The Catholic religion was for the most part banned, illegal and the practice of it subject to severe punishment. Seminaries to train new priests were outlawed and foreign-trained priests forbidden entrance into Ireland.
There was one Thou Shalt and it managed to be the bitterest of the lot, a law that demanded Catholics pay tithe into Protestant coffers. The commandment that remained unwritten was no less forceful for its lack of ink and it was firmly etched within the Catholic consciousness, thou shalt not live as a human being nor aspire to the lofty notion of being one and this we will not let you forget. Ever.
The dour Lowlander Scots who settled in Northern Ireland were a God-fearing, hardworking, suspicious minded breed who saw the ‘Old Irish’ as a feckless, lazy, yet dangerous foe. Even the Pope, far away in Rome, was as suspect as if his middle name was Beelzebub and he sprouted horns under his hat.
Where the Riordans fit into this history was also, as anything inherently Irish must be, a point up for debate. However, the first one to breeze into history with any aplomb was the organizer of the Defenders, a rural underground group who would eventually forge strong links with a group of young Protestant idealists called the United Irishmen, led eventually by the unfortunate Wolfe Tone.
It was Wolfe Tone who led the Rebellion of 1798 that set into action events which were to forever alter the course of Irish history. The Rebellion failed miserably from the perspective of the peasants but for the British it was a bit of a triumph. It proved what they had believed all along—that the Irish were a feckless, upstart bunch of hooligans who were not to be trusted. It was this mentality that brought into being the Act of Union of 1800 which was passed by the use of force, threats and bribery, an Act that forced the Irish Parliament to amalgamate with the British one, rendering them voiceless in an assembly of some 650 strong. The Irish Parliament had consisted of the Protestant Ascendancy, leaving the three million Catholics of the time without representation.
One fallout of the Act of Union was that political power shifted from Dublin to London and so did many of the titled landholders. Irish landholdings were exploited in an effort to maintain lavish lifestyles, while in Ireland the people who tilled the land faced starvation, disease and death.
In an effort to maximize yields from small landholdings, potatoes as an easy and hardy crop became heavily relied upon, which led to the disastrous famine of the 1840’s. The famine would kill one million and send another million fleeing to America, though they would often die on the disease ridden ships and never see the shores where they’d sought sanctuary. Ireland would lose nearly half of her population and would forever change the face of America.
Cathal Riordan, father of Kieran, chose to stay. He watched his brothers leave and knew that he would never see them again. Then he set himself the task of surviving and keeping his family alive. It was, even for so strong and determined a man, a daunting task. It meant eating grass and stealing fish from the landlord’s pond. It meant hunting in the night and learning to ride the wind as if he’d been born to it. It meant watching your friends and neighbors die because you could not spare them a morsel. It meant holding the only baby girl ever known to have been born to the Riordan line and knowing that there was not enough food for her mother to nurse her, it meant building a wee coffin with your two hands and putting your own flesh and blood under the ground. It meant losing faith in God and church and man. It meant having your home seized by English troops, razed to the ground and burnt, just so you couldn’t drag through the ashes for your meager belongings.
It meant watching your oldest boy die in agony from the ‘bloody flux’, blood pouring from his body and being unable to help him. It meant not making love to your wife for fear of pregnancy and finally because you were too weak to even consider the idea. It meant selling every scrap of clothing, bedding, leaving only the cloth on your back, which was louse-ridden and filthy. It meant finally putting your only remaining boy on a famine ship and praying to a God you no longer believed in that he would make it to America alive. It meant watching your wife die from a combination of starvation and heartbreak and then stumbling drunk with grief and pain along roads where entire families lay in ditches, dying of the black fever, typhus. It meant walking for endless days and nights, never stopping, gone beyond the limits of degradation, humiliation, pain and affliction into the no man’s land of madness. Not knowing where you were, lost, alone and crazed, falling to your knees and then onto your face only to discover that you’d made your way to the ocean and would likely die because you were too weak to lift your face from a mere four inches of saltwater.
Cathal did survive, was pulled out of the water by a grizzled old fisherman and taken to Inisheer, the southernmost island of the Arans. Cathal came from a long line of men who preferred to keep their feet firmly planted on land but from necessity, he learned to navigate the frail wickerwork curragh, the traditional Irish boat, on the rough and unpredictable north Atlantic waters. Fish and seaweed became the staples of his diet and he would swear to his dying day that he could still taste the both of them.
Healing comes even to those who don’t want it and so it came to Cathal. In 1852 he remarried, a quiet dark island girl who gave him three sons within the space of five years.
From the seeds of famine sprung the sapling of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an oath-bound secret society whose object was revolution. Its tentacles reached across the ocean by the following year and Clann na Gael was established on American shores. Thus began the long relationship of support from the United States for Ireland’s fight for freedom.
In 1866, twenty years after his father put him on a famine ship, Kieran Riordan came home. He brought with him an American wife and a ten-year-old son, Daniel. A year later, he and his father would be hung for their part in an unsuccessful uprising. The British hung, flogged, jailed and transported the leaders thus adding more names to the very long roll of Irish martyrs.
Kieran’s wife decided to stay in Ireland and raise her son. Daniel would grow up in an Ireland that saw the likes of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Protestant lawyer who became the leader of the Irish Parliament and devoted much of his life to the issue of Home Rule, giving the Irish the right to rule their own destiny. It was as close as Ireland would ever come to complete independence. Parnell was ruined by a divorce scandal and died only a year later. His cause would be taken up by others but never with the same fervor or charisma. Home Rule would be tabled, put aside, shunted about and never seriously considered by the British Parliament. Its ghost would hang about firing more generations, leading them to insurrection and defeat.
The Unionists, descendants of the Lowlander Scots, had no interest in Home Rule, ‘Home Rule is Rome rule’ went a popular slogan of the day and the Unionists led by Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law wished to remain firmly wrapped in the Union Jack. They would play the ‘Orange Card’ and appealing to the most primitive fears and hatreds would stir the cauldron for another generation of sectarian strife and hatred.
Daniel Riordan became a leader of sorts, helping Parnell to tie the disparate limbs of politics and force, the marriage of these two bedfellows forged another link in the chain that would eventually lead to the formation of the Irish Republican Army.
Daniel, never comfortable in the city, settled in Connemara, home to an ancient and lonely landscape. It suited him well. He raised four sons, the youngest of whom was Pat and Casey’s grandfather, Brendan. The Riordan household became the hub of the surrounding countryside, a place where wisdom was dispensed in equal measure with food, drink and respite. If two men had a quarrel over a piece of land, a horse, a cow or even a woman they would take their dispute to Daniel who could be trusted to make a fair judgment. Strays of all sorts made their way to the Riordan door, dogs, cats, children, men on the run, women in despair, all certain to receive a welcome and a place to lay their head for as long as need be. Though a blacksmith by trade, Daniel ran a small but prod
uctive farm. He’d a way, people said, of coaxing the best from the soil, of making the cows produce more milk and the chickens more eggs. It was true that despite the raising of four big, hearty boys with appetites to match, there was never a better table than the Riordans for good, honest fare.
Daniel, despite a happy home and full belly, never forgot the past. He had, as a boy of eleven, watched his father and grandfather hang and vowed he would honor their memory. Kieran and Cathal had come late to Republicanism, but Daniel was born to it. It became in his time the religion of the Riordans. By no means an orator, still Daniel had a quiet strength that made him a natural leader, a magnet to which people were drawn and, once drawn, became disciples. Under his guidance, people banded together to push for reform, to defend their rights, to take back what had been stolen and nearly destroyed in the Irish soul. Though not a proponent of force as a means of change, Daniel nevertheless believed its use justified when necessary. Land reforms slow to come finally resulted in the buying out of landlords in the later years of the nineteenth century and a return to the Irish owning their own land.
However, for every reason to hope, there was an equal and opposite reason to despair. Nineteen twelve saw the signing of a covenant by 470,000 Unionists, loyal to the British crown, swearing an oath never to accept Home Rule and to prevent the implication of it by force if necessary. One hundred thousand men joined the Ulster Volunteer Force, an organization that would come to be feared for more than its numbers. Three hundred tons of rifles and ammunition were landed for their use in April 1914 while the British Army stood idly by, allowing a sectarian group to arm themselves. The Unionists had no reason to fear. Home Rule, though put into effect by law, was rendered impotent by its suspension until the Great War should end.
Daniel, far away from the world in which the illusions of politics were practiced, saw the ruse for what it was. The action had, in effect, done little other than to pacify the Unionists, who seemed blinded by the sight of the Union Jack into believing that the British saw them as equals and peers of the realm. Perhaps in British eyes they were not as Irish as the Catholics but they were still incontrovertibly Irish and thus somewhat less than human, though handy to use as a trump card during election times.
Daniel could feel change coming. In answer to the formation and arming of the UVF an Irish volunteer corps was formed. They were banned from arming themselves by the same government who’d sat idly by and allowed the UVF to bring in 300 tons of illegal arms. Shortly after, there would be a split in the Irish corps over the issue of conscription, and the largest section would go to war, fighting and dying in British uniforms, believing they were fighting for freedom and justice for nations without voice. They were, to a certain extent, cannon fodder for the British generals, much as the Canadian and Anzac troops would be.
Those who refused conscription became the Irish Volunteers and they, along with the small force of the Irish Citizen’s Army, would change Irish history forever. England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, it seemed the time to take a stand.
During the Easter week of 1916, a group of idealists, poets, teachers and socialists stood on the stairs of the General Post Office in Dublin and proclaimed the Republic of Ireland. Daniel’s son Brendan was amongst their numbers.
They fought valiantly for Irish sovereignty, to declare Ireland for the Irish, in the name of dead generations and ones yet to come, they fought for a cause which five decades later still had not come to fruition. They were outnumbered twenty to one but managed to hold out for a week before admitting defeat.
Sixteen of the Rising’s leaders were executed, some so badly wounded from the fighting that they had to be propped up in chairs to be shot. Suspects, innocent or guilty, were rounded up and jailed in British prisons. Brendan Riordan, twenty-six years of age, was one of these. While he sat without trial in a British prison, his father was shot through the head twice and killed. It wasn’t known who the shooter was, but beside Daniel’s lifeless body was left the message, ‘Fenian lie down.’ Brendan, unable to attend his father’s funeral, vowed from his prison cell to never lie down. He was released three months later because of a great tidal wave of public anger, from both the Irish and American sides of the Atlantic, directed towards the governments of England and the United States. The Irish immigrants were an important electoral body to a president trying to win support to go to war. The prisoners, for reasons having little to do with justice, were released. By force of charm and family legacy Brendan, without actually intending to, gathered about him a group of young insurgents and became their unofficial leader.
Brendan went to Derry, a northern city that was a hotbed of sectarian strife. Catholics there lived under the some of the worst discrimination in Ireland, consigned to ghettoes called the ‘Bogside.’
The remnants of the Rising’s leadership formed the Irish Parliament, ‘Dail Eireann’ in 1919, with Sinn Fein as its ruling party. The elected President, a gentleman with an ungainly figure and an even unlikelier name, Eamon de Valera, was absent from the Dail’s first sitting as he was locked up in prison, a rather inauspicious beginning for a man who would rule, on and off, for much of the century. In fact, on that twenty-first day of January many people were absent. The Unionist party, though invited, didn’t even bother to refuse, they simply didn’t come. When the roll of Sinn Fein representatives itself was called the words ‘fe glas ag gallaibh’, ‘jailed by the foreigner’, were called out thirty-six times. ‘Ar dibirt ag gallaibh’, ‘deported by the foreigner’ was another oft-used phrase that day. In fact, there were only twenty-eight deputies present out of the one hundred and four names called.
De Valera was not to rule for long that first time. The Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood melded at this point to become the IRA. Michael Collins, a man of no small brilliance, was the commanding officer of the army at this time and he and his colleagues brought the British to the table to hammer out a treaty. The Irish got less than they hoped for but it was enough to cause Collins, never a pushover, to accept the terms of a limited form of government for the twenty-six southern counties with full recognition of the existing powers and privileges of the British-Loyalist government in the north. Collins saw it as the first step in a long and bloody process. His friend and rival, Eamon de Valera saw it as nothing less than treason and resigned as president of the Republic. Those who followed him became the Anti-Treaty faction, those who stayed with Collins, Pro-Treaty. Ireland went to war with herself. In the end the seven hundred who died, the hatreds that were inflamed and the divisiveness that would taint Irish politics for decades served little purpose. Ireland remained partitioned.
Brendan, after much soul-searching, found himself fighting under Michael Collins. It was here he would learn many of the skills that he would need in the years to come. He would see prison twice more in his lifetime, would survive beatings and floggings and hunger strike and tear his own soul apart in trying to separate his political ideals from the course of armed struggle he had chosen to follow. He would die from four bullets to the chest and be laid to rest beside the three sons who were killed before him. Brian, his oldest, alive only by the fortune of not being home when masked armed strangers killed his brothers, was a quiet man, not given to fighting nor a great many words. Brendan, a family friend had once said, had been born with his hand fitted to the shape of a gun; he hadn’t liked violence but had understood it in the context of its Irish marriage with politics. Brian neither liked nor understood it. His republicanism tended to be of the mythical, rather than practical sort. Romanticism though fled in the face of imprisonment without trial or real accusation. Brian was jailed on trumped up charges, a privilege the government granted itself under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939, allowing it to intern Irish citizens it suspected of crime, real or imagined. Such an imprisonment could not be challenged in the courts as the Act was not subject to the court’s power.
He was jailed, they tol
d him, for crimes against the Republic and they produced signed statements saying he’d been seen in the area where a bomb had killed four people. Brian had not even heard of the incident much less been present at its execution. To secure his confession he was, over the course of two weeks, beaten, half-starved, denied access to a toilet, beaten some more, chained to his bed post, allowed to sleep only in twenty minute snatches then seized by the hair and awakened by his face slamming into the bedpost. He was certain after the first week that he’d sustained brain damage and would, indeed, walk with a limp for the rest of his life. Four weeks after his initial arrest he was released without reason or explanation. He went home to his mother who nursed him back to health and when he was well enough to get about on his own he went to Belfast. Within a week, he had joined the IRA. It had been easy for him; his father’s name still carried enough weight within the Army to ease his initiation.
He never moved to the forefront of the army, he took his orders from other men and carried them out quietly and obediently. He was, as it turned out, rather expert at explosives, a job that required a still hand and a steel mind. He managed both. He was particularly effective during the Border campaigns of the fifties.
The Fifties were a decade which saw a great reduction in the violence that had defined the Forties. Many within the Republican movement favored passive resistance as an alternative to armed struggle. Wearied and disillusioned by bloodshed and death, the generation that had seen the IRA through the forties began to fade into the background, the new generation stepping forward, many merely seeking excitement without being aware of the consequences of their actions. There was sporadic activity within the ranks of the movement, some of so little consequence that it seemed, even days later that the incidents were mere rumor and never really happened at all.
Exit Unicorns Page 6