In some locales history is visible. For example, there is a little valley known as Beal na mBlath (the Mouth of Flowers), which you reach by driving along a deserted country road north of Dunmanway, turning right at a crossroads marked by an inn, and stopping a further hundred yards or so along the road. There is a grassy bank on one side of the road and a wooded bank on the other, and, as happens on so many West Cork lanes, there is the sound of a brook shivering in a thicket somewhere. It was here, a memorial stone reminds us, that, on 22 August 1922, Michael Collins met his death. A few miles north-west of Beal na mBlath is the road from Dunmanway to Macroom. At a remote point in the road, not far from a crossroads, you’ll see a monument shaped like an enormous tombstone. This commemorates the Kilmichael ambush: in November 1920, Tom Barry’s IRA Cork No. 3 Brigade, for the loss of three men, surprised and killed eighteen British Auxiliaries, burned two armoured lorries, and seized arms and ammunition. The whole fray can be re-imagined by reference to a relief model of the terrain that’s been placed on site, complete with electric lights of varying colours to illuminate the positions of the two lorries, the IRA command post, and the three points on the roadside rocks from which the IRA men fired; it is apparent, if you walk down the exposed road in question, just how well chosen was the ambush site and how little hope the Auxiliaries had of escape. The monument to the boys of Kilmichael was unveiled in around 1970. To mark the occasion, several hundred marchers paraded in a military formation. At the front walked Tom Barry and Jim O’Neill and, attached to his hand, Jim’s oldest grandson. At a certain point I broke free of my grandfather’s grip and ran on ahead, leading the column on my own; turning around, I saw the marchers salute as they passed the monument and so I saluted, too.
I have no memory of my grandfather at all, and the Kilmichael incident is known to me only through the chuckling recollection of my grandmother. She related the story as we stood together at the monument on a chilly, drizzling November day. As my sturdy, beloved grandmother described my younger self marching on this road, I was surprised by a surge of gratification which, had I not uneasily suppressed it, would have come close to euphoria. In however tiny a respect, my trajectory had intersected this rough land and its people, who had granted me uncomplicated admission into their ranks; and, for whatever reason, I was suddenly engulfed by a feeling of kindredness and racination that was unaccustomed and thrilling. This was something other than a simple wave of pleasure set off by an encounter with one’s cultural origins; it was, rather, an intense recognition – or what felt like recognition – of a primitive affiliation to a political and historical community, an affiliation so pure and overwhelming that for an instant it felt as though I had stumbled upon a solution to a riddle.
Then again, I’m open as anyone to the spells places can cast. When, in March 1995, I flew into Cork city for the first time in years and looked out of the aeroplane window to see the two channels of the river Lee dazzling among my birthplace’s low hills and the sun shining on one half of the city and the rain falling on the other, I was bewitched. My entrancement continued in the taxi from the airport, for as we descended into Cork a rainbow, the biggest and most fiercely striped I’d ever seen, made a miraculous half-circle from the valley down below to the highland on my right. I could not help associating this iridescent loop of vapour with the optimistic political atmosphere in the country. The ceasefire declared by the IRA and its paramilitary loyalist counterparts was over six months old. Daytime patrols by the British army in the North were waning, troop numbers were falling, and the talk was of exploratory talks between the British government and Sinn Féin. True, some issues looked troublesome, in particular the insistence by London and unionists that paramilitary organizations had to disarm prior to their participation in all-party talks; but the general view was that the benefits of peace had proved so substantial that, however tough and protracted the road ahead might be, a return to violence was out of the question. Things were looking up.
The taxi drove me to my grandmother’s house in Ballinlough, a district of Douglas in south Cork dominated by a large estate of tidy, pebble-dashed houses built forty or so years ago. I arrived to find a Sunday evening family gathering in full swing. Crowded into the living room were three uncles, Jim, Terry and Padraig, and their wives, Kitty, Mary and Joan; my aunt Angela, down from Dublin for the weekend; my aunt Marian and her husband Don; and, of course, my grandmother, who gripped my face as I stepped over threshold and gave me two fervent kisses. I was happy to say little as the family talked amongst itself. The chatter – incessant, cheerful, uncontentious – ranged from the terrible weather (for two golfless years it hadn’t stopped raining) to local politics to the question of whose looks were inherited from whom. As I observed the goodwill and talk flowing around the room, I wondered how my warm and open family could ever keep things from each other – things that might amount to secrets. As I found out, they did; and it was as though, by some trick of chiaroscuro, the very brightness of such talk served to plunge unspoken matters all the further into obscurity.
Sometimes it appears that political convictions may be genetically transmitted characteristics, like a certain crookedness of the nose or the ability to swing a stick at a ball. My grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, the story went, was each imprisoned in the cause of Irish freedom. There was a nuance: although his father Peter was a rebel, Jim O’Neill’s republicanism mainly descended from the family of his mother, Annie O’Driscoll. Her father, William O’Driscoll, was a famous Land Leaguer, and on his release from Cork Gaol a crowd carried him shoulder-high into Kilbrittain and named him William the Conqueror.
I discovered that stories circulated plentifully among the O’Neills. My grandmother was their collector and teller-in-chief. It was she who told them earliest and shaped them longest, and she who was invested with the authority of having been there. Born on 19 May 1912, she was, in a manner of speaking, there in 1916 for the Easter Rising; there when the Irish Republican Army came into being, there during the Anglo-Irish War – in which Tomás MacCurtain Senior was shot dead in front of his family, and Terence MacSwiney, MacCurtain’s successor as Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger-strike – and during the Civil War. My grandmother was party to these mythic episodes and they were part of her. She said – and she wasn’t joking – that her terror of thunderstorms and loud noises in the night stemmed from the times when she cowered indoors while the British forces ran wild in the deserted streets of Dunmanway, hammering down doors and drunkenly shooting and murdering and causing mayhem.
Grandmother’s view of the world was profoundly political, if not downright Manichaean. Everywhere she saw the forces of justice and good locked into an unending, many-faceted conflict with the forces of injustice and evil. Approaching her ninetieth birthday, she continued to follow current affairs, taking sides on a wide range of issues: Balkan warfare, Central American flood relief, local industrial disputes, the persecution of gay broadcasters, the treatment of Rumanian immigrants. She made a point of buying The Big Issue, the magazine for the homeless, and knew all about the life of her regular vendor, Christy. When she visited me in London at the age of eighty-three, she instinctively befriended the two tramps – immense, bearded, raucous drunks – who slept at the corner of the street I lived in, and for years asked how ‘those two lads’ were getting on. Her consumption patterns were shaped by a variety of boycotts (against governments and corporations) and sympathies (for Irish-made products), and the time I flew over to Cork on RyanAir she did not hesitate to criticize me for using an airline that was bad to its workers. The war between right and wrong was without limitation, and whenever I visited my grandmother I was treated to up-to-the-minute despatches from the front. Very often the bulletin concerned some showdown, skirmish or exchange of words in which Grandma had been personally involved: an encounter with Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Catholic arch-unionist ideologue who denounces Irish nationalism as ‘Catholic imperialism’, whom she once upbraided in the streets of Dublin; or some occurrence whose very banality revealed