When major Gaelic games were scheduled, the pavements on the Falls Road filled with throngs of men and boys, too poor to pay for a bus ride. Though my father was one of those men, he claimed shoe leather got him to the game quicker than a bus. The return journey was often depressing because local football and hurling teams rarely matched the skills of teams from the island’s other provinces. I was always bemused by the playing of ‘The Soldier’s Song’, the Irish national anthem, before games because the majority of spectators knew only a few familiar lines or phrases of it in Gaelic, especially the closing lines, which were always sung with gusto. Had the games been held in Dublin, more people would have been able to sing the entire anthem in Gaelic. As a friend of mine later explained, Catholics in Northern Ireland liked everything Gaelic except the language, while Catholics on the rest of the island learned Irish at school and rarely spoke it.
I often overheard adults talking politics in my childhood, but it was in primary school where history and social awareness were defined for me. I took the De La Salle Brothers at their word when they taught me history because they had a most persuasive way of getting their message across. They used thick leather straps to beat knowledge into your hands or legs if you displayed little aptitude for learning or if your attention waned during lessons. I acquired one of their straps decades later and its construction impressed me: several machine-stitched layers and a perfectly formed handle. It was indeed a formidable weapon when wielded by a Brother keen to dispense raw justice. The prospect of being battered with a strap encouraged me to pay attention in class. When my homework required me to learn chunks of Patrick Pearse’s speech over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa, I devoted hours to the task.
Catholics of Ireland revered Pearse, considering him one of the most prominent revolutionaries of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, which paved the way for the eventual end of British rule in twenty-six of Ireland’s counties. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was a rebel from an earlier generation and the first Irish Republican to organise the dynamite bombing of English cities in the 1880s. After he died in exile on Staten Island, New York, in 1915, the Republican movement shipped his body home for a majestic burial. It was a stunning public relations coup for a movement which needed a spark to ignite a dying political passion.
Pearse, a schoolteacher, poet and devout Catholic, was chosen to deliver the graveside oration in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, where O’Donovan Rossa was buried. The oration would become the centrepiece of Irish Republican rhetoric and, in the decades following, the Christian and De La Salle Brothers made sure every pupil familiarised themselves with it.
By their promotion of Pearse’s idealism in the Northern Ireland of the early 1950s, the Brothers became the vanguard of the blood sacrifice tradition of an Irish Republicanism that would find fertile ground two decades later in the emerging Provisional IRA. When the Provisional IRA took to the political stage in 1971, some of my classmates from the early 1950s played prominent roles, in particular Gerry Adams. Four decades later, when I went to interview him, he invited me to go next door to St Finian’s, our old primary school, to look at some photos of us when we were students there.
As we walked through the narrow stone entrance of the school, which had remained unchanged architecturally for half a century, I expected to inhale the smells of stale milk and urine, which permeated the schoolyard all those years before. Now, the crates of empty milk bottles were gone, but the toilets still faced some of the classrooms. Students met Gerry Adams with smiles while I received curious stares when we entered the main building. Boys as young as five gave him admiring glances and reached out to shake his hand. After we looked through our class photos, he whispered with a wry smile it was time for the Angelus. I was somewhat speechless, having forgotten the prayers of my childhood. But, when the bells of nearby Clonard Monastery rang out, memories of me reciting the Angelus floated back. It was a prayer devoted to the time the Virgin Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel and told she would bear a child. In the 1950s, pupils stood up in every classroom throughout Ireland to recite it. I now found myself standing alongside Gerry Adams at the head of a class of seven-year-old boys, their hands clasped in devotion. He led the prayer while I bowed my head, embarrassed as I stumbled over the words. A line of it struck me as emblematic of what I was witnessing, ‘And the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’
Gerry Adams and the pupils spoke it with such requisite reverence, their eyes closed, heads bowed ever so slightly. When the prayer ended, boys reached out to touch Gerry like pilgrims touching a relic in the hope of being transformed. They were thrilled to be close to their hero in the flesh and were trying to come to terms with the sheer joy of it. The historian Thomas Carlyle said history is like a letter of instruction handed down to us. It is charred and burned and pieces are missing, making it difficult to read. In Ireland, people never faced that problem. The oral history tradition, which was handed down to them and fed their understanding of the past, was vivid and seemingly complete. Looking at Gerry Adams and his young admirers, I saw how the past was made more enticing by the presence of a living icon instead of the dead ones whom I was once encouraged to imagine. As I left St Finian’s that day, I thought of the ‘Angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell ringing out in the foggy dew’.
We are witnesses of Time with a duty
to reflect the past without bitterness.
– Martin Dillon
PART ONE
ONE
Belfast – Early Family Roots
My mother insisted she preferred her children on her knee than on her conscience. It was her way of saying she agreed with the Vatican’s ruling that artificial birth control and abortion were mortal sins. As a consequence, she had ten of us, starting with me, Martin, and my fraternal twin, Damien, followed by seven girls and the last in line, a boy named Patrick. The girls were Frances, Ursula, Mary, Monica, Imelda, Attracta and Bernadette. Starting with the eldest, I learned to rhyme off their names in that order.
Irrespective of my mother’s commitment to Church dogma, she really wanted lots of children, and like many Catholic women of her generation she never considered motherhood a burden. I tend to believe my parents paid little attention to the Catholic version of birth control called the rhythm method. My mother believed it was God’s will she had a large family. For her, marriage and the sex act were not only about pleasure but also about procreation.
While born Mary Teresa, she was always known as Maureen, one of eight children born to Edward Clarke and Margaret Clarke, née Carson. Her father, Ed Clarke, was a troubled individual, who was abusive towards his wife and children. Some people said he was angry with the world because one of his legs was shorter than the other, which required him to wear a heavy, ugly boot. It left him with a pronounced limp, and sometimes children poked fun at him in the street. He was from Ballymanagh, a townland close to Ballina, County Mayo, in the West of Ireland. He became estranged from his family at an early age and ran off to London where he worked for a decade in the famous Saville Row garment district, becoming an expert men’s tailor. Years later, he moved to Belfast where he met and married my grandmother, Margaret Carson. They settled into No 4 Ross Place, a two-level, brick house opposite St Peter’s pro-cathedral in the Catholic, Lower Falls area of West Belfast.
Ed’s story of how he left