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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312156329 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/15/1997 |
| Edition description: | REPRINT |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 640,307 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.89(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rebel Hearts
Journeys Within the Ira's Soul
By Kevin Toolis
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1995 Kevin ToolisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-15632-9
CHAPTER 1
ARCHIVES
It was an overcast Sunday morning in January and the Irish Republican Army was waiting at the end of the lane. The victim, a man in his fifties, left noon Mass a few minutes early to avoid the crowd of fellow church-goers blocking the narrow road outside St Brigid's. He walked over to his car with the old lady to whom he had offered a lift, helped her into the passenger seat, walked round to the driver's door, got in and was turning the key in the ignition when two young men in duffel coats, with hoods up, walked over to the Mercedes. One drew a gun and fired five bullets through the driver's window. The first round hit High Court Judge William Doyle in the face, the others in the head, the last in the chest; seventy-two-year-old Mrs Convery was hit by a ricochet in the leg. Women in the emerging congregation, hearing shots and seeing murder, began to scream. The two killers turned, running through the church-goers towards their getaway car parked down the avenue. Two doctors in the crowd, one of them the Judge's brother Dennis, ran to the car and vainly tried to resuscitate the Judge, but it was over, he was dead. Canon Patrick McAlister, who had just celebrated the Holy Sacrament of Mass, administered the Last Rites on the roadway outside his church.
I arrived about half an hour after the Judge had been murdered. The green Mercedes was still by the kerb, just opposite the entrance to St Brigid's, in a tree-lined street off Belfast's prosperous Malone Road. Already, the car was isolated by the white plastic police tape. The Mercedes had ceased to be a car and had become an exhibit of death. A few stragglers gaped but the majority of the congregation had gone, leaving flak-jacketed policemen, armed with M1 carbines, shifting their weight from foot to foot to keep the circulation going, guarding this evidence of Sunday morning murder.
Soon the SOCO men, Scene of Crimes Officers, would arrive to paw their way through the Mercedes' ashtray, the side compartments, the detritus of another's life, and bureaucratically record the last forensic moments of someone else in Northern Ireland. They would dust for the fingerprints that everyone knew would not be there – the gunmen were wearing gloves – and record photographically the exact position of the car and its contents for the file of evidence at the trial of Doyle's killers, who everyone knew would never be caught and whose trial would never happen.
Glass fragments littered the seat and the ground outside the driver's window, and the tan leather seats were covered in drying blood. Aside from the stains, the upholstery on the driver's seat was unmarked – all of the IRA's bullets were still inside Judge Doyle, the body already declared 'dead on arrival' at the Royal Victoria Hospital a couple of miles away. High Court Judge William Doyle was already on the conveyor belt for a post-mortem that would slit him open and extract the bullets that might just match those of other bullets extracted from other IRA victims now or in killings to come. Next week Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) men would come to noon Mass at St Brigid's with clipboards to interview members of the congregation in search of the eyewitnesses they knew they would never find and who everyone knew had seen nothing. At the far side of the tape, down the avenue of trees and out on the main road, the light Sunday afternoon traffic circulated unmolested by the immediacy of this death.
I peered in through the shattered driver's window: supposedly a reporter but really a voyeur. On the shelf at the back lay the Sunday tabloid papers. I knew in that moment that I had reached the right place at the right hour. I was in Belfast for this: for death and killing and violent republicanism.
Doyle was a servant and officer of the British Crown, the British Government, in Ireland. He sat in judgement on IRA suspects. He had power and wielded authority. He was a living symbol of the Crown and therefore an enemy of the rebels, the IRA, and they killed him for it. For in Northern Ireland power, authority and legitimacy were in murderous dispute.
Judge Doyle was also the enemy within. He was a Catholic on a Protestant/Unionist judicial bench which asserted the authority of the British Government. He blurred the lines of an ancient struggle but made himself an easy 'stiff' (murder victim) by his regular attendance at Mass at St Brigid's. During the week the Judge was escorted everywhere by armed RUC bodyguards and was invulnerable. But at weekends, perhaps tired of the oppressive security, he shed his judge's robes, dismissed his guards and reverted to domestic routine amidst the Victorian mansions of the Malone Road. He must have thought he was safe; he must have thought the Malone Road with neat gardens, Mercedes cars and money was immune from the Troubles. He was wrong. Someone in the congregation at St Brigid's had recognized him and told the IRA, and they came on the right Sunday to kill him.
There was an awful Irish intimacy about his death, murdered at Mass in front of the congregation, fingered by someone who was part of that Catholic congregation. The IRA did not need to travel to kill Doyle. Their supporters were already there in St Brigid's, also dressed in suits and Sunday best on the Malone Road, hidden amongst the smiling schoolgirl choir or walking back down the aisle slyly staring after Holy Communion. I wondered what were the passions that allowed, perhaps compelled, someone to kill in that way in that place.
* * *
Judge Doyle's killing was somewhere in the middle of what was known as Ireland's Troubles. For twenty-five years a little sniping war has been fought in the north-western corner of Europe; Doyle was victim two thousand and something. The exact number does not matter; there was a lot of killing before and a lot of killing after. And there is still some, a little, killing to come. The death toll is three thousand and something now.
It was called the Troubles because the exact nature of the conflict was difficult to define. It was not a war in any conventional sense. There was no artillery, no tanks or fighter planes, the electricity worked and so did the telephones. There were no set-battles, no definitive front-lines, no victories and no total defeats. Ninety-nine per cent of the time the land was at peace. You could have lived and worked in Ulster and never have seen a soldier, never heard a word spoken in anger. You could have had a holiday in Northern Ireland. A tourist driving round in a hired car would have seen small sleepy villages, lush green fields, the prosperous Victorian-built city of Belfast and the impressively preserved medieval walls of Derry. The good people of Ulster, inured to sectarian slaughter and terrorist bombing, would have been shocked and appalled if a visitor was mugged. Crime levels in Ulster were ridiculously low. The Troubles were not general anarchy, mayhem or chaos. It was rare for the innocent, the unaligned, or the uninvolved to get killed in the crossfire. All the killing was directed, pinpointed, reserved for special occasions and special places. You had to seek out the Troubles; you had to know where the strata of conflict erupted into public view.
The word itself, 'Troubles', vague and ill-defined, was a euphemism, but it suited the vague and ill-defined nature of the war in Ireland. It has many sub-definitions: a thing that causes distress; an occasion of affliction; a misfortune; a calamity; public disturbance, disorder or confusion. The Troubles disturbed life – they did not destroy it. Most of the time, for most of the people, nothing untoward happened. The pursuit of capitalism, the rearing of children, the growing of crops, the manufacture of industry, were unaffected. At other times, usually in certain specific places, there were riots, disturbances, threats, beatings, car hijackings, men in masks, fear, and murder. The Troubles, and this is important to remember, were acts of rebellion rather than revolution. No one had a plan to proclaim a 'liberated' Northern Ireland a Marxist state.
The euphemism of the Troubles was useful because it was hard to classify these events, these troubles; the grounds and nature of the conflict mutated even within the small confines of Northern Ireland, which is just over five thousand square miles and has a population of one and a half million people. In Belfast, the capital of Britain's Irish 'province', the urban Catholic unemployed in the IRA plotted murder from their British-taxpayer-built council houses, ambushing British soldiers, firing rockets at police jeeps and 'stiffing' vulnerable targets, like Judge Doyle, whilst their Protestant adversaries hijacked cars, drove into Catholic districts and shot 'taigs' (Catholics) at random. In Derry, seventy miles away, the IRA had no such opponents but the organization had long been substantially penetrated by the British security forces. Both sides waged an intelligence war against each other that revealed itself in the dead bodies of IRA informers found in plastic bags along the border with the Irish Republic if the IRA succeeded, and the dead bodies of blown-up soldiers if the British security forces failed. In the countryside of Tyrone and Fermanagh, the IRA's soldiers, known as Volunteers, fought a more traditional guerrilla-style campaign, sniping at armed soldiers, blowing up barracks and crossing from the immunity of farmhouses in the neighbouring Irish Republic to assassinate lone members of a British Army militia, the Royal Irish Rangers (RIR). In the 'Provisional Republic of South Armagh', just sixty miles south of Belfast, the IRA controlled the ground and the British Army were safe only in their concrete bunkers or high up in the sky protected by circling Vietnam-style helicopter gunships.
The Troubles were spasmodic. Their public history was a roll-call of the high points of atrocity and outrage: fifteen killed by a Loyalist bomb in McGurk's Bar in Belfast in 1971; thirteen civil rights marchers killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972; nine civilians dismembered by IRA car bombs on Bloody Friday in Belfast in 1972; twenty-one disco-goers blown up by the IRA in Birmingham in 1974; thirty-three shoppers blown up by Loyalist car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974; twelve diners burned to death by an IRA fire-bomb in La Mon restaurant in 1977; ten IRA hunger-strikers dead in prison in 1981; eight IRA Volunteers killed by the SAS at Loughgall in 1987; eleven civilians blown up by the IRA at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen in 1987; five civilians shot dead in a bookie's shop by Loyalists in Belfast in 1991; and two children killed by an IRA bomb in Warrington in 1992, and on and on and on. The gaps between significant acts of collective murder were filled by a steady drumbeat of individual whackings (murders) or stiffings.
People often tried to explain the Troubles in terms of other conflicts, but this was not Cuba, nor Algeria, nor South Africa nor Vietnam. It was Ireland and the tenacity of the struggle between the rebels and the Crown was older than all the 'isms' of the twentieth century. The Troubles were an endless series of small military skirmishes. The objective was to go on killing the enemy wherever you could find him, and thereby wear out his will to fight on. The ultimate goal was fairly clear. Ireland was and is divided; six of the nine historic counties of the province of Ulster are under British rule, the other twenty-six counties constitute the Republic of Ireland. The IRA were fighting to remove the British Crown from what they regarded as Irish soil and reunite Ireland. The British Government were fighting to defend the Northern Irish state and the desire of the 850,000 strong Northern-Irish-born Protestant population to remain separate from the rest of Ireland. It is the longest war the world has ever known.
* * *
I was still standing next to the Mercedes when it began to rain, soft flicks of water sat on the skin of the Judge's car, a breeze got up, and it grew colder. I walked back through the empty streets of the Malone Road district to my rented room. I sat down next to the gas fire, drank some tea and tried to write down what I had seen and what I had felt. I tried to remember a clear point, a moment of origin, that would explain why I was in Belfast, why I was fascinated by the IRA and their violent struggle, why I too was a Republican, but I could not. There never is a discrete, documentable moment of beginning in any story of this nature; there are just moments of departure.
I was ten years old when Ireland's Troubles broke out again in 1969. I was born the sixth of seven children to Irish emigrant parents who had settled in Scotland. In Edinburgh my parents, the seven children and the lodger who attached herself as a permanent addition to the family lived packed into a large stone tenement apartment on the fringes of the half-demolished Irish quarter, the Pleasance. When the sixties civil rights marches in Northern Ireland erupted in violence on our newly acquired colour television set we believed that our fellow Catholics in Ulster were standing up for their rights. We admired people who 'stood up for themselves' and refused to be cowed, even if we were not really sure what they were standing up for. We disliked the occasional marches of sectarian Protestant Orangemen through the streets of the Pleasance.
My first school was St Patrick's Roman Catholic Primary in the heart of the Pleasance. Our most famous old boy was James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born Irish Republican leader executed by the British for leading the 1916 Easter Rising. This fact was never mentioned by the teachers – perhaps they were not even aware of it themselves. As Catholics we were different from the majority Protestant population; we could not take part in what we were told was the heresy of worshipping the Queen of England as the head of our faith. St Patrick's did not play the National Anthem 'God Save the Queen' and we never prayed for her longevity.
But I never thought of myself in Scotland as Catholic with a capital 'C'. If, as teenagers, we had allegiances it was an allegiance to pop groups, the Who or Genesis or Led Zeppelin. I changed schools to Holy Cross Primary, the junior offshoot of a prestigious grammar school from which the aspirant Catholic middle classes launched themselves. I did not know it, but I was changing class. Saving up to buy an Afghan coat and sleeping, or attempting to sleep, with the daughters of Edinburgh's more prosperous burghers soon occupied far more of my energies than concern for the civil rights of Catholics in Ulster or the re-emergence of violent Irish republicanism. I stopped going to confession when I was twelve after I discovered girls and masturbation and was too embarrassed to tell the priest. At fourteen I stopped even going to Mass and sneaked off to the movies instead. At fifteen I was more inclined to Communism, being a hippy, smoking marijuana and losing my virginity. The Troubles in Ireland were news from a distant country.
Neither of my parents was Republican. My father, Patrick Toolis, worked as a building foreman and never voted for anyone other than the British Labour Party all his life. He was one of the most gentle men you could ever meet and he loved to sing for his exhausting brood of children. His songs were always love ballads; only rarely would he sing rebel songs that commemorated the glories of a lost republic. My mother, Mary Gallagher, was more animated; her fiery personality ruled our household, but she too had little time for a country in which she had only known poverty and hardship. Ireland was her past and Edinburgh, where she worked as a nurse, raised her children and prospered, was her daily life.
But we had another place, another identity in the world. Every summer my father would borrow his firm's noisy diesel workmen's van, pack it with a dozen children and aunties, and drive the four hundred miles to our real 'home' in Achill Island, County Mayo, on the extreme west coast of Ireland. Every year in the sixties and seventies as Northern Ireland was engulfed in communal violence we drove the same route from Edinburgh to the Stranraer ferry on Scotland's west coast, past the farms where my mother worked picking potatoes as a thirteen-year-old girl, and sailed across the Irish Sea. As the ferry docked at Larne we grew anxious and drew into ourselves. We believed that the North was populated by hate-filled Orangemen who would foam at the mouth at the sight of our Catholic flesh. We were as convinced as anyone that the whole of Northern Ireland was a war zone. We had no real understanding of what was taking place there and no desire to tarry and find out.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rebel Hearts by Kevin Toolis. Copyright © 1995 Kevin Toolis. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
List of Abbreviations, Organizations and Terms,
1. Archives,
2. Defenders,
3. Brothers,
4. Informers,
5. Volunteers,
6. Chieftains,
7. Martyrs,
8. Rebel Hearts,
Notes,
Index,
Copyright,
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