Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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How could he rhapsodise about the glorious dead of long ago while we watched on the nightly news the burned remains of civilians being gathered up on Bloody Friday? Neither my father nor my mother, or any of my close relatives, understood the north. Until 1969 it had had no practical impact on their lives. They watched from Dublin as curfews were declared and the first British troops arrived. Then came refugee camps in the south for embattled Catholics: 10,000 crossed into the Republic in 1972 – the year of Bloody Sunday, and Bloody Friday;* the year my parents broke up; the year we escaped my father’s headlong descent into alcoholism. The north was burning and blowing up but I was lost in the small room of my own sorrow. Nothing made sense.

      The refugees were kept further north. But I remember a group came to the seaside in Ardmore, County Waterford, one weekend in August in the early seventies. They were hard kids from the streets of Belfast and they scared us. An Irish government file from the time gives a good indication of how many southerners felt about the new arrivals: ‘Refugees are not always frightened people who are thankful for the assistance being given them. Some of them can be very demanding and ungrateful, even obstreperous and fractious – as well as, particularly in the case of teenage boys, destructive.’13 Oh yes, we in the Republic had moved a long way from the destructive impulses of war. When crowds clashed with police outside the British embassy in Dublin, a Garda told the Guardian newspaper that ‘We didn’t know what was happening in the North until this lot attacked us.’14

      The Provisional IRA became active in the Republic, training and hiding and, very occasionally, shooting at our own security forces. We had army patrols outside the banks, special courts to try IRA suspects and a ‘Heavy Gang’ of policemen who battered confessions out of prisoners. The word ‘subversive’ entered our daily vocabulary. To a middle-class boy like me, Republicans were aggressive young men in pubs selling the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht, a different and dangerous tribe whom we needed no encouragement to shun. In universities and schools we were now being taught a different history. The story of relentless English awfulness – and let there be no doubt, there had been plenty of it – was replaced by a more nuanced narrative in which the past was complex and sometimes confounding.

      I realised by the mid-1970s, as the death toll from shootings and bombings in the north moved towards the thousands, that history was a great deal more than the stories my father had told me. It lay in the untold, in the silences that surrounded the killing in which my own family had been involved, and in the Civil War that had divided family members from old comrades. But for all the new spirit of historical revisionism we were not encouraged to ask the obvious contemporary question: What did the violence of our own past have to do with what we saw nightly on our televisions? What made the violence of my grandmother Hannah’s time right and the violence of the ‘Provos’ wrong? Why was Michael Collins a freedom fighter and Gerry Adams a terrorist?

      Interrogating these questions did not suit the agenda of the governments that ruled Ireland during the years of modern IRA violence. They were dealing with a secret army that wanted not only to bomb Ireland to unity but overthrow the southern government in the process. Both our main political parties had been founded by men who put bullets into the heads of informers, policemen and soldiers. By the time I was a teenager the last of them was long gone from public life. Their successors, the children of the Revolution, demanded that violence be kept in the past where it could do no harm. In short, we had had enough of that kind of thing.

      In this ambition they were enthusiastically supported by the mass of the population. Whatever it took to keep the Provisional IRA and other Republicans in check down south was, by and large, fine with the Irish people. There might be emotional surges after Bloody Sunday in 1972 or the Republican hunger strikes at the Maze prison in the early 1980s, but the guns of Easter 1916 or the killers in the ‘Tan war’ were not who we were now. The Provisional IRA on the other hand took their cue from the minority within a minority who had declared an All-Ireland Republic with the Easter Rising of 1916, and as long as there was a republic to be fought for they claimed legitimacy for killing in its name. Down south they were hounded and despised, an embarrassing, bearded fringe who occasionally added to the store of public loathing and mistrust by killing a policeman or soldier in the Republic. Any attempt to contrast and compare with the ‘Old IRA’ was officially discouraged for fear of giving comfort to the Provos.

      The northern slaughter helped to shut down discussion of the War of Independence and the Civil War – what we now call the Irish Revolution – in families too. I knew only that my paternal grandmother and her brothers, and my maternal grandfather, fought the ‘Black and Tans’, the special paramilitary reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Given all we had been taught as children about the old oppressor it was easy for us, who had no knowledge of blood, to accept that the IRA of the War of Independence would shoot the English to drive them out of Ireland. I was not aware that many of those shot were fellow Irishmen wearing police uniforms. In this reading the Old IRA followed in a direct line from the rebels who faced Elizabeth’s army at Listowel Castle. They killed the invaders.

      Nobody spoke to me of the dead Irishmen who fought for the other side; much less of the fratricidal combat that engulfed north Kerry after the British departed in 1922. In my teens I was not inclined to enquire about the long-ago war. It did not interest me much then. I was already looking abroad to the stories of other nations. In Cork City Library, after my family had moved to Cork from Dublin, I devoured biographies of Napoleon and Bismarck. It was the big sweep of history that had me then. The relentless drumbeat of bad news from the north only pushed me to look further away from all of Ireland.

      There was another, more painfully personal reason. When my parents separated in 1972 contact with my father’s family, with my grandmother and her people, dropped away. I would see her a couple of times a year at most. Even if I had had the inclination, and she had been willing to speak, there was never the time to ask Hannah the questions. In my mother’s family a similar silence prevailed. Although their father had fought in the War of Independence, my maternal uncles and aunts, with whom I spent most of my time, were largely apolitical. They bemoaned the tragedy of the north but felt helpless; their daily lives and ambitions were circumscribed by an attachment to family and to place, to Cork city where we lived a comfortable middle-class existence far from Belfast and its horrors.

      It was only much later that I began to ask the questions that had been lying in wait for years. But by then those who might have given me answers were dead or ailing. Paddy Hassett, my maternal grandfather who fought in Cork, was long gone. He had told his own children nothing of his war service. My aunts and uncles knew only slim details of what had happened in north Kerry during the Revolution. It was only thanks to an interview broadcast in 1980, a year after I entered journalism, that I became aware of the darker history that had engulfed my family in north Kerry.

      It took an English journalist, Robert Kee, to produce the first full television history of Ireland. Kee interviewed Black and Tans and British soldiers. He spoke with IRA men who described killing informers and ambushing soldiers. The combatants were old men now, sitting in suburban sitting rooms in their cardigans, calmly retelling the events of nearly sixty years before. It was also the first time I had heard any participant speak of what happened after the British left in 1922, and of how those who rejected the negotiated Anglo-Irish Treaty turned on the new Free State government. Men and women who had fought together against the British became mortal enemies.

      I remember a sense of shock because the episode on the Civil War focused on an incident in north Kerry where my family had taken the Free State side. I knew the Free State army had carried out severe reprisals for IRA attacks during the Civil War, but the sort of blood vengeance of ‘Ballyseedy’ evoked the stories my father told me of English massacres. Not on the same scale, of course, but with an unsettling viciousness. In March 1923, in retaliation for the killing СКАЧАТЬ