1999 (49 page)

 

During St. Patrick's Day meetings in March of 1998, Bill Clinton called on David Trimble to engage in a face-to-face meeting with Gerry Adams.

 

Mo Mowlam paid an extraordinary visit to the Maze prison to have face-to-face talks with both republican and loyalist prisoners. Afterwards, the paramilitaries announced they would support the peace process.

 

Easter fell in April that year; a cold, wet, snowy April in Northern Ireland. The massive hulk of Stormont looked even more bleak than usual. Representatives from the Irish and British governments must have felt a certain foreboding as their cars swept up the long drive.

After sixty-five hours of negotiation that lasted from Spy Wednesday to Good Friday—frequently accompanied by the raucous background of Ian Paisley's followers bellowing insults—an agreement seemed to be within grasp. At the last moment David Trimble could not bring all of his Unionist Party along with him. Then Bill Clinton made good on his promise to help in any way he could. In a three-way conference between the president of the United States, the
taoiseach
of Ireland, and the prime minister of the United Kingdom, a strategy was hammered out that the Ulster Unionist Party was willing to accept.

And the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

Or, as the unionists persisted in calling it, the Belfast Agreement.

April tenth, 1998,
Barry carefully printed on the back of each of the photographs he had taken. Most of the men were smiling, though some of the smiles looked pained.

 

Barry returned to Dublin in an emotional state somewhere between euphoria and dread. The high resulting from the signing of the Agreement, with its built-in optimism and promise for finally bringing a peaceful solution to the northern situation, was intense.

Yet all the years of brutal experience were piled onto the other side of the scale.

In spite of all the nay-sayers, the stops and starts, the lies and counterlies, and an almost total lack of trust on both sides, somehow they've done it. Brave men who had their lives repeatedly threatened because of their actions have done the impossible.

Everything came back to the matter of trust. One must trust that somehow it would work and there really would be an end to the violence.

A rainbow in the northern future.

A thirty-two-county republic where all of its children are cherished equally.

 

On the twenty-fifth of April a young Catholic man called Ciarán Heffron was shot six times through the head by members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force as he walked through Crumlin, Co. Antrim. Heffron was on his way home from university to visit his seriously ill mother.

During a drunken loyalist party in Antrim a videotape was made on which the killers described explicit details of the murder. The tape eventually was sent to the Northern Ireland public prosecutor's office, but no charges were ever brought.

 

In May IRA informer Sean O'Callaghan claimed in his book that the IRA had kidnapped Shergar. According to him they had been unable to control the horse, and the animal injured itself and was dead within four days.

Ursula had not bought the book; she heard the story on the news and promptly rang Barry.

“I don't believe a word of it,” she said stoutly. “How can you trust a person like that? An
informer,
someone who sells out his own for money!”

Barry was amused. “Does this mean you're a republican again?”

“I always
was
a republican!”

 

On the fifteenth of August a three hundred-pound car bomb in the town of Omagh killed twenty-eight people outright, including a pregnant woman, and injured hundreds more. The RUC had received a warning ahead of time but had been given the wrong location for the bomb.

The Provos strenuously denied planting the bomb. Speaking for Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness said he was appalled and disgusted, adding that it was an indefensible action.

Three days later a newly emerged dissident group calling itself the Real IRA admitted responsibility for the Omagh bomb.

On the twenty-second of the month the INLA announced a complete ceasefire.

Sometimes there was one grave too many.

 

Once Fianna Fáil had claimed to be “a broad church,” a republican, populist party as envisioned by Eamon de Valera, representing all of the people of Ireland. No longer. Since the seventies the culture of corruption had bitten deep. Property developers presented brown envelopes stuffed with cash to politicians who unhesitatingly accepted them—and in some cases demanded them. Fianna Fáil supplanted Fine Gael as the party of the rich, furiously building more golf courses and marinas and luxury apartment complexes, while schools rotted away for lack of funds and sick people waited on hospital trolleys for beds that were not there.

 

Paul Morrissey looked embarrassed. “I've been offered so much money for my farm I just can't turn it down, Ursula. We're going to sell out and move to Galway. The twins are at the university there…you know…” He spread his hands, silently begging her to understand.

In spite of her best intentions and all of Breda's help, Ursula could not remain at the farm without the support of the Morrisseys. The effort was physically beyond her. She spent several days trying not to face the inevitable, then at last rang Dublin.

“Ursula's going to lease out the farm to someone else,” Barry told Barbara. “She asked me if we still want her to live with us.”

Barbara stood very still. Savouring the reins of power in her hands. It was not as totally satisfying as she would have expected. “Where?”

“Anywhere you like,” he said.

 

Barry telephoned his mother. “You have two invitations.”

“Two?”

“You can live here with us in Harold's Cross, or we can all move up to Mountjoy Square. For reasons best known to herself, Barbara's decided to leave the choice up to you.”

Ursula began to laugh.

She laughed so hard she could not get her breath and Breda had to take the phone away from her. “We'll ring you back,” she told Barry hastily.

She helped Ursula to bed and put a cold cloth on her forehead. The laughter had passed but Ursula was still pale; she appeared disoriented.

“What in the name of all the saints is wrong with you?” Breda asked anxiously.

“Life goes in a circle.” Ursula sounded bemused. “Did you know that? Isn't it funny?”

“Are you coming down with something? Are you delirious?”

“Barry says we could live in Mountjoy Square if we wanted to but I don't want to. I wouldn't like it and you wouldn't either. So we're going to live in Harold's Cross again.”

Breda gave her a sedative, waited until she was asleep, and then telephoned Barry.

 

When they were packing up her things Barry found a number of letters to Ursula from Henry Mooney. He did not usually read other people's letters, but he could not resist.

“The military defeat suffered by the republicans in 1923,” Henry had written, “encouraged rational men to look in another direction—politics. The militant force people hated him for it, but Eamon de Valera rightly foresaw there was no other way to get back the Six Counties which Britain had coerced away from us in the Treaty.

“As a trusted friend, rather than as a journalist, in August of 1924 I attended a two-day meeting of present and former republican deputies of the Dáil. Mary MacSwiney kept the minutes. There was a hot discussion about whether or not the republicans, as heirs of the legitimately and constitutional elected first Dáil which had preceded the Civil War, were in fact an emergency government de jure. Sean McEntee pointed out that since they were not now the government de facto they had no power over the life and property of citizens of the state.

‘De Valera concurred, adding—and I think these were his exact words—‘We can have no sanction of force.' He said that criminality was something the republicans could not deal with on their own, except by public opinion and expulsion. On the second day of the meeting he stressed, ‘We will not permit or sanction any executions.' Con Markievicz backed him up. Her words were, ‘If we attempt to execute a man for common murder we should be acting as a junta.'

“De Valera had a final warning for the IRA. He said if the Army made any attempt to take life, he and his fellow republicans in the Dáil would disclaim all responsibility and regard the Volunteers responsible for the killing as traitors.

“Harsh words indeed, Precious, especially coming from a commandant in the Easter Rising. In retrospect, I realise that he was staking out the moral high ground for Irish republicanism. Surely we can be militant without being militaristic. As long as the movement stays within the law, avoiding both the hypocrisy of the Free Staters and the cynical manipulations of the British government, sooner or later the people of Ireland will reclaim what they have lost. I truly believe that. I am only sorry I will not be there to see it.”

In faded pencil in the margin of the letter, Barry recognised his mother's handwriting. “You will be here, Henry. You'll see it through my eyes, or Barry's, or the eyes of his children.”

Preparing for what she anticipated would be the last big change in her life, Ursula managed to summon a spirit of adventure. At least on the surface, for others to see.

When everything was almost ready she paid a long visit to the barns, spending the day with the horses. Trying to inhale their very essence into herself to sustain her through all the days to come.

On the last day, the absolutely final day, Ursula watched as the favourite bits of furniture and other possessions she was keeping were loaded into a removal van. Barry and Breda were with her but she was hardly aware of them. Presences at the periphery. The farm was at her centre; would always be at her centre.

She insisted on going into the house one final time, alone. Slowly, painfully, she made her way up the stairs, her fingers spidering along the wall for support because she refused to hold on to the stair rail.
This will be the last time I put my foot on this step. And this is the last time I shall see my bedroom with the view out across the fields.

She peered into the dusty looking glass on the dressing table. “I turned into an old woman while I wasn't looking,” she told her reflected image. She scrutinised the frown stitched between her eyebrows, which had turned white. And her deeply pleated upper lip. “No laugh lines, though. Perhaps I didn't laugh enough.”

The good bones that had been her genetic gift remained, more beautiful than ever with the flesh pared away. Hers was a face one might see on the statue of an heroic female figure: Maeve of Connacht, or Constance Markievicz.

“I shall look like that in my coffin,” Ursula said aloud. “Good. No one will pity me.”

 

Having read Henry's letter, when Barry returned to Dublin the first thing he did after Ursula and Breda were settled in their new rooms was to drive to Mountjoy Square.

The door to the private apartment at the top of the elegant staircase had a beautiful antique crystal doorknob, but also a very modern combination lock. It rather spoiled the effect, Barry thought sadly.

His weapons and Ned's notebooks were where they had always been, safe in the private hideaway he had constructed for them. He picked up the rifle and held it for a long time. Letting his body remember. Daring the beast to surface.

It was under control now.

He laid the rifle aside and picked up the last of the notebooks to read again the very final entry, scrawled when Ned was almost blind:

“De Valera was both right and wrong. So was Collins. So were we all. That is little comfort now.”

 

On the first of January, 1999, the Republic of Ireland took its place with ten other countries in the European Union.

In July five hundred thousand Irish men and women bought shares in Telecom Eireann when the communications company was floated on the stock market. The government had heavily promoted the deal, but within a short time the share price began to fall dramatically, never to recover.

 

Another Northern Ireland solicitor who had defended republicans was blown to pieces in a car bomb. Rosemary Nelson had been only a few yards from her home when she was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries.

No one was arrested or charged with the crime.

 

Hundreds of thousands fled Serbian aggression in the Baltic country of Kosovo.

 

Mo Mowlam was replaced as Northern secretary by Peter Mandelson in October 1999.

The British and Irish signed an agreement by which Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution was changed.

And former
taoiseach
Jack Lynch was buried in his native Cork.

 

A television programme shown on RTE, entitled “States of Fear,” exposed to a shocked nation the incredible amount of physical and sexual abuse that had been suffered by children in state institutions run by the religious orders.

As with every other news item of interest, there was considerable discussion of the programme in the yellow brick house. Ursula said she had always suspected it. Barbara said it could never happen in America.

Breda said it was probably still going on and always would, and people had to forgive and forget.

“Forgive and forget,” Barry echoed. “That's where it goes wrong. Forgetting solves nothing, it only sweeps the dirt under the carpet to reappear some other time, maybe at the worst possible time. We must forgive and remember.”

In December Chris Patten published his long-awaited report on policing in Northern Ireland. His detailed observations were acute and his cogent suggestions were widely praised. If strictly followed, they would bring an end to any question of RUC collusion with loyalists, creating a just system to replace generations of institutionalised sectarianism. The report was then put in some bureaucrat's bottom drawer and forgotten. But the step had been taken. The suggestion that a way forward was possible now existed.

Somewhere over the horizon there was a glimmer of hope; of peace.

 

The Irish government sent a free Millennium candle to every household in the Republic with instructions to light it at midnight on December thirty-first.

 

Barry invited every friend he could think of to join them for a huge pre-Christmas party in the yellow brick house. “There would have been more room in Mountjoy Square,” Barbara pouted.

On Christmas Eve he gave her a topaz ring the colour of her eyes.

She held it up to sparkle in the lights from the tree.

In those same lights Ursula glimpsed the pattern of her life in its entirety, stretching from past to future.

Young Brian, gifted with his father's great energy and fine mind, would become a captain of industry in the new Europe. Grace Mary, no longer “Trot,” had a singing career ahead of her that her mother would envy.

And Pat would inherit the farm. Her will had been rewritten and signed. Pat with his darkling eyes and faun's ears would spend his life amidst the scenes she loved, and perhaps someday he would find a girl with a rebel heart to share them with him.

 

The very last present that Patrick handed out that day was to his father. “This is from my mother. She says it's always been yours.”

The package was flat, and stiff with cardboard. When Patrick laid it in his hands Barry felt something akin to an electric shock. He glanced up to find his mother and his wife watching him closely.

There were tears in Ursula's eyes and her arm was around Barbara.

Barry opened the package. It contained Henry Mooney's copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

 

In her room that night Ursula took out a fresh sheet of creamy paper and began to write a letter.

On New Year's Eve Barry took Barbara to the apartment at the top of the house in Mountjoy Square. “We'll have a great view,” he promised.

They stood together looking out over the city. Just for a moment she leaned her head on his shoulder. Barry knew the future with her would be turbulent. But he would not trade it for anything.

 

Precisely at midnight hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women lit their candles to welcome the new Millennium.

Ireland bloomed with stars.