1999 (44 page)

By which he understood that his mother had never confided the secret of the Mountjoy Square house to Breda. “Not yet,” he replied.

“Is it to be a surprise Christmas present, then?”

“She hasn't done anything to merit a present that big,” he said brusquely, keeping his eyes on the road.

Oh dear,
thought Ursula,
they're still quarrelling then.
The children had not mentioned it when they came to visit during the summer, but she knew. Ursula always knew things.

When the car pulled up in front of the yellow brick house the children ran out to meet them. “How tall they've grown since the summer!” Ursula cried.

“You have to expect changes,” said Barbara.

On Christmas Eve morning the Hallorans opened their presents beside the tree. Patrick had become the official postman, reading aloud the name of the recipient, followed by the name of the sender. When all the presents had been identified Ursula said, with some surprise, “Is there nothing for any of you from Séamus?”

“Not yet,” Patrick confirmed.

Tiny cold feet tracked across Ursula's heart.

“How about you?” Barry asked her. “Did you bring your present from him?”

“It had not arrived when I left.”

“Speaking of presents,” Barbara chimed in, “open that one next, Ursula.” She indicated a beautifully wrapped package. “I picked it out especially for you.”

On cue, Trot burst into a chorus of “The Spanish Lady.” The package contained a large Spanish shawl made of silk. Barbara explained, “It's for you to drape over your lap when you go out in your chair.”

Ursula caught Breda's eye. “Now,” she mimed.

Breda bent down to make sure the chair's locking device was fastened.

Ursula took a firm hold on the arms of the chair. Leaned forward.

Stood up.

There was an astonished silence.

Ursula took one tentative step before her legs began to tremble. Barry leaped forward to catch her. “Mother,” he said.

 

In hospital that afternoon the doctor was able to confirm that Ursula really had regained the use of her legs. Not totally, but to a degree. “Some spinal cord damage does heal,” he admitted. “We just don't know how or why.”

“I can explain the why part,” said Ursula. “I've been planning a trip to Boston to see an old friend of mine and I wanted to walk up to him in the airport.”

As they were leaving the hospital Barry suggested, “You should ring Séamus and tell him the good news straightaway. It may be a while before you can actually walk again, but he'll want to know.”

“You call him for me,” said Ursula. In a small voice.

He placed the telephone call as soon as they returned to Harold's Cross. “Transatlantic phone lines are jammed at the moment,” the operator reported, sounding regretful. “Please try again in half an hour.”

Eventually the phone rang somewhere far off, in America. A disembodied voice announced, “We are sorry, but the number you have dialled is not in service.”

After working his way, with a combination of charm and guile, through various layers of the American telephone system, Barry learned that Séamus McCoy's telephone had been disconnected in August. The final bill had been paid in full at that time. The telephone company had no forwarding address for Mr. McCoy. Thank you for calling AT&T, Mr. Halloran.

Barry was worried. “Séamus may be in trouble,” he told Ursula. “I'm going over there to bring him back as soon as I can book a seat on Aer Lingus.”

“You don't know where he is.”

“Not yet, but there are people who will; our people. I'll find him.”

Ursula laid a hand on her son's arm. “Don't try. If Séamus had wanted us to know he would have told us himself.” Her gaze slid past him, fixing on a faraway place. “We always have cats at the farm,” she remarked with seeming irrelevance, “to keep down the rats. Plain, unassuming cats who go about their business and ask no quarter from anyone. Cats have great dignity, Barry. When one of them feels the time has come to die, it goes off to die alone.”

Barry's heart constricted. “You don't think…” He could not finish the question.

Ursula offered him hope she did not have herself. “Give it time. If Séamus wants to get in touch with us, he will.”

Barry and his mother did not mention their concerns about McCoy to the rest of the family. “There'll be time enough when the holidays are over,” they told each other. “Perhaps we'll have heard from him by then.”

They had not, however. And Ursula was anxious to get back to the farm.

Barry argued, “Now that you've begun your recovery you should stay here in Dublin, so you can be close to specialists who can help you. You won't find a neurological team in Ennis, I already checked.”

“I got this far without them,” Ursula said. “I'll go the rest of the way on my own too.”

She was adamant. So the suitcases and the wheelchair and Breda went back into Barry's car, the good-byes were said, and they set out for Clare. Barry could not help noticing how much more colour there was in his mother's cheeks after they crossed the Shannon River.

Before he left the farm Ursula, leaning heavily on his arm, managed to take four steps. She was not as jubilant as one might have expected. “Whatever your problems with Barbara,” she told her son, “resolve them sooner rather than later. Remember that life is very short, and of all wounds, regret most lacerates the heart.”

“Ursula, you're not…”

“Don't look so worried. All things considered, I'm in amazing health. My problem is, I have too much life left over.”

 

By 1992 the programme for Social Partnership that Charles Haughey had introduced in 1989 was beginning to show effects, although unemployment was still running at two hundred thousand and the young were still emigrating. The concept of having the trade unions work with the government, rather than against it, was taking time to develop, but its acceptance coincided with the arrival of increasing development funds from the EU.

Perhaps there was hope for the future.

 

On the twenty-second of January former UDA intelligence officer Brian Nelson pleaded guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder, as well as fifteen charges of possessing information that could be useful to loyalist paramilitaries. The charges of murder were then withdrawn. Nelson was sentenced to ten years in prison on the conspiracy charges. He would be out in a much shorter time.

 

A disgusted Brendan Delahanty told the remaining Usual Suspects, “There you see how the northern security forces protect themselves from justifying their actions.”

 

In February, after becoming embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal involving several journalists, Charles Haughey resigned as
taoiseach.
He had led Fianna Fáil for eighteen years. The new
taoiseach
was Albert Reynolds, a former country music promoter who owned a pet food business. Unlike his controversial predecessor, who had risen from middle-class origins to become—as one of Haughey's many enemies would one day admit—“a natural aristocrat,” Reynolds was and always would be one of the plain people of Ireland. He was also a self-made millionaire who understood that the best way to get things done was to do them himself.

 

“I'm going to miss that old rogue Haughey,” Ursula admitted.

Breda said, “You're a bit of a hero-worshipper, aren't you?”

“I know it's unfashionable these days, like patriotism and fidelity. But I believe in heroes, Breda. The very fact that you sneer at the concept proves how badly we need them. Our heroes have feet of clay because they're human; otherwise we would crucify them. We did it before.”

Yet she was not as contemptuous of organised religion as she had been in her youth. Sometimes in her wheelchair and sometimes leaning heavily on Breda Cunningham, but walking, Ursula Halloran had begun attending Mass. Not weekly, and certainly not daily like the deeply devout, but two or three times a month. The rituals of her faith that she had scorned for so long were like a pair of well-worn shoes. She found herself sinking back into them with a sense of homecoming.

The Volunteers in the early IRA, like Ned Halloran, had been Irish men of their time; so deeply religious that they blessed every operation before undertaking it. The 1969 split in the Army had devastated them, and the turmoil that followed had left many behind. Somewhere along the way the Catholic Church had left Ursula behind too—perhaps through its oppressively patriarchal attitude towards women.

But if she was honest with herself, and Ursula tried always to be honest with herself, she loved the fragrance of incense.

You get no credit for giving me my legs back,
she silently told God from the middle of the second pew.
I did it myself, and it was bloody hard work too. You should have rewarded me instead of taking Séamus.

Sitting on the bench beside her, Breda rattled her rosary beads.

But I won't hold that against you,
Ursula continued.
Maybe he was in so much pain that he wanted to go and you were doing him a favour. Death isn't the worst thing in the world.

While the service droned on she indulged herself in imagining how things would have been if the major decisions of her life had gone the other way.

But they didn't. What is, is.

 

The Republic was rocked by revelations that the popular bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, had fathered a child with an American divorcee, Annie Murphy. It would prove to be the first chink in the fortress of the previously unassailable Catholic Church in Ireland.

Ireland's High Court refused to permit a fourteen-year-old girl identified only as “Miss X” to go to Britain for an abortion. The verdict, which became notorious as “the X Case,” subsequently was overturned by the Supreme Court as Catholic values began to lose their stranglehold on Irish culture. Allegations of cruelty by members of religious orders perpetrated on children in their care were followed by outright accusations of pedophilia. Within a few years the Church would no longer be a major moral force in the lives of most Irish people.

Ireland was not the only place where institutions were under fire. Los Angeles was hit by race riots. Two days of looting, mayhem, and murder followed the abuse of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The abuse had been captured live on a video camera.

 

In the early morning of July fifth, Kieran Patrick Abram, a Catholic from West Belfast, was on his way to his home off the Falls Road. A group of loyalists had been lying in wait for a Catholic—any Catholic. When Abram appeared they attacked him with wooden bats spiked with nails. The victim, whom a pathologist later described as “moderately intoxicated,” was unable to defend himself, and died.

The judge hearing the case said, “It is an unfortunate and all too familiar aspect of life in Northern Ireland that the days leading up to the twelfth of July are fraught with violence and confrontation. Hatred and antagonism are aroused and the rituals surrounding what is supposed to be a celebration awaken and encourage those feelings.”

The Orange Order was highly critical of the judge's remarks. In a statement issued by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland they stated, “Some of the judiciary have a reputation for making silly remarks, but an attempt to blacken the cultural, religious, and political expression of a people, and to relate it to a horrific killing, is not only obviously inaccurate but grossly offensive.”
¹

 

Many unionists, and more specifically the loyalists, were not interested in conflict resolution. They only cared about consolidating their version of a Protestant identity that they perceived to be inextricably interwoven with the British culture. Yet it was not the religious aspect of that identity that they sought so grimly to retain, for the means they used had nothing to do with Christianity.

Barry felt sorry for them. Bereft of the tattered trappings of power they had flaunted for three hundred years, these staunch defenders of a long-extinct Union were beginning to learn how it felt to be dispossessed in a land they honestly believed was theirs.

 

A meeting of the Intergovernmental Conference in London decided that talks in Northern Ireland with an eye towards establishing a long-term and peaceful political arrangement in the province must be resumed.

Albert Reynolds agreed. The new
taoiseach
began making some exploratory overtures on his own towards the parties involved.

On the twenty-ninth of April political talks resumed at Stormont.

As summer approached, the tentative peace process, or at least the exploration of the possibility of a tentative peace process, developed several strands. British and Irish politicians met one another; members of Northern Ireland's political parties, with the exception of the DUP, met one another; even a few members of the various paramilitary organisations met one another. There was talk. There was rancour. There was mistrust.

But connections once established were not broken.

 

That spring the IRA bombing campaign in Britain hit a spectacular economic target by blowing up the Baltic Exchange in London, creating a staggering billion-pound insurance bill.

“One bomb in London is worth a hundred in Belfast” came back to haunt British ears.

And behind the scenes, in quiet rooms, the talking went on.

 

John Major claimed his fourth successive victory to again lead the Conservative Party.

Ireland won the Eurovision again, with Linda Martin singing a song penned by Johnny Logan: “Why Me?”

And Eamon Casey resigned as bishop of Galway.

 

On the fourth of September Peter McBride, eighteen, the young father of two small children, was stopped by the British army in Belfast. An identity check showed that he was not wanted by the police; a body search proved he was carrying no weapons. The attitude of the soldiers, however, was so aggressive that the frightened young man broke and ran. Guardsmen Mark Wright and James Fisher chased him and shot him in the back, killing him.

Although they were convicted of murder and given a life sentence, the British Army Board decided the two soldiers could continue in the army under an “exceptional circumstance” clause, describing the murder as “an error of judgement.” Guardsman Fisher subsequently was promoted.

 

Foreign investors were beginning to take notice of the Republic of Ireland's favourable tax rates for new businesses.

Several large American firms opened branches in Ireland.

Developers began, cautiously at first but with increasing confidence, building new housing estates.

New car sales increased.

The National Roads Authority began building new motorways to allow the inhabitants of the new housing estates to get to their new jobs.

 

An objective person travelling south from Northern Ireland would have noticed that the roads south of the border were beginning to look better than the roads north of the border. The ability to be objective was not, however, in the remit of leading unionists.

Fortunately it existed elsewhere. John Major's government was actively courting the republicans, sending as many as nineteen separate messages to the Sinn Féin leadership through various backchannels.
¹
In 1992 the messages focussed on the Adams-Hume talks, which Sinn Féin called “the Irish peace initiative.”

However Sinn Féin and the larger republican community remained dubious about the possibility of doing business with the British government. Every tenuous step must be analysed, criticised, and presented to the Army Council. Sinn Féin was becoming the accepted voice of the new republican movement but the Army Council was still the muscle.

And the muscle continued to be exercised.

 

The big obstacle when it came to restoring some form of internal government in Northern Ireland was, at least in Ian Paisley's opinion, centred around Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution. Paisley refused to consider any form of rapprochement with Irish nationalists as long as they retained a constitutional claim to the Six Counties.

“We'll never give it up,” MacThomáis averred.

“What if that's the price of peace?” Barry asked.

MacThomáis folded his arms. “We'll never give it up.”

Barry, who went everywhere and listened to everyone and had something of his mother's intuitive understanding of currents beneath the surface, was not so sure.

With the break in his marriage something had been broken in him. He now knew that nothing was set in stone. If peace eventually came—when peace eventually came—it would not be the peace the republicans had fought and died for, but an imperfect peace constructed of compromise. No glorious victory. No clear-cut moment when all the loose ends were tied up and everything made sense.