Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  . “Some sherry?” Martin gestured towards a full bottle on the coffee table. “It’s rather on the dry side, but I think you might like it.”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Nuala. “Actually I rather like dry sherry.”

  The little fraud didn’t know the difference between dry and sweet, of that I was sure. “Waste not, want not, as my ma—Grandma that is—always used to say.”

  “The woman from Galway?” Martin asked casually.

  Was he involved in this business? Was he a member of the Consort of St. George and St. Patrick? Perhaps its head?

  “Yes indeed, a fierce little woman named Nell Pat Malone, Pat for her father, I guess, to distinguish her from another Nell, Nell Mike and Nell Joe or whatever.”

  “Didn’t you say that they had to leave during the Troubles?”

  “Yes. As best as I can reckon, my grandfather was on the far fringe of the IRA, as Collins’s Irish Volunteers came to be known. He seems to have been on the antitreaty side during the Civil War, against Collins, that is. Then they left, rather suddenly, apparently under threat of death.”

  The sherry was excellent. I resolved that I would have two glasses of sherry and two glasses of wine and not another drop. Herself might just let me fall on my face in the rain today.

  “There were a lot of hatreds left over when peace finally came.” Martin sighed. “A lot of scores to be settled. A number of people left at the time, sick to death of all the fighting and hatred. There seems to have been some unspoken agreement that if you went into exile you were granted an immunity from execution.”

  “Did your grandparents,” Liz asked, “have any communication with their families in Ireland after they left?”

  “They never said much about Ireland or their families. I knew that Ma had a brother Tim to whom she was very close and that he died young, but I never was told how he died. Now I wonder if he was killed in the war.”

  “Poor boy.” Liz refilled my glass.

  “Occasionally they spoke of relatives somewhere else in the States. They might have even visited them. But my recollection is that once they came to America, they wiped the slate clean and began a new life.”

  “How difficult that must have been.”

  “Immigration is never easy,” Nuala said grimly. “It’s like a divorce from your own country and people.”

  “Very true, my dear.” Martin had adopted a professorial tone. “You may be unjust to your grandfather, however, Dermot, in describing him as a radical. The lines were not clearly drawn in those days. Personal loyalties to commanding officers were much more important than principled positions on the treaty.”

  He spoke with the confidence of someone who had the conversation on the right track. But what track was it?

  “So I gathered.”

  “Looking back on it”—the lecture was now flowing easily—“the miracle is that Ireland ever survived as a nation. Surely there were many who did not expect that it would, particularly after Collins was shot. You see, most of the ordinary folk were more than satisfied with the treaty—peace and freedom, if you know what I mean. Moreover, the IRA GHQ in Dublin knew that it did not have the munitions to continue a war. However, the political leaders were badly split, although I think none of them really wanted or expected a civil war. Both sides reckoned that the other side would collapse. Men like Brugha thought that their deaths would stir the people as the deaths of the 1916 martyrs had. They completely misread the popular reaction. People were tired of martyrs.”

  What the hell was he up to?

  “Idiots,” Nuala said crisply, nodding to Liz that, yes, of course she would have another wee sip of sherry.

  With the toffs she didn’t say eejits.

  “You must not be too hard on them, my dear. Those were wild and uncertain times. Perhaps one should not have revolutions, but, you see, when one does, the revolutionaries will almost always fall out one with another over principle. That is exactly what happened. Poor Michael Collins was the one man in the leadership who tried to keep both sides happy. The remarkable thing is not that he failed but that he almost succeeded. Griffith was under no illusions about De Valera and his faction. He wanted to crush them completely. Dev made an error in judgment, one of the few in his life and one he would correct a few years later when he took the oath and joined the government. However, he was implacably against the treaty at the time. And he never quite forgave the Big Fella for being the man who made Ireland, as Tim Pat Googan calls him in his book.”

  “Occasionally in error but never in doubt?” I murmured.

  “Which is just what your man’s brother the priest says about himself.” Nuala chuckled lightly.

  “In the spring and summer and autumn of 1922, the time your grandparents left I assume—”

  “Yes. In the fall.”

  He knew too damn much about Ma and Pa. So he was worried about them too.

  “At that time”—he hardly noticed my correction—“the country was in chaos. Perhaps half the IRA commands accepted the treaty out of loyalty to Collins, if nothing else. The other half rejected it. Many if not most of the latter had done little fighting during the Anglo-Irish War. The new National Army of the Free State that Collins had pulled together was an untried force. As you may remember, the dissidents in Dublin, Rory O’Connor and Cathal Brugha, the so-called defense minister of the republic, seized the Four Courts and the Gresham Hotel. Both men were friends of Collins, as was Harry Bolland, another one of the dissidents.”

  “And his rival for Kitty Kiernan,” Nuala noted.

  “Precisely. You know your history well, my dear.”

  “I’ve made a study of those times.”

  Fraud!

  “So Collins hesitated and pleaded. His friends were convinced he was a traitor. It is said that Bolland’s last words when he died in an attempt of the National Army to arrest him in Skerries was ‘Have they got Mick Collins yet?’ ”

  “Before he died on the operating table,” Nuala corrected him.

  It is the nature of Irish women to correct men when they are wrong, even on small details. Especially on small details.

  “Finally, Griffith, O’Higgins, and Cosgrave, the new hard-liners if you will, insisted on action. The Four Courts were demolished by gunfire and with them most of the archives of Irish history. Brugha was killed, O’Connor and Childers were executed later, and the Civil War began.”

  “A horrible time.”

  Right, and one that herself and I had already demonstrated we understood, she with more accuracy about the details than he. Why the history lesson?

  “No one expected it to happen. They were all bluffing. Finally the bluffs were called and the country was plunged into chaos. Units of the IRA controlled most of the country, but it was a weak control. In the meantime, British troops were still under attack, the National Army was unproven, and the Provisional Government with Collins as chairman, minister of defense, and minister of finance—oh, yes, he was a financial genius too among other things—did not seem strong enough to restore order, although it had won an overwhelming victory in the Dáil election, which was supposed to be a plebiscite on the treaty.”

  “He had the people on his side then?” I asked, knowing damn well that he did but playing the game with him.

  “Oh, yes, indeed. And the bishops and most of the clergy for that matter.”

  “He said once,” Nuala observed primly, “that he half wished the bishops were not on his side.”

  The woman would not be silent. No way.

  “He did indeed, my dear. You must have made quite a study of that era. Most young people your age are not interested. . . . Nonetheless, Westminster was most reluctant to provide the arms and munitions that the National Army needed. You must remember the violence of the previous years. Collins wiped out the English intelligence unit here in one raid. Then the Black and Tans sprayed Croke Park with weapon fire during a football game and killed forty people. They burned Cork City almost to the ground. The Iris
h destroyed several convoys of British troops and shot up the Tans whenever they found them. Then they assassinated Sir Henry Wilson, the former British chief of staff, on Collins’s order. There was a general feeling in England, I very much fear, that the Irish were a savage people.”

  “Occupying as they were someone else’s country?”

  Martin smiled mirthlessly. “Precisely, Dermot. Moreover, many people here were tired of the violence and death. I daresay that if you were sitting in this house with my own grandfather and a group of his friends in 1922, drinking sherry as we are now and at this very table, you would have agreed that the Provisional Government would fail and the only way to stop the bloodbath would be to restore British rule, however temporarily.”

  “We would have been wrong.”

  “Only just. Churchill had ordered General McCready to storm the Four Courts and might have insisted if the Free State troops had not attacked first. Grandfather, I might remark, was an Irish patriot who believed in home rule and peace. He deplored the violence and naturally supported the treaty, however problematic its success seemed at the time. We have some splendid correspondence with his friend from the Boer War days, Winston Churchill, in which he tells poor old Winston how badly he understands Ireland.”

  “Winston always did misunderstand Ireland,” Liz remarked as if she had known Churchill personally.

  “An imperialist character to the bitter end,” I added.

  “Oh, yes,” Nuala agreed, showing me that she had really been doing her homework. “He gave a speech in which he warned the Provisional Government that if they didn’t wipe out the rebels in the Four Courts, Britain must consider the treaty void. That almost produced the opposite effect. Collins said that Churchill should come over to Ireland and do his own dirty work.”

  This from a young woman who two weeks ago wasn’t quite sure who Michael Collins was and had barely heard of Winston Spencer Churchill.

  “I hate to interrupt this discussion,” Liz said as she stood up, “but I’m afraid luncheon is ready. It’s a cold snack—I hope you don’t mind, my dear?”

  “I rather like cold lunches.” Nuala rose gracefully, placing her sherry glass on the table with a hand that was steadier than mine, and herself drinking three glasses compared to my two. “Warm lunches make one so sleepy in the afternoon, especially after one has helped to demolish a bottle of sherry.”

  Her accent was so much Dublin now that you’d be willing to bet that she too was Anglo-Irish.

  “Yes, we did rather finish it off.” Martin seemed surprised. “Didn’t we?”

  “Destroyed it altogether.” I pretended that I was from the West of Ireland, much to the general amusement of the group.

  “Yank that he is”—Nuala sighed—“Dermot is not used to drinking sherry at lunch.”

  More laughter.

  Bitch.

  The “cold snack” was in fact a large meal, an assortment of pâtés, jellies, salads, and cuts of meat and smoked fish. Nuala’s vast blue eyes glowed in delight.

  There was, needless to say, white wine. Two bottles of it.

  “The mistake we would have made had we been here in, let us say, the spring of 1922,” Martin said returning to his lecture, “was to underestimate the importance of organization and administration, even in a guerrilla war. Genius that he was, Collins did not make that mistake. He controlled the apparatus. Once he had concluded, however reluctantly, that the conflict was inevitable, he went about fighting it with the skill and determination with which he did everything.”

  Would he ever get to the point? I glanced at herself. She frowned, perhaps warning me not to push.

  “He was a most complex man,” Liz observed.

  “Oh, yes, indeed. Very much so,” her husband continued. “In Britain he had the image of the gunman, the terrorist, albeit a romantic terrorist, and then, after he died, a great man, a genius whose death hurt both sides. In fact he was something much more—a fastidious administrator with a passion for detail, a careful financial officer who accounted for every penny spent. He saw reality much more clearly than did the romantic revolutionaries around him. He was a quite brilliant mathematician and as late as 1915 wanted to migrate to America and study to be an engineer. His last occupation in England before the Rising was as a bank clerk. In fact, when he told his chief that he was signing up, the chief thought he meant joining the British Army and paid him a bonus. Three years later this bank clerk, still in his middle twenties, was sitting across the conference table from David Lloyd George as the representative of Ireland.”

  “A bank clerk guerrilla?”

  “It was the bank clerk mentality that enabled him to build the structure, if you take my meaning, that survived his tragic death. Looking back on it, there should never been a doubt about the outcome, despite all the doubts that existed then. Rather quickly the National Army cleared out Dublin and the other cities. Cork, for, example was supposed to be a stronghold of the IRA, but Emmet Dalton reduced it in a single day’s skirmishing.”

  “It was a war of skirmishes.”

  “Quite. Like the Anglo-Irish War before it. We must not think of our more modern total war concepts. These men were not Marxist ideologues bent on destroying the entire social order. Rather they were fighting for control of a society whose basic premises they all accepted. Imagine, for example, this city just before the assault on the Four Courts. The horse show went on, naturally.”

  “Kitty Kiernan came down for it, and herself in poor health at that,” Nulla remarked.

  It was all right for her to push towards the point of the history lesson but not for me.

  “As did the schools and the theater and the papers and the business corporations and the ships coming in and out of the docks. The battles at the Gresham and the Four Courts were brief fights that we could have heard from this dining room and noted that perhaps we would not have high tea at the Gresham for the next week or two. Men continued to take their afternoon drinks in their pubs or their clubs. The Cork yacht race took place on schedule, even though Emmet Dalton was skirmishing with the Irregulars in the heart of the city. Most Irish businessmen in this city argued about the fighting, you see, though they didn’t go near it. Life went on not much differently than it does in Belfast today.”

  “And the Free State won,” Liz said, filling my wineglass again. “I’m glad you like our Galway smoked salmon, my dear.”

  “I like everything from Galway.”

  “Mind you,” Martin went on, “the death of Collins was a severe blow to the Free State. We have a letter from Winston in our archives in which he says that he will absolutely oppose sending any more arms to the Free State for the National Army and that reassertion of British control is inevitable.”

  “He wouldn’t have been sad about that,” Liz said somewhat bitterly. “He believed all his life, as you know if you’ve read him, that the Irish are incapable of self-government.”

  “But Kevin O’Higgins and Richard Mulcahy proved at least as determined and more ruthless than Michael Collins,” I concluded the story.

  “Quite so. O’Higgins was later assassinated, perhaps in reprisal for the execution of Rory O’Connor, but by that time the Free State had won. Lieutenant General Mulcahy lived to ripe old age—he and Dev were the last of the leaders. They never did like one another. I knew Dick of course, listened to him tell stories at the club for hours on end.”

  “Did he ever say who he thought killed Michael Collins?”

  “He never spoke about it, Dermot. I gather that for the record at least he believed that it was an accidental mistake made by a renegade band of Irregulars who had no idea whom they had killed. Why do you ask?”

  “I think my grandfather might have pulled the trigger for the fatal shot.”

  –– 36 ––

  “A LOVELY woman, isn’t she now?” Nuala sprawled on the couch, by her own admission “destroyed altogether.”

  “She is.”

  “Pretty boobs. And every inch a la
dy, isn’t she?”

  “Every inch.”

  “Only a tiny bit of a hooker, isn’t she?”

  Nuala spoke in a flat, dispassionate tone of voice, simply stating an obvious fact. I judged it best to keep my mouth shut.

  “And himself, a good and decent and honorable man, isn’t he now?”

  “He gives that impression.”

  “Of course, he’s full of shite!”

  “Ah?”

  “He’d only order someone to try to cut us up for a good and holy cause, one that’s identified with his own fundamental decency.”

  “You think he did?”

  She paused. “Maybe. What do you think that lunch was all about?”

  It was the first hint that this gorgeous young woman was also a detective. Foolishly I paid it little heed. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “You have to think about everything, don’t you now? Do you ever have a spontaneous reaction to anything or anyone?”

  The drink taken had made her contentious.

  “Sure.”

  “And after you’ve thought about it, you always decide to the opposite?”

  “Only sometimes.”

  “I should either take a nap or do my swim.” She yawned. “Anyway. I can still walk a straight line.”

  “So can I.”

  “And yourself not having half the jars that I had.”

  “Two-thirds. . . . We’re both short hitters, Nuala Anne.”

  “Isn’t it the truth? Do you really think your granda shot Mick Collins?”

  “I have a hunch that’s what happened. Why else would they have had to leave the country?”

  “Do you think he knew who it was that he killed?”

  “That I doubt. Apparently the Irregulars didn’t know Collins was in the convoy. Though your man Tim Pat Coogan says they did, but they really didn’t intend to kill him. Maybe Ma will tell us more in the diary.”

  “Sure, I should get to work on it, instead of indulging in me heathen pleasures in the pool.”

  “Swim first while I think.”