A Conspiracy of Lies E-Book

Frank Connolly

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'A propulsive and gripping political thriller hewn from one of The Trouble's darkest days, Connolly skilfully blends fact and fiction to arrive at something that feels blazingly true. A blistering read.' —Noel O'Regan 'An essential and disturbing novel that describes the bombing of Dublin 50 years ago with insights into the ensuing cover-up' —Christy Moore  'This is a vivid and absorbing fictional account of one of the darkest days ever visited on Ireland's capital city' —Justine McCarthy  'A tender love story of two young Dubliners trying to survive the danger of the terrible political truths they uncover' —Theo Dorgan Three bombs shook Dublin in May 1974. Angie and Joe meet in the wake of the single worst atrocity of the Troubles. Brought together by the effect of the bombings on their lives, these two young people set out to discover who is responsible, facing confrontation with dark forces in Irish and British society. As Angie and Joe navigate the aftermath of the bombings, their journey leads them deep into the underbelly of 1970s Dublin, a time and place rife with cultural and political turmoil. Together, they vow to uncover the culprits behind the city's worst atrocity. Their investigation draws them into the shocking political and criminal landscape surrounding those in high places with the blood of innocents on their hands. The more they discover, the deeper they become involved in a world they don't understand—and the consequences could be devastating.

Leseprobe

Photo: Derek Speirs

Frank Connolly is an investigative journalist who has written extensively on current affairs and politics in Ireland over the past thirty years. His journalism contributed to the establishment of two judicial tribunals into planning and police corruption. He has worked with numerous Irish media organisations over the years and has been a regular contributor on radio and television news and current affairs programmes. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, he has also lectured in journalism and regularly appears at book and cultural festivals and events to promote his work. He is currently Head of Communications at SIPTU. His previous books include Tom Gilmartin: the Man who brought down a Taoiseach and NAMA-Land, and he is the editor of The Christy Moore Songbook.

MERCIER PRESS

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© Frank Connolly, 2019

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 662 7

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

To Mary for our deep, enduring friendship and love, and for her invaluable guidance through this imaginary journey.

Inhalt

Prologue

Summer 1974

1 Joe

2 Angie

3 Joe

4 Angie

Spring 1975

5 Joe

6 Leinster House

7 Angie

8 Angie

Spring 1976

9 Leinster House

10 Joe

11 Angie

Autumn 1976

12 Leinster House

13 Joe

14 Angie

15 Joe

16 Angie

Summer 1977

17 Joe

18 Angie

19 The Bistro

20 Booterstown

21 Joe

22 Booterstown

23 Joe

24 The Bridewell

25 Angie

26 Leinster House

27 Joe

28 Angie

29 Lock-up

30 Leinster House

31 Joe

32 Angie

33 Dublin City Centre

34 Dublin Castle

35 Joe

36 Angie

37 The Detention Centre

38 Angie

39 Government Buildings

40 Northside

41 Granby Lane

42 Angie

Autumn 1977

43 Government Buildings

44 Joe

45 North Inner City

46 Angie

47 Dublin 2

48 Joe

49 Angie

50 Government Buildings

Spring 1978

51 Angie

Acknowledgements

Also available from mercier press

Mountjoy JailDorset StreetParnell Street car bombTalbot Street car bombSouth Leinster Street car bombEast WallHumphrey’s PubCity MorgueStore Street Garda StationMater HospitalGranby RowJervis Street HospitalPalace BarTrinity CollegeHolles Street HospitalLeinster HouseThe LibertiesFallon’s PubSpecial Criminal CourtThe Bridewell Garda StationGresham HotelShelbourne HotelDublin CastleLiberty Hall

Everyone remembers where they were at the time of the bombings, except those too young, too old or too dead.

Prologue

It is a warm, early summer’s afternoon as three cars move slowly through the streets of Dublin. Each driver knows what to do. Find a good parking spot and disappear. On Parnell Street, a green car pulls up outside a garage just yards from the city’s main thoroughfare. Its Northern Irish registration plates stand out. A tall, blond man emerges from the car and walks quickly away. He doesn’t lock the door. Pulling a dark cap over his head he mingles with the bustling hordes heading for the train station in the evening rush hour. ‘Soon they’ll get a taste of what’s been coming to them for a long time,’ he says to himself. ‘I hope the boys get away okay.’

SUMMER 1974

1

Joe

The bells of the church tower ring as I walk through the gates. It’s warm out here, bright, noisy, full of people. The cars are lashing up and down the North Circular, heading for all the places people can go when they’re not banged up. When it’s safe, I cross to Berkeley Road and walk towards the cream-coloured box. I have to call the ma. Two pence in the slot. The house phone rings.

‘Hello? Who’s that? I can’t hear you,’ she answers.

I’ve forgotten how to use the thing. Press button A, for fuck’s sake. The phone in the ’Joy’s been broken for months.

‘It’s me, Ma. I’m out. On the street. Early release.’

‘Joe, merciful hour. Are you alright? Are you coming home for tea? When did they let you go? And your sister about to drop.’

‘I’m fine, Ma. Where is she?’

‘Holles Street and due any minute.’

‘I’ll surprise her before I come home.’

‘She’ll like that and I’ll have some steak for you, love.’

Crossing Dorset Street, I look up at the huge Guinness ad with the couple lying in flowers. I’m tempted to drop in somewhere for a pint, but it’s too early. Besides, I can’t go into the hospital smelling of gargle. Tricia wouldn’t like that with her first baby on its way into the world. I pass the Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square. Pity she’s not in the Rotunda just around the corner. Where all the northsiders are born. I could see her there and still grab a pint or two before heading home.

There’s no fucking buses. A few are parked up, empty, but none are moving. The busmen are on strike. Bus stops with no queues, on a Friday! Jesus, I’ll just have to leg it to Holles Street.

Crossing into O’Connell Street, I pass Tom Clarke’s old tobacco shop under the shadow of Parnell. A kid is pumping petrol into a grey Morris Minor at the garage in Parnell Street. Brown hair, early teens. Cars, double-parked, all shades and sizes, a guard directing traffic, a woman pushing a pram, fucking gorgeous. I spot my da’s car pulling up at the garage, his olive-green Hillman. Then a tall, fair-haired man gets out. Mid-forties. Not my da. Northern reg: DIA. Didn’t cop that. Anyway, Da’s likely on the high stool in Nolans by now. First pint, browning black, and a chaser. Old bollox never came to visit me once. No mercy for the sinner.

I pick up speed down O’Connell Street. Blazing Saddles is on in the Savoy, Forte’s is packed with people eating ice cream, there’s a smell of cooking oil. I’d mill a bag of chips. No, Ma’s steak is what I need. The Clery’s clock says ten past five. Crowds are heading down Talbot Street for the trains, the paper boy says there’s no end to the bus strike.

‘Hurdle and Pressed – No buses for Dubs this weekend,’ he shouts. Over the bridge. I wonder who’s in the Palace Bar as I get the whiff of coffee from Bewley’s.

I pass the imposing gates of Trinity College and follow its wall around to Nassau Street. There’s a smell of freshly mown grass. Across the street, I notice a bunch of flowers outside a shop. Tricia will like them. I head over. A girl with blonde hair wearing a light yellow coat over a short skirt walks out as I enter the newsagent. She drops her pack of ten Carrolls into a small red handbag. Beautiful. About my age. She returns my gaping look with a shy smile and heads up the street, towards Merrion Square. I pay for the lilacs and tulips wrapped in coloured paper. Outside, I see her up the street, crossing towards the college wall.

Two big cracks erupt like thunder from the city centre.

Another almighty bang, much closer, and a ball of smoke. The ground shakes. I tumble onto the street, dropping the flowers and my kitbag on the footpath as I fall. Then, silence. People are shouting, pointing. Flames and smoke are rising from a car not far down the road. I pick myself up and run. I approach the burning blue car. Beside it is the girl in yellow, her leg almost torn away, her blonde hair covered in blood as she lies on the footpath, still gripping her red handbag. Pure terror in her pleading eyes. I take off my jacket, cover her near-severed leg. I kneel down, taking her hand. She looks at me and screams.

‘My leg, please help me, please save me, please call my mammy.’

I gently raise her bloodied head.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

‘Carol … My leg, I can’t feel it.’

The handbag falls from her hand.

‘Carol, you’re badly injured. Try to stay awake. The ambulance is near. Can you hear the sirens?’ She looks at me, her mouth opens, but no words come out. Her eyes close.

It seems like an age before the men with stretchers carefully lift her into the back of the white van.

‘Do you know her?’ a white coat asks.

‘No. Her name is Carol though.’

‘She’s still breathing, just about,’ he says.

I pick up her red bag and place it beside her on the stretcher. The mutilated body of another woman is lifted carefully from the footpath and put on board. I grab my jacket from the ground and follow the ambulance as it weaves its way slowly through the injured, shocked and helpless. On Lincoln Place it picks up speed and disappears into Westland Row.

As I turn back, a few guards are pushing people away from the bomb site, from the burning wreck, towards the modern office building on Clare Street. I hear the sound of cracking glass from above.

‘Get them away from the fucking building before the windows come down,’ I shout at one rookie as he and other guards herd the stunned onlookers into danger. He looks up and shouts at people to move away from the building. It’s a miracle no one else is killed when the sheets of heavy glass crash to the footpath from four and five storeys above. It’s fucking hell. The air is full of smoke and sirens blare across the city. My jacket and shirt are stained with Carol’s blood. I don’t go to Holles Street, just a few hundred yards down Merrion Square. I can hardly walk straight. I wander back towards town. I wait in line at a phone box to call my ma and tell her I’m all right. I don’t tell her I’ve blood all over my shirt and I won’t be going to see Tricia in this state. I hope she’s all right, baby and all.

‘Get out of there, Son, before the whole place is blown apart. The world’s gone mad,’ she says.

‘I’ll be home soon, Ma.’

I put the phone on the hook and break down. I’ve seen the aftermath of car bombs on the telly before, but I’ve never seen a dead body on the street. Not to mind holding the hand of a beautiful young woman in terrible pain. My head is reeling and my hands are shaking. I don’t know what to do, where to go, or how to get there.

When I woke this morning I was in the safest place in Dublin. Safe if you discount the assortment of thieves, strokers, abusers, dealers and general no-good gangsters that share the corridors and cells of Mountjoy Jail. Not to mention the screws – peculiar and often dangerous specimens with almost as few scruples as the men under their care and control. My home for one year, three months and six days. For hash dealing. Nothing to see but the chimneys of the Mater, the odd pigeon and a soundtrack provided by freight trains, traffic and the odd ice-cream van on a summer evening.

I was stirred from my slumber by the loud hammering on the cell door.

‘Heney. Get yourself up and ready. You’re out of here today, you lucky bastard,’ the Seagull shouted.

‘We have to make room for some other scumbags,’ was the explanation for my early release. It took a while for the paperwork to be sorted, so it was the afternoon before my cell door opened.

Seagull was at the gate with my release slip just after 4.30 p.m. I resisted the temptation to remind him of the nickname he had earned as a greedy bastard always on the look-out for money in exchange for the smokes, vodka, porn and hash he smuggles in for the unfortunates whose cash has helped fill the beer belly protruding from his size forty-fours. I just smiled as he sneered, ‘Free at last, free at last.’

Into this fucking mess. I walk down Nassau Street to find a screen to tell me what the fuck’s going on. Windows are cracked and smashed along the street and in the college library. As I round College Green, retracing my earlier steps to freedom, hoards of people are coming in my direction, some bloodied and in tears, all scared. On Westmoreland Street two young guards are telling people not to cross O’Connell Bridge. Some ignore them. I don’t. In the Palace punters are crowded around the TV and the evening news. Pictures are coming in of three bomb sites, the dead and injured scattered on the streets and the absolute chaos of a city rocked by the unexpected.

Three car bombs exploded within minutes of each other around half five on Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street, the newsreader tells us. Over twenty dead, more sure to follow, hundreds injured, thousands shocked and terrified. All the bombs were planted on roads leading to the train stations on the day the buses are on strike. The pub is full of people crying, shouting at the TV, skulling pints and looking for answers. I see my mate, Donal, a struggling photo-journalist, camera round his neck, tears in his eyes. Just back from Talbot Street, he says. Blood-stained like myself. In shock.

‘I saw a woman’s head and someone’s arm. There’s blood pouring down the gutter outside Guiney’s,’ he tells me. I describe holding the hand of the beautiful young woman. Her yellow coat and red bag. Her leg hanging off. We hug and hold on. We’re both sobbing like babies. Who did this, and why? I’m not long in the place when the images come through from a border town where another car bomb has killed a lot of innocents in a pub. The tears come again. The late edition of the Press carries the headline ‘No end in sight for bus dispute’. The date on the masthead reads 17 May 1974. The first pint tastes bitter.

2

Angie

I’m on the East Wall Road when I hear a massive bang, then another, and a third, farther away. The aul one I’m talking to says it’s the Germans back to bomb the North Strand. I laugh. She’s nuts. But we can see smoke rising from the city centre, less than a mile away, and the scream of multiple sirens cuts through the normal sounds of the day. There must have been a bad accident, or worse.

I move on, going door to door collecting the pools money for the Central Remedial Clinic. Everyone I talk to is wondering what happened, but no one knows what’s going on. I turn into Church Road and the man at the first house has the radio on. I can hear the reporter talking about three bombs exploding in the city centre, on Parnell and Talbot streets and near the Dáil. A dog barks. A lone magpie flutters from a pole.

One minute I’m doing the rounds for the CRC, the next I’m running down the street in a panic, shouting, ‘My mam’s looking for a pair of shoes for me on Talbot Street,’ to no one in particular. I’m heading for the Black Widow’s, the sweet shop run by the woman still in mourning for the husband lost at sea God knows where, and the only place nearby with a phone.

As I burst through the door, I shout, ‘I need to call my Aunty Joan in Humphrey’s. I have to find my mam. She goes there for a drink after the shopping. I need to know she’s safe.’

The widow knows me and can see something is wrong. ‘Go ahead, love. Do you need change for the phone?’ I shake my head and dial the number of the lounge bar, my hand trembling.

My aunty tells me she’s in the snug waiting for Mam to join her for a glass of stout on her way from town.

‘Maggie’s not here yet but I’m sure she’s fine, Angie love,’ she says. I can hear the worry in her voice and I don’t believe her. It’s well after six, the shops are closed and Mam’s still not there. She should be on her way home to make the tea by now.

I play along anyway. ‘Will you tell her to come home as soon as she gets there?’

‘Of course, love, why don’t you go on home and make sure she’s not there already. After all that’s happened she may have gone straight there. And if she is, let me know.’

I hang up and run back to our house, but there’s no word or sign of her. I fear the worst. My ma always says I’m gifted, or cursed, depending on which way you look at it, with a sixth sense. I’ve a habit of expecting things to happen before they do. Bad things. The loony cycle, my ma calls it.

My da’s in the sitting room watching the TV. He’s trying to stay calm, so as not to worry me. I can see he’s edgy and afraid, trying to keep his worst fears to himself.

‘I’m going into town to find her, Da.’

‘I don’t see the point of that,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you wait here, Angie, and I’ll see if I can track her down? You check the neighbours and I’ll go into town.’

We both know she won’t be at the neighbours. Margaret Whelan is always home to make the tea, unless she says otherwise well in advance. He’s trying to distract me because he doesn’t want me to witness the chaos and carnage in the city centre that he’s seen on the evening news. I grab my jacket. ‘I’m going to town, Da.’

‘I don’t want her to come back to an empty house,’ he mutters. He sees that he won’t be able to stop me, though, so he gives in. ‘Okay, I’ll drive. We’ll find her together,’ he says, trying to smile, his courage restored.

Before we leave, I put the pools money away in a box in the kitchen. Mam’ll kill me if the meagre investments of our already poor neighbours fall into the wrong hands.

We’re not the only ones making for town. Streams of people are heading on foot to the city centre in a near-silent procession. The No. 53 isn’t running due to the bus strike. Everyone shares the same bleak foreboding as we begin the search for mothers, daughters, sons, husbands and wives, not knowing whether they’re dead or alive. Da picks up three of the sorry pilgrims, who pile into the back of our VW.

We go first to the city morgue on Store Street. Many have joined the queue there, hoping to rule out the worst. We do likewise. My da doesn’t want me to go in. I insist.

‘If you don’t find her here try the hospitals. The injured were moved to Jervis Street and the Mater. You’ll have to walk. The guards have blocked cars from the city centre,’ says the matter-of-fact doorman as we enter. It’s a scene of human wreckage and despair, the odour of death and antiseptic in a room where over a score of bodies in various states of disrepair have been laid on slabs hastily assembled to receive the unfortunate victims. We’re confronted with the horrific remains of the day’s atrocity: mangled body parts, blood-stained sheets and a bewildered team of medics trying to identify which limb goes with which torso. Mam is not among them, thank God, but the heartbreak and pain of the callously bereaved burrow their way into my already frantic mind. I recognise the faces of some who’ve found their loved ones dead and in pieces. I am close to throwing up and my eyes are glassy, blurred with tears. In contrast to the noise of the sirens, inside it is almost quiet, the only sound the muffled cries and whispered prayers of people as they find mothers, fathers, daughters and sons.

I walk past a table converted to a makeshift bed for the recently deceased, where a corpse is shrouded in dirty white linen. I stop when I hear a slight murmur from under the blood-stained sheet. The sheet twitches. A ray of sun through the window casts a sudden light into the room. My hands fly to my mouth. The body stirs again. It makes a loud, groaning sound.

‘Help, it’s alive,’ I scream.

A woman in white rushes over. Whoever’s underneath the sheet is trying to sit up. ‘My good Lord,’ she gasps. She recovers, lifts the blood-soaked sheet and finds a teenager, the top of his head sheared open, brown hair matted a rusty red, covered in blood, one ear hanging off, one eye open. There is no skin on the other side of his face. Just raw flesh, red, black and blue. His look of absolute agony penetrates my soul.

‘This one should not be here,’ the medic says, back in control. ‘Over here, quickly.’ The lad makes a high-pitched sound as he is shifted onto a makeshift stretcher by two shocked mortuary attendants.

I collapse into my father’s arms. Five minutes and a splash of water on my face later, I walk outside gripping Da’s left hand, weeping floods of tears.

‘We’ll have to check the hospitals,’ he says, recalling the advice of the doorman.

‘Where do I start?’ I say, dismissing my da’s reluctance to let me, or my hand, go.

‘You shouldn’t be walking around the town on your own. What if the bombers come back?’ Da says.

‘What if Ma is lying in the rubble somewhere?’

‘Okay, I suppose we might find her sooner if we split up,’ he says, a look of fear in his eyes, his hand still in mine. ‘I’ll go to Talbot Street. She said she was going to O’Neill’s for your shoes. Then I’ll try Jervis Street hospital. You head up to the Mater and then go straight home if you can’t find her.’

Both of us are trying to remain calm, at least on the outside. He hugs me again and reluctantly lets me go.

He leaves his car parked by the morgue and we head our separate ways. I’m silently thankful he’s gone to Talbot Street. I couldn’t face it if we found bits of Mam or her clothes on the road.

The eyes of the boy Lazarus are still in my head as I stumble up the street. The ambulance with him inside races past me, sirens blaring, towards a place for the just-about living from one for the already dead.

In the Mater Hospital the injured are stretched on every surface, doctors and nurses calling out instructions and treating the crying, shocked and bleeding casualties. A girl not much older than me, in a white uniform stained with the residue of the evening’s human traffic, asks me my mam’s name, her age and what clothes she was wearing. She is calmly trying to match the names she has on a list of the admitted with distressed visitors searching for hope and resolution.

‘Margaret Whelan, fifty-one, brown hair, a dark-green coat,’ I say amid the scene of confusion and chaos.

‘And you are?’ the nurse asks.

‘Angela, Angie, her daughter …’

She tells me to try and find a chair as it will take a while.

As darkness falls outside, the same nurse approaches me. She takes my arm gently and leads me up a flight of stairs, into a corridor and to Mam, lying on a trolley with white bandages across her eyes, sound asleep. Her handbag is lying across her chest. A page from her children’s allowance book with her name and address is taped to her leg.

A young doctor appears and tells me that she was brought here from Talbot Street and she’s been treated for injuries to her eyes, the seriousness of which he cannot determine without a specialist’s opinion. All he can tell me is that both retinas are damaged. ‘She appears otherwise intact,’ he continues dispassionately, ‘with some cuts and bruising to her head, face, arms, hands and legs. We have to monitor her for any possible internal damage that we have not been able to identify yet. You can see we’re completely stretched and there’s a long wait for X-ray.’

Anger and relief swell in my head in equal measure. That’s my ma he’s talking about in such cold terms. I’m thinking about the mental trauma that must go with being suddenly thrown into the air by an explosion only a few yards away as you are innocently walking to a shop to buy a pair of shoes for your daughter.

‘She’s lucky,’ the young doctor continues, interrupting my thoughts as he completes his dry and formal assessment. He rushes off to tend to more urgent cases.

I join a queue for the public phone and call May Delaney, one of our neighbours.

‘Tell my da I found her in the Mater. He should be home by now. Her eyes are hurt but otherwise she seems to be okay. They don’t have the full picture yet. She’s asleep and I haven’t been able to talk to her. She’s in St Brigid’s ward,’ I say.

‘Oh, thank God. Don’t worry, Angie, I’ll tell your da, and do give your ma my best when she wakes up,’ May says and hangs up.

I’m holding Mam’s hand and begging her to get well, to go back to what she was before today. I curse the fact that she went shopping for me, for stupid shoes that I don’t need but that she thinks will help me meet a nice fella and settle down. I told her I didn’t want the shoes and refused to go looking, so she went to buy them herself. She’s always rushing about doing things for other people. I wish she wasn’t such a living saint, with her candles and beads, always praying for good things to happen instead of looking after herself. I curse myself for the row I had with her over the swanky shoes and dress she wants me to wear like a fucking peacock in heat for the debs. I told her I’ve no intention of going, let alone with some twit I don’t even know or like. ‘I want to go to college,’ I shouted, ‘not get tied to a kitchen sink.’

‘You and your fancy notions,’ Mam said. ‘English litterture, for feck’s sake … excuse the French, God bless … and Irish. Who the hell needs Irish nowadays? Well unless you want to become a teacher like Mary down the road, now that’s a proper job. Students, up all night, like you’d be with that layabout brother of yours, listening to that hippie music. Blowing in the wind is right, that’s about all it’s good for.’ She stopped, looked at me and melted, as she does. When she continued, her tone was softer.

‘Ah well I suppose you’re not so bad; at least you do your study and help around the house. But I’m going into town to get you those nice shoes, whether you like it or not.’

Before she left she issued some last words of warning. ‘Mind that pool money, love. There are chancers and gangsters out there who wouldn’t think twice about robbing a young one. This town has gone to the dogs.’ Then she was gone.

As I sit by her side, I cry silently.

When she finally wakes up, my da is sitting on the chair beside her trolley, holding her bruised and bloodied hand.

‘Your eyes, Margaret, your beautiful eyes,’ he says. ‘What have they done to you?’

Barney Whelan bursts into tears.

3

Joe

As the summer months bring their usual cocktail of sun and rain, we’ve not made much headway in deciding who bombed the living daylights out of the city back in May. By ‘we’ I mean the young, unemployed and otherwise occupied professionals, students and artists that make up my circle of friends and drinking buddies in the Palace and nearby watering holes. Some of us had a close shave that afternoon. It is a sombre memory, the shock replaced by a mix of sorrow and anger. My unexpected return from forced exile is all but forgotten. Anyway, we all know that I’m not exactly hard chaw criminal material, just a bungling college dropout with decent taste in music and an eye for good-looking women.

Donal has asked me more than once what I’m going to do next. He’s one of the few who visited me in jail. Every now and then, after a few pints, he tells me again about the woman’s head in Talbot Street and how the stressed-out news editor in the Press told him to fuck off when he offered some photos of the bomb site. I remind him about Carol and her yellow coat, her red bag and her cigarettes. Two women were killed on South Leinster Street. Neither is called Carol.

‘She must have survived,’ I say.

‘Too swamped to be looking at amateur snaps, he told me,’ Donal complains about the editor. ‘And me fresh from the scene with original photos, gruesome stuff, heads, legs, gallons of blood and dozens of shoes scattered along the street. I got a picture of the two-year-old found wandering around after her folks were wiped out.’

‘Maybe they were too shocking for the papers,’ I say in an effort to console him. ‘The images they did publish were gory enough – a whole family blown to bits on Parnell Street, body parts strewn everywhere.’

‘There’s no rhyme or reason to it all. How can blasting our town apart be a blow for Irish freedom?’ he asks again.

‘It was hardly the Provos bombing the biggest city in their own country,’ I say.

‘It doesn’t stop them wrecking the second biggest, which they claim to own as well,’ comes the response.

‘The loyalists are sending us a message to keep our noses out of their little Orange state. That’s why one bomb went off just a hundred and fifty yards from the Dáil,’ says another barfly.

‘Only ’cause the Brits let them,’ the barman intervenes.

The May bombs were not followed by official days of mourning. The flags did not fly at half mast as they had after Bloody Sunday. It was left to their own to bury the dead. Days of funerals had followed across the country – many of the victims were from outside the city, some from farther afield. A young girl from Paris, a boy from Casalattico in Italy, unwitting martyrs in a foreign war. The government is blaming the IRA. Whether they did it or not, it’s all their fault. Republicans are blaming the Brits and their loya­list friends. In the Palace we are still trying to make sense of it all.

‘The UVF and other loyalists said they’d nothing to do with it, though Sammy Smyth from the UDA says we had it coming,’ says Donal. The people say ‘a plague on all your houses’. Then they choose to forget. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Life is returning to something close to normal since my release. I got the ma’s steak, my sister had the baby, the da bought me a pint and said he was sorry he didn’t visit me, but he couldn’t bear the sight of me behind bars. He even gives me a hug. And he hopes I’ve learned my lesson. That was it. Through a friend of his in the catering trade I’ve got a job in a restaurant. It’s called ‘The Bistro’.

Da’s done a lot for me over the years. We were never left wanting, me and my sister. He helped me through college though he didn’t earn much as a foreman for the Corpo, and now he’s got me work.

‘Part-time, but it’s a start,’ he said. ‘The owner is a bit of a gobshite, I’m told, but you need the work, so hold on to it.’

My hard-earned experience in the kitchen of the ’Joy will come in handy, although I wouldn’t mention it in my CV. Not that I have a CV. I tell my new boss, Aidan Murphy, that I’ve worked in several kitchens in well-known establishments at home and abroad, mostly in London, and that’s good enough for him. He doesn’t expect much, and pays even less. Rent money. Free food. It helps cover the urgent necessities of life, like girls, music and drink, though not necessarily in that order. Not all of the time. At least it gets me out of bed in the morning.

Murphy is the sort of unpredictable guy who likes to keep his staff guessing as to his mood on any particular day. But this summer he has reason to be more manic than usual given that he is undergoing a revenue audit, that his attractive wife, Paula, is determined to spend the few meagre bank savings he thought he had managed to keep from her, and that the May bombings brought business to a halt for several weeks. They also cost him his commis chef, who returned home to the States before he found himself with a missing limb or, worse, in someone else’s fight. So Murphy tells me, three weeks into the job.

When he overhears me during a tea break going on about who’s responsible for the bombings, the various failures of the government and the police, and other sinister conspiracy theories, he loses it.

‘Stick to making the fucking French onion soup instead of bullshitting like Danny the Red,’ he tells me. ‘You’re getting on my wick with all this political crap. And I don’t want to hear any more about that trade union stuff either.’

Murphy has a thing about unions. ‘I don’t mind unions once they know their place, but if I had a choice they’d be run out of town. It’s enough to be screwed by the taxman without the fucking commie bastards from Liberty Hall trying to wreck my business,’ he complains to his uncaring wife and anyone else in earshot.

What really bothers him, though, is that an extra layer of discretion is required in ‘The Bistro’ because it attracts a clientele of influential business and political big shots, whose custom can help make, or break, the aspirations of an eager and ambitious restaurateur like himself. During the one fifteen-minute daily break enjoyed by his staff he declares that ‘no one is to discuss this bombing thing on the floor of the restaurant. There could be anyone, government ministers, judges, guards, the fucking newspaper people, God forbid, listening to you,’ he warns, directing a long and searing gaze in my direction.

It seems that everyone and everything in the city has been shaken by the blasts one way or another. Everyone remembers where they were at the time of the bombings, except those too young, too old or too dead. But no one talks about them much. The instinctive and cautious reaction, as with the boss, is to shut up. Nothing to see here. Maybe that’s for the best. I’ve enough on my plate without losing the only job I can get for speaking out loud concerning things I don’t really have much of a clue about.

Besides, I’ve been in enough trouble, getting involved in things I should have stayed well away from. As an impoverished student I’d supplemented my income with an ill-advised bit of dabbling in the drug trade. I bought a quarter kilo of hash wholesale from Harry Steele, an old schoolmate in Crumlin and a rough diamond from the other side of the tracks. I broke the lump into smaller ten spots, making a not insignificant profit in the college bar at UCD at fairly minimum risk. I never carried more than a few, easy to discard packs of deals at any one time and was careful to avoid any unnecessary confrontations with drunks, idiots or guardians of the law, on campus or otherwise. It was to be my first and last foray into the hash business.

My fatal mistake was to fall victim to complacency, stupidity and greed, mainly the last two. Steelie dropped off a load at my gaff one evening and offered me £20 to keep it ‘offside’ for a few days. He said it was for ‘the lads’ – some of the crowd fighting for Ireland when they’re not shooting each other. I barely thought twice about it. I never thought at all about the consequences of being caught in possession and charged with supply of a large quantity of Moroccan red concealed in a ceramic water jar.

I also didn’t consider the motivation for Steelie’s unexpected arrival at my house. It certainly wasn’t for the love of any cause, as Steelie is first and foremost a ‘me féiner’. His only real passion is motor bikes. He sold me my Honda for a tenner. The nifty fifty gets me around. Steelie’s nickname sums him up, really. He has a bit of a name on the streets for hot-wiring Yamaha models, which are all the rage and get a good price on the black market. But times are tough and I should have guessed that he was mixing with the political hard chaws to supplement his crust.

Only the discovery a few days later by the police of a similar load of pottery full of dodgy stuff in Ringsend alerted me to the danger lurking in the coal heap in the garden shed. I quickly dumped the load in the nearby allotment plot of a recently deceased neighbour, whose garden shovel and fork had, helpfully, been abandoned in the wake of his premature departure.

‘He won’t be needing those where he’s going,’ commented an early riser as I returned from the moonlit burial of Steelie’s ill-gotten gains with the implements.

‘I thought I’d tidy up Eddie’s plot, God rest him. May as well put his tools away in case someone else needs them,’ I replied.

The two heavies who arrived at the front door two nights later were not, as I first feared, from the drug squad or Special Branch. It was worse than that. Ignoring the pleasantries, they bundled me into the living room of our terraced house and proceeded to interrogate me about Steelie, the hash and details of any recent trips I may have taken to Africa, Europe or any other exotic places.

‘I haven’t a fucking clue what you’re talking about,’ I protested as I looked down the barrel of a revolver.

‘We know Steelie gave you stuff to mind. How do you think we got here? He was keen to tell us everything after the accident with his left knee. We want to know who arranged the shipment from the ’Dam,’ said the man with the gun.

‘I told you, I don’t know anything about it. He asked me to mind this fucking vase. That’s all.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the field out the back.’

I did not need to be told who I was dealing with to recognise that I could soon end up in the same queue at the pearly gates as the dead allotment owner. But they were more concerned about the circumstance and arrangement of the delivery than about losing it to the guards.

Lucky for me, at least one of the pair seemed to accept my negligible role in whatever dodgy deal was going down.

‘Did Steelie mention anyone else involved at the other end?’ the smart one asked.

‘No one. I didn’t even know it came from Holland until you told me.’

‘What the fuck are you doing in the drugs business, anyway?’ the same one said.

‘I’m not,’ I lied. ‘Steelie asked me to do him a favour for 20 quid.’

‘You’re a lucky man. Now go out and get the fucking dope,’ said the other as he put his weapon inside his trouser belt and took his eyes off my shaking knees.

‘We’ll be in touch,’ the nicer one said with a smile as his comrade lugged the now-recovered vase, covered with an old blanket from the hot press, into the back of a van parked a couple of doors down.

A few days later, as I sat on a high stool in Nolans, the same one approached me.

‘Well, Joe, how’s she cutting today?’

‘Alright, so far,’ I said warily.

‘We confirmed your story, but we also know that Steelie was giving you stuff to sell. We could put a stop to your canter, even get you fucked out of the college, or worse. But we’re not inclined to do that. Instead, we want you to do us a favour, seeing as you’re not afraid of taking a risk, once it’s worth it.’

‘What kind of favour?’

The man sat closer and explained that the drugs run had been a one-off venture by a former member of theirs living in Holland. He had used a secret route set up by the organisation to import guns and other weapons needed in their campaign for Irish freedom and a workers’ republic.

‘It’s not the hash we’re worried about. But the same bloke brought it in using our private courier service and that’s not good for us or for him.’

‘So why are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘Because we think you might help us. In return we’ll ignore your little dealing operation in UCD. The movement is hard on drugs, but our members in the student union seem to have no problem with you.’

‘I wonder why?’ I said. A survival mechanism in my brain told me not to add, ‘They’re my best customers.’

A week later I’m standing at a phone booth near the entrance to the central station in Amsterdam wearing a light-blue jacket and carrying a copy of that day’s Financial Times. My head is covered with a baseball cap, eyes with dark shades. Wrapped inside the paper is a large wad of English fifty-pound notes – twenty grand’s worth. Across the street my new friend and anti-drugs crusader is sitting at a café with a young woman in red.

I’ve been told to wait for a man with unnaturally blond hair wearing a dark pinstripe suit and carrying a copy of today’s Wall Street Journal to approach me. He is to ask a prearranged question and I’m to reply with the answer I’ve learned off by heart.

‘Are you Steelie’s cousin?’

‘No, but I’m going out with his sister,’ I say to the blond stranger with a Dublin accent.

I can’t unload the FT quick enough and point blondie to the woman, now sitting alone in the coffee shop, to deliver his end of the bargain. I’m not told exactly what’s going on, but it can only be a drugs deal. I don’t want to know.

Steelie had agreed to set up the arrangement in return for a guarantee that his right knee, and probably his brain, would remain intact. I was chosen as I had a clean face, not recognisable to former revolutionaries turned drug pushers from Dublin. I reluctantly agreed to play my part, in return for a promise that my role in the vase episode and the hash-peddling business would not be disclosed to my family, college dean or anyone else in authority. I was also not averse to the offer of two hundred quid plus expenses for making the two-day trip. When it came down to it, though, I had little choice in the matter.

After the brief exchange I didn’t wait to see or hear what happened next. I even avoided the temptation to score a nodge in the nearest hash house. I took the next train to the airport.

Back home, I saw the news coverage about an Irishman who had drowned after falling into a canal in the Dutch capital, ‘a man previously known to the gardaí with criminal and republican connections and possibly linked to a gang of international drug dealers’.

I sipped my Guinness and decided, there and then, to never dabble in crime or politics, at least those of the risky variety. I’d keep up my small hash-dealing operation in college just to cover the money for pints, but that was it.

Although I remained on nodding terms with the local heavies, my brief role as an international conspirator was consigned to history. I didn’t ask what really happened to the man in the ’Dam, and neither did anyone else apparently. I just hoped he didn’t have a copy of the Financial Times with my prints on it in his house. The whole incident was soon forgotten among the piled-up victims of Ireland’s various conflagrations, or so I thought. That is, until I got the early morning knock, had the house searched, was dragged into the Bridewell and shown a copy of my plane ticket from the ’Dam and a neatly transcribed statement from the nice revolutionary who turned out to be an informer for the Branch in his spare time. Or had recently been turned into one. And they found a few ten spots, all wrapped in tinfoil and ready for sale, under the saddle of my Honda 50. I pleaded guilty to possession with intent to supply, got sent down for two years and disappeared into the bowels of the ’Joy for what the judge described as the punishment I deserved for having the ‘stupidity of a sorry young man driven by greed’.

Thus my college education and part-time dealing business came to an abrupt end and I embarked on my own journey of discovery in the University of Crime populated by the involuntary inmates in a volcanic melting pot of no-hopers, dangerous lunatics, clever grafters and, in some cases, very skilled and self-educated conmen. My daily concern was physical and mental survival, and to this end I willingly obliged any request from my fellow guests of the nation and our minders to carry out chores, including cooking, cleaning, writing and reading letters for the illiterate, and passing stolen goods. In fact anything short of providing the sexual services that were always in demand at a certain price. That I would not do.

I kept my head down and counted the days. I had no steady girl so only my ma, sister and a few close friends filled the occasional visit slots and kept me in touch with the outside world. My one prized possession was a forbidden short-wave radio which, deep into the night, wired me into another world, a universe of language, sounds and stories, and kept me sane. I got it from Seamus Russell, a cellmate who also left a few books behind when he departed almost as quietly as he arrived in the jail, halfway through my stretch.

Russell was one of dozens of republicans who landed in the jail as the row in the North seeped across the border. Except Russell was not housed with his political mates and did not engage in their loud and determined protests against prison uniforms, work or anything else that made them like the rest of us crims. He was doing time for drunk and disorderly and assault, after hitting a garda on the head with a bottle during a pub fight on Summerhill. Strange though, he didn’t seem like a rowdy boozer. He kept his head down, working with me in the kitchen, and was polite, reserved and friendly with sinners and screws alike. Rollies were his only vice and for weeks I used some of my meagre allowance to supplement his supply of skins. He went through a lot of them, especially on Friday nights. That’s when he wrote a letter to his faithful girlfriend, who visited every week for thirty minutes on a Saturday. Long letters scrawled in tiny writing on almost half a packet of cigarette papers stuck together, wrapped tightly and sealed in what he called a ‘comm’. Passed with a kiss. Concealed communications in tiny print. He told me he didn’t want the screws reading his personal stuff.

The night before Russell left the jail, time served, he told me that he knew I was set up rightly by my revolutionary friends over the Amsterdam caper and warned me to keep away from them.

‘Not so bright for a college kid. You might pick up some fresh ideas from these,’ he said as he placed the books and radio on my bed.

‘See you down the road,’ he smiled. ‘And don’t store them in here for a while.’

Twenty-four hours later, three of the head IRA honchos jumped into a stolen helicopter that landed in the prison yard and flew away to freedom, leaving behind a jail full of cheering convicts of all persuasions and none. Mine was the only cell in our wing to be torn apart in the subsequent searches. The Special Branch spent two hours grilling me about ‘that bastard Russell’, even though I told them I knew little or nothing about him. The men behind the wire in D-wing laughed and sang their way through the beatings.

It turned out that Seamie’s girlfriend was also kissing comms with one of the men in the republican quarters. According to the angry screws, she probably hired and hijacked the chopper. Their problem was the police hadn’t a clue who the girl was.

Once I’d retrieved them from a hiding spot among the vast array of pots and pans in the kitchen pantry, I consumed the books I’d inherited from the master escape planner. Stories of Irish history, politics and world revolution by household names I’d never given a blind curse about before. The radio provided a nocturnal escape into an exotic world far beyond the stifling confines of my cell and daily routine. That’s how I survived my spell inside until my return to normal life with a bang in May.

***

By the end of the summer I’ve settled into a steady if boring routine. Suits me down to the ground. Most mornings on my way to work I pass the walls of Trinity. My mind returns to the injured woman on the road, the body parts of the young mother and someone else’s daughter that were scattered across South Leinster Street just a hundred and fifty yards from parliament. Perhaps it’s the history student in me, or the politics of reality I learned the hard way in the ’Joy, or just the plain feeling that I don’t know the half of what’s going on around me. I used to think that we control our own destiny. Now I’m not so sure. You can be walking down the street one minute, and lifeless or limbless the next. Who decides?

So I try to find out. I read everything I can about that day and use the generous facilities of the National Library to read up on who was killed, hurt and may be guilty. I find it hard to understand how the police investigation into the attacks could be wound up within three months.

According to Donal, when the Irish Home Affairs Minister met his British counterpart at the high security meeting in Baldonnel in September, not a word was spoken about the bombings. It was all the talk in the newsroom of TheIrish Press. For whatever reason, there’s no appetite in government to take on the bombers or to ask the Brits what they know.

‘Keeping their heads down in case the loyalists and their puppet masters in the shadows pay us another visit,’ says Donal. Like me, he’s still trying to make some sense of that day.

4

Angie

I’m staring out the bedroom window at the clothes waving from the line, blues, reds and whites, at Da’s blooming flower patch, yellows, greens and purple, at a robin on the branch of our neighbour’s small pear tree with a cat ready to pounce. Only a few weeks ago I was a political innocent starting the Leaving Cert. Now I’m trying to grapple with a world where people are blown to bits on their streets. Of course, I’ve seen it on the TV, scenes from Derry and Belfast and other places just a hundred miles up the road. But that seemed so far away, different people, distant lives. How fucking naive and stupid we all are.

Mam is home and resting, waiting for the appointment with the consultant which will determine the future prospects for her vision. Her eyes are still covered. She’s settled down after weeks of pain, pills, tests and daily visits from the doctor. The X-rays didn’t show any internal damage to her bones. But her bruises came in all colours and only hot baths and Radox seemed to help. And then there was the crying, day and night. The non-stop bawling and keening which erupted at the least expected moments. It’s easing off, thank God. She’s coming back to herself.

Since the exams finished I’m at home with her every day. My da hasn’t got over the shock of it all and Mam’s bad eyes, but he keeps himself busy doing his bread rounds, helping out with the credit union and fussing over her when he’s in the house. He’s not even fifty-five, but he’s aged this past while. Still, he’s relieved to have her alive and home, something he keeps repeating like a mantra – it seems to bring him some comfort, so I don’t tell him to stop.