Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  —20—

  THAT WAS not bad. It wasn’t what I wanted. But it was an improvement. What did I want? I wanted ecstasy. I wanted something to heal my reaction to last night. I wanted to lose control. Well, I almost did. I was so close, but then the focking actress in me took over and I was playing games again. They were nice games. I’m grateful to You for them. But I wanted more. I think he did, too. But he never tells me what he wants. Fair play to him! I never tell him what I want either. I don’t know what I want.

  We were so close.

  And the gobshite has the nerve to read to me from me own spiritual book! Isn’t he wonderful!

  I love him so much.

  I had a talk with me ma last night. (Why am I telling You this? You know it already!) Typical Irish woman talk about such matters—round about, indirect, lots of silence, and sighs and winks and nods of the head. Well, me ma doesn’t wink, but it’s the same thing. And we’re talking in Irish, which must be the most indirect language in the world.

  Me: Aren’t there some women now who don’t like sex at all, at all?

  Ma: They say that there’re some so prim and proper that they never lose control.

  Me: Control, is it?

  Ma: (sigh).

  Me: ’Tis all right for the men to lose control, but not for the women?

  Ma: Sure, aren’t the men often just as much afraid as women?

  Me: (sigh).

  Ma and Me: (silence).

  Ma: Och, there isn ‘t much point in it, is there, unless both of them lose control?

  Me: Isn’t the thing about ecstasy?

  Ma: Isn’t it, now?

  Me: You can ‘t control ecstasy, can you?

  Me and Ma: (sigh).

  Me: Sure, it doesn’t happen all the time, does it?

  Ma: It doesn’t have to … but the more the better.

  Me and Ma: (silence after that uncharacteristically candid comment).

  Ma (sigh): ’Tis fear.

  Me (sigh): ‘Tis.

  Ma: Of the body.

  Me: And the things it makes you want, too.

  Ma: Aye, you have the right of it … a little bit of fear every time you start.

  Me (like I know what I’m talking about): Sweet fear.

  Ma: Aye. Delicious terror.

  Me: (sigh).

  Ma (after long pause): Some say that women want it more than men.

  Me: And why shouldn’t they?

  Me and Ma: (quiet laugh, just a little suggestive).

  Ma: Well, there are those who say it’s all about the fire inside, if you take me meaning

  Me: Aye, ‘tis the fire.

  Ma: They say that the fire inside the woman burns somethingfierce.

  Me: Do they now?

  Ma: ’Tis said that when the fire burns bright inside a woman it glows in her eyes.

  Me: Some would want to hide it.

  Ma (sigh): How else can their man tell it’s there?

  Me: How else?

  Ma: I wouldn ‘t know about them things, but isn ‘t it the fire they ‘re afraid of?

  Me (to meself): The hell you don’t know about it.

  Me: Aren’t they afraid if they let go there’ll be nothing left of them at all, at all?

  Ma: ’Tis them prim and proper ones who feel they have to hide so they can control their man, as if that was what love was all about.

  Me (to meself): That was pretty direct for her.

  Me (taking the risk of being equally direct): Aren’t they the ones who figure that if they take off their clothes that’s enough?

  Ma: And in the dark, too.

  Me and Ma: (Silence).

  Ma: Them as wants ecstasy has to take off more than their clothes, don’t they now?

  Me: Sure, you have the right of it, woman.

  And that was that.

  When she and me da were going up to their room (and didn’t I know what they are going to up there? Wasn’t the fire in her eyes?), she hugged me and said, “Things work out, Maire Fionnuala, when we give them a little time, don’t they?”

  Delicious terror? I’ve never felt that way! But I want to!

  The fire has been burning inside me since I saw him consume me with his eyes that foggy night in O’NeilTs. I want to let it out.

  Please help me.

  —21—

  IT’S TIME, Nuala Anne, that I begin to write my report, first of all about Kevin O’Higgins and then about Lady Augusta Downs. I’m not sure how they’re connected or even whether they have to be, except that they lived at the same time, a bad time for Ireland.

  I’m going to provide some background before you read the two stories the Gardai have put together and which I have scanned into my computer with Paperport.

  When you were growing up, my love, Ireland was one of the most peaceful countries in the world. It still is. The crime rate here is the lowest in Europe. Even Northern Ireland, despite, the political violence, has the lowest crime rate in, you should excuse the expression, the United Kingdom.

  The Irish people are peaceful folk if left to themselves. Unfortunately, they have not been left to themselves for half a dozen centuries or so. Since Cromwell and the Penal Times after him, there have always been revolutionary movements in the country, the United Irishmen in 1798 and the Fenians in 1848, for example. In addition to these organized rebels, there have also been waves of rural terrorists who fought the landlords, sometimes for freedom and justice, sometimes for their own profit. Such groups, often with names like the Ribbon Men and the White Boys, terrified the English and scared the Irish peasants. The modern IRA is not all that different from its predecessors. It was hard to tell who was a patriot and who was a thief. Most of them were both perhaps, because that is the way things are in an occupied and oppressed country, where starvation lurks at the next bend in the road.

  Still most Irish people were too hungry and also too peaceful to be rebels or terrorists. The United Irishmen in ‘98 and the Fenians in ‘48 were intellectuals, not peasants. After the Land League battles at the end of the last century and the distribution of land to the peasants, Ireland became a peaceful country again, especially since everyone believed that the English would keep their promise to grant Home Rule. Indeed, if they had not used the beginning of the Great War in 1914 as an excuse to postpone Home Rule, it is pretty likely that all the “Troubles” since then would never have happened.

  Even then Ireland was peaceful during the early years of the Great War. Thirty thousand Protestant Volunteers marched in the North to make it clear they wanted no part of Home Rule. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society (of which your man the Big Fella was the head by the way), was plotting revolution. Their own Irish Volunteers were also marching, often with makeshift uniforms and wooden guns. Most Irish folk considered them to be eejits. No one took either set of volunteers all that seriously. The Irish, as I say, have always been a peaceful law-abiding people—when others leave them alone and give them a chance to be peaceful.

  Then on Easter Monday 1916, your man Willy Yeats’s “Terrible Beauty” was born. At the last minute a split occurred in the leadership of the Volunteers. There was no rising at all in the west, and the rising in Dublin drew little support. The men who proclaimed the Republic of Ireland at the General Post Office knew they would lose, but they firmly believed that their sacrifice would launch the beginning of the end of English rule in Ireland.

  They were right, but only because the English, as usual, did exactly the wrong thing. Most people in Dublin and around the countryside thought that the Volunteers in their funny dark green uniforms were a pack of amadons. If the Brits had simply put them in jail, no one would have given them another thought.

  However, to the English mind, they were rebels in the time of war, rebels who might even be allied with Germany. So they shot the lot of them. The whole country was shocked. Public opinion indicated the people were now ready for revolt. In the election of autumn 1918, Sinn Fein swept most of the Irish districts. Its elected represe
ntatives refused to take their seats in the English parliament. Instead they gathered in Dublin and proclaimed themselves the Dail Érieann, the duly elected parliament of the Irish Republic.

  Then public order began to collapse. Young men swarmed into the Volunteers (who soon were calling themselves the Irish Republican Army, a name that may never go away), many just home from the war and many others with nothing else to do.

  It is difficult now and it was even more difficult in those days to distinguish between revolutionary action and terrorism, pure and simple. Most IRA men did nothing at all. The Cork Brigade, for example, was well organized, properly drilled, and influential at the meetings of the army. But it didn’t do any fighting. When the ragtag Free State Army (the Big Fella’s crowd) landed at Cork in August of 1921, they swept the Cork Brigade away without any trouble—and didn’t even interfere with the annual Cork Regatta. Other units were much more active. They ambushed army patrols, burned down RIC barracks, executed collaborators, and set fire to the homes of the English and killed some of them.

  General McCready, the commander of the British Army in Ireland, advised London that he did not have the men to put down the now-open revolt The English had one more chance. If they had offered to negotiate then, they probably would have got a better deal and the violence, which had not yet become a way of life, would have diminished. In fact, they did just the opposite, as the two reports from the Gardai describe.

  The burning and killing went on, some of it aimed at the English army, some at settling old grudges.

  Then came the cease-fire and the treaty and the breakup of the Irish Republican Army. After the death of Michael Collins, there was no hope of a peaceful solution. The Free State Army had little trouble winning the few pitched battles that actually happened. The “Irregulars,” as they called the IRA, turned to terrorism. The anarchy in the countryside was now worse than ever.

  The leaders of the Free State Government were convinced that they had to show the world that the Irish knew how to govern. Indeed, they had launched the Civil War by shelling the Irregulars in the Four Courts on the banks of the Liffey under English pressure—especially from our old friend Winston S. Churchill. He warned Collins that unless the Free State took action against the Irregulars, the British Army would have to intervene and restore order.

  He was talking through his hat. The British Army had not been able to restore order before and could not do it now. General McCready dreaded the results of an English attack on the Four Courts. Nonetheless, the Irish leaders felt that the whole world was watching them to see if the Irish were really capable of selfgovernment.

  That must seem a strange idea to you now. Ireland is a successfully functioning democracy that has built one of the most prosperous economies in Europe. But in those days Ireland was a very new nation. It never before had a national government of its own. A lot of people, influenced by English propaganda, expected that the Irish would prove too immature to govern themselves.

  Moreover, democracy itself was in doubt. The people of Ireland had voted in favor of the treaty. The Irregular army felt that it represented the republic and the people who had voted for peace did not. Therefore, its decisions cancelled out the election. This, by the way, is the same logic the IRA uses today.

  The challenge, then, for the Free State was to restore peace and validate democracy. That meant it had to repress the anarchy in the countryside. There was no gentle way to do that. Therefore, harsh measures were required. After Collins’s death, Kevin O’Higgins was the man who had to impose order on the country. He did that and paid for it with his life. Collins died because he had created a free Ireland, O’Higgins because he had created a peaceful and democratic Ireland. Both men were geniuses.

  Later, when De Valera came to power, he was equally ruthless in dealing with the rump IRA that had broken with him when he accepted the Free State. There was a nice irony in that the man who had set loose the furies eventually had to fight them himself.

  That, then, is the background to understand the times in which Kevin O’Higgins lived and died. He lacked the charm and the imposing physical stature of Collins. He was just as smart and just as determined. Moreover, while he was certainly troubled by the need to approve the execution of men who had been his friends, it probably bothered him less than it would have bothered the Big Fella if he were still alive.

  Unlike the Big Fella, however, O’Higgins apparently did not successfully resist the allurements of Lady Hazel Lavery, the temptress from Chicago who seemed to take special delight in seducing Irish revolutionaries. I’d just as soon leave her out of this story. But she may be involved in the puzzle we are wresding with. Besides, if I try to leave anything out, you’ll know and I’ll be in trouble.

  There was little in the early life of Kevin Higgins (as he was known when he was growing up) that would suggest he was the man to restore order to Ireland—and, by the way, to decide that the Irish police, like the English, would be unarmed. He was the fourth of sixteen children (that’s right, SIXTEEN). His father was a doctor, his mother the daughter of a lawyer who was also Lord Mayor of Dublin. Thus, unlike Collins, whose father was a farmer, O’Higgins was a member of the solid Catholic upper-middle class. He was obviously intelligent but did not like to study. He drifted from school to school and spent some time in seminaries, both Maynooth and Carlow, and was thrown out of both of them for smoking.

  He joined the Irish Volunteers but was not involved in the rising. While at law school in Cork, he was arrested for “unlawful assembly” and spent three months in jail. After his release he ran for parliament and came to Dublin to serve as a member of the underground Dáil While there, he passed the bar examination with highest honors. William Cosgrave, the Minister for Local Government in the secret government, needed an assistant. Impressed with O’Higgins’s intelligence and determination, Cosgrave chose him for the job.

  The Black and Tans burned down his family home and arrested and imprisoned his father. By this time his father, at first opposed to the revolutionary movement, was a strong supporter.

  O’Higgins was only a year younger than Collins at the time. The latter was a major figure in the strange shadow government that operated successfully in the half-light of Dublin, despite English efforts to snuff it out. O’Higgins was only a minor player, though a tough and resourceful one. He would not be in a minor role for long.

  He was already winning for himself a reputation. He describes himself in a letter to Brigid Cole, the young woman he was to marry, ironically an English teacher at the seminary he attended in Carlow: “Whenever there’s an abusive letter to be written, Cosgrave says, ‘Here, Higgins, you’re a cross-grained divil; you’d better deal with this fellow—and for God’s sake work off some of your spleen on him instead of on me.’ ”

  Apparently, this was supposed to impress her. Apparently it did, because they would be married during the cease-fire and go to London on their honeymoon while Collins was negotiating with Lloyd George and Churchill. His young assistant Rory O’Connor, of whom he was deeply fond, was the best man at the wedding.

  Those were great days for O’Higgins. He was an increasingly important leader in an underground government working for the freedom of his country. He was on the run constantly from the English. He was in love with a beautiful young woman, and she with him. One wonders how all of this could be going on at the same time.

  DeVere White offers an explanation:

  If this seems incongruous, in the dark setting of those days, to a reader who did not know them, it will not surprise anyone familiar with the times. For they were very incongruous times; people continued to live normal, even cheerful, lives in Dublin, while lorries, fenced with wire, in which hostages sat, surrounded by their captors in black berets with rifles cocked, dashed through the streets. Very few people were taking part in the struggle which was being carried on in their midst. Races, dances, theatres flourished, but violence was intermittent, sporadic, like death which occurs every day e
verywhere, but of which we are hardly conscious until it turns its eye on someone near us.

  When Collins came back with his compromise treaty, the best he could get without going back to a war for which he did not have either the weapons or the support of a war-weary Irish people, O’Higgins had no problem supporting the treaty—as did a majority of the Dáil. He wished as they all did that the terms were better, but it was all they could have and it was a beginning. Moreover, he did not trust De Valera, and he did not like the men around Dev, whom he considered to be thugs. Moreover, he worshiped Collins. When De Valera and his minority resigned from the Dáil, O’Higgins became one of the strongest advocates of the treaty. His intense belief in democracy did not permit him to think that the IRA had the authority to overrule the majority of the Dáil and the wishes of the majority of the people of Ireland.

  The die was cast.

  His friend Rory O’Connor had gone over to the antitreaty forces. When challenged that his argument that the army’s rule was supreme was an invitation to dictatorship, O’Connor did not disagree.

  O’Higgins became a member of the new “Provisional Government,” which, as he said, was “eight young men in city hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another one not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the keyhole.” His job was to supervise the transfer of the financial structure of the English government in Ireland to Irish control. He went at it with his usual vigor and determination. He also accompanied Collins to London for further negotiations. Like previous Irish delegates, he enjoyed visits at the house of the painter Sir John Lavery and his American wife, Hazel (born in Chicago, Nuala Anne, at 415 North Avenue, just down the street, more or less, from our house).

  Looking back at it, Nuala my love, it’s hard to see why the Irish hung around Sir John’s home. Lady Hazel was then in her early forties—ten years older than Collins and O’Higgins—and was, if one is to judge by photographs of her, something less than a raving beauty even when she was much younger. Her salon, however, must have been charming and gracious. It provided access to English political society, a place where one could chat with Winston Churchill in relaxed and even jovial circumstances. With a long record of liaisons with English political leaders (possibly including Churchill), she was surely accomplished in the arts of seduction. An incorrigible romantic, she had made the cause of Ireland her own, something useful in a life that had been mostly dull and unhappy. Judging by the letters to and about her, she smothered men with a kind of reassuring and motherly affection. Even Michael Collins, who, it would seem, stayed out of her bed, considered her an important and affectionate friend. O’Higgins, if we are to judge by his letters to her, fell hopelessly in love with her and remained that way for the six years of life that remained to him. In the pictures of him with her and Sir John (who apparently did not mind his wife’s sexual flings) he is an intense young man with a receding hairline and dangerous eyes.