Blood-Dark Track (49 page)

All told, ten men had been killed and one wounded in the space of three days. They were all Protestants. No Catholic – not one pro-Treaty ‘Free Stater’ or landlord or perceived informer – was even shot at.

Viewed broadly, the massacre was the vengeful expression of a sense of grievance arising from recent lethal attacks on Catholics in Belfast, outrages such as the killing of Canon Magner in the Anglo-Irish War, and agrarian discontent with the landlord class (to which, incidentally, few of the dead belonged). Its actual spark, though, was the death on the night of 25/26 April of Michael O’Neill (no relation), who was shot while leading a break-in by the IRA Bandon battalion into a house in Ballygroman, between Bandon and Cork. At daybreak, the three male occupants of the house – the well-known unionists Thomas and Samuel Hornibrook (father and son) and Captain Herbert Woods (son-in-law of Thomas Hornibrook) – were taken captive by the IRA. Woods, the man who’d shot Michael O’Neill, was killed that day and the two Hornibrooks the next day. Ballygroman House was burned to the ground. Judging from the subsequent massacre, these killings were evidently not deemed to be a sufficient reprisal.

In April 1922, Jim O’Neill was twelve and a half years old and living in Kilbrittain. He would have learned of the killings from tense adult mutterings and coded kitchen discussions. What he may not have picked up was that the deadly events were deeply rooted in his own family. The IRA had broken into Ballygroman House in the first place because Woods and the Hornibrooks were suspected of involvement in a shadowy counter-revolutionary loyalist underground, the Protestant Action Group. The most notable of the killings attributed to the Protestant Action Group, the ones that cried most loudly for vengeance, were the unrequited deaths, in February 1921, of Jim O’Neill’s first cousins, James and Timothy Coffey.

But there was a twist: the Coffeys’ killers were not the Protestant Action Group, an entity that was very probably mythic rather than real. The brothers were killed by members of a Royal Irish Constabulary undercover ‘special squad’ disguised as farmers; not, in other words, by Captain Woods or the Hornibrooks.

These three dead Protestants were multiply entombed. Their violent deaths were not reported in the Irish newspapers; their bodies were buried in secret somewhere in West Cork; and their remains, unlike those of northern Catholics shot dead as informers, were never officially missed.

Although a few prominent republicans voiced disapproval of the April massacre, its perpetrators, who were almost certainly active members of the IRA, were never identified or ‘brought to justice’: not by the IRA, which at the time was effectively responsible for law and order in Cork, nor by history. The April massacre, as Peter Hart observed, was as unknown as the Kilmichael ambush was celebrated. Grandma, with her phenomenal memory and longevity, represented a near-exception to the general non-remembrance; but in her mind the sectarian slaughter had survived only as a story of the curious succession of families to occupy a town house in Dunmanway. In this sense, the April massacre was comparable to the Adana massacre of 1909, which lived on in the Dakad family as a tale of eating ortolans in Cyprus.

But there were further and deeper parallels between events in Cork and Cilicia. The April shootings in the Bandon valley were accompanied by a wave of death threats against Protestants, and the combination caused a panicked exodus from the county, with trains and boats out of Cork packed with refugees for a fortnight. Only six months before, in November 1921, just such scenes had taken place on the jetties of Mersin, as Cilicia’s terrified Armenians and other Christians fled the country en masse. The migrant groups in Ireland and Turkey were remarkably similar. Both were minorities regarded as a fifth column of the foreign enemy; both suffered a demographic cataclysm unmentioned by dominant nationalist histories; and finally, both left a vestigial population in the new nation-state whose members instinctively understood that, whatever the political and
constitutional affirmations to the contrary, their citizenship was a matter of indulgence and not of right. I’d always suspected that Admiral Somerville’s descendants’ lack of interest in knowing the identity of his killers reflected their belief that it didn’t really matter which meaningless Ryan or Murphy – or O’Neill – had pulled the trigger. Now I sensed that their disdain may also have been due to an inherited, self-preservative knowledge that to lay claim to certain kinds of justice, historical or political, was to overstep the mark; and I understood why Mrs Salter-Townshend had gone out of her way to characterize Castletownshend as sleepy fishing village of no political importance.

I found myself in a state of shocked, almost angry clarity, as if these revelations of Cork’s past, which were so tangled with my family’s past, formed a recovered memory of something I’d concealed from myself. I’d always known, of course, that families and nations have self-serving editions of their pasts, and would have freely admitted that Ireland was no exception. But I hadn’t been asked to think hard about it in relation to the Protestants, and therefore I didn’t: because, for all my objectivity and outsider’s perspective, I was as susceptible as any Catholic Irishman to dazzling by the national myths.

In the brilliant assertion of the Proclamation of Independence, the Irish Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and the equal opportunities to all its citizens, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, no matter their religion. And so it is a great cause of pride to the overwhelmingly Catholic nationalist movement, and vital to the credibility of its vision of an inclusive united Ireland, that so many of its greatest soldiers and apologists and martyrs have been Protestants: Theobald Wolfe Tone, Charles Stuart Parnell, Roger Casement, Erskine Childers, Countess Markiewicz. These admirable figures invest the idea of the Irish nation-state with an extraordinary moral pedigree, and in my mind they stacked up in a kind of totem pole symbolic of nationalism’s unseen, ecstatic intimacy with the forces of justice. This didn’t prevent me from taking a critical view of republican activities or even of the aspiration to a united Ireland; but it did equip me with the
conviction that the nationalist
impulse
, even in its most misguided and violent manifestations, was essentially high-minded.

As a consequence, I had always viewed sectarian killings – in which the victim is marked for death because of his religion – as essentially the preserve of loyalists, who seemed to specialize in shooting Catholic taxi-drivers and (as happened in July 1998) burning to death young Catholic children. Republican political violence, by contrast, was – shockingly but nevertheless sincerely – directed at targets designated by their functions: soldiers, police officers, judges, politicians, and contractors who supplied these instruments of British government with goods and services. Occasionally, a particularly horrifying or inexplicable killing would shake this dichotomy, but not for long. As time passed, the outrage would assume a maverick character and the totemic figures, unyielding in their virtue, would hover again into view. I wasn’t immune to the appeal of the modern icons, either: the deaths in 1981 of Bobby Sands and nine others in Long Kesh Prison, hunger striking in protest at the treatment of IRA prisoners as ordinary criminal inmates, attested to the idealism with which even the most violent nationalists acted. And finally, of course, there was my own family: my knowledge of their good faith extinguished any real doubt in my mind about the essential purity of the nationalist enterprise. Which explains why I felt guilty and anguished not only about the Cork pogrom but about another terrible thing that had, at last, become apparent to me: that Admiral Somerville had been killed because he was a Protestant.

There was no way around it. Somerville wasn’t the only Irishman in Cork to give references to local men seeking to enlist in the Crown’s forces. What distinguished him from the other referees – priests, councillors and other men of standing, a significant number of whom, like Somerville and indeed Tom Barry, had at some point served in the British army – was his religion.

How could this be? How could my great-uncle Tadhg, the man I was named after, who’d earned the respect and warm remembrance of my father and other decent people for his humanity and intelligence, who considered sectarianism anathematical to his strongly
held nationalist principles, have reconciled himself to a sectarian killing?

Answer: because the onus of reconciliation only arises on the appearance of two mutually inconsistent facts. Tadhg didn’t for a moment see that he was committing a sectarian act, and so there was nothing for him to reconcile. And why didn’t he see? Once again, because only a single set of facts was visible to him: that Somerville’s actions made him a British agent who had forfeited life. A second, irreconcilable set of facts – that Somerville’s actions were no different from those of scores of others – was nowhere in sight. In this way, my great-uncle’s principles and conscience stayed intact. There were no double standards because there were no double facts.

This structure of ethical thinking had a wider application. I had often wondered how so many republicans could be highly sensitive to injustice and suffering and yet highly adept at living with the consequences of their bombings and shootings. I’d put it down to an unusually rigorous self-belief that helped them to overcome internal conflict. Now I suspected that there was little or no internal conflict to overcome, because only the strategic consequences of violence were internalized. The human consequences – the consequences to the victims – were externalized into a moral outer space.

I knew, of course, that this kind of morally self-sparing compartmentalization is common to military organizations everywhere. All armed forces narrate the world in terms that will enable their combatants, who are ordinary men and women, to kill and inflict damage effectively. Most basically, the humanity of the prospective victims is effaced in wartime by blankly characterizing them as the enemy. But most wars and their brutalizing narratives are temporary and, crucially, coterminous; the war ends, its lethal editions of the world dry up like floodwaters, and the former adversaries fall back on a residual pool of humane, or at least non-martial, stories about themselves and each other. But what if there is no healthful reservoir? The conflict in which Somerville was killed was well over three centuries old by the time of his death, and I began to ask myself whether this miserable perpetuity was the sign of a country
saturated from top to bottom with deadly narratives. The surface currents of Protestant bigotry were clearly visible; but there also had to be less perceptible flows, deeper down. It was obvious, once I thought about it, that these could only come from one source. The only narratives that pervaded to the very bed of Ireland’s political culture were those of Irish nationalism, which are treasured to this day.

The stated principles of nationalism – equality, freedom, brotherhood, etc. – were as noble and unimpeachable as its dead, and they shed a beautiful light on the dim and perilous moral terrain that had to be crossed to achieve our nation’s autonomy. In a fundamental sense, though, this luminosity led us astray; unlike the Old Masters who slipped a skull or some other token of human fallibility into their paintings’ darknesses, in our self-righteousness we lost sight of what lay in the shade.

The human significance of Protestants in Ireland, like that of any other ethnic minority, depended on the visibility in the culture of their complex ideas about themselves. Not surprisingly, these ideas, which included contrarian unionist narratives, were overshadowed by the nationalist revolution. This was not solely the result of the nationalist doctrine that all the people of Ireland were Irish and equally so, but also of a set of secondary wartime doctrines that derived their logic and virtue from the primary doctrine: and so Protestant opponents of the revolution, actual or perceived, were cast as informers or Orangemen or British agents and were liable to be ‘executed’ and, in death, to be literally labelled as such. The April massacre, however, occurred during the truce after the Anglo-Irish War. None of the military epithets could be applied to the victims, and their deaths therefore could not be explained in the usual nationalist terms. What was startling was that, in the absence of a conventional nationalist explanation, the Catholic community was struck dumb; it possessed no
alternative
vocabulary with which to speak of the dead. It seemed that the only significance Protestants were capable of enjoying was nationalist significance; which meant that most of them, including the April massacre victims, had no real significance at all.

Evidently, just as centuries of hostile interrelations had done little or nothing to humanize Syrians and Armenians and Turks in each other’s eyes, so it was with the Protestants and Catholics of West Cork, who, in Con Conner’s euphemistic phrase, lived in their own little worlds. I had always known that the Bandon valley Protestants, tainted by a reputation for extreme bigotry, formed one of the most resented of the seventeenth-century plantation settlements, but I’d never really contemplated the political effects of the animosity and had roughly assumed that, somehow or other, nationalism’s uplifting tenets elevated its adherents from sectarian emotions. In fact, the April massacre and the Catholic community’s response to it – silence and more violence – suggested that the opposite was true: that nationalism simultaneously nurtured and concealed a capacity in ourselves for a hatred as powerful as that which led to the oblivion of the Armenians.

All of which explained how Tadhg Lynch could commit a sectarian killing without him – or, decades later, me – seeing it for what it was; and why Tadhg and Angela and Joe Collins were prompted to pick out a Protestant for death: because, at some level, they must have sensed that the killing of a prominent Protestant would sound, after the IRA’s years of military inactivity, like a tribal siren.

It was precisely this primitivism that so disturbed the Catholic public at the time. Had Somerville ignored a warning, the killing could have been shaped into a story of hard but fair play; but the absence of warning left the community face to face with its sectarian demons – a prospect so haunting that even Tom Barry disassociated himself from an action he himself had sanctioned. In the event, a communal exorcism was performed by a deft act of narrative. By repeated references to anti-unionist episodes in his ancestry and to the fact that he never engaged in
active
recruitment, the Admiral was cast as a quasi-nationalist good old boy. There was, of course, no direct mention of his religion. The actual, nuanced identities of this Protestant, unionist Anglo-Irishman were blotted out like the shadows of a man under floodlights.