Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (8 page)

However, for every reason to hope, there was an equal and opposite reason to despair. Nineteen twelve saw the signing of a covenant by 470,000 Unionists, loyal to the British crown, swearing an oath never to accept Home Rule and to prevent the implication of it by force if necessary. One hundred thousand men joined the Ulster Volunteer Force, an organization that would come to be feared for more than its numbers. Three hundred tons of rifles and ammunition were landed for their use in April 1914 while the British Army stood idly by, allowing a sectarian group to arm themselves. The Unionists had no reason to fear. Home Rule, though put into effect by law, was rendered impotent by its suspension until the Great War should end.

Daniel, far away from the world in which the illusions of politics were practiced, saw the ruse for what it was. The action had, in effect, done little other than to pacify the Unionists, who seemed blinded by the sight of the Union Jack into believing that the British saw them as equals and peers of the realm. Perhaps in British eyes they were not as Irish as the Catholics but they were still incontrovertibly Irish and thus somewhat less than human, though handy to use as a trump card during election times.

Daniel could feel change coming. In answer to the formation and arming of the UVF an Irish volunteer corps was formed. They were banned from arming themselves by the same government who’d sat idly by and allowed the UVF to bring in 300 tons of illegal arms. Shortly after, there would be a split in the Irish corps over the issue of conscription, and the largest section would go to war, fighting and dying in British uniforms, believing they were fighting for freedom and justice for nations without voice. They were, to a certain extent, cannon fodder for the British generals, much as the Canadian and Anzac troops would be.

Those who refused conscription became the Irish Volunteers and they, along with the small force of the Irish Citizen’s Army, would change Irish history forever. England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, it seemed the time to take a stand.

During the Easter week of 1916, a group of idealists, poets, teachers and socialists stood on the stairs of the General Post Office in Dublin and proclaimed the Republic of Ireland. Daniel’s son Brendan was amongst their numbers.

They fought valiantly for Irish sovereignty, to declare Ireland for the Irish, in the name of dead generations and ones yet to come, they fought for a cause which five decades later still had not come to fruition. They were outnumbered twenty to one but managed to hold out for a week before admitting defeat.

Sixteen of the Rising’s leaders were executed, some so badly wounded from the fighting that they had to be propped up in chairs to be shot. Suspects, innocent or guilty, were rounded up and jailed in British prisons. Brendan Riordan, twenty-six years of age, was one of these. While he sat without trial in a British prison, his father was shot through the head twice and killed. It wasn’t known who the shooter was, but beside Daniel’s lifeless body was left the message, ‘Fenian lie down.’ Brendan, unable to attend his father’s funeral, vowed from his prison cell to never lie down. He was released three months later because of a great tidal wave of public anger, from both the Irish and American sides of the Atlantic, directed towards the governments of England and the United States. The Irish immigrants were an important electoral body to a president trying to win support to go to war. The prisoners, for reasons having little to do with justice, were released. By force of charm and family legacy Brendan, without actually intending to, gathered about him a group of young insurgents and became their unofficial leader.

Brendan went to Derry, a northern city that was a hotbed of sectarian strife. Catholics there lived under the some of the worst discrimination in Ireland, consigned to ghettoes called the ‘Bogside.’

The remnants of the Rising’s leadership formed the Irish Parliament, ‘Dail Eireann’ in 1919, with Sinn Fein as its ruling party. The elected President, a gentleman with an ungainly figure and an even unlikelier name, Eamon de Valera, was absent from the Dail’s first sitting as he was locked up in prison, a rather inauspicious beginning for a man who would rule, on and off, for much of the century. In fact, on that twenty-first day of January many people were absent. The Unionist party, though invited, didn’t even bother to refuse, they simply didn’t come. When the roll of Sinn Fein representatives itself was called the words ‘
fe glas ag gallaibh’
, ‘jailed by the foreigner’, were called out thirty-six times.
‘Ar dibirt ag gallaibh’, ‘
deported by the foreigner’ was another oft-used phrase that day. In fact, there were only twenty-eight deputies present out of the one hundred and four names called.

De Valera was not to rule for long that first time. The Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood melded at this point to become the IRA. Michael Collins, a man of no small brilliance, was the commanding officer of the army at this time and he and his colleagues brought the British to the table to hammer out a treaty. The Irish got less than they hoped for but it was enough to cause Collins, never a pushover, to accept the terms of a limited form of government for the twenty-six southern counties with full recognition of the existing powers and privileges of the British-Loyalist government in the north. Collins saw it as the first step in a long and bloody process. His friend and rival, Eamon de Valera saw it as nothing less than treason and resigned as president of the Republic. Those who followed him became the Anti-Treaty faction, those who stayed with Collins, Pro-Treaty. Ireland went to war with herself. In the end the seven hundred who died, the hatreds that were inflamed and the divisiveness that would taint Irish politics for decades served little purpose. Ireland remained partitioned.

Brendan, after much soul-searching, found himself fighting under Michael Collins. It was here he would learn many of the skills that he would need in the years to come. He would see prison twice more in his lifetime, would survive beatings and floggings and hunger strike and tear his own soul apart in trying to separate his political ideals from the course of armed struggle he had chosen to follow. He would die from four bullets to the chest and be laid to rest beside the three sons who were killed before him. Brian, his oldest, alive only by the fortune of not being home when masked armed strangers killed his brothers, was a quiet man, not given to fighting nor a great many words. Brendan, a family friend had once said, had been born with his hand fitted to the shape of a gun; he hadn’t liked violence but had understood it in the context of its Irish marriage with politics. Brian neither liked nor understood it. His republicanism tended to be of the mythical, rather than practical sort. Romanticism though fled in the face of imprisonment without trial or real accusation. Brian was jailed on trumped up charges, a privilege the government granted itself under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939, allowing it to intern Irish citizens it suspected of crime, real or imagined. Such an imprisonment could not be challenged in the courts as the Act was not subject to the court’s power.

He was jailed, they told him, for crimes against the Republic and they produced signed statements saying he’d been seen in the area where a bomb had killed four people. Brian had not even heard of the incident much less been present at its execution. To secure his confession he was, over the course of two weeks, beaten, half-starved, denied access to a toilet, beaten some more, chained to his bed post, allowed to sleep only in twenty minute snatches then seized by the hair and awakened by his face slamming into the bedpost. He was certain after the first week that he’d sustained brain damage and would, indeed, walk with a limp for the rest of his life. Four weeks after his initial arrest he was released without reason or explanation. He went home to his mother who nursed him back to health and when he was well enough to get about on his own he went to Belfast. Within a week, he had joined the IRA. It had been easy for him; his father’s name still carried enough weight within the Army to ease his initiation.

He never moved to the forefront of the army, he took his orders from other men and carried them out quietly and obediently. He was, as it turned out, rather expert at explosives, a job that required a still hand and a steel mind. He managed both. He was particularly effective during the Border campaigns of the fifties.

The Fifties were a decade which saw a great reduction in the violence that had defined the Forties. Many within the Republican movement favored passive resistance as an alternative to armed struggle. Wearied and disillusioned by bloodshed and death, the generation that had seen the IRA through the forties began to fade into the background, the new generation stepping forward, many merely seeking excitement without being aware of the consequences of their actions. There was sporadic activity within the ranks of the movement, some of so little consequence that it seemed, even days later that the incidents were mere rumor and never really happened at all.

Within this rather loose framework, Brian managed to find a niche for himself. He revived, on a smaller scale, the Republican newspaper his father had founded some thirty years earlier and poured what little time and money he could find into it. He’d been taught Gaelic as a child and now taught his own sons, born in 1944 and 1949, to speak it as well. His boys were the core of his life and when their mother left, shortly after Pat’s second birthday, none of them, it could be said, was sorry to see the back end of her. Brian raised them to be self-sufficient, to cook and clean and mend and should the occasion eventually arise to not be too big of burden for a woman. He told them stories, pretty silver spun fancies when they were small, grand tales of rebellion as they got older, always at a safe remove in the mists of ancient Ireland. He gave them the sky on long summer nights when they went to the west coast to fish. In another life he might have been an astronomer or a poet or perhaps even both, one thing leading quite naturally to the other. Instead, he worked his weeks at a brewery and nights he built weaponry for a revolution whose coming he feared. His weekends and evenings belonged to his boys.

They were good boys, Casey a little wild at times though not getting up to any mischief that a normal boy wouldn’t. With Pat there were no complaints, he was too quiet at times and too hard on himself, but all in all they gave Brian no sleepless nights. It was other things that did that. Casey, by ten, started doing odd jobs after school and on weekends, delivering groceries and then when he was a little older he did cleanup at the brewery after hours, which led to driving forklift in the warehouse and then driving van when he was of an age to get his license, delivering crates of Connemara Mist to the four corners of the country. School didn’t hold his interest but Brian was determined he would see it through. Pat was of a more academic bent and excelled particularly in literature and history. He too took on odd jobs and among the three of them, they managed to avoid the poverty and unemployment that plagued their corner of the world. They weren’t rich and never would be but as long as they ‘had the sky and a bit of something to eat,’ as Brian was wont to say, it was enough.

Enough until Pat came home from delivering papers one day, black with bruises, blood running from cuts. A gang of Protestant boys had cornered him in a blind alleyway just off a road he’d unwisely taken as a shortcut. Brian, cleaning wounds and checking him over for broken bones had been grateful he’d only been beaten up and nothing more. Casey took a dimmer view of things. Always protective of his little brother he was enraged at what he saw as Brian’s lack of concern. Brian had to physically restrain him from leaving the house, afraid of what might happen to him if he let him out the door.

“Goddamnit Da’,” Casey had sworn at his father for the first time, “how can ye sit here an’ do nothin’ after what’s been done to him? How can ye?”

“Casey,” his father had said sternly, “sit down an’ behave as if ye’ve the grain of sense God gave ye. Now look,” he’d continued as Casey unwillingly sat, “what earthly good can it do to rampage up an’ down the streets lookin’ for a bunch of boys we’ve not the slightest notion of? We don’t know what they look like or who they are an’ runnin’ about knockin’ all their heads in isn’t goin’ to help yer brother.”

“So we sit an’ do nothin’?” Casey, never still at the best of times, had leapt up from his chair. “Why do we live this way Daddy? It’s like we’re hidin’ from somethin’, it’s like we’re supposed to pretend that we don’t know where ye go after we’re in bed. It’s like ye expect us to deny our own birthright.”

Brian had gone very still and white. “An’ just what might that be Casey?” he’d asked, voice deceptively calm.

“To live as free men an’ if not that then to fight for freedom every day. Like yer father did,” Casey said, flushed with anger.

“An’ to die like my Daddy did?” Brian asked, voice still light but the syllables flattened out in a way that, had Casey known his father’s anger, would have warned him to cease and desist.

“Aye, if one must. It’s better than to live afraid.”

“Better to die like a dog in the street, with only the one son left to mourn ye? That’s better, is it? I didn’t think our life here together was so terrible but apparently,” Brian gave his son a look that made Casey’s knees wobble ever-so-slightly, “I was mistaken.”

“Daddy, ye know I mean no disrespect,” Casey began in a conciliatory tone but was cut off by Brian’s black look.

“No I’m afraid boy that I don’t know that. Ye hint that I’m hidin’ in a corner like some cowerin’ child but ye think I’m so daft that I won’t notice the insult. No, boy,” he said firmly as Casey began to protest, “ye’ll let me say what I must in my own home. I loved my daddy, loved him like he was the whole damn world when I was a little boy, he seemed to fill up the sky he was that big, he’d that much presence an’ power. He carried the burdens of an entire nation on his back for most of his life an’ yet he’d time to read to us an’ play with us an’ spend days where we felt we were the only thing of any importance in his life. But I was his oldest son,” Brian’s voice lowered and softened, “an’ I saw the nights when he could not sleep an’ he felt cornered, when he couldn’t reconcile who he was with what he believed, until he got so weary that he didn’t know what he believed anymore. I saw the man who sacrificed things an’ people in his life but never was able to leave them behind. Yer granddad never knew peace a moment of his life. He gave everything he had, sacrificed things he never told anyone about an’ for what? Is Ireland free? Are we the inhabitants of an undivided peaceful nation?”