Return to Killybegs

8

I jumped the low wall at a run, not seeing the hawthorn bushes in the dark. The brambles tore at my forehead and hands. I stifled a cry. I was knotted all over with tension, my neck aching. The fear. Right behind me, Danny Finley threw himself head first into the gnarly bed of brambles.

— Shit! What the hell is that?

— We need to give the Belfast lads a course in botany, growled our captain, a British army deserter.

— They’re called thorns. They’re a bit like their barbed wire, answered a voice in the darkness.

— Very funny, Danny groaned.

There were around fifty of us lying behind the hedges, backs against black trees, or creeping over the frozen earth. Danny was bleeding, his face lacerated by the thorns. I threw him a sympathetic glance.

— Take a look at your own face, he growled.

It was four in the morning. We were about to attack the RUC station at Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh. At nightfall, a young Enniskillen priest had blessed our troops. Rome was threatening us with excommunication, but our priest forgave us our trespasses. We had gathered around him, on the bog, in the wind, one knee on the ground and our hands on the freezing wood of our guns. We were wearing civilian clothing. No uniforms, not even a flag. Coats, caps, waterproofs, woollen pea coats and city shoes. We looked more like militia than an army, or, rather, like our fathers during the Civil War.

Each óglach had to watch his partner’s back. Danny and I were covering each other. The explosives manufacturers had just placed four bombs against the wall of the barracks. We were with them. We had dived into the thorns after coming back to get under cover.

It was 14 December 1956. Two days previously, the IRA had launched its ‘Border Campaign’. Coming from the Free State, Republican units were striking British targets in Northern Ireland, then withdrawing across the border again. For the first time since 1944 we had taken up arms. Certain Belfast combatants were also deeply involved in the campaign.

— Open your mouths and lower your heads, our officer ordered.

The explosions were terrible. I was deafened. I grabbed Danny. Everything was flying around us — concrete, wood, tiny projectiles that whistled past like bullets. We didn’t have to go into the building, just strike it.

— Into position!

Alarm behind the walls. A whistle being blown, a siren, shouting. I lay down with my elbows on the ground and my cheek against the butt of my gun. It was a Mauser Karabiner 98K rifle. I’d tried it out during training, but never in combat. Each combatant had three magazines of five rounds. There was clearly no question of besieging them; we were simply announcing our return to combat. I shot my first bullet at nothing. A human shadow, perhaps. I was unsteady. I hated the sniper stance. Stomach pressed against the ground, the shock of the discharge against my shoulder, the crash against my cheek, a pain in my ear. I stood up.

— What are you doing? roared a comrade.

I shot four times, straight ahead, standing with my legs apart like during drills. I aimed at the moving chaos, the confusion facing us. I reloaded. I was thinking of nothing. Gut empty, head empty. Just the powder and the din.

— Get back on the ground, Meehan!

Danny came up to my level, standing, like me. A third got up in turn. I saw nothing. I made my weapon heard. We were shooting at the same time, calmly. When they returned fire, Danny dragged me to the ground. The police were firing back aimlessly. Lead wasps flew overhead. I engaged my last magazine. And then we suddenly heard the terrible voice of the Browning. Steel detonations, staccato, dry, violent.

— Look out, machine-gunfire! Fall back, ordered our captain.

We had no casualties, only the wounds Danny and I had received from the thorns. Our unit crossed back to the Republic just before daybreak. We were ordered to surrender without fighting if we were intercepted by the Irish army. The IRA Army Council had decided that our bullets were for the British enemy, not for our brothers from the Free State.

Across the border, at the edge of the village, a coalman’s truck was waiting for us. We gave back our weapons. I handed mine over with regret. A soldier is nothing without his gun, just a defeated man. Two men wrapped them up in black blankets and buried them under the coal.

Around us, the first of the early-rising residents were appearing. They lowered their eyes when they passed. No enthusiasm, but no hostility, either. I found neither the Belfast winks nor the wide-open doors. For many Irish from here the war had been over for more than thirty years. If it continued in the North, ‘on the other side’, it was none of their business.

Some members of the unit left for home on foot across the fields. They were farmers, local men. Others had left their bicycles in ditches. Two got into the truck, guns at their belts. The officer gripped our hands, Danny’s and mine. He wasn’t in any hurry. He wanted to show us that he had nothing to fear. That in this region, the Republic was sovereign. That’s when two gardaí appeared at the church corner. They spotted us. One stopped the other with his arm. Without a word, they turned on their heels and left unhurriedly.

— We’re not chasing you away, I hope? the IRA captain asked them out of earshot.

He laughed. A car arrived and he got in with four others. With his hand on the open window he shouted, ‘Éirinn go Brách!’

I shuddered. The last time I’d heard that cry was when Padraig Meehan had beaten George, old McGarrigle’s donkey. I was a child. I had been ashamed of my father, ashamed of that ‘Ireland Forever!’ And yet here I was today and it was my whole life.

Danny and I went back to Belfast by bus. We crossed the border separately. I hated the first British flag that appeared on the road, planted in a winter garden. I hated the Christmas decorations twinkling mockingly behind the white curtains of wealthy homes. I looked at my frozen country. Its beauty. Its misfortune.

I felt nothing. I was exhausted. I dozed. I wondered whether I had killed anyone during the attack. I was prepared to die, but not to kill. I hoped never to have to look a dead man in the face. I was on borrowed time. A victim on borrowed time, an assassin on borrowed time. That was really what we all were, every one of us. And I was very aware of it.

I was interned on 16 May 1957, at thirty-two years of age. Arrested along with hundreds of other nationalists from both sides of the damned border. Once again without evidence, without trial, and without so much as the hope of a conviction.

There were three of us in my cell at the Crum. British prisons no longer had the space for solitary confinement. The hygiene was beastly, the food excremental. We had no way of knowing whether we were there for a month or for ten years, imprisoned temporarily or locked up for life. So the weakest gave themselves up — the oldest, those without hope. In exchange for an anticipated release, around a hundred of our group renounced violence. Seánie was one of those. Captain Seán Meehan, my brother. He had been damaged by the battles, by prison. He didn’t like the socialist murmurings that had been running through the ranks since the end of the war.

— I’m an Irish patriot, not a communist! he would respond when we used to dream about a different country.

He no longer believed in our path. He said the IRA was a mosquito vainly circling a lion. He even ridiculed our weapons.

— Three men to a gun? We’ll go far with that!

He wasn’t afraid, that wasn’t it. He’d refuse to lift his arms up during searches and spit in the screws’ faces, not allowing them the satisfaction of seeing his pain when he was beaten. He was simply tired. He was letting go of the burden of our Republic. He didn’t want to be involved in any more combat. He was laying down arms. There had been Malachy Meehan, our grandfather, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who was killed by the British in 1896. And then Padraig Meehan, our father, dead from having lost a war. And then him, Seánie Meehan, and me, Tyrone Meehan. And who would be next? Who else would fill English prisons or die from a bullet shot from an English gun? Niall Meehan? Brian Meehan? Wee Kevin Meehan? Why not go ahead and offer up baby Sara?

We spent a long time talking. Hours. He gripped my head between his big hands, trying to get through to me. He was going to sign the pact. His surrender. He would go back to be with our mother. He would send those of our family who could be saved far away. He asked me to do the same. I said things I shouldn’t have said, dead men’s words. I shouted that a Meehan didn’t leave his country. He laughed viciously.

— My country? What country? And what is Ireland doing for us? What has it done for us, tell me? Your problem, Tyrone, is that you look at the world from the end of your street. When an old man winks at you crossing the road, or a kid admires you, when a door opens, you think that the entire population is behind you. Bullshit, wee brother! What is Republican Ireland, Tyrone Meehan? Two hundred Belfast streets and a few measly nationalist areas in Derry, Newry, Strabane? Scraps of villages! The Protestants are the majority in their Ulster and that’s the way it’ll stay. Dublin is no longer on our side. The Irish hunt us down with the same hatred as the British. We spend our time behind bars and when we get out, we can only cry in misery. And for what? Who is there to hear our cries? What country would defend us? Germany? Fantastic! What a great political lesson! Support everything our enemy fights? Is that it? The dance with the devil till the end of time?

I was crying, in distress and in rage.

— Open your eyes, Tyrone! Wake up! It’s not a battle that we’ve just lost, it’s the war. Our father’s war. It’s over, wee soldier! Over, do you understand? We are a few thousand trapped men surrounded by billions of people who are deaf to our cause. We have to give in, Tyrone, save what we have left — your life, our lives. I want to see Áine wearing a dress that doesn’t shame her for once. Do you understand that, Tyrone? I want laughter, new faces, streets without soldiers. I want nothing more to do with what we are, wee brother. Ireland has worn me out. She’s asked too much of me. She’s demanded too much. I’m sick of our flag, our heroes, our martyrs. I don’t want to exhaust myself any longer just to be worthy of them. I’m giving up, Tyrone. And I know that you will, too. One day, when you’ve suffered one wound too many. I’m going to breathe. Do you understand? I’m going to live like a passer-by on the street. A nobody. A hero of today. Someone who brings his wages home on a Saturday and goes to Communion on Sunday with his head held high.

My brother left Crumlin in October 1957. With my mother’s blessing, he sent Brian and Niall to the United States to an uncle on the Finnegan side.

In Easter 1960 when I was let out, he was a cop in New York and married to Deirdre McMahon, an emigrant from County Mayo. For St Patrick’s Day that year he marched along Fifth Avenue in uniform with his Irish colleagues, behind the green banner of the Emerald Society, an organization supporting Irish-American cultural understanding. Mother showed me a picture of him, posing before a wooden harp. With the tip of her finger, she stroked his face, his cap, his foreign uniform. She was neither proud nor sad, she was just empty. I put my arm around her shoulder.

I was thirty-six. I had been promoted to IRA lieutenant and married Sheila Costello. Jack, our son and only child, was born a year later, on 14 August 1961. Along with him and wee Kevin I was the only Meehan man left, surrounded by four girls. I knew that only my mother was holding us together. One day, after her death, Róisín would leave. And then Mary. And Áine. Wee Kevin and Sara would follow one of them like a mother. But already, while my mother was praying at the top of her voice, my sisters would avoid me so they could talk about Australia and New Zealand. Without ever admitting it to me, Áine was already dreaming of moving to England.

The Border Campaign was intended to liberate regions of Northern Ireland so as to lay the foundations for a provisional Republic. It was a failure. Once again, everything had to be rebuilt. Our army was in disarray, our movement in tatters, and our courage likewise. When the IRA campaign officially ceased in February 1962, eight of our men had been killed, six policemen had met their ends, and only our rivers ran free.