The Heather Blazing (20 page)

One man was insisting that painting the roads was the best way to win votes.

“You can go from house to house, and you can put what you like in the post, and you can hold a monster meeting out in the barley field, but you put white paint across the road, and that's the thing will waken the people up.”

Everyone listened carefully as the man, who had been an important figure in the War of Independence, spoke, but as he continued, one girl, whom Eamon did not know, whispered something to her companion, and they both giggled.
Several people turned around to look at them, but they had now started to laugh out loud.

Eamon stopped listening to the speaker; he waited for further outbursts of tittering and laughter. He looked behind him disapprovingly, but when one of the girls caught his eye she laughed even more. He felt now that they were laughing at him as much as at the man who was speaking. He thought that his father should stop the meeting and call them to order. He wondered who they were.

“This has always been,” the next speaker said, “a party of young people. It was founded by people with energy and strong convictions and a love of Ireland, and we want to make sure that the young people of this country stay with us now, and I'd like the young people here tonight to go on the canvas, put their names down now, and find out what the problems are on the doorsteps. I also propose that young Redmond makes a speech at the final rally. I met one of the Christian Brothers who says that he's a great speaker. We need young blood in the party.”

The two girls laughed even louder as they ran across the room and out of the door into the street. They continued to laugh and talk when they got outside. No one passed any comment on them.

Eamon waited for his father. It was late. There had been many suggestions about how things should be done; now people were talking quietly among themselves. He noticed that the two girls had come back, and one of them was busily going through the electoral register with one of the older women.

“There's no one in that house,” he heard her saying. “Mark that down and the Brogans in Number Nineteen are Fine Gael to a man, dyed in the wool on both sides. Whoever goes in there is just to leave a leaflet in.”

She seemed to know the town better than most of them; he was surprised at how seriously people were treating her instructions.

“And don't send any of Aidan's supporters canvassing in the Shannon, like you did the last time. They were nearly run out of it,” she laughed. He wondered who she was and how she could remember the previous election so clearly. He had worked on the last election but he did not remember her.

“She's Carmel O'Brien, Vinny O'Brien's daughter,” one of the men told him. “She's in the office over in Buttle's. She's just left school.”

He stood back and watched his father explain a point to someone, but he could see that the man had difficulty understanding what his father was saying. Carmel O'Brien came over to him.

“They want us to go canvassing up in Vinegar Hill Villas tomorrow night. Will you come?” She had the electoral register in her hand.

“I have a lot of envelopes still to do,” he said. “I'll have to speak to my father about it.”

“Could you do that immediately?” she asked. Her manner was direct. “I need this sorted out tonight.”

He noticed as she turned away how tall she was and slender, well formed. He wondered if it was right that they should go together to canvass. Maybe it would be better if each of them went with someone older, who had more experience of elections.

His father was doubtful as well, but the man who had spoken about young people was standing nearby and he said that Eamon and Carmel should definitely canvass the new houses in Vinegar Hill Villas. They would be canvassed again anyway, he said, in the few days immediately before the election.

“Do you want to speak at the final rally?” his father asked him on the way home.

“Not if de Valera is to be there. I'd be afraid,” he said.

“Don't mention that to anybody,” his father said. “It's meant to be a secret.”

*  *  *

The next night he went canvassing with Carmel. They walked up the Shannon together and then turned into the new estate.

“There's no jobs here,” one woman told them. “There's nothing for us at all, except the cattle boat to England. We only see them at Christmas and maybe in the summer.”

“If you vote for Mr. de Valera now,” Carmel told her, “we'll get a factory in this town.”

Eamon asked her if she believed it was right to promise things to people.

“Well, there'll be no factory anyway if they vote for Fine Gael, that's one thing for sure.”

Back in the headquarters she went through the register with one of the older women.

“Now, someone should go and see them again because they're wavering,” she said. “Thank God for Noel Browne, he's the one that's going to win Fianna Fail this election.”

“Well, a lot of people out my way say they'd be Fianna Fail all the way if Noel Browne was in the party. He's rid the country of TB.”

“And Fianna Fail will follow on his good work—that's what I tell them,” Carmel said. “But we're the party that respects the Church.” She sounded as though she did not believe what she was saying, as though she was trying out slogans on them, and Eamon moved away when she began talking about the man who proposed painting the roads.

“Did you ever hear worse?” she asked. “Daubing paint across the roads! It'll still be there years later.”

Eamon grew nervous as the days approached for the final rally.

“If de Valera comes,” the local candidate said in a hushed voice to his father and himself, “he'll talk about Wexford's glory and 1798 and they'll all cheer. But we're looking for votes and somebody had better talk pounds, shillings and pence from the platform.”

The only time, Eamon's father said, that their local candidate
had ever spoken in the Dail was to ask them to open the window. It was, his father laughed, the man's maiden speech and it was widely reported. But he was a decent man, his father added, and worked hard for the town. He would help anyone out. He, too, thought that Eamon should make a speech. Eamon's Uncle Tom still believed that he was too young.

“He looks older than he is,” the candidate said. “If you're against him making the speech, why don't you make it?” Uncle Tom said that he did not have enough experience at public speaking.

“Lemass is going to talk first,” the candidate said, “and he's going to introduce me, and then Dev's going to walk across from the hotel and that's when the band will play. But we need someone before Lemass, someone local to get the crowd going. Will you do it, young Redmond, will you?”

“If my father thinks I should.”

“I'm all for it,” his father said.

It was settled then. He took two days off school to work on his speech. He practised it on his own at first, and then he went down to his Aunt Margaret who listened to it in full.

“Oh that's grand, Eamon, that'll bring the votes in. Go hard on Noel Browne now. Wait until your father and your Uncle Tom hear it. It's great to see de Valera coming to the town again. Twenty years ago no one would believe you if you told them that Fianna Fail would be in power for sixteen years. After the Civil War it was very bitter here. Michael Collins was in this house, and there were others, men your grandfather and Tom had fought beside and trusted, and all they wanted was an easy peace. An easy peace and a good job. Once they got power they wouldn't give it up, they were worse than the British. They shot their own, and after the war a lot of our side went to America and never came back. They gave up hope, and if it hadn't been for de Valera and a few others, ready to work hard and organize, we'd never have
got back in. There were people in this town who wouldn't speak to you, or even look at you. But that all changed when Fianna Fail won the first election. I remember, Eamon, the first time de Valera came after he won, he was led into the square by fifty men on white horses and they were lighting tar barrels all over the Market Square. That was a great day here. That was a day to remember.”

Later, when his father and his Uncle Tom came back from the party headquarters in the town he acted out his speech for them, but he noticed when he was halfway through that they were both quietly laughing. They tried to stop when he looked up but his Uncle Tom had to leave the room.

“That's a great way to treat him now,” his Aunt Margaret said to his father, but his father was still shaking with laughter and he left the room as well.

“Don't mind them now, Eamon, don't mind them.”

He told her about the two girls laughing at the meeting.

“The election makes them all nervous,” she said. “But don't mind them.”

When his uncle came back he apologized for laughing.

“I just thought of some of the hecklers in the square. They could stop you in your tracks. There'll be a lot of hecklers. You'd want to watch them, Eamon,” he said and began to laugh again.

On the morning of the rally he went to Courtney's barbers in Weafer Street and had his hair cut.

“I hear you're preaching tonight, sausage,” Paddy Courtney said to him. “We'll all be down to listen to you. People'll be asking about de Valera: who's the long fellow beside young Redmond?”

“No school today?” a man in the queue for a shave said to him.

“Did you not hear the news?” Paddy Courtney stopped and addressed the group of men sitting on the bench waiting their turn. “Sausage here is going to open this evening's
deliberations. The Croppy Boy here is going to address his native town in the first national language.”

“I'd say that there'll be fellows waiting for him in the square. The whole town'll be out tonight, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour,” a man on the bench said.

“And the other shower,” said the barber.

“The mother and his child,” one of the men sniggered.

Eamon wore his good suit, a white shirt and a green tie. He went first to the party headquarters.

“Have you it off by heart?” a man asked him. He did not reply. He walked across to Bennett's Hotel. De Valera had arrived and was upstairs. Later, he would be going on to a rally in Wexford. A former minister whom Eamon recognized as Sean Lemass and his group were having sandwiches in the lounge. Eamon was introduced to Lemass and shook his hand.

“I knew your grandfather,” Lemass said. He turned to the group. “He's one of the Redmonds,” he said. “You're Michael's son, isn't that right?”

“He's making a speech tonight,” someone said.

“So he should,” Lemass said. “We're going to need every vote we get.”

As the time drew near they walked up through the town, and when they reached the platform in front of the council building the Market Square was filling up with groups of men talking in serious tones to each other. There were chairs at the back of the platform; a microphone had been set up at the front. Several men were now testing the microphone.

“The trick is,” Lemass said to him, “look at every face. Don't look down. If you're nervous pick one man in the crowd and address yourself to him. They're all looking at you and you should look back at them.”

Eamon nodded; he was nervous now.

The groups of men were getting larger. There was a big group outside Stamp's public house and another around the
monument to Father Murphy and 1798. As yet there were no women in the square.

“Watch,” a man said to him. “The minute it starts the place'll fill up. There's fellows in from Bree and Ballindaggin and all around the Milehouse for this.”

It was half past seven now, and de Valera had to be in Wexford for a monster rally at nine o'clock, or a quarter past nine at the latest.

“Crowd or no crowd,” Lemass said, “we have to start.”

Eamon's father and the local chairman and several of the group who had been with Lemass went up on the platform and sat down. They left a space for Lemass in the centre, and a space for the candidate beside him. Eamon wondered if they had forgotten about him and he felt a sudden hope that they would decide not to let him speak. It was like the queue for confession, this terrible waiting.

Eventually, the chairman of the local branch of the party went to the platform. It was dark and becoming cold. Eamon noticed that the square was slowly filling up; people were coming in from Cathedral Street and Weafer Street.

“This is a great day for the town of Enniscorthy,” the chairman said. There was a buzz in the microphone which grew into a piercing whistle as he spoke. He stood back while an electrician came on to the stage and began to fiddle with it, and then he tested it again.

“Can you hear me now?” he asked. His voice blared around the Market Square, but no one replied. Again, a whistling, piercing sound came from the microphone.

“Don't go so close to it,” the electrician shouted at him.

“Can you hear me now?” the chairman asked again, standing back from the microphone. His voice echoed in the square. He turned to the electrician and told him to warn each speaker to keep his distance from the microphone.

“This is a great day for the town of Enniscorthy,” the chairman began again. “Not far away, and soon to appear, is one
of the greatest statesmen in the world today, a figure revered both here and abroad. Our past and future Taoiseach.” The crowd was paying no attention; between each phrase the murmuring of voices could be heard. Eamon looked carefully at the text of his speech, although he knew it now word for word. Men were standing on the steps of the monument and people were watching from the windows of the houses, from Byrne's and Godfrey's and the Munster and Leinster Bank.

“Vote Fianna Fail!” the chairman shouted. “Vote de Valera!”

There was a small cheer.