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Power Play. Deaglán de Bréadún
Читать онлайн.Название Power Play
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isbn 9781785370434
Автор произведения Deaglán de Bréadún
Издательство Ingram
The Irish Times, on 23 December 1922, quoting an unofficial briefing by the Free State authorities, reported that the IRA members had attempted to dislocate the Great Southern and Western Railway line using two spare engines to set up an obstruction at Cherryville. This was a major security threat because, as Durney points out: ‘The Cherryville junction was vitally important as it had railway links to west and south.’ The unit was also said to have ambushed Free State troops at the Curragh Siding, on 25 November. There were accusations as well that looting was carried out on shops and other business premises in the locality, although these claims were strongly rejected by surviving relatives and supporters.
Whether as a result of surveillance or inside information, the anti-Treaty unit was traced to a dugout or tunnel underneath the stables of a farmhouse at Moore’s Bridge, about 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) from the Curragh camp. The intelligence officer of the group, thirty-one-year-old Thomas Behan was shot dead, during or after his arrest. While it is alleged that he was shot out of hand, the official record states that he was trying to escape from his place of detention.
Having been found guilty by a military court of possessing arms and ammunition, seven members of the group were executed on the morning of 19 December 1922. Three of them were aged between eighteen and nineteen years. Each of them was shot by firing squad, one after the other. They are said to have shaken hands with their executioners, and to have sung The Soldiers’ Song, which has a chorus that begins: ‘Soldiers are we, whose lives are pledged to Ireland.’ This was a clarion-call of the Volunteers in the General Post Office at Easter 1916, and later, in the Irish-language version Amhrán na bhFiann, became Ireland’s national anthem.
Two members of the column were spared: Pat Moore (whose brother, Bryan, was shot as commanding officer of the unit) and Jimmy White (whose brother, Stephen, was executed with the other six). Durney comments that ‘it was probably a step too far to execute two sets of brothers at the one time’. The column had been arrested at the family farmhouse of Bryan Moore and his sister, Annie, who was also taken into custody. Annie’s fiancé, Patrick Nolan, was among those executed. In a state of inconsolable grief, she was taken to the female wing of Mountjoy jail in Dublin. In a last letter to his parents, Nolan wrote: ‘Dearest Mother, there are a few pounds in my suitcase, you can have them, or anything else in the house belonging to me.’ James O’Connor wrote to his mother: ‘I am going to Eternal Glory tomorrow morning with six other true-hearted Irishmen’. It was the largest group to be executed during the Civil War, in which there were seventy-seven official executions. The seven are known as the Grey Abbey Martyrs, and their deaths are still commemorated by republicans today.
Mary Lou has rural connections, with her mother – O’Connor’s niece – coming from the Glen of Aherlow, and the family retains strong Tipperary links. These connections are important in Ireland; her father was born in Dublin, but with roots in County Mayo.11 Mary Lou’s parents separated when she was only nine years old. Such occurrences were relatively rare in the Ireland of that time, a state where divorce was banned until 1995. In the Banotti interview, she said: ‘That was a big disruption in our family life but it was something we got through.’ The children remained with their mother. All of them did well in their careers. Mary Lou told me: ‘We worked hard, that is the ethos of our house. If you wanted to get ahead, you got cracking and there was an expectation that you’d do well at school and work hard. We were just, I suppose, lucky as well.’12 There were four children in the family, two boys and two girls: ‘I’ve an older brother called Bernard, then there’s myself and the set of twins, Patrick and Joanne.’13 A scientist by profession, Joanne hasbeen associated with Éirigí [Rise Up!], a left-republican group that is critical of the Good Friday Agreement and seeks to build a mass radical movement but does not advocate a renewed campaign of violence. Mary Lou says they get on very well: ‘I only have one sister. I love my sister and we’re on great terms. She’s got two lovely children, I’ve got two children. We’re very close, we’re a very, very close family.’14 Mary Lou had just turned twelve when IRA prisoner of the British and abstentionist MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, Bobby Sands, died on hunger strike. She was later quoted as saying that this was a ‘road to Damascus’ moment.15 She clearly recalls the ‘sheer brutality’ of the ten hunger strikers being allowed to die: ‘And that was beamed into your front room.’16 She attended a Catholic girls school on nearby Churchtown Road: Notre Dame des Missions, founded in 1953 by the order of nuns which bears that name. In a table of private schools, published in the Irish Independent on 17 September 2014, Notre Dame was listed as charging €4,300 per annum, with day-fees at other private schools in the Dublin area generally ranging from €3,600 to €12,000-plus.17 The points she got in her Leaving Certificate at Notre Dame were insufficient for her purposes, so she repeated the exam the following year at Rathmines Senior College. She then started a four-year course in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), no longer seen as a unionist enclave since the Catholic Church lifted its ban in 1970 on members attending the college.18 In tandem with her social background, McDonald’s schooling contributed to the self-confidence that is one of her hallmarks as a politician. As she told Banotti: ‘I had a great education and a great sense of myself.’19 She has warm memories of her teachers at Trinity, among them being the eloquent and feisty Independent Senator David Norris. ‘It wasn’t so much that he taught – he performed! And it was absolutely brilliant,’ she told me. The prominent Kerry-born poet and academic Brendan Kennelly also gets full marks from Deputy McDonald: ‘Brilliant in tutorials, a really good teacher, very affable and very connected with the students.’20 Despite the impact the hunger strikes had on her when she was younger and her parents’ interest in political issues, she kept aloof from such involvement at TCD. This seems strange in light of her later activity, since for many people it is their only period of activism. How was she able to keep clear of the political arena? ‘Well, actually, with relative ease, because I liked my books, I liked my friends and I always worked when I was in college. So I always kept myself very well out of it.’21 Her mind was on the glories of literature in the Saxon tongue: ‘I liked all the Anglo-Irish [writers]. I particularly liked Beckett’s theatre. I know it’s very dark: I got a kick out of that. I liked the Metaphysical Poets and American literature. I went through a phase of Sylvia Plath; I think every college student does.’22 She had a break abroad before the end of the four-year degree course: ‘I took a year out when I was studying in Trinity and I went to live in Almeria, in Andalucia, in the south of Spain. It was after third year: a gap year. I taught there – the typical kind of thing.’ She still heads off to Spain for a holiday when she gets a chance. After the Easter break in 2012, Labour’s Pat Rabbitte responded to her latest criticism of the Government in the Dáil with the memorable quip: ‘Such tanned indignation!’23
After graduation from Trinity she spent a year at the University of Limerick (UL), where she took a Master’s degree: ‘That was in European Integration Studies: law, economics, politics. I think I was the only person in the class that didn’t have a degree in Economics or European Studies.’24 When asked what motivated the shift from English Literature to European Studies, she says she had an interest in the European Union and its institutions: ‘I go on instinct on lots of things. I didn’t have a masterplan where I carefully plotted-out every step of a career-path... That’s self-evident!’25 After UL, she worked as a researcher in a Dublin-based think tank, the Institute of International and European Affairs. The IIEA was founded in 1990 by former general secretary of the Labour Party, Brendan Halligan.‘I went on to Dublin City University (DCU) where I started my PhD. It was in Industrial Relations/Human Resource Management.’ This was meant to be a follow-up to her MA thesis at UL which was concerned with the 1993 re-organisation of the state airline, Aer Lingus. ‘I was in the IIEA, went into DCU, was working away, did some teaching, working away on my research, and then I went to the Irish Productivity Centre, to work as a consultant.’26 Romance enters the story too: during the heady days of 1990, when the nation was buoyed with hope because of the Irish soccer team’s performance in the World Cup, Mary Lou met her future husband, Martin Lanigan, in Peter’s Pub in downtown Dublin. They married in 1996 in a Catholic wedding