Feckers (17 page)

Louis Walsh had learned something dark and deadly in his showband days. He looked into the soul of his fellow man and figured out what it would be prepared to settle for. His refusal to carry this insight with him to the grave will not be easily forgiven.

30
Ian Paisley

O
nce, back in the 1970s, Paisley boasted of how John Hume had once turned to him in frustration and said, ‘Paisley, you’re just an Ulster Protestant.’

‘I replied to Mr Hume: “I am glad that at last you have got the message. I am indeed an Ulster Protestant!”’

Although there has since been the bones of an accommodation between Southern nationalism and Paisley’s tribe, the truth of the matter is that the condition of Ulster Protestantism is still as mystifying to most of those who live south of the border as it ever was. We just don’t get it: their reciprocal ignorance of Southern nationalism, their rage against the Republic, their belligerence, their dogged insistence on being ‘British’ in defiance of geography and self-interest. Neither do we get the way they don’t get us: their persistent prating about ‘Rome rule’, long after the fact. Their continuing condescension about the ‘banana republic’ and their ironic references to the ‘Free State’, even though their own little ‘statelet’ went to wrack and ruin while the Republic was going to Paradise and back. ‘They try to explain Ian Paisley, but they don’t understand,’ the Big Fella elaborated to a meeting of his followers in Omagh in 1981. ‘Ian Paisley is the incarnation of every Protestant Ulsterman here at this meeting tonight. I am only saying what you want me to say, what you want to hear.’

In a speech denouncing the latest joint initiative of the British and Irish governments, Big Ian criticized both Charles Haughey, Taoiseach of the Republic, and Humphrey Atkins, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State. The readings that night were from the Old Testament, the music was ‘Rock of Ages’. A bystander’s report described a scene of passionate intensity. When speaking, the Reverend Paisley delivered an improvised oration that transported his audience to new heights and new places in themselves. His arms flailed and the sweat poured off him. His voice rose in pitch and power, like a tenor coming to the climax of his final aria.

‘We shall defend what is ours. We be determined men, come to do a task, and with God’s almighty grace we will do it. I say to Charles Haughey, that son of an IRA gunman from Swatragh, that guardian of the IRA whose murderers have darkened sixty Fermanagh homes with death. Charlie Haughey, the Godfather of our intended destruction, the green aggressor, I say to you, Charlie Haughey, that you will never get your thieving, murderous hands on Ulster, because we are determined to fertilize the ground of Ulster with Protestant blood before we enter your priest-ridden banana republic.’

There have been many books, many articles and a multitude of broadcast documentaries produced about the ‘troubles’ on the island of Ireland over the past forty years. But not even the best among these efforts has come close to capturing the complex interflow of currents and forces, the undertows and whirlpools of this most incomprehensible of conflicts. This story is all but untellable, in part because the roots of the conflict extended to so many levels of Irish society, north and south. And yet, somehow, the mysterious nature of both the conflict and its eventual resolution is summarized in the personality of Ian Paisley, and the complex nature of his relationship with those inhabitants of the island who were not happy to call themselves British.

Not long ago, Ian Paisley was greatly feared by the people of the Republic – and not in an abstract sense. He was feared in the manner of a demonic force of nature whose tempers seemed to threaten on a scale that was godlike. He was the stuff of our nightmares, and not just the metaphorical, political kind. He was someone who had us crunching bolt upright in bed in the deadest hours, quaking under the thunderous bellow of his voice, recoiling from the fiery torches of his eyes and wiping his spittle from our fearful faces.

Fast forward to the Noughties, and Paisley had metamorphosed as though into our favourite uncle, a cheery broth of a boy who made us laugh inwardly at the ridiculousness of the idea that we had ever seen him differently. Even those of us who never met him in the flesh – who might even yet recoil from such a meeting for fear that he would revert to type in our presence – have come to, yes, love Paisley. The word is not too strong.

This change of heart did not occur for wholly political reasons, nor can its drifts and shifts be conveyed by psychological analysis. But if the story of recent Irish history can be comprehended at all, it is to be comprehended in the personality of Ian Paisley, and in his shifting relationships with the various political and human entities on the island.

Paisley belongs to a rare elite of political figures who have brought to politics the fullness of a strong personality and confronted history as though it were a little boy asking for more. The nearest equivalent produced in the Republic was Charles Haughey, but compared to Paisley, Haughey was, as Paisley always intuited, that little boy.

Only by understanding how we came to love Paisley can we begin to understand what has happened to ourselves. This is not comprehensible in terms of memoranda, discussion documents, declarations, still less of bombs, bullets and kneecappings. These were but the surface events of a drama that went to the core of the identities of the peoples on the island of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century.

The image of the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ conveys something of what has happened. We watched Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in the paroxysms of mirth brought on by their blossoming friendship, and something of the benign mystery of reconciliation came across. These men who used to hate and slander each other, now belly-laughed at each other’s jokes. But this was more than an image of two men. It was an image from a culture that changed because of the complex interworkings of human personality as much as by the plodding and drudgery of politics. The Chuckle Brothers were the children of reinvented public desires, two men who stood for many more. The spectacle of their bodies trembling with laughter would not have been possible unless something enormous had shifted deep in the soul of Ireland. For many years these two men had engaged in ritualistic disavowals of one another because that was what their respective tribes wanted to hear. The process by which we travelled from there to where we ended up did not happen by chance, nor was it some maudlin reconciliation conducted for the sake of peace. It was a profound human interaction which collapsed the ideological, historical and political barriers between two men who happened to be politicians, because such a collapsing had first been achieved at a more general level. This one-on-one human reconciliation drew its energy from a profound change in the surrounding culture, and in turn nurtured the changes that had given it life.

The peace process was not something that happened on television, but, long before that, in the hearts and minds of the people. There had to be a process of thawing, initiated by the leaderships, but incapable of being dictated or contrived. Around the talks table, a formal method was called for: an engagement of moderates, followed by engagement of extremists. This too was a layer of the drama, vital to the unfolding of the deeper one.

But this was still just the formal political process, depending for its viability on a deeper process in the imagination of society, and, beneath this collective imagination, in the individual heart of every member of that society, contriving to change him- or herself in ways that cannot be measured or discounted. Ultimately, it was not the politicians who changed Ireland, but the people, one by one, in our private hearts, allowing our deepest antagonisms and prejudices to melt away in the hope of a brighter dawn.

And yet the story can only be told, comprehended, as a drama in which the King of the Culture, flawed and flamboyant, was Ian Paisley. And here was the deeper truth about Paisley: that, despite his protestations, he was at least as Irish as anyone else and more so than most of those who claimed the condition. For who, beholding the extravagant dimensions of his remarkable personality, could conclude other than that he emerged from the mists of some Celtic identity crisis? In truth, he was as ‘British’ as the Pope of Rome.

And this is perhaps the tragedy of Ireland in summary: that neither part of itself could recognize itself even in this, its most vibrant and passionate manifestation. For if, four decades earlier, we could have got to know each other as well as we got to know each other in the end, the whole sorry bother could have been substituted with a brief but hearty slanging match.

31
Martin Cahill

A
round the end of the 1980s, an odd figure emerged into the grey light of an Ireland still struggling with recession. His name was Martin Cahill, but he called himself ‘The General’, and he was, by all accounts, a major criminal and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. But then, almost overnight, he became something of a star.

First he appeared on the primetime television current affairs programme,
Today Tonight
, wearing an anorak with the hood pulled up and with his hand covering his face. Sometimes he wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts and once he dropped his pants to show he was wearing Mickey Mouse shorts. Emerging from a period in Garda custody, he would wear a homemade balaclava and, as he made his way through the throng of reporters, hum to himself a simple tune.

Cahill was rumoured to have an unusual domestic arrangement: he was living simultaneously with two sisters, in two different houses. He came across as great crack altogether. He had an easy line in humour and some great yarns about how he would take the mickey (Mickey Mouse, geddit?) out of the cops who were keeping him under constant surveillance. Nobody was quite clear what this surveillance was intended to achieve, since Cahill was unlikely to try to commit any crime while he was being watched.

Nodding satirically towards his garda escort, The General would inform journalists that he was thinking of advertising for an armed garda escort for the movement of large amounts of cash. It would have been easy to forget that this joker had once nailed a criminal ‘colleague’ to the floor.

Cahill had spent most of his adult life in jail, mainly for relatively trivial offences. He had been suspected of many crimes, including the 1986 robbery of eleven priceless paintings in the Beit collection from Russborough House, County Wicklow. The haul included a Vermeer, a Goya and a Rubens.

Cahill had immense respect for An Garda Síochána. He believed it was a mistake to underestimate them, and the lengths to which they might go in order to get their man. Still, he regarded his dealings with them as a game, in which the main thing was not to show a reaction. In prison he learned to read, and read Dale Carnegie’s book,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
.

Martin Cahill told of an impoverished childhood. He had grown up as one of 12 children, the son of a lighthouse keeper. Convicted of his first criminal offence even before he entered his teens, he had spent time in Daingean reformatory, one of the most notorious of those Church-run institutions for orphans and wayward children which would in 2009 be exposed in the Ryan Report into abuse in Catholic-run institutions. When he was released from Daingean, he remained at liberty for two years before being jailed for four years for handling stolen property.

The General was to change not merely the popular concept of criminality in Ireland but also the way crime was reported. He would become the first subject of a new style of crime reporting, in which a kind of irony entered into what had previously been an unambiguously serious business. Thenceforth, the most gruesome thugs and sadists were given nicknames and written about as though they were soap stars, which in a sense they now were. Cahill was the first of a new breed of allegedly lovable criminals, the old rogue with a heart of gold who saw himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. He spoke about his deprived childhood and seemed to take it for granted that this justified his grown-up activities.

The Robin Hood subtext began to enter into the reporting of nearly all criminality. No story of the evil deeds of the latest drug warlord was complete without an account of his impoverished childhood and grievances against ‘the system’. Before The General, crimes were reported as offences against society, simple breaches of the law, demanding detection and punishment. But, after him, every criminal became potential inspiration for a film, or a novel, in which the ‘backstory’ was invariably rooted in a troubled past and a desire to ‘get even’ with society.

A new breed of crime reporter emerged who became to the criminal underworld what gossip writers had been to the showbiz scene. They wrote about the private lives of criminals, their sex lives, their rumoured deeds, heroic and otherwise. The reporters featured in dramatic television ads and created the impression that all this had something to do with investigative journalism. The criminal underworld, flattered by the attention, began to compete for stardom.