In April 1922, Jim O’Neill was twelve and a half years old and living in Kilbrittain. He would have learned of the killings from tense adult mutterings and coded kitchen discussions. What he may not have picked up was that the deadly events were deeply rooted in his own family. The IRA had broken into Ballygroman House in the first place because Woods and the Hornibrooks were suspected of involvement in a shadowy counter-revolutionary loyalist underground, the Protestant Action Group. The most notable of the killings attributed to the Protestant Action Group, the ones that cried most loudly for vengeance, were the unrequited deaths, in February 1921, of Jim O’Neill’s first cousins, James and Timothy Coffey.
But there was a twist: the Coffeys’ killers were not the Protestant Action Group, an entity that was very probably mythic rather than real. The brothers were killed by members of a Royal Irish Constabulary undercover ‘special squad’ disguised as farmers; not, in other words, by Captain Woods or the Hornibrooks.
These three dead Protestants were multiply entombed. Their violent deaths were not reported in the Irish newspapers; their bodies were buried in secret somewhere in West Cork; and their remains, unlike those of northern Catholics shot dead as informers, were never officially missed.
Although a few prominent republicans voiced disapproval of the April massacre, its perpetrators, who were almost certainly active members of the IRA, were never identified or ‘brought to justice’: not by the IRA, which at the time was effectively responsible for law and order in Cork, nor by history. The April massacre, as Peter Hart observed, was as unknown as the Kilmichael ambush was celebrated. Grandma, with her phenomenal memory and longevity, represented a near-exception to the general non-remembrance; but in her mind the sectarian slaughter had survived only as a story of the curious succession of families to occupy a town house in Dunmanway. In this sense, the April massacre was comparable to the Adana massacre of 1909, which lived on in the Dakad family as a tale of eating ortolans in Cyprus.
But there were further and deeper parallels between events in Cork and Cilicia. The April shootings in the Bandon valley were accompanied by a wave of death threats against Protestants, and the combination caused a panicked exodus from the county, with trains and boats out of Cork packed with refugees for a fortnight. Only six months before, in November 1921, just such scenes had taken place on the jetties of Mersin, as Cilicia’s terrified Armenians and other Christians fled the country en masse. The migrant groups in Ireland and Turkey were remarkably similar. Both were minorities regarded as a fifth column of the foreign enemy; both suffered a demographic cataclysm unmentioned by dominant nationalist histories; and finally, both left a vestigial population in the new nation-state whose members instinctively understood that, whatever the political and constitutional affirmations to the contrary, their citizenship was a matter of indulgence and not of right. I’d always suspected that Admiral Somerville’s descendants’ lack of interest in knowing the identity of his killers reflected their belief that it didn’t really matter which meaningless Ryan or Murphy – or O’Neill – had pulled the trigger. Now I sensed that their disdain may also have been due to an inherited, self-preservative knowledge that to lay claim to certain kinds of justice, historical or political, was to overstep the mark; and I understood why Mrs Salter-Townshend had gone out of her way to characterize Castletownshend as sleepy fishing village of no political importance.
I found myself in a state of shocked, almost angry clarity, as if these revelations of Cork’s past, which were so tangled with my family’s past, formed a recovered memory of something I’d concealed from myself. I’d always known, of course, that families and nations have self-serving editions of their pasts, and would have freely admitted that Ireland was no exception. But I hadn’t been asked to think hard about it in relation to the Protestants, and therefore I didn’t: because, for all my objectivity and outsider’s perspective, I was as susceptible as any Catholic Irishman to dazzling by the national myths.
In the brilliant assertion of the Proclamation of Independence, the Irish Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and the equal opportunities to all its citizens, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, no matter their religion. And so it is a great cause of pride to the overwhelmingly Catholic nationalist movement, and vital to the credibility of its vision of an inclusive united Ireland, that so many of its greatest soldiers and apologists and martyrs have been Protestants: Theobald Wolfe Tone, Charles Stuart Parnell, Roger Casement, Erskine Childers, Countess Markiewicz. These admirable figures invest the idea of the Irish nation-state with an extraordinary moral pedigree, and in my mind they stacked up in a kind of totem pole symbolic of nationalism’s unseen, ecstatic intimacy with the forces of justice. This didn’t prevent me from taking a critical view of republican activities or even of the aspiration to a united Ireland; but it did equip me with the conviction that the nationalist impulse, even in its most misguided and violent manifestations, was essentially high-minded.
As a consequence, I had always viewed sectarian killings – in which the victim is marked for death because of his religion – as essentially the preserve of loyalists, who seemed to specialize in shooting Catholic taxi-drivers and (as happened in July 1998) burning to death young Catholic children. Republican political violence, by contrast, was – shockingly but nevertheless sincerely – directed at targets designated by their functions: soldiers, police officers, judges, politicians, and contractors who supplied these instruments of British government with goods and services. Occasionally, a particularly horrifying or inexplicable killing would shake this dichotomy, but not for long. As time passed, the outrage would assume a maverick character and the totemic figures, unyielding in their virtue, would hover again into view. I wasn’t immune to the appeal of the modern icons, either: the deaths in 1981 of Bobby Sands and nine others in Long Kesh Prison, hunger striking in protest at the treatment of IRA prisoners as ordinary criminal inmates, attested to the idealism with which even the most violent nationalists acted. And finally, of course, there was my own family: my knowledge of their good faith extinguished any real doubt in my mind about the essential purity of the nationalist enterprise. Which explains why I felt guilty and anguished not only about the Cork pogrom but about another terrible thing that had, at last, become apparent to me: that Admiral Somerville had been killed because he was a Protestant.
There was no way around it. Somerville wasn’t the only Irishman in Cork to give references to local men seeking to enlist in the Crown’s forces. What distinguished him from the other referees – priests, councillors and other men of standing, a significant number of whom, like Somerville and indeed Tom Barry, had at some point served in the British army – was his religion.
How could this be? How could my great-uncle Tadhg, the man I was named after, who’d earned the respect and warm remembrance of my father and other decent people for his humanity and intelligence, who considered sectarianism anathematical to his strongly held nationalist principles, have reconciled himself to a sectarian killing?
Answer: because the onus of reconciliation only arises on the appearance of two mutually inconsistent facts. Tadhg didn’t for a moment see that he was committing a sectarian act, and so there was nothing for him to reconcile. And why didn’t he see? Once again, because only a single set of facts was visible to him: that Somerville’s actions made him a British agent who had forfeited life. A second, irreconcilable set of facts – that Somerville’s actions were no different from those of scores of others – was nowhere in sight. In this way, my great-uncle’s principles and conscience stayed intact. There were no double standards because there were no double facts.
This structure of ethical thinking had a wider application. I had often wondered how so many republicans could be highly sensitive to injustice and suffering and yet highly adept at living with the consequences of their bombings and shootings. I’d put it down to an unusually rigorous self-belief that helped them to overcome internal confl
ict. Now I suspected that there was little or no internal conflict to overcome, because only the strategic consequences of violence were internalized. The human consequences – the consequences to the victims – were externalized into a moral outer space.
I knew, of course, that this kind of morally self-sparing compartmentalization is common to military organizations everywhere. All armed forces narrate the world in terms that will enable their combatants, who are ordinary men and women, to kill and inflict damage effectively. Most basically, the humanity of the prospective victims is effaced in wartime by blankly characterizing them as the enemy. But most wars and their brutalizing narratives are temporary and, crucially, coterminous; the war ends, its lethal editions of the world dry up like floodwaters, and the former adversaries fall back on a residual pool of humane, or at least non-martial, stories about themselves and each other. But what if there is no healthful reservoir? The conflict in which Somerville was killed was well over three centuries old by the time of his death, and I began to ask myself whether this miserable perpetuity was the sign of a country saturated from top to bottom with deadly narratives. The surface currents of Protestant bigotry were clearly visible; but there also had to be less perceptible flows, deeper down. It was obvious, once I thought about it, that these could only come from one source. The only narratives that pervaded to the very bed of Ireland’s political culture were those of Irish nationalism, which are treasured to this day.
The stated principles of nationalism – equality, freedom, brotherhood, etc. – were as noble and unimpeachable as its dead, and they shed a beautiful light on the dim and perilous moral terrain that had to be crossed to achieve our nation’s autonomy. In a fundamental sense, though, this luminosity led us astray; unlike the Old Masters who slipped a skull or some other token of human fallibility into their paintings’ darknesses, in our self-righteousness we lost sight of what lay in the shade.
The human significance of Protestants in Ireland, like that of any other ethnic minority, depended on the visibility in the culture of their complex ideas about themselves. Not surprisingly, these ideas, which included contrarian unionist narratives, were overshadowed by the nationalist revolution. This was not solely the result of the nationalist doctrine that all the people of Ireland were Irish and equally so, but also of a set of secondary wartime doctrines that derived their logic and virtue from the primary doctrine: and so Protestant opponents of the revolution, actual or perceived, were cast as informers or Orangemen or British agents and were liable to be ‘executed’ and, in death, to be literally labelled as such. The April massacre, however, occurred during the truce after the Anglo-Irish War. None of the military epithets could be applied to the victims, and their deaths therefore could not be explained in the usual nationalist terms. What was startling was that, in the absence of a conventional nationalist explanation, the Catholic community was struck dumb; it possessed no alternative vocabulary with which to speak of the dead. It seemed that the only significance Protestants were capable of enjoying was nationalist significance; which meant that most of them, including the April massacre victims, had no real significance at all.
Evidently, just as centuries of hostile interrelations had done little or nothing to humanize Syrians and Armenians and Turks in each other’s eyes, so it was with the Protestants and Catholics of West Cork, who, in Con Conner’s euphemistic phrase, lived in their own little worlds. I had always known that the Bandon valley Protestants, tainted by a reputation for extreme bigotry, formed one of the most resented of the seventeenth-century plantation settlements, but I’d never really contemplated the political effects of the animosity and had roughly assumed that, somehow or other, nationalism’s uplifting tenets elevated its adherents from sectarian emotions. In fact, the April massacre and the Catholic community’s response to it – silence and more violence – suggested that the opposite was true: that nationalism simultaneously nurtured and concealed a capacity in ourselves for a hatred as powerful as that which led to the oblivion of the Armenians.
All of which explained how Tadhg Lynch could commit a sectarian killing without him – or, decades later, me – seeing it for what it was; and why Tadhg and Angela and Joe Collins were prompted to pick out a Protestant for death: because, at some level, they must have sensed that the killing of a prominent Protestant would sound, after the IRA’s years of military inactivity, like a tribal siren.
It was precisely this primitivism that so disturbed the Catholic public at the time. Had Somerville ignored a warning, the killing could have been shaped into a story of hard but fair play; but the absence of warning left the community face to face with its sectarian demons – a prospect so haunting that even Tom Barry disassociated himself from an action he himself had sanctioned. In the event, a communal exorcism was performed by a deft act of narrative. By repeated references to anti-unionist episodes in his ancestry and to the fact that he never engaged in active recruitment, the Admiral was cast as a quasi-nationalist good old boy. There was, of course, no direct mention of his religion. The actual, nuanced identities of this Protestant, unionist Anglo-Irishman were blotted out like the shadows of a man under floodlights.
Naturally, public outrage over Admiral Somerville quickly died out. There were no songs written about him or bars named after him or annual commemorations instigated. His ghost, unlike the ghosts of the patriot dead, did not make demands on the consciences of the living.
As it happened, Boyle Somerville was a great enthusiast of ghosts and paranormal phenomena. His interest was shared by his sister Edith, who believed that during the Civil War, when republicans posed a grave threat to the family and its properties, her late uncle Kendal Coghill had organized the spirits of bygone Somervilles and Coghills into a squadron that protected their living kin. After his retirement from the Royal Navy, the Admiral decided to specialize in the field of psychometry, a method of communication with the dead in which the medium makes use of some object or place closely associated with a deceased person. Boyle agreed to put his particular skill at the disposition of Edith, who planned to write a family history, and to contact their deceased ancestors on her behalf; but he was shot before he was able to help her in this way. Edith Somerville was undeterred. She invoked Boyle’s co-operation from beyond the grave and incorporated into her book information about the family that her brother’s spirit had been able to convey to her. In acknowledgement of his ghostly input, she credited him as co-author of Records of the Somerville Family (1940).
A glance at this book informed me that the Somervilles came to Ireland in 1692, in the aftermath of the final defeat of the Catholic rebel army of James Stuart by the forces of the Protestant King William of Orange. This was the time of the introduction of the Penal Laws, which prohibited Catholics from voting, holding office, practising law, teaching, owning a horse worth more than five pounds, receiving an education at a Catholic school, or leaving land to a single son. The Somervilles themselves arrived as refugees from religious persecution by Catholics in Scotland, and it occurred to me that Admiral Somerville in this sense resembled Joseph Dakak, whose family had likewise come to Mersin in response to religious oppression. Admiral Somerville, like Joseph, belonged to a rich and profoundly self-sufficient religious minority with a tradition of looking on the national majority as an unfrequentable, undifferentiated and largely negligible mass. Like Joseph, Somerville made gestures of goodwill to the majority group (for example, making donations to St Vincent de Paul Society) but insisted on retaining his ethnic and cultural distinctiveness, including his military title, which, like Joseph’s adopted surname of Dakad, had the effect of associating him very closely with recent imperial oppressors. Both men were self-cultivating types with an interest in history. Both relied on unreliable nationalist assurances of their equal citizenship. And finally, both failed to appreciate the appearance of their actions in the eyes of men who saw the world through nationalist eyes, men like Tadhg Lynch and, of course, Jim O’Neill. An unsettling scenario of shado
ws presented itself: if one substituted Joseph Dakak for his double, Somerville, and Jim O’Neill for Tadhg Lynch, one was left with the scenario of Jim shooting Joseph dead.
I had never really invested the image of my moonlighting grandfather with political significance. But now, when I imagined him walking through the black fields of West Cork, net in hand, or tracking the dark water with his sons, I associated his hand-me-down knowledge of river currents, mudbanks, copses, and salmon pools with another West Cork inheritance. Included in the birthright and estate of my grandfather, who never came into Ardkitt or Graunriagh, was a tutelary hatred that imprisoned him long before, and long after, the Curragh. I now understood what had frightened my father on those nights when Jim O’Neill took him out to the river; it was his patrimony.
New York, May, 2000
Epilogue
Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead.… What a glorious moment!
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead
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