eyed innocence.

“You don't remember? Do you have any idea what you've done?”

“I didn't expect the police to come looking for them, if that's what you mean. I thought, well”—a dismissive gesture here—“I guess I thought those old books might make an interesting documentary or something. And the people upstairs would be grateful to me.”

His voice was flat, weighed down by the effort to hold his temper. “Barbara, the names in those old books belonged to men and women who have living children and grandchildren. And unlike you, some of those younger people have been raised in the republican tradition.”

Comprehension dawned in her eyes. “Do you mean they're still supporting the IRA? Is that why you kept the notebooks a secret?” Her voice shrilled in outrage. “Are you raising money for those terrorists? Admit it, damn it, I know you are!”