Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ There had not been a nationwide rebellion in Ireland for more than a century when the failure of the rising of 1798 led directly to the Act of Union that hobbled Ireland to Britain in 1801.* The most recent outbreak had been a small and failed uprising in 1867, staged by the Fenians, a secret society dedicated to the expulsion of the British Crown from Ireland and to the establishment of an independent republic. In the 1880s the Fenians launched a bombing campaign in Britain, the first major terrorist attacks of the modern age, striking at the London transport system, police stations and prisons, and the dining room of the House of Commons. They even staged an abortive invasion of British Canada.* Their rebellion, in Ireland, had amounted to a handful of skirmishes. But the ideas and organisational structures of Fenianism survived. The movement’s short spasm of violence would also allow leaders such as Patrick Pearse to claim an unbroken tradition of armed resistance through the centuries of British rule.

      The official name of the Fenian movement was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and it would recover from defeat in 1867 to shape the political thinking of a new generation of Irish separatists in the early twentieth century. Michael Collins was an IRB man and steeped in its traditions of secrecy; they would serve him well in the guerrilla war that erupted in 1919.

      It was Collins more than anybody else who forged the war machine that had killed District Inspector O’Sullivan. He would have been in Dublin, on the late January day of the policeman’s burial; his spies would likely have been mingling among the mourners and reported on its progress and on what they overheard. At the top of O’Connell Street, a crowd of onlookers gathered near the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell, his arm pointing into the past, towards Home Rule and peaceful change and all that had been devoured in the age of revolution. The crowd had their backs turned to the monument and its chiselled words: ‘No Man has a right to fix the Boundary to the march of a nation.’ But the nation was marching after coffins. The days of Parnell, the Home Rulers and great parliamentary speeches were over. This new era was crowded with killing.

      That same month, a few miles away in Drumcondra the police captured five IRA men after a failed ambush. An informer betrayed their position. After courts martial the five were hanged, among them a nineteen-year-old student from University College Dublin. The reaction from the IRA was to wait a little. Then, eight weeks later, the informer was found, abducted and shot. Blood begat blood. Andrew Moynihan, a married farmer in Ballymacelligott, twenty miles south of Listowel in County Kerry, was found with incriminating documents by the police. He was shot while trying to escape. There was a problem with this explanation. A fleeing man would surely have his back to his pursuers. But Moynihan was shot in the chest and the face.8 His killer was a Black and Tan, and veteran of the war in France. There was a perfunctory investigation but no charges were pressed. At London’s Mansion House, Prime Minister Lloyd George had confidently declared: ‘by the steps we have taken [in Ireland], we have murder by the throat’.9

      But in the counties of Ireland murder spat back. It roamed Dublin, tracking secret agents and killing them where they slept, smashed into sleeping tenements, coiled in ambush on remote bog roads, ran up the stairs of redbrick Georgian houses in tree-lined suburbs, leaped in flames through the roofs of Anglo-Irish mansions, and always vanished into the sullen, unrevealing faces of the crowd. And murder also wore the uniforms of the British military, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries, regular policemen, and secret agents who dispensed with the law. Yeats captured the mood of the time:

      Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

      Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

      Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

      To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

      The night can sweat with terror …10

      The police and army filed into Glasnevin cemetery to lay their dead comrade to rest. District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan was an Irish Catholic and a supporter of Home Rule within the British Empire, the path pursued by the majority of Irish nationalists until the upheaval produced by the rebellion of 1916. O’Sullivan would be buried in the same vast graveyard as nationalist heroes like Parnell, Daniel O’Connell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The following year, Michael Collins, the leader of the war that claimed the policeman’s life, would be buried here too, shot dead by his former comrades in arms. It was here, six years previously, that Patrick Pearse had delivered the graveside oration for his Fenian friend, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse’s pledge that ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ would become the rallying cry for the Revolution to come.

      The forces of the Crown stood to attention. Behind them was a group of around a hundred or more mourners. As the Pathé news cameras roll a young boy, a street urchin possibly, suddenly darts forward to pluck something from the ground, just behind the Auxiliaries. What has he found? A dropped coin perhaps. Nobody pays him any attention. And he vanishes out of shot.

      Tobias O’Sullivan is buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church. At the grave a woman stands in a mourning veil with two small boys dressed in black coats and caps. These are Bernard and John, the dead policeman’s sons. The woman is Mary, his widow, known to her family and friends as May, and she and some others are briefly seen looking away from the grave. That is because Tobias O’Sullivan’s daughter, his youngest child, Sara, aged two, is crying, hidden behind the row of larger figures at the grave’s edge, and being taken care of by another family member. The two boys look as if they are in a trance. The gravediggers, two young men in shirtsleeves, stare at the boys. They are in fact young policemen, because the gravediggers are on strike. The film is from the era before sound. But we can imagine the graveside murmur. The stifled cries as earth is piled upon earth. A newspaper reported on ‘pathetic scenes at the graveside, the widow and her two young sons weeping pitifully as the police buglers played the Last Post’.11 Tobias O’Sullivan is buried as an Irish policeman under the British Empire and as such is destined to be officially ‘unremembered’ in a newly independent Irish state. The only memorials for men like O’Sullivan will exist in quiet homes – a photograph or keepsake on the mantelpiece beside a votive candle; the bloodstained tunic he was wearing when he was shot, kept in a private place until his widow has died and eventually it vanishes. These Irishmen who killed and were killed by other Irishmen in the War of Independence are not commemorated or publicly mourned.

      An old IRA man who fought in north Kerry remarked wistfully of the War of Independence: ‘We didn’t handle them properly for their brothers were in the IRA. In August 1920, the RIC were beating up the [Black and] Tans … we should have been able to pull the RIC our way if we had worked it properly.’12 The RIC was disbanded after independence. But the wounds of death were not forgotten. Not by those who loved the dead. Or by those who killed them. Tobias O’Sullivan was shot on Church Street in Listowel, near the house where my father grew up. He died at the hands of my grandmother’s comrades in the IRA. Hannah never spoke to me of his death or indeed of her comrades who died at the hands of the police and army. But decades after the killing, the shade of District Inspector O’Sullivan lingered in the hidden memories of Church Street. The dead have a way of coming back, if they ever went away at all.

      II

      The day I donned my first uniform was one of the happiest in my life, and I felt that Dublin belonged to me as I swaggered down Grafton Street with my black cane stick, gloves neatly under my shoulder strap and my whistle chain across my breast.13

      Constable Jeremiah Mee

      Tobias СКАЧАТЬ