Blood-Dark Track (22 page)

After Graunriagh, Jim went back to Ardkitt. In his late teens, he quit the farm and went to Cork city. At some point between 1930 and 1932, when he was in his early twenties, he joined the IRA. Although at this time many republicans were throwing their weight behind Fianna Fáil (my grandmother recalled her brother Tadhg campaigning in West Cork in the 1932 election), my grandfather never trusted Éamon de Valera. As the ’thirties passed and de Valera
did little to progress the unification of Ireland, my grandfather’s distrust developed into loathing. ‘He hated him; he really, really hated him,’ my grandmother said.

Jim O’Neill threw himself into paramilitary life with characteristic determination. With his single-mindedness, physical strength and easy way with machinery, he was a very competent and respected volunteer and known for being a strict disciplinarian. By the mid-’thirties, he was an IRA company OC and TO (training officer). Training took him away for weekends to special camps, and he would often come home from work in the evenings only to set off immediately for a drilling session in West Cork, where his knowledge of the country complemented his expertise with a Lewis machine-gun. When the civil war in Spain started in July 1936, Jim O’Neill toyed with the idea of fighting against the fascists. But the IRA forbade its members from travelling to Spain (a prohibition of limited effect: around 400 Irishmen, mostly ex-IRA, fought in the International Brigades, 42 dying in action), because volunteers were required for active service in Ireland. Only months after the killing of Admiral Somerville, the first anti-British military campaign since 1921 was to be launched.

The first step was to be a raid on Gough Barracks, in County Armagh, by 26 men from the Cork active service unit. Among the select few was Jim O’Neill.

The Corkmen packed their bags and went to confession and bought train tickets for Dundalk. However, when the women’s republican group Cumann na mBan – which was not supposed to know anything about the raid – requested to participate in the raid, it became apparent that the attack was an open secret. The Armagh raid was cancelled. My grandfather always regretted this lost opportunity, just as he always regretted not having fought for the Spanish Republic – even though its cause was doomed and nothing he could have done would have affected the outcome of that war.

The Armagh raid was the idea of Tom Barry, the new IRA Chief of Staff. His right-hand man was my great-uncle, Tadhg Lynch, the IRA adjutant-general. I knew from family talk that Tadhg was an IRA man but I only learned what a prominent national figure
he’d been from reading historical literature. I read, for example, that in May 1937, he marched alongside his friend Frank Ryan, recently returned from the Spanish Civil War, at the head of the anti-Coronation march in Dublin. There was a huge brawl with the police, but the marchers made it to the Smith O’Brien monument in O’Connell Street, where Tadhg, ‘his coat and shirt a mess of blood, but voice, mind and body vibrant with the passion of a great work well done’ (
An Phoblacht
), chaired the meeting. Fighting broke out again and Tadhg was knocked out. Waking up next to Tom Barry in hospital, my great-uncle got out of bed and mobilized the Dublin unit for another march the next day. A
New York Times
headline read: ‘Dublin Republicans Battle Police in Anti-British Rallies’. Tadhg no doubt appreciated the effect of such media coverage: that year he edited a new series of
An Phoblacht
, the newspaper that still remains an important IRA mouthpiece.

My grandmother said that Tadhg was an analytical man, into strategy: he wouldn’t be a fellow to go out and do the shooting. Her brother Jack, she implied, was different. Jack was a man of action.

Everybody loved Jack Lynch. They loved his cheerful, straightforward take on the world, they loved his devilment and courage. It was Jack who was always on the run, always getting into scrapes and, most of the time, getting out of them – shooting his way out of a tight spot in Drimoleague from the back of a roaring motorcycle, clambering on to the roof of MacCurtain Hall in Cork as the Special Branch poured into the building. It was Jack, abroad in West Cork, who one night was warned by a ghost not to go to a place surrounded by waiting security forces. It was Jack who holed up in a dugout at Ardkitt and took breakfasts from his great admirer, Peter O’Neill, Jack who was happy-go-lucky. When, during active service in England, his false identity became known to the doctor who removed his appendix, the doctor, a man called Keyes, turned out to be a Dunmanway Protestant and for some reason gave him the wink. Jack was across in England for two or three years, Grandma said, working undercover as a navvy. In 1940, when the police tried to arrest Jack and his friend Denis Griffin in Dunmanway at the rear of O’Driscoll’s pub, Denis Griffin was
caught, losing a finger to a bullet; but Jack escaped. ‘Jack was quick,’ Grandma said.

These colourful anecdotes did not reveal the wider significance of great-uncle Jack and, in particular, his activities in England. Jack Lynch was appointed the IRA’s commanding officer for Great Britain in 1937. He was based mainly in Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham, and his pseudonym was Buckley. On 12 January 1939, the IRA formally served Lord Halifax with a demand for the British military evacuation of Ireland within four days. The demand was not met, and on 16 January 1939 the IRA responded by blowing up electrical lines and power stations. In February, time-bombs were set off at Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square underground stations, seriously injuring two people; at the end of March, two major explosions struck Hammersmith Bridge, bombs blew up in Birmingham, Liverpool and Coventry, and seven further explosions hit London. In May, fifteen people were treated as a consequence of tear-gas attacks in Liverpool, four explosions shook Coventry, four magnesium bombs were set off in a Birmingham cinema, and London cinemas were damaged. In June, the postal system was attacked: letter bombs were posted, and twenty pillar boxes, a mail van in Birmingham and a sorting office in London were blown up; three banks in central London were smashed by huge explosions, and Madame Tussaud’s was damaged by a balloon bomb. By 24 July 1939, there had been 127 incidents, one fatality, and serious injuries to 55 people. Two days later, bombs went off at Victoria Station and King’s Cross Station, where a man was killed. A day after that, in Liverpool, a bridge was blown up and a post office reduced to rubble. Then, on 25 August 1939, a bomb intended for the destruction of a power station detonated in the middle of a busy Coventry street. Five people were killed. Two members of the Coventry unit of the IRA, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were arrested and hanged.

On 2 September 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, a state of emergency was declared in Éire (as the Free State was now called). Worried that the IRA’s activities compromised the neutrality of the State, de Valera acted decisively against
militant republicans. IRA men were selectively arrested in the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940. In a countrywide haul in June 1940 and in continuing arrests thereafter, practically all known republicans were locked up.

Jack Lynch, who returned to Ireland in 1939 to take command of the Cork IRA, managed to avoid capture until 1942. Jim O’Neill was not so lucky. On 2 January 1940, six months before the general round-up, a Special Branch detective arresting Tomás MacCurtain Junior was mortally injured, and in retaliation Cork’s senior IRA men were immediately seized. At three or four in the morning, armed detectives knocked on the door at Friars Road. Jim O’Neill, who had played snooker earlier that night at the fire brigade, was in his bed and in a state of undress. As he fumbled to put on his new Christmas shirt, one of the detectives told him to hurry up. ‘You’ll wait as long as it takes,’ my grandmother snapped. ‘We didn’t send for ye.’

James O’Neill, who refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, was found guilty of membership of an unlawful association and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He was taken to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. During his spell there the Supreme Court declared that the Emergency Powers (Amendment) Bill, which empowered the state to intern Irish citizens without trial, did not contravene the Constitution. The Bill was duly signed by President Douglas Hyde. My grandfather was re-arrested on his release from Mountjoy and taken to the internment camp at the Curragh, in County Kildare. My grandmother was notified by telegram that her husband would remain interned until further notice.

Nine months later, in December 1940, Jim O’Neill was released on parole for a few weeks to receive dental treatment. He was delighted to be home. His teeth were fixed, he visited old friends, and he took his three young sons on outings to West Cork. A fourth son, Padraig, was conceived.

My uncle Jim recalled this interlude with peculiar vividness. He was playing on the street with his kid brother, Brendan, when a black car came down Friars Road. Jim had only ever seen cars stop on the street when a family took delivery of a baby from the
hospital, so when the black car halted outside the O’Neill house, he pointed and said to Brendan, ‘Look, we’re getting the baby.’

It was the Special Branch, in a Black Maria. In an instant, armed soldiers were running through the garden and taking positions on rooftops. A jeep screeched to a stop and more soldiers sprang out, holding rifles. The house was surrounded and then occupied. The soldiers waited. My grandfather, returning from an errand to buy cigarettes and records for his fellow internees, was seized before he could set his foot through the door.

A search of the premises was carried out. Under the saddle of a doorway, they found a dismantled machine-gun and rounds of ammunition that (without my grandparents’ knowledge) had been secreted there by Jack Lynch and an IRA carpenter.

The following day, my grandmother went with her three children to see Jim at the Bridewell in Cornmarket Street. They were told that dinner was being served to the prisoners and that they should return in an hour. The young family went outside to wait. Cornmarket Street is adjacent to the North Channel of the river Lee. Young Jim noticed that there was a lot of activity in the Channel, with boats in the water and a crowd gathered round. For some reason a man was in the river, repeatedly diving and resurfacing in the pea-coloured water. A little while later, the O’Neills returned to the Bridewell. As they sat in the waiting-room, the body of a drowned boy was brought in, wrapped in a blanket. My grandmother put her hands over her sons’ eyes.

When my grandfather came into the visiting-room, flea-bites covered his face, his hands, his throat, his ears.

He was transferred to Collins Barracks. My grandmother made him an apple pie and went to visit him with the three boys. No visiting on a Sunday, she was told. The pie, a suspicious object, was not passed on to her husband. The boys ate it.

That night, at three in the morning, there was a hammering at the door. It was Jim Moore, the Special Branch detective notorious for his vindictiveness and lechery. My grandmother refused to let him in. Jim Moore shouted, ‘We’re moving James to the Curragh.’

It was four years before James and Eileen saw each other again.
When they looked back on the perplexing circumstances in which the machine-gun had been discovered at Friars Road, they came to the conclusion that a person must have informed on them. They also began to wonder whether Jim’s release had not been a trap and whether he had not all along been a dupe of the Special Branch. Jim had always been a careful man, slow to take people into his confidence, but after his internment this caution turned to suspiciousness. Years without privacy, without respite from the anxiety of being spied on by so-called comrades (‘Your best friend could betray you,’ Grandma said), years of being subjected to false and vicious rumours concerning his wife, and of seeing the worst side of his fellow internees, left him disillusioned and untrusting. ‘He came out very, very bitter,’ Grandma said. ‘He was very bitter about what one Irishman would do to another.’ This fear – of betrayal, of being tricked – stayed with my grandfather. In the late ’forties, money was so unaccountably tight that he concluded that Grandma was being blackmailed – whereas in fact she simply did not have the heart to tell her husband that, even though he was working so hard, there was just not enough to make ends meet. Even in the ’sixties, when he moved into his own house in Douglas, my grandfather’s paranoia continued. The back garden of the new house abutted the garden of Mr Sparrow, the policeman, and this worried him: ‘Draw the curtain,’ he would direct, ‘he might be looking down at us.’ After the Curragh my grandfather was plagued by suspicions – suspicion of his loving wife, suspicion of his neighbours, suspicion of the authorities – and was never entirely free of an inkling that a deception was being played on him and that things were not what they seemed.

I
n March 1995, I got in touch with my great-uncle Paddy Lynch. Paddy was my grandmother’s younger brother and I knew that he’d been interned at the Curragh with his brothers, Jack and Tadhg, and my grandfather. I had never met Paddy but was told he was a terrific fellow who loved a yarn. He lived in Maynooth, Co. Kildare, with his wife Peig (herself described by my grandmother as ‘a staunch one’), and I wrote to him asking if we might meet.
After I’d received no reply, I gave him a call. I wasn’t expecting an especially warm response – I was, after all, a virtual stranger with an English accent – but, even so, the depth of his feeling took me by surprise. Right from the off, he was agitated and antagonized. ‘Haven’t you received my letter?’ he asked. I had not, I told him. ‘Well, I’ve no intention of discussing the camp in any shape or form, or having any dialogue about it whatsoever.’ Before I could think of anything to say, Paddy quickly added, ‘When I left the camp, it was dead and buried and never going to be resurrected. It’s fifty years since I left and you won’t get me to mention one iota about it. I’ve been pestered down the years by fourteen or fifteen people, by people well up in the writing business, offering me a lot of money. I won’t do it. I could do with the money, but I couldn’t take one cent. It would be blood money. If you want to talk about Gaelic games or horseracing, my pet subjects, we could spend three to four days talking about them. But that’s all. You’re perfectly welcome to come round, I wouldn’t want to put you off. But we’d have nothing to talk about except the weather.’