That night three prisoners – Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and Conor Clune – died in the guardroom of Dublin Castle. They were desperate gunmen, it was explained, killed while trying to escape.
Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy were important officers in the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers. Conor Clune was a young man from Clare on a visit to Dublin. He had no Volunteer connections. Since the authorities could not explain away his sudden love of violence, they announced that he was a lieutenant in the Clare Volunteers. This solved everything.
Because of the number of dead, that Sunday – 21 November 1920 – became known as Bloody Sunday. But the dead of that day were no more dead than those who had died individually, in streets and fields and alleyways, on any other day. That much at least is certain.
That particular war in Ireland went on until the following summer. Then there was a truce, and negotiations in London which led to freedom for the greater part of the country. One of the chief negotiators on the Irish side was Michael Collins. The form of freedom he brought back did not satisfy some people. They disputed it, and the democratic election which supported it, in the way that they were now used to – with guns. The Civil War which followed crippled Ireland for many, many years. Its echoes still linger. Apart from anything else, it swallowed the lives of many honourable men. One of them was Collins.
And the people in our story? The Conway family had many things happen to them, good and bad. Families do. Yours does and mine does. The man known as Fowles was an agent for Michael Collins throughout the war. Afterwards he joined the new Irish police force, the Garda Síochána. When he retired he got pensions from both the Irish and British police forces, and from the British Secret Service as well. He died in his bed in the early 1980s.
Simon Hughes fought on the government side in the Civil War. Later he served in the army of the new Irish state, but met with prejudice because he was English. In the mid-1920s he left the army and went into business. He was very successful.
Martin Ford fought on the opposing side in the Civil War. He died fighting in 1922, lying in a ditch in a place whose name he never even knew. His side lost that war.
Hugh Byrne, the killer, also fought on the losing side in the Civil War. Near the end of it he committed a notorious crime, and then escaped to America. There he became a gangster and later, as he grew rich, a respectable citizen. So it often goes. He lived to a ripe old age, retiring to Ireland in the 1970s. He met Jimmy Conway once and they spent the day together, two old men discussing the dead days they’d lived. They found a good deal to mourn, and even a few things to laugh about.
A family cleans up a mess and starts living again. Countries learn to do that too.
That’s history for you.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
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First published 1998
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–407–9
Text © copyright Gerard Whelan 1998
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Whelan, Gerard
A winter of spies
1.Ireland - History - 1910-1921 - Juvenile Fiction
2.Children’s stories
I.Title
823.9’14[J]
The O’Brien Press receives assistance from
Typesetting, editing, layout, design: The O’Brien Press Ltd
A Winter of Spies Page 13