1999 (37 page)

 

Barbara planned a farewell dinner with all of her mother-in-law's favourite foods. And no eggs. Several close friends were invited, including Paudie Coates and Éamonn MacThomáis. The conversation was lively and Barbara made no attempt to diminish its political content; in fact she encouraged it.

This is Ursula's night, she'll be gone tomorrow.

Sometime before the pudding was served the talk came around to the role of women in modern society. Barbara perked up; here at last was a subject that interested her.

“I don't understand why more Irish women don't have careers. If I even mention going back to singing I'm treated like a freak.”

“That's not true,” Barry said.

“No? In America I'd be encouraged, but not over here.”

“I've never tried to discourage you from having a singing career. I love to hear you sing.”

“So do I,” McCoy added.

“And how am I supposed to have a career with three children clinging to my skirts?”

“They hardly ‘cling to your skirts,'” Barry replied.

“Well, I have to be here for them all the time; it amounts to the same thing.”

For once Ursula took Barbara's side.
I might as well, I'll be out of here tomorrow.
“I think she should resume her career,” Ursula said. “In fact, she owes it to the rest of us.

“The Proclamation of the Irish Republic was deliberately phrased to give women equal rights with men. Our first government after independence, the Sinn Féin government, wrote the new Constitution along the same lines. Then came the Treaty that led to the so-called Free State in which women would never be free again. When de Valera rewrote the Irish Constitution he wrote us out. We were dismissed from any serious consideration by such phrases as ‘the inadequate strength of women' and ‘women's place in the home.' We'd won the vote in 1918 but that was the last political triumph for Irish women. From then on we were meant to be domestic slaves; a slavery sanctioned and encouraged by a patriarchal Church that demanded we bear all the children we could so we'd have to stay at home. Just to make certain, the Marriage Ban specifically denied married women the right to salaried employment.”

Barbara exclaimed, “That's awful, I didn't know that!”

“You're getting too excited, Ursula,” Barry murmured under his breath. Her cheeks were very flushed.

She ignored him. “Yet Irish women had fought side by side with the men of 1916! Curiously enough, Eamon de Valera was the only commanding officer who had no women with him. What does that tell you? Women were an active part of that first government under Sinn Féin. In the Free State, however, those same women were marginalised.

“If women were wise enough not to marry, at least they still had personal autonomy. But the government went out of its way to make sure their voices were not heard in any meaningful way. The only women who were allowed into even the lowest realms of political life were the widows of Free Staters who would sit with their hands folded and their eyes cast down and agree with anything the men wanted.

“Things are no better now. If Barbara wants to have a singing career, or go into politics, or join the Gardai for that matter, I think she jolly well should!”

Ursula flung her head back and swept the table with her eyes. Daring any man to contradict her.

“Whew,” said Paudie Coates. Whose wife had been left at home to mind the children.

 

On the seventeenth of December an IRA bomb exploded outside the exclusive Harrods department store in London. Six people were killed, including three police officers, and more than ninety were injured.

With a heavy heart, Barry flew to London to photograph the scene.

Subsequently the IRA issued a statement saying the Army Council had not authorised the attack, and expressing regret for the deaths.

In the 1980s the control and direction of loyalist death squads became a key item in Britain's strategy for Northern Ireland. Up to fifteen percent of the Ulster Defence Regiment, ostensibly dedicated to keeping the peace and protecting the people, was involved in these squads.
¹

The Force Research Unit of the British army, together with the RUC Special Branch, reorganised, armed, and directed a number of unionist paramilitaries. Within a few years of receiving new weapons smuggled into the Six Counties by British agents, loyalist murder gangs had increased their capacity to kill by three hundred percent.

Politicians, civil rights activists, election workers, and human rights lawyers all became targets. Through a network of paid agents the British government identified troublemakers it wanted disposed of and guaranteed the assassins would have a clear run at them. Special Branch made sure that any subsequent investigations were cursory and the killers were never brought to justice.

British Intelligence justified collusion as “taking the war to the IRA.”

 

Nineteen eighty-four was the year George Orwell cursed.

On a bitterly cold January day a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl called Ann Lovett was found in a pool of blood at the grotto of the Blessed Virgin on a small hill outside the town of Granard. Her arms were covered with bruises where she had gripped them in the birthing agony. By her side was the pair of scissors she had brought to cut the umbilical cord. On a moss-covered stone at the foot of the statue lay her tiny baby boy. The girl was rushed to hospital but died of exposure and haemorrhaging.

A referendum on abortion had taken place halfway through her pregnancy. Although the “Swinging Sixties” were already a generation in the past, Ireland had turned thumbs down.

When the Ann Lovett story appeared in the newspapers the shock to the nation was intense. Here was the truth behind the hypocritical veneer of Holy Catholic Ireland. People were moved to tears by the tragedy—but not really surprised. Emotionally crippled by the arrogant, unforgiving morality of their Church, generations of Irish men and women had lived in denial of their own sexuality and its consequences.

Slowly at first, then like a dam breaking, other women began to reveal secrets they had kept hidden for years. They told of rape and incest, of love betrayed, of concealed pregnancies and nightmarish births in hidden places and babies buried in battered suitcases. Pain and shame and grief. Broken hearts and wrecked lives.

 

Breda Cunningham made certain that Ursula saw a doctor in Ennis General Hospital on a fairly regular basis. As Ursula had long since discovered in Dublin, people stranded on the beaches of hospital waiting rooms loved to talk.

One day she encountered a woman of her own generation, a spinster named Sophie Sinnott who had been born on a country estate north of Dublin, a place called Willow Park. “We had a big cut-stone house with three stories plus the attics,” she reminisced, “though I was never allowed into the attics. Of course there was a basement too, the kitchen and laundry were down there. I never saw them either, that was the servants' territory.”

“How many servants did you have?”

“Let me think.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “There was the butler, the housekeeper, the parlour maid and the upstairs maid, two ladies' maids—my mother said no lady could ever have enough maids—the cook, the kitchen maid, and a girl in the scullery.”

“To care for how many people?”

“My parents, my brother Jack, and myself and my sister Elisabeth. But we always had a lot of guests too,” she added hurriedly, as if suddenly realising that the size of the staff required justification.

“Did you employ anyone else?” Ursula asked.

“My goodness yes. The outside staff included the chauffeur—he was married to the housekeeper—the head groom and a couple of stable boys, and two men in the dairy. We always kept eight or ten cows to supply the family with milk. Jack used to boast that he could drink a cow dry all by himself.”

The mention of horses had brought a sparkle to Ursula's eyes. “Did you ride?” she asked when the other woman paused for breath.

“No, but my father and Jack went out with the hunt two or three times a week.”

“As a girl I had the most wonderful horse,” said Ursula. “He was called—”

“Oh, really?” Sophie Sinnott interrupted. “I'm nervous of horses, they're far too big. What was I saying? Oh yes. There was a full-time carpenter at Willow Park to see to the maintenance.” She gave an aristocratic sniff. “You know, it's impossible to hire a carpenter for even an hour's work these days. They make more than doctors and they're busy littering the landscape with ugly boxes of houses that all look alike.” The spate of words slowed; stopped. She peered at Ursula as if seeing her for the first time. “Are you sure you want to hear all of this, my dear?”

Ursula gave a wry smile. “I find it fascinating. My girlhood was very different from yours; it's hard to believe we were living on the same planet, never mind in the same country. The Ireland I grew up in was bone-poor, subsistence level. We never knew there was such a thing as a butler.”

“Everyone in our set had servants,” Miss Sinnott replied. “How could one possibly manage without them? With a country house like ours—though we had a town house in Dublin too, of course—a head gardener and his apprentice were essential, as was a kitchen gardener. The kitchen garden was walled to keep neighbouring boys from stealing the apples. We grew our own vegetables there on the estate; we were practically self-sufficient. One could spend weeks without ever leaving the grounds. Our light and heat were supplied to the house by a gasometer. It never failed. My father was very proud of that.”

Ursula recalled the paraffin lamps and turf fire of her childhood. They had never failed either. “How did the gasometer work?” she wondered.

“I'm not exactly sure, I never had to concern myself with such things. I believe the gas was pumped to the house under pressure, using a system of weights that some of the outside staff winched up by hand. But country houses are impossible to keep warm, you know. All those high ceilings and acres and acres of windows.”

“How dreadful for you,” said Ursula, suppressing a smile. “Did your family do any farming at Willow Park? Aside from the kitchen garden, I mean?”

“Oh yes, the demesne was expected to pay for itself. We had forty or fifty acres under tillage and several large fields where we raised cattle for market. The drover would leave in the afternoon with a dozen or so bound for Dublin. All livestock travelled on foot in those days, you know; there was none of this fancy motorised transportation for cows and pigs. The drover would have to run ahead of the cows for a while to keep them from ducking through open gates and gaps in the hedge, but once they began to tire they were more manageable. They would reach Dublin early the next morning and be herded through the streets before the traffic grew heavy.”

“When I was a small child I saw cattle driven through the streets of Dublin on their way to the slaughterhouses,” Ursula remarked. “They looked so anxious and bewildered; I felt sorry for them.”

Sophie Sinnott raised her sparse eyebrows in surprise. “Did you really? Why?”

“Because they didn't know what was about to happen to them, I suppose.”

“Oh, my dear, none of us ever knows what's about to happen to us.”

 

McCoy was hardly himself after Ursula's departure. When the phone rang in the hall he was always the first one there, hoping it was a call from the farm. He was immensely cheered by a newspaper article on the twenty-fifth of January. “Listen to this!” he announced at the dinner table. “Yesterday the Northern Ireland Office agreed to a request by the City Council of Londonderry to change its name back to the original Derry, as taken from the Irish.
Daire
, meaning Oak,” he elucidated for the benefit of those who did not have Irish.

 

In March Gerry Adams was arrested while trying to calm a potentially violent situation that had developed after the RUC tried to take an Irish flag from Sinn Féin election workers.
²
Adams and two colleagues were summoned to appear before a magistrate in the courthouse in Belfast on March fourteenth. During the lunch recess they left the building together with a friend. As they drove away in search of fish and chips a volley of gunfire rang out. The car windows shattered.

Three men were hit by rifle fire. In an assassination attempt by loyalist paramilitaries, Gerry Adams took five bullets. The most serious was in his back.

Rushed to hospital, he walked in despite his wounds. Belfast republicans organised a round-the-clock vigil at the hospital. Still in pain but recovering, Adams checked himself out after five days and resumed his work on behalf of the party.

 

The house seemed strangely empty with Ursula gone. Barbara constantly complained about the amount of work that had fallen on her shoulders since Breda was no longer available to do it.

Barry was thankful for his own work, which kept him out of the house. It seemed as if every month brought some new report on Northern Ireland from some official body or commission, contradicting one another, irritating northern politicians who did not agree, and coming no closer to providing a solution. The New Ireland Forum stated that Ireland was one nation and that Britain was ultimately responsible for partition by refusing to accept the democratically expressed wishes of the majority of the Irish people.

The Haagerup Report, adopted by the European Parliament, rejected any idea of a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and said there was no possibility of a united Ireland in the foreseeable future. However it did call for a power-sharing government and an integrated economic plan.

In the June elections for the European Parliament there were eight candidates for the three Northern Ireland seats. Among those running were the DUP leader Ian Paisley, Ulster Unionist John Taylor, John Hume for the SDLP, and Danny Morrison for Sinn Féin. Paisley, Taylor, and Hume were elected, but Morrison had increased the Sinn Féin vote by fifty thousand over the previous European election.

Afterwards Morrison stated, “Electoral politics will not remove the British from Ireland. Only armed struggle will do that.”
³

 

For the privileged few in Ireland there was a radical new development in residential design. They were having “en suites” installed: a private bathroom adjoining a bedroom, instead of the customary one bathroom for an entire house.

“We could build an en suite off your bedroom,” McCoy suggested to Barbara.

“I'd love it, Séamus, but we could never afford it.”

“Are you sure? Seventeen seems to be doing all right. The other day he was talking about buying a car to replace Apollo.”

“His car is a business expense; an en suite is a luxury.”

“But you'd love it,” he reiterated.

She didn't say no.

 

Several members of the IRA and the INLA were murdered by loyalists under circumstances that made collusion with the security forces embarrassingly obvious. Newspaper headlines in both Ireland and Britain used phrases such as “Shoot to Kill” and “Police Cover-up.” The British government was forced to act. John Stalker, the recently appointed deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester, was assigned to make enquiries.

Upon his arrival in Belfast Stalker was given a chilling warning by John Hermon, the chief constable of the RUC: “Remember, Mr. Stalker, you are in the jungle now.”
⁴

 

In May the Soviet Union announced plans to boycott the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, just as the United States had done to them in 1980. The world's leading athletes were caught in an international tit-for-tat.

 

President Ronald Reagan paid a four-day visit to Ireland. He and Mrs. Reagan were warmly welcomed in the village of Ballyporeen in Co. Tipperary, from which his Irish ancestor had emigrated.

Barry Halloran joined the scrum of reporters and photographers surrounding the U.S. president. Private opinion amongst them seemed to be divided about Reagan. Some saw him as a joke, a Hollywood cowboy whose good looks had carried him a long way; an example of America's preoccupation with the superficial. Others suspected a keen intelligence behind the amiable facade. Barry fell into the latter category. As part of his “homework” he had read some of the essays Reagan published on policy issues, both domestic and foreign. He did not agree with everything the man said, but he agreed with the way he said it. That positive, grittily optimistic attitude was severely lacking in Ireland.

Except, perhaps, in a very few.

 

As a city, Galway was celebrating its five hundredth birthday, so Barry drove down to take photographs. It would be his first trip in the new car—the new used car, as he jokingly described the black, four-door Ford. It was only two years old, which made it new enough on Irish roads dominated by old bangers.