1999 (41 page)

A number of people were already waiting around a fresh grave roped off by a yellow cord. A grave large enough to hold three coffins. As Barry approached, Gerry Adams acknowledged him with a minute nod. So did Martin McGuinness. With a few exceptions, the leadership of both Sinn Féin and the IRA was in Milltown Cemetery that day.

Barry had photographs of both Savage and Farrell in his republican archives, but not of McCann. None of the three had been personal friends of his yet he knew them well. Knew the forces that motivated them and the dream in their hearts.

Dreams were harder to kill than people.

How many more gravesides will I have to visit? Which will be the final one that brings people to their senses at last? Will I even live to see it?

Concentrating on dark thoughts, Barry paid no attention to a man who stood by himself at the far edge of the funeral plot. The man was wearing a heavy anorak and had blunt, brutal features, yet there was a dreamy look on his face. A distracted look, as if listening to inner voices. He scanned the crowd, then fixed his eyes on Adams and McGuinness. His expression changed. Focussed. Reaching into his anorak, he took out two hand grenades.

A swift flicker of movement in the cold still air.

Barry had trained himself to observe small details at the periphery of vision, and was aware of the grenades being hurled even before his brain identified them. Instinctively he grabbed the woman standing nearest him and threw her onto the ground, covering her with his body.

Two grenade blasts sounded almost simultaneously. Shrapnel tore through the assembled crowd. While people were still screaming and falling, their assailant produced an automatic pistol from another pocket and began pulling the trigger convulsively.

This was not an ordinary crowd; many were Volunteers who had seen action before. It was only a couple of seconds before they hurled themselves after the man with the gun.

He was already trotting towards the nearest road. “You Orange bastard!” someone shouted after him.

Barry scrambled to his feet and helped the woman to hers. “Are you all right?”

“I am all right,” she replied shakily. “But I think I owe you my…”

Barry did not wait to receive her thanks. He set off with the others in pursuit of the attacker.

Barry's long legs covered a vast amount of ground with every stride, but some of the younger men had a head start. They pelted after the shooter who turned on them several times, cursing and firing his pistol. “Catch me if you can, you Fenian fuckers!” he screeched hysterically. From the depths of his anorak he drew a second pistol and began firing that too.

His pursuers dodged behind gravestones, then resumed the chase.

While the gunman ran on, two men zigzagged towards him from near the cemetery gate, hoping to cut off his escape route. He did not see them until they were almost upon him. With yet another mad scream Michael Stone squeezed off a shot at Thomas McErlean. The bullet smashed through the young man's shoulder and into his chest cavity.

McErlean fell, fatally wounded, just as Barry's bad leg gave out on him and he pitched forward. The ground rushed up to meet him. He felt something like a hammer blow to his chest.

“Are you shot?” someone shouted down at him. Gritting his teeth, he shook his head and struggled back to his feet. He hobbled to the cemetery wall and leaned against it, swearing with frustration.

The camera on its strap had been beneath him when he fell facedown on the ground. He gave it a tentative shake. Something rattled.

“I curse that man from a height,” Barry growled under his breath.

Meanwhile the object of his curse had reached the road and was trying to flag down passing motorists. No one would stop for a wildly gesticulating madman. He turned back towards his pursuers, fired at them again, and hurled one last hand grenade.

Then he dropped his weapons and began strolling down the road as if he had not a care in the world.

The enraged crowd swept out of the cemetery after him. They had begun chanting. “IRA! IRA! IRA!”

Barry tried to follow but his leg would not cooperate. Only his spirit ran with them. Closing on the gunman. Seizing him, throwing him into the back of a car, beating him viciously, and then dragging him out and hurling him to the pavement where he was pummelled with fists and stones and kicked again and again until the police finally arrived.

 

The video camera proved its worth that day. No still photograph could match the shocking immediacy of the violent “home movie” scene in Milltown Cemetery that was broadcast on television that night.

The murderer in RUC custody was identified as Michael “Flint” Stone, who described himself as “a dedicated, freelance loyalist paramilitary,” and wanted to know “How many of the bastards did I get?”

Three of his pursuers had been shot dead. Only one of them was a member of the IRA. Neither Gerry Adams nor Martin McGuinness was hurt, but scores of men, women, and children had been injured.

 

Back in his hotel, Barry was badly shaken. He went into the tiny toilet-and-shower cubicle—advertised as “en suite” to justify the price of the room—and leaned heavily on the basin while he eyed himself in the mirror.

“Sick bastard,” he observed. He might have been referring to Stone.

He turned on the cold water in the shower to full volume and stepped under it. His skin was impervious to the icy water. All he could feel was the fire in his soul.

Sleep was impossible. Sometime before dawn he took a sheet of hotel stationery from the bedside locker and began writing a letter.

Barry stopped writing. Wadded up the sheet of paper and took out another one.

Barry signed the letter before reading it again.

Do I really believe all this? I have to. What else is there?

The distance between rational thinking and primal emotions seemed very great indeed.

A few days later two British soldiers drove a car straight into the funeral procession of Volunteer Kevin Brady, one of Michael Stone's Milltown victims. Whether the intrusion was by accident or design no one would ever know. The infuriated mourners dragged the pair out of the car, beat them savagely, stripped them naked, and shot them at close range.

Father Alec Reid arrived in time to give artificial respiration to the soldiers, but it was too late.

 

Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people on board and eleven on the ground. Libya was strongly suspected.

Yet the year was not without its lighter side. In June a sculpture depicting an unnaturally elongated woman reclining in a fountain was installed in Dublin's O'Connell Street. Designated as “Anna Livia” in honour of the River Liffey, she was promptly renamed by the locals. Her new titles were exemplars of Dublin wit. “The Whoor in the Sewer” and “Anna Rexia” were two of the best.

Barry photographed her from all angles.

More and more of his time was being spent in Dublin. It was emotionally harder for him to go north; to cover the stories that never seemed to stop. The deaths, the beatings, the brutalisations. Names and faces were almost interchangeable. They were all human beings and they were all suffering.

 

Below the surface hope was stirring. The Hume-Adams meetings continued. Secret contacts among various factions, including the two governments, remained in place.

 

Hope was beginning to put out tiny green shoots elsewhere in the world as well. As 1989 approached a tyranny was crumbling.

On a grey November day Barry Halloran photographed the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hanging limply on its flagpole in front of the embassy. Under the leadership of Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the winds of change were sweeping across eight and a half million square miles.

Ursula had predicted a new flag would be hanging from that pole before too long.

 

Christmas in the yellow brick house was brightened by the presence of Ursula and Breda Cunningham. Barry had refused to take no for an answer. The children were delighted with their grandmother's company. Barbara privately complained to Barry, “They behave so well when she's around. It's insulting, really. Why don't they act like that for me?”

“Because you're here all the time and they only see their grandmother on special occasions.”

“I'm not here all the time! I'm a working woman, I have a job. A
career,
” Barbara stressed.

She made every effort to get along with Ursula during the holidays. Ursula did the same. Both women were uncomfortable, with a nagging sense that things could be so much better, if only.

Ursula had brought the Christmas present she already had received from Séamus McCoy. On Christmas Eve she opened the gaily wrapped package and found a small crystal globe containing a snowball scene. Turned upside down, it created a miniature blizzard that delighted the children. “Until you can visit me in Boston,” McCoy had written on the accompanying card, “here's a bit of Boston for you.”

Until you can visit me in Boston.

Ursula turned her wheelchair so no one could see her face and busied herself neatly refolding the wrapping paper; neatly smoothing the ribbon to use again.

 

Before she returned to the farm, Ursula took Barry aside. “When are you going to tell Barbara about that other house of yours?”

“When it's ready. I only work on it as the money comes in because I don't want to go any farther in debt, but one of these days I'm going to drive her up to the front door and hand her the key. It's what her mother wanted for her all those years ago. I'll never forget how disappointed Isabella was when she saw this house instead.”

“Why are you trying to please someone else's mother?” Ursula asked sharply.

“I'm not, I'm trying to please my wife. Do you want to see the house? We could drive over there before I take you back to Clare. You could show me where you used to live.”

Ursula gave a barely perceptible shudder.
We're not meant to go back; surely the bomb taught me that.
“I don't think so, Barry, but thank you for asking. Right now I'm just homesick for the farm.”

Pat overheard her final words. “Can I go too, Nana?”

She smiled. “You have to go back to school, little man.”

“But school is
everywhere
!” the boy cried, throwing wide his arms as if to embrace the world. “Like wind and grass and God.”

“We may have an agnostic here,” Barry remarked.

Ursula said, “We may have a druid.”

 

Nineteen eighty-nine began badly. On the twelfth of February a Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane, was eating dinner with his family in the kitchen of their home in a middle-class area in North Belfast. Finucane was well known for defending republicans. His brother Séamus had been involved with Mairéad Farrell; the two had even set up a home together. But that was before the killings on the Rock.

It was almost seven-thirty when two masked men wearing camouflage jackets burst into Finucane's house through the unlocked front door. Finucane started towards the glass door that separated the kitchen from the hall. The intruders shot him in the chest and stomach. In front of his wife Geraldine and their children, they then fired eleven more bullets into their victim as he lay dying on the floor. A ricocheting bullet struck Geraldine in the ankle. The children were unharmed—physically. The trauma of that day would remain with them all their lives.

The assailants made a clean getaway. At the time, no one was identified for the murder and no arrests were made. Once again people spoke of state-sponsored assassinations and a governmentally sanctioned shoot-to-kill policy targeting republicans and their supporters.

No official enquiry was undertaken aside from the basic forensic examination carried out at the scene. Although there had been a recent spate of strongly anti-republican comments by representatives of the British government, London denied responsibility for any actions that might have precipitated or encouraged the murder.

 

Until you can come to Boston.
Keeping her efforts secret even from Breda, Ursula once more began trying to reactivate her dead legs. Every instinct told her it was far too late.

Every instinct told her she must not give up.

She kept McCoy's glass globe beside her bed so she could see it every morning as soon as she awoke.

 

In May tens of thousands of Chinese students flooded into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to protest the policies of their government. Within a few days their ranks were swelled to over a million by ordinary men and women joining the protest. On Sunday, the fourth of June, the government sent in the troops.

The massacre that followed was dubbed Bloody Sunday by the international news media.

Barry briefly considered putting together a photographic essay on three Bloody Sundays—two in Ireland and one in China—then discarded the idea.
All joy is the same, but no pain can be compared with any other pain.