1999 (34 page)

“Countries are much the same, Luke. Little ones are influenced by bigger ones. The Republic is bigger in size and population than Northern Ireland, but if you throw in the rest of Britain we're tiny. It was a miracle of God we ever beat the British at all, and people down here still tiptoe around them. Some even try to be like them. It's only human nature to want to be on the winning side.”

Patsy stroked his jaw contemplatively. “Can't change human nature. Me oul' woman used to say that and she's right so.”

“But we can change the way we think,” Barry responded. “It's the only hope we have.”

“What do you mean by ‘change'?” asked Luke.

“What do you mean by ‘we'?” Danny wanted to know.

“Change means being willing to consider new ideas, even if they're unpalatable. We is us; all of us. The Provos, the civilians, the nationalist politicians—both Sinn Féin and the SDLP—and…”

Luke snorted. “Don't expect anything from the Social Democratic and Labour Party, they're only lip-service nationalists.”

Barry rounded on him. “Do you know that from personal experience?”

“Not from personal experience. But every dog in the street knows it.”

“That,” said Barry firmly, “is where change begins. We have to forget what ‘every dog in the street' knows. We're not dogs, we're Irish men. If we want our grandchildren to grow up in a united Ireland we have to start making it happen now.”

Brendan peered at him from beneath his bushy brows. “This doesn't sound like you at all, Barry. Just who have you been talking to?”

In November Ian Paisley declared, “My men are ready to be recruited under the Crown to destroy the vermin of the IRA. But if they refuse to destroy them, then we will have no other decision to make but to destroy the IRA ourselves. We will exterminate the IRA!”
¹

In the second week of December two Sinn Féin leaders, Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison, took part in a phone-in programme broadcast over LBC, a radio station in London.

The programme was not carried in the Republic.

Because of his inflammatory remarks in Northern Ireland the U.S. State Department revoked a visa it had granted to Ian Paisley.

 

Nineteen eighty-one wound down to a close. As the Christmas decorations went up, posters depicting the hunger strikers still clung to lampposts. Men and women on their way to the nearest IRA recruiting station or Sinn Féin office saluted them. Public support for Irish republicanism had never been so strong.

 

January of 1982 was the coldest in living memory. Ireland had its first significant snowfall in almost two decades. Cars skidded off roads and trees broke beneath the weight of snow cover. Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald was out of the country on holiday. Acting in his stead, Tanaiste Michael O'Leary slipped and fell on his way to government buildings, seriously injuring himself.

The country ground to a halt.

Barry took Brian and Trot to frolic in the snow in the Phoenix Park. In the photographs he took that day he began looking for small details that possessed a beauty of their own aside from the larger context. Like his daughter's glossy eyelashes, each one a separate work of art. When he managed to capture a single snowflake frozen on the bonnet of his car, he punched the air like a child let out of school.

“Why did you do that, Da?” Brian wondered.

Barry grinned. “I just stopped Time.”

In the glittering winterscape of the Phoenix Park he had discovered a brief freedom. By narrowing everything down to one tiny detail and making that his sole focus, he could escape the conflicting thoughts about a much larger issue that were pulling him in two directions.

Barbara dismissed Barry's photographic miniatures as “artsy-fartsy.” Yet one day when she picked up his latest photograph, showing the eyes of a tiny kitten peering over a child's naked toes, she smiled. Barry saw her touch the glossy surface of the photograph with her fingertips as if to stroke the kitten.

And he loved her.

 

At the end of the month loyalist leader John McKeague was shot dead by the INLA.

Northern Ireland also proved fatal to the dreams of entrepreneur auto manufacturer John DeLorean. He was forced to close his Belfast plant and the business went into receivership, consigning the avant-garde DeLorean motor car to history. DeLorean was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with possessing cocaine.

In the Republic the coalition government was brought down over the issue of tax increases on beer, petrol, and cigarettes, taking Garret FitzGerald down with it.

On the ninth of March Charles Haughey returned to power, becoming
taoiseach
for the second time.

 

Early in April a white paper entitled
Northern Ireland: A Framework for Devolution
was published by the British government. It proposed the election of an Assembly to consist of seventy-eight members, who would then work to reach agreement on the establishment of a devolved government for the Six Counties.

Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin gave the idea a cautious welcome.

The Ulster Unionist Party opposed it from the beginning.

Before the Assembly bill could be readied for Parliament war broke out in the Falkland Islands, three hundred miles east of Argentina. Argentina claimed sovereignty over the islands but that claim was disputed by the British, who were using them as a base to administer a colony composed of a whole cluster of islands in the South Atlantic. Negotiations to resolve the dispute had been under way for years until Argentina finally had despaired of reaching a political solution and went on the attack.

Margaret Thatcher immediately declared a war zone of two hundred miles around the Falklands and sent a British task force steaming eight thousand miles to do battle. Her premiership, which had been undergoing heavy weather at home, was greatly strengthened by the fact that suddenly she was “a war leader.”

The reaction in Ireland was somewhat different. Charles Haughey, recalling Britain's colonial past in his country, denied Thatcher his support.

Relations between the two countries soured still further. Thatcher announced “no commitment exists for Her Majesty's Government to consult the Irish government on matters affecting Northern Ireland.”
²

 

Charles Haughey proceeded to appoint Séamus Mallon, the deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland, to the Seanad. The Republic's Senate had very little actual power; that rested with the Dáil. But the gesture was huge, a pledge betokening the future of a united Ireland. Expressed politically.

 

Martin McGuinness gave up his position as chief of staff of the Provisional IRA to devote himself to politics.

 

The massive British force that slammed into the Falklands proved overwhelming. Argentinean planes succeeded in sinking two British destroyers and two frigates, but the defenders were helpless against a vastly superior force. The British soon established a beachhead and surrounded the Falklands' capital, Stanley, on the thirty-first of May.

On the fourteenth of June Argentina surrendered. The Falklands War was over. The final casualty count was seven hundred Argentinean dead, compared to British loses of 250. Aside from that nothing much had changed—except Margaret Thatcher had acquired a new nickname: The Iron Lady.

 

Alone in her room one morning before breakfast, Ursula felt a distinct tingling in her feet. She started to call out to Breda but changed her mind. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on moving her toes beneath the bedcovers.

Did they? I can't tell.

She flung aside the covers and watched her feet intently. Surely that was a twitch, a slight flexing of the toes. Using both hands, she lifted one of her legs over the side of the bed. Then the other.
I can feel the floor under my feet. I can!

Don't get your hopes up
, she warned, even as a flood of images poured over her: herself standing, herself walking, herself strolling along beside Séamus McCoy, the two of them laughing together over a private joke. The two of them…

“You should have waited for me,” Breda said from the doorway. “I was just coming to help you get dressed.”

 

On June eighteenth Lord Gowrie, minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office, said, “Northern Ireland is extremely expensive on the British taxpayer…If the people of Northern Ireland wished to join with the south of Ireland, no British government would resist it for twenty minutes.”
³

 

Ursula schooled herself to awaken an hour before anyone else in the house. In that private time she renewed her struggle to walk. She was sure she was making progress, though not enough for the doctors to accept. It was a matter of “infinitessimalism”: the name she had given to Barry's photographs of tiny details. Tiny details painstakingly connected to other tiny details added up to a whole picture.

A whole woman.

Maybe I shall even ride again. And teach Grace Mary.

 

In July an IRA bomb exploded in London's Hyde Park as a detachment of the Blues and Royals trotted by on their way to the Horse Guards' Parade. Two guardsmen were killed instantly and seventeen spectators were injured. Seven horses lay dead in the road. Another horse, called Sefton, would recover after an eight-hour operation to remove shrapnel.

Two hours after the first bombing a second charge was detonated under a bandstand in Regent's Park, killing six members of the Royal Green Jackets army band.

 

Ursula was deeply shocked. “They killed
horses
!” she kept saying over and over again, as if she could not believe it.

McCoy tried to explain, using all the clichés about war, but she brushed them aside. “We never did things like that, we never waged war on women and children and innocent animals.”

“Maybe you just don't remember,” he suggested gently.

“Oh, leave me alone!”

 

The 1982 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest was “A Little Peace.” Ireland did not send an entry to the contest that year.

At a Falklands remembrance service in London, Archbishop Runcie said, “War has always been detestable.”
⁴

But war was in the air.

Poland was under martial law.

Meanwhile a revolution of a different kind was sweeping Ireland—the video revolution.

 

Most people down the country still did not have television sets, but in Dublin, as Barbara told Barry, “Everyone's buying video players, even the Cassidys.”

“So you're campaigning for one too?”

“Your mother could watch those old movies she loves,” Barbara replied virtuously. “They're coming out on video. VHS, not Betamax. Alice says Dennis says VHS is the way to go.”

Barry responded with his most successful defence: saying nothing.

Barbara fumed for several days before taking her case to Ursula.

“I've had a long nonversation with your wife,” Ursula told Barry later. “It would be more productive to talk to the dog.”

“We don't have a dog.”

“That's what I mean,” his mother said. “Barbara wants a video player and tried to persuade me to ask you for it. I told her I had absolutely no interest whatever in the latest gadgets but she wouldn't listen. She simply doesn't listen, Barry.”

“Tell me about it,” he sighed. A few days later he bought the machine.
Anything for a quiet life,
he thought with a sting of self-contempt.

Talk in the Bleeding Horse began to centre around the possibility of a new Northern Assembly. Amongst the Usual Suspects opinion was divided. Barry, Luke, and Brendan said they were in favour. Danny, Patsy, and Séamus McCoy were opposed.

Barry found himself in the position of arguing for a point of view with which he was not—totally—in agreement.

“We have to take a serious look at the political option,” he told the others. “Northern Protestants reject the idea of a united Ireland because they're afraid we will treat them as they've treated us. The only way to convince them otherwise is through peaceful dialogue, it certainly can't be done at gunpoint.

“Secondly we have to address the deep distrust unionists feel for nationalists. They've been deliberately infected with it for generations by those in power, and it will probably take more generations to overcome the damage. But they have to be peaceful generations. Which brings us back to that word ‘peaceful.'”

“With the loyalists beating the drums of war every step of the way?” scoffed McCoy. “I don't think so.”

“That's where leadership comes in, Séamus. Not military leadership, but political leadership.”

“You're daft, Seventeen. I never thought I'd hear you talking like this.”

Am I daft?
Barry wondered.

Meanwhile the Troubles continued in Northern Ireland. Shootings, beatings, bombings. Too much blood on too many streets, while ordinary people did their best to raise their children and pay their bills. Life had to go on in the midst of death.

Death which attacked in the midst of life.

Danny went as suddenly as a candle is snuffed out. The man from Kerry dropped dead when he was attacked by his own heart one Thursday afternoon in Harcourt Street. None of the Usual Suspects had even known he had a heart condition.

At Danny's funeral a tricolour was draped on the coffin. The church was almost full. “He must have had a lot of friends,” Barbara whispered to Barry. “He didn't talk about himself much,” her husband replied.

Afterwards the remains were taken to Mount Jerome Cemetery for burial. Three uniformed Volunteers wearing black masks suddenly emerged from amongst the mourners at graveside. Barbara gasped and cringed against Barry. The gun party raised their rifles to fire a volley over the grave, then melted back into the crowd and disappeared.

Barbara was shaken. “It's like…like a military funeral.”

“It
is
a military funeral,” Séamus McCoy told her. “With full honours.”

 

On the thirteenth of September Her Serene Highness Grace Kelly, princess of Monaco and descendant of the Kellys of Mayo was involved in a fatal automobile crash on the Riviera.

 

With the passage of time Ursula could see more and more of Ella Rutledge Mooney in Barbara. She did not physically resemble her elegant grandmother, but she had many of her ways. Her quick light step. Her perfectionism. Even her insistence on the social niceties. If one of the children referred to someone as “he” Barbara would cry, “He! He! Who's ‘he,' the cat's dinner? Call a person by his name.”