Buried Troubles

by Marian McMahon Stanley

  1970’s IRA Murder and Gun-Running Uncovered at Connemara Mother and Baby Home

  Patrick’s prose was florid, yellow journalism at its best, but flowed well— skillfully capturing a dangerous and complicated time in Irish history. The story was compelling, well-researched and, Rosaria believed, all true. The key source was Thomas Martin. But Patrick’s report of his meeting with Liam Joyce, in which he’d ambushed the shelter director with his knowledge of the murder at Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home, locked the narrative down.

  It was all there.

  An IRA execution at the Mother and Baby Home by a high-level IRA operative, most likely Declan Twomey of West Belfast, on orders of Cathal McKenna, who was present the night of the murder and led the operation. The arms shipments from America, the nuns’ implicit knowledge of the Home as a waystation for arms transport through their general factotum.

  Brendan Joyce. The story of Brendan’s son, wracked with remorse and conflicted loyalty, escaping to Boston for a life of penance and service. Always under the protection of Declan Twomey, the man who pulled the trigger that night at the Home—devoted to protecting the “wee Fenian,” the young boy who saw what he shouldn’t have. The young boy now a man who kept his secret for the sake of his father, for the sake of Declan Twomey—like another father to him.

  Rosaria and Sarah were lost in their own thoughts for a few minutes. Sarah stared into space, mindlessly stroking the handle of a blue teapot. Rosaria dropped back in her chair and turned to look out a nearby window at the students walking by.

  There had always been stories. Maybe the stories were true, or only in part. Before the IRA contracted with Libya for arms shipments, guns destined for Belfast were said to arrive off the west coast of Ireland from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Perhaps the crates were marked as maritime supplies or fishing gear or other innocuous cargos. Ferried to the mainland by local fishing boats and then perhaps stashed in abandoned farm outbuildings or buried in the local rocky fields near the border until picked up for transport to the North.

  One moonless night, a fishing boat, motors muted, glides into a seldom-used little harbor at the end of a long, bumpy, and overgrown road through the Derrygimla commonage. It pulls silently alongside a granite wharf just big enough to handle one Connemara fishing boat at full tide. A granite wharf which fronts the Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home.

  On the rise beside the Home sits a cemetery. Built into a small hill there an old burial vault from famine times, filled with victims of the Great Hunger— victims perhaps early in the famine years—before so many, so many skeletal, ghostly figures began dropping like flies on the sides of the roads. Before the communal spirit became utterly overwhelmed and lost the capacity to absorb, to give decent burials, decent rituals.

  Years later, there was room to hold the remains of babies and small children—bits of humanity perhaps too weak or malnourished to withstand the frequent epidemics or the damp Connemara cold. Joined too, by some of their despairing young mothers in this final resting place. Those who didn’t make it lay here by a small, dark harbor in the wilds of western Ireland, after lives perhaps punctuated with brief, youthful moments of forbidden ecstasy. A steep price—theirs alone to pay—for those moments. Or perhaps, there was no ecstasy involved. Perhaps some had been violated through no fault of their own, and were punished for becoming victims.

  But then, maybe this burial vault was still not entirely filled. There was clearly room enough for crates on their way North, with another, later stop at an arms dump in a Munster farm outbuilding. Crates bound for the gray, crowded streets of Derry. For the callused, experienced hands of hard men, for the softer hands of young men filled with rage and excitement, reaching for manhood.

  And outside the vault one night, a murder. A big man who’d been alive just the day before, who’d kissed his wife and children goodbye when he left his row house on a side street in West Belfast. A big man who’d stopped afterwards to buy his tickets for the GAA All-Ireland football match-up between Tyrone and Mayo. Now, dropped by his former colleagues like a piece of meat off the back of a sheep trailer with a false bottom. A short, emotionless errand for these men on their way North. To the North with their cargo of death into the cauldron of The Troubles and the warring streets.

  Behind them, a man’s body—still warm—sinks into the oblivion of the bog. A bog keeps its secrets and preserves them. Bog bodies from thousands of years in the past are frequently recovered, amazingly well preserved. It would be no great thing to find a leathery, preserved victim from the time of The Troubles— perhaps an informer or just a generally inconvenient person. Happens all the time. The years of The Troubles or even the Great Hunger are such tiny slivers of time in the life of the vast, boggy prehistoric moors. They will hold their secrets—until the day they decide to tell.

  ◆◆◆

  Rosaria straightened her shoulders and turned to Sarah, speaking softly. “Where do you think Patrick would have sent this article if he’d been able, Sarah?”

  “Oh, right to The Independent?

  “Then that’s exactly what we’ll do right now.”

  Together, Rosaria and Sarah composed an email to the editor of The Independent, explaining the background of the article, including Patrick’s murder. By mid-morning, they’d attached Patrick’s article and it was ready to go. Rosaria let Sarah press the Send button, after which she wrapped the girl in a long embrace.

  “Well done, Sarah. Well done.”

  ◆◆◆

  Patrick’s story was indeed as explosive as he thought it would be when it appeared in The Independent. After the article appeared, The Independent did more research, and a follow-up article reported on a small group of activists, including Professor Hugh Moran of the National University at Galway and his accomplices.

  While this group was not involved in the earlier arms smuggling operation, its members were passionately devoted to protecting the ambitions of men like Cathal McKenna, who promised to speed up unification of the two Irelands. These men became aware through communications from Boston that a woman named Rosaria O’Reilly would be asking questions about Patrick Keenan’s research—questions that might lead her to learn about an IRA execution in the seventies ordered by Cathal McKenna at the Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home.

  The article went on to comment that to have been active during The Troubles was forgiven and even understood—within limits. But for a politician with national ambitions in the Republic to have blood on his own hands— that was another matter. A Taoiseach who had murdered or who had ordered murders was not the image of a modern, European, forward-looking Republic. Too dark. Too violent. Too much reality.

  The article finished:

  How could one not draw conclusions now about the connections between the murder of Patrick Keenan—who was researching the story of an IRA execution ordered by Cathal McKenna—and the claims of Mrs. Eleanor Martin of Clifden that her husband Thomas, who gave the young student the story, was murdered in the care home where he was living?

  CHAPTER 43

  Before Justine’s ill-advised photo of Rosaria and Solly at a local fundraiser appeared in the social pages several months ago, Rosaria had never really had her picture in the Boston Globe. Unless you counted a couple of group photos in the business pages from her former corporate life.

  “You’re famous again. Check out the Globe on-line,” Solly said in his next call. “Cute picture but you’re not going to like it any better than the last one.”

  “Hmm. Great. Okay. I’ll call you back later.”

  Rosaria searched for the iPad which she’d stashed away on arriving in Ireland, and had never missed. She found it behind Mrs. Burke’s fussy settee in the corner, fortunately plugged in and fully charged.

  While the cottage did have WiFi, no one had promised that it would be fast. The little blue “working on it” circle seemed to rotate for a maddeningly long time. In the meantime, she went to the kitchen to refresh
her coffee and let the little blue circle do its thing. She’d just sat down in the green chair again when the front page of the Globe appeared.

  Solly had told her that the papers were full of the Declan Twomey and Liam Joyce story. The public couldn’t get enough of it—a high profile philanthropist and the saintly director of a Boston homeless shelter—with this kind of history. It was unbelievable. Reporters were hungry for as much information as they could uncover for their readers.

  For her part, Rosaria did not have the heart to go to the Globe website and read about Patrick’s murder, Saint Liam Joyce’s long-held secret, and his new vocation in a Trappist monastery. Nor did she wish to hear more about Declan Twomey’s dual life as a successful and upstanding citizen of Boston as well as a violent IRA operative. A life lived by a hard code that ended in suicide. She’d been isolating herself in the Burke cottage to get away from all this—with only Fergus, Mossie, and Bridie for company.

  Now, she steeled herself to see the photo Solly told her about. She did not have to scroll down very far to find it. The picture was part of the front page news, accompanying the story of Declan Twomey’s death and the investigation into Patrick’s murder. And she did indeed look cute in the old black and white photo. But then, she was probably about six years old at the time, and who doesn’t look cute then?

  Her dark hair was in thick braids, with plaid sateen ribbons that matched her plaid dress with a white bodice. Smiling happily, she was holding up a doll with dark braids like her own. Two men sat on either side of her, each grinning and each with an arm around her shoulders.

  Each with an arm around the shoulders of a sweet girly. Jimmy O’Reilly’s sweet girly daughter. Her proud father on the one side of her and, on the other side, a younger version of Declan Twomey.

  Rosaria knew the restaurant in the picture—O’Keefe’s in Malford Square. The wood-paneled wall in the background, covered with photos of groups and mementos—including crossed Irish and American flags and a large brass shamrock. O’Keefe s—where they’d often celebrated special family occasions and events and entertained visitors.

  Looking at her father’s wide open and smiling face, Rosaria called to memory the visitors he’d meet and receive with his family at O’Keefe’s restaurant over the years. There were so many occasions and so many visitors in Jimmy O’Reilly’s exuberant life. They were all a blur to her. Mostly business related, but perhaps not always to do with the shoe factory’s commercial business. Maybe, she couldn’t deny now, some had to do with the gunrunning business.

  She had a wisp of a memory of Declan Twomey. One of any number of big men who came to socialize with Jimmy O’Reilly and his family over a pot roast at O’Keefe’s. Some had odd accents, but were kindly to her and, like her father’s other business associates—the real ones in the shoe business—they often brought small gifts to Jimmy O’Reilly’s daughter. After dinner, they would repair to the long wooden bar in O’Keefe’s and talk about—what?—talk about arrangements.

  Rosaria gazed at the doll in the picture again. How she’d loved that doll. Brought by one of those big men she’d somehow forgotten. Brought by Declan Twomey for Jimmy’s wee girly.

  She touched Declan Twomey’s image through the screen. A full mass of hair which must have been a deep red brown then, those thick black eyebrows and lively eyes. This picture was before those eyes deadened over the years from having seen too much, done too much. Deadened with all the killings, all the betrayals, all the revenges. And there was no ragged scar on his right cheek. This was before he murdered a man at the Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home. Before the man he murdered had thrown a jagged rock at him and left a memento of that violent night.

  Two hands around her shoulders in the picture. Her father’s long, slim hand on one shoulder, dwarfed by the heavy hand and blunt fingers of Declan Twomey on the other.

  Declan Twomey’s hands. She saw them in her mind’s eye pulling the trigger on the man called Johnny Powers. Those hands wielding an oar on the Long Wharf when he smashed Patrick Keenan’s head and left him to die in Boston Harbor.

  How many others? How many other John Powers? How many other Patrick Keenans?

  And her father. Her gentle, generous, naive father. Did he know any of these horrors? Was he caught in some romantic old story of songs and brave republican martyrs? Could he ever have imagined the agony of endless violence and cold brutality—the ceaseless deaths of innocents? She had to believe, for her own sanity, that he couldn’t.

  Solly called a few minutes later. “You see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was mailed from Chatham. We figured Twomey dropped it in the mailbox just before he did himself.”

  “I see. Why do you think he did that?”

  “For you, I think.”

  “Nice.”

  “You know, honey, I don’t know if it was meant maliciously—outing your dad and all. That’s kind of ancient history and plenty of guys around Boston could be held accountable in different ways during those years.”

  “Give me another reason he sent it.”

  “In a funny way, I think maybe he wanted you to remember him differently.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Complicated,” said Solly.

  “I guess.”

  “Will you come home now, sweetheart?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come home.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Fall was in the air when Sergeant Gerard Conneely called Solly one morning a few weeks later. The leaves on the hardy urban chestnut trees that the Boston Park Department planted on Tremont Street had started to turn. Students at Northeastern, across the street from Boston Police headquarters, now wore sweaters and jackets as they rushed to classes, and had switched to hot coffee takeout from Peet’s instead of the warm weather iced coffee.

  “Well, Solly, my friend. Looks like we’ve found our man. Looks like we found Johnny Powers.”

  “No kidding. Where’d you find him?”

  “Well, we didn’t find him, exactly. One of the turf-cutters’ dogs did. The men were out collecting the dried peat stacked in the bog when—wouldn’t you know it—one of the dogs came prancing up the road with an arm bone in his month.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “No, I am not. The bone was partly deteriorated. The acidity in the bog does that, but the skin—the skin, you know, it gets tanned like leather. All brown and tough—it’s almost like a shroud for the bones.”

  “Got it. Don’t need to hear the rest about the bones and the skin and the bog.”

  Conneely laughed, “Wimp.”

  “Yeah, I am,” Solly agreed. “How do you know it wasn’t an animal bone?”

  “Well, now, the animal would have to have been wearing a navy sweater and a bitch of an expensive watch.”

  “Find the rest of the body?

  “Yeah, the dog led us right to it. All fits together. You know, he even had the remnants of tickets to that year’s GAA football match between Tyrone and Mayo in his leather wallet, along with his identification. The leather must have given some protection to the contents.”

  “Who won?”

  “Which game? The football game? Probably Mayo.”

  “What other game would we be talking about?”

  “This other republican game that this case was all about, Solly—no winners yet in that long game. The Long War. May go into overtime. My money’s on the Republicans. In the end.”

  “Figures.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Just before Thanksgiving that year, Rosaria was in her kitchen experimenting with a new curried pumpkin soup recipe that she intended to serve for dinner on the day with Solly, Bridie, and a couple of guys Solly worked with.

  Archie slept in an afternoon patch of sunlight near the long window facing the harbor. Favorite grubby tennis ball beside him, content that all was as it should be again in his little doggy world.

  Rosaria had brought up the mail earlier and dumped it on the hall ta
ble without looking through the pile. It was that time of year when catalogs and circulars seemed to mate and procreate in the mail box. Even as she tried to get her name off of various mailing lists, she had to work hard to stay ahead of the catalog flow before the pile got overwhelming.

  Now, while the soup simmered—this recipe is a keeper, she thought, if only for the smell—she brought the pile of mail over to the recycling container to do a quick sort and discard the day’s collection of catalogs. In the process, she almost threw away a letter tucked in among the brochures and circulars. A small white envelope with an unusual stamp. She peered at the stamp closely— Gibraltar? Who would be sending her a letter from Gibraltar?

  But it was the handwriting on the front that took her breath away. Painfully familiar and blocky. She had to sit down quickly on the hall chair before she stumbled from the dizziness, the tingling throughout her body. Inside, a few lines in that once-loved script floated on a hard white card:

  I won’t ask for forgiveness—beyond forgivable. Remember Malin Point and pray for me. — H.M.

  Rosaria’s Curried Pumpkin Soup

  I clipped this recipe from the “Home” pages of a local paper in Madison, Wisconsin many years ago when two of our kids were at UW Madison. If I knew the original author of this delicious soup, I would gladly give credit.

  We have served this soup at Thanksgiving and fall dinners for decades. I thought the smell of a curried pumpkin soup on the stove in Rosaria’s apartment would enrich the last scene of Buried Troubles, I hope you enjoyed the book and perhaps will also enjoy her pumpkin soup!

  Ingredients (Serves 7):

  ½ pound fresh mushrooms, sliced

  ½ cup chopped onion

  2 tablespoons butter

  2 tablespoons all-purpose flour