When my grandfather came into the visiting-room, flea-bites covered his face, his hands, his throat, his ears.
He was transferred to Collins Barracks. My grandmother made him an apple pie and went to visit him with the three boys. No visiting on a Sunday, she was told. The pie, a suspicious object, was not passed on to her husband. The boys ate it.
That night, at three in the morning, there was a hammering at the door. It was Jim Moore, the Special Branch detective notorious for his vindictiveness and lechery. My grandmother refused to let him in. Jim Moore shouted, ‘We’re moving James to the Curragh.’
It was four years before James and Eileen saw each other again. When they looked back on the perplexing circumstances in which the machine-gun had been discovered at Friars Road, they came to the conclusion that a person must have informed on them. They also began to wonder whether Jim’s release had not been a trap and whether he had not all along been a dupe of the Special Branch. Jim had always been a careful man, slow to take people into his confidence, but after his internment this caution turned to suspiciousness. Years without privacy, without respite from the anxiety of being spied on by so-called comrades (‘Your best friend could betray you,’ Grandma said), years of being subjected to false and vicious rumours concerning his wife, and of seeing the worst side of his fellow internees, left him disillusioned and untrusting. ‘He came out very, very bitter,’ Grandma said. ‘He was very bitter about what one Irishman would do to another.’ This fear – of betrayal, of being tricked – stayed with my grandfather. In the late ’forties, money was so unaccountably tight that he concluded that Grandma was being blackmailed – whereas in fact she simply did not have the heart to tell her husband that, even though he was working so hard, there was just not enough to make ends meet. Even in the ’sixties, when he moved into his own house in Douglas, my grandfather’s paranoia continued. The back garden of the new house abutted the garden of Mr Sparrow, the policeman, and this worried him: ‘Draw the curtain,’ he would direct, ‘he might be looking down at us.’ After the Curragh my grandfather was plagued by suspicions – suspicion of his loving wife, suspicion of his neighbours, suspicion of the authorities – and was never entirely free of an inkling that a deception was being played on him and that things were not what they seemed.
In March 1995, I got in touch with my great-uncle Paddy Lynch. Paddy was my grandmother’s younger brother and I knew that he’d been interned at the Curragh with his brothers, Jack and Tadhg, and my grandfather. I had never met Paddy but was told he was a terrific fellow who loved a yarn. He lived in Maynooth, Co. Kildare, with his wife Peig (herself described by my grandmother as ‘a staunch one’), and I wrote to him asking if we might meet. After I’d received no reply, I gave him a call. I wasn’t expecting an especially warm response – I was, after all, a virtual stranger with an English accent – but, even so, the depth of his feeling took me by surprise. Right from the off, he was agitated and antagonized. ‘Haven’t you received my letter?’ he asked. I had not, I told him. ‘Well, I’ve no intention of discussing the camp in any shape or form, or having any dialogue about it whatsoever.’ Before I could think of anything to say, Paddy quickly added, ‘When I left the camp, it was dead and buried and never going to be resurrected. It’s fifty years since I left and you won’t get me to mention one iota about it. I’ve been pestered down the years by fourteen or fifteen people, by people well up in the writing business, offering me a lot of money. I won’t do it. I could do with the money, but I couldn’t take one cent. It would be blood money. If you want to talk about Gaelic games or horseracing, my pet subjects, we could spend three to four days talking about them. But that’s all. You’re perfectly welcome to come round, I wouldn’t want to put you off. But we’d have nothing to talk about except the weather.’
A few days later, Paddy’s letter – which had been held up in a mail strike – arrived.
Dear Joseph,
I was released from the Camp fifty years ago come 3rd of next May. As I was walking across the plains of Kildare, I stopped for a moment, looked back, and said ‘Paddy, everything in there is dead and buried for ever.’ I have no intention to resurrect even one word to anybody.
If you have visions of dialogue between us, hoping to prise me open, it’s not on. End of story.
Some months later, in September 1995, I travelled from Cork to County Kildare. I drove in a bewildering alternation of hard rain and extraordinarily pure sunlight that suddenly turned the plain at Cashel bright as Africa. I passed through grey, half-pretty towns – Fermoy, Urlingford, Durrow – and, taking a detour from the main road, through villages that had not sloughed off the old colonial topography: the long, high wall that runs by the road as you enter the village, with tall woodland behind the wall; the continuation of the wall for an unseemly distance; a gate in the wall with a lodge and a lane leading to a Big House obscured by trees; the resumption of the wall and treetops; then the grey, treeless village: a petrol station, bungalows, and old cottages with pebbledashed walls made of a hotchpotch of brick and mortar and stone.
County Kildare gave the appearance of being devoted entirely to horses and their riding, breeding and training. Signboards advertised pony shows and gymkhanas and race meetings and stud farms, and in places the white railings of gallops ran alongside the road before nimbly curving away into intensely lush grassland. I passed through Kildare town, and not long after I saw a sign giving the direction of the Curragh Camp – still in use, as it had been during the Emergency, as the central military barracks of the army of the Irish State. I had no idea what to expect. I had never been to the Curragh – the plain which gave the Camp its name – and had not yet read anything about the Camp.
I turned down a side-road and moments later was presented with a desolate spectacle. Before me was a broad, featureless belt of heathland traversed by a single empty road. The road led to a distant wood of pine trees. Within the wood and visible above the treetops was the unmistakable silhouette of a military tower. A few sheep stained with turquoise dye grazed on the thin grass of the heath. On the rainy eastern horizon were the Wicklow Mountains, whose charcoal shapes seemed to have smudged the grey sky above them. As I drove slowly across the plain, I began to feel apprehensive. My approach was clearly visible to anyone in the red-brick tower, which looked like the Victorian tower of my Cambridge college, a suicides’ favourite that, student rumour had it, was the work of an architect of prisons and lunatic asylums. A sign asserted, NO PHOTOGRAPHS ON PAIN OF IMPRISONMENT. I came to the wood. Abandoned concrete huts pocked a hollow to my left. I drove on slowly. I stopped at a cross-roads surrounded by a cluster of buildings that included a post office and a general goods store. Young men in civvies and number one haircuts slouched on concrete steps. Barriers blocked the road to the left and right, which were restricted to AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY. I was at the centre of the camp, and I realized what made me so uneasy. It was the proximity of incontestable power.
By leave of the camp commander, I had a meeting arranged with a Corporal Seoirse Devlin at the Curragh Military Museum, which was located in a large, one-roomed brick building. Corporal Devlin was a small, compact, extraordinarily enthusiastic man in his thirties. The Museum, he explained, opened in 1955 after an American millionaire called Chester Beatty donated one of the top eight weapons collections in the world to the Irish nation. Corporal Devlin was the curator of the collection and looked after it practically single-handedly. ‘It was worth the trouble,’ he said, gesturing eagerly at the exhibits. Housed in glass cases was a startling variety of exotic instruments of destruction: African and Dayak swords, daggers from Caucasia and India, clubs from Polynesia, Japanese muskets (especially fine, these, the corporal said), and a whole arsenal of bejewelled, ancient and otherwise precious spears, knives, cutlasses, pistols, scimitars, battle-axes and bludgeons. In addition to the Beatty exhibits, some of Corporal Devlin’s private collection of military memorabilia was on show: handguns, a Lewis machine-gun of the kind Jim O
’Neill used to teach his men to assemble and disassemble, military motorbikes, rifles, military uniforms and jackets that included old Irish Volunteer and IRA tunics. It was an extraordinary feat of accumulation, given the limited time and money available to a corporal in the Irish army and the limited interest of his employer in its own cultural history.
I mentioned that there didn’t seem to be anything in the Museum about the old internment camp. There was a certain amount of material, the Corporal said, and he showed me a photograph of a group of cheerful young German officers being served tea by a waiter wearing a white jacket and a bow tie. Seeing my astounded expression, Corporal Devlin explained that from the summer of 1940 onwards, about 40 RAF men (who included Poles, Free French and Canadian fliers) and 60 Germans, mainly Luftwaffe men, were interned at the Curragh in accordance with Ireland’s neutrality policy. These fellows – most of whom had crashed in Ireland or its territorial waters – had it pretty good. The Germans received their salaries in sterling, and every RAF man had his own room and received pay of 35 shillings a week. Food, which included roast beef once a week, was never in short supply, and drink could be bought cheaply by the Allies at a bar stocked by the Dublin British Legation. One man even shipped his wife over to Ireland, spending the days with her in Newbridge, which was just a mile or two away, and returning to the camp in the evening in accordance with the terms of his parole, which allowed internees to leave the camp so long as they came back at night. The internees would cycle into neighbouring towns and work on nearby farms. Once a month they were allowed to catch a bus into Dublin. Although there was no fraternization, the two opposing sides (in the only instance in the war of their co-imprisonment) greeted each other amicably. A schoolboy’s code of honour governed their relations with their Irish captors. If an escaping prisoner knew he had been spotted, in deference to the guards’ lack of ammunition and the obvious pointlessness of any bloodshed, he surrendered on a ‘bang-bang, you’re dead’ principle (an American who bent the parole rules to escape to Belfast was sent back by his superiors). Whereas Allied internees were released in mid-1943, the Germans were held until the end of the war. ‘At first,’ Corporal Devlin said, ‘the Germans plotted and attempted one or two escapes, but soon they settled down. They didn’t have such a bad time of it, in the end.’ Indeed, only a short while ago a group of former German prisoners had revisited the Curragh to relive the old days. All this was fairly well documented, Corporal Devlin said, and two books had been written about the Allied internees alone.
‘What about the war-time Irish internees?’ I asked. The corporal touched his round glasses. ‘Well, that is still a sensitive subject,’ he said. ‘It so happens that I’ve done some digging around, but I haven’t come up with anything. A lot of documents have been burned.’ ‘So there’s no record of the IRA internments? Only of the Allied and German?’ The corporal nodded. ‘And there isn’t a monument or anything of that kind? Some acknowledgement?’ Devlin touched his glasses again. ‘It isn’t talked about,’ he said. ‘It’s a non-subject.’ I asked whether there was any chance that I could see the site of the old republican internment camp. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said apologetically. ‘It’s in a security area and you’d need authorization to go there. You’re not missing much,’ Corporal Devlin said. ‘There aren’t any huts left.’ Then he retrieved a book and showed me a sketch plan which showed the lay-out of the camps..
I left Corporal Devlin in his museum and walked back to my car, which was parked by the crossroads at the centre of the camp. I decided to try my luck. I went to reception office and asked for permission to see the old German internment camp. A couple of phone-calls later, I was being driven to the south part of the Curragh Camp by a soldier who’d been detailed to give me five minutes of his time. He led me into a field bespattered with sheepshit. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Here’s the old German camp.’
We were at the perimeter of the camp. To the south was half a mile of open plain where sheep grazed and a horsewoman cantered; tall trees and a village, Brownstown, marked the limit of the plain. To the east were the Wicklow Mountains; to the north, the body of the military camp, with its redbrick buildings; to the west, a misty plain.
I entered the field and walked around for a few minutes. The foundations of the camp buildings, concrete ridges that protruded from the grass, were still visible; the wooden superstructures of the huts had all disappeared. Slabs of concrete marked the locations of the stoves around which the internees had huddled. Nettles, thistles and weeds grew everywhere. The only structure of any size left standing was the red-brick chimney the Germans built for the cookhouse. Then I walked towards the neighbouring field, which was the location of the old republican camp. The two camps were separated by a deep trench that still contained ancient curls of barbed wire. I walked to the edge of the trench and gazed out at the site of my grandfather’s five-year captivity; for unspecified security reasons, I was allowed no closer. I could make out the foundations of the huts in the grass and, in a slight dale at the edge of the campsite, the old playing field.
I turned back and returned to my car with a feeling of relief. The whole of Curragh Camp, not just the old internment grounds, had a charmless, depressingly defective air, and I could understand why the troops nowadays preferred to commute into work from the surrounding towns. Even if they’d wanted to live here, much of the picturesque red-brick Victorian terraced housing designated for their accommodation was no longer fit for human habitation. The camp had been built by the British in 1855, and it seemed to me that the place was still clouded by its years of service as the principal barracks of the foreign power and the headquarters of the Black and Tans.
As if to confirm this thought, the sun emerged from a blue gash of sky as I drove out of the camp. The day was suddenly a glorious one and the clouds white as cricketers. I noticed the grandstand of the Curragh racetrack a mile or two away and the pale H’s of rugby posts rising here and there on the heath.
I drove on to Dublin. I entered the city centre and then, crossing to the Liffey’s northern bank, drove to Arbour Hill, which rose just north of the river and whose atmospheric old working-class housing was becoming fashionable. I paid a visit to Arbour Hill Prison cemetery. It was a peaceful, tree-lined place. There was a carefully tended lawn and a memorial wall inscribed with the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Ireland read out in public by Patrick Pearse to launch the Easter Rising:
Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, calls her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman.
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and the equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole of the people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
The signatories of the Proclamation – Thomas J. Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett – were executed by firing squad and their remains, treated with quicklime, were buried here, at Arbour Hill Prison, where a memorial stone with inscriptions in Irish and English recalled them. When I first came across the text of the Proclamation, as a twenty-one year-old student in a Cambridge University library, the surge of emotion I felt was so strong that my scalp and cheeks and ears prickled, and it’s even possible that my eyes clouded over. I cannot fully account for these intense sensations of patriotic exhilaration, but I know that it’s only once you are buoyantly swept away in their simplifying current that you realize quite what a burden it is to wade through that other, finicky, obstructive, futile, morally muddy world, and what an absolute relief it is to be quickly towed by certainty and feel significant. No matter how familiar I grow with it, I am always moved by the Proclamation of Independence and grateful for it.
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