by Anne Emery
Brennan looked at the man beside him. Ballad singer, wit, bon vivant, wise counsellor, bomb maker: Turlough was all these things, and Brennan liked him immensely, as he did so many others in this part of the world. The mix of outsized personality and violent history was a feature of many people in Brennan’s own family, and he got on with them famously. Did this mean he glossed over what they had done, or might have done, during the dirty war that had raged here for over twenty-five years? No.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Turlough said then. Brennan didn’t bother with a rote denial. They were both silent for a few moments and then, “Could I speak to you in your other capacity, not as a fellow H block prisoner but as Father Burke?”
“Certainly.”
“Let’s go over there.” Turlough pointed to the end of the room where there was some private space. They both sat, and Brennan waited. Turlough said nothing.
Eventually, Brennan prompted him. “You wanted to talk to me?”
“I do. It’s just that I don’t want the other lads . . .”
“There’s no need to go through the ritual.” No need to make the sign of the cross and recite the words and make it obvious that he was in the confessional. Then somebody picked up a mandolin and launched into a song, and nobody was paying attention to priest and penitent at the back of the room.
“First of all I have to confess, Father, that I confessed this before.” Brennan merely nodded. “And it didn’t take.”
Brennan had to smile at that. “How do you know?”
“Because the priest refused to give me absolution.”
“Did he say so?”
“He did. I killed two civilians. Two Protestant men with no paramilitary involvement. I thought the barracks had been cleared, but in fact it hadn’t been. Two innocent people died. I never got caught for that, by the way. I’m here on unrelated charges, other explosives offences. But that other disaster, I confessed it to my priest, and he said I had spent so much time justifying myself and explaining how it happened that I wasn’t taking responsibility for it. Said he was forever hearing stories about phone boxes not working when warnings were meant to be given before the bombs went off, or the men ringing the authorities with genuine warnings but the peelers didn’t pass the warnings along. All of these things have happened, of course, but my priest said he had heard this all too often. In my case, I didn’t know there was a delivery man on the premises. And I thought the cleaner had ended his shift an hour before. The priest said I was denying responsibility, that I wasn’t remorseful. But I am! I have the deaths of those two people on my conscience.”
“Some people are not as scrupulous as you are when it comes to casualties.”
“Aye, I know. Civilians are not targeted but they end up being killed and injured anyway. That should never happen.”
“Even if not intended, civilian deaths are inevitable when bombs are exploded on the streets of a town or in shopping centres, as they have been during this conflict.”
“Well, Father, I can assure you that mums with shopping carts, or fellows delivering newspapers, have never been my targets. I never go near those places, exactly for that reason.”
“I believe you. And I know you are genuinely sorry for what you did. Here’s your penance: someday, somehow, do something to help the families of your victims. Or other victims. Anonymously. I understand that. I’ll leave it to you to sort out. Will you do that?”
“I will. You have my word.”
“Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen.”
* * *
Back in his cell that night, Brennan prayed and hoped with all his heart that Turlough and others would find ways to bring even a small portion of solace to victims of attacks perpetrated by the Republican side, just as Brennan and Ronan were trying to do for the victims of the Loyalist bombings in Dublin and Monaghan.
And then the spectre of a moral philosopher arose in Brennan’s consciousness, as it so often did. The question to be debated yet again was the question of a just or an unjust war. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Or to turn it around, this war, these Troubles didn’t arise fully formed out of nothing. The statelet of Northern Ireland was formed not from the nine counties of Ulster but of the six with a Protestant majority. That way, there was no fear of Catholics voting it out of existence. And the loyal-to-Britain majorities were maintained by gerrymandering, rigging the boundaries of districts to make sure the majority stayed that way. There was no universal franchise here in the times leading up to the Troubles; the only people who had a vote in local elections were a man who either owned or rented a house, the man and his wife. Any other adults living in the house, such as lodgers or grown sons and daughters who could not afford houses of their own, could not cast a ballot. And public housing was given out by elected councils; if you gave someone a house, you were giving them two votes. Same with jobs: give a man a job and he might be able to buy a house and thus become eligible to vote. So, don’t hire him. Oh, and there was a “business vote,” whereby nominees selected by the business could vote more than once. This was not the situation in mainland Britain of course, just here in the North of Ireland.
All of this was incontrovertible fact but, even so, Brennan hated thinking like this: Nationalist and Unionist, Republican and Loyalist. Us and them. And he particularly hated thinking in sectarian terms, of Catholic and Protestant. When he was anywhere else on the planet he never thought of his fellow Christians in that way; he respected and admired the freedom and the culture that Protestantism had brought to much of the world. But in this small part of the world, the minority had been denied that freedom. And that was what had led to the civil rights movement here. Then, when the people attempted to end discrimination by peaceful means, what happened? The marchers were beaten by the police, shot and killed by the army. So what do you do if peaceful protest is met by violence? You fight back. People had not just started throwing rocks and petrol bombs and real bombs for no reason. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
But even if you had a just cause, a justifiable reason for taking action, what kind of actions were justified in carrying out that struggle? What or who was a legitimate target? Military installations? Government buildings? Commercial property, on the theory that if it got too costly, London would no longer prop up the local regime? And could killing ever be justified? Civilians? Never, not even if their deaths were unintended, were “collateral damage.” Soldiers? Well, they were just the poor devils who were sent out to fight for their country. Or do its dirty work. Was it fair to target them? Some would say that’s the risk they signed up for. But did that justify the actions of a sniper taking out a soldier from a rooftop above the fray? And what about the situation when soldiers went far beyond the code of the soldier and acted as terrorists themselves? What about soldiers and intelligence spooks who colluded with one side in killing the other?
These notions had been warring in Brennan’s soul for as long as he could remember, ever since, as a child, he had come to understand what it meant that his family was a “well-known Republican family.” He was no closer to resolution now than he had been then, no closer to certainty even in here, where he was locked up with alleged soldiers — or, as the authorities would have it, terrorists — in this long and terrible war.
Selfish concerns took over then. While he was talking to Turlough and hearing his confession, Brennan had momentarily forgotten his own plight. He had been back to his real self, Brennan Burke the priest, performing the sacraments and ministering to his fellow man. Now in his bed in the middle of the night, though, he reverted to Brennan Burke the physical, mental, and neurological wreck, bedevilled by drink and nicotine and raging against his misfortune.
* * *
Brennan had a brief, painful encounter early in July. Tomás Burke came for a visit. Before going out to meet him, Brennan gave himself over to a fantasy, an imag
inary scene in which Brennan grassed on young Tom in return for his own freedom. He imagined himself walking away from the H Blocks, boarding a plane out of Belfast, leaving all this behind him forever. There was no mystery about why people in desperate circumstances turned on their co-conspirators. But he knew he would never do it. Brennan was a Burke. Burkes were not informers; they sure as hell did not turn in members of their own family. He walked out to the visiting area to meet his cousin’s son.
They sat across from one another in the cubicle, both of them knowing why Brennan was in here, neither of them knowing what to say. Finally Tom spoke up, with the only words that could possibly be said, “You’ll be acquitted, Brennan. I know you will. Reddy O’Reilly is brilliant; he’ll get you out of this.”
Brennan wanted to sound hopeful, wanted to ease the young man’s distress. They both knew that whatever sentence Brennan might be facing if convicted would be less onerous than what Tom would face if he were in Brennan’s place. The charge against Tom would be murder, the sentence imprisonment for life. A young man with a wife and family . . . But what about Brennan? Surely his life was of value as well, and if he lost years of it . . . He chastised himself; Tom would not be thinking of Brennan as expendable. Brennan felt compelled to reassure him. He took a glance around to make doubly sure no one was listening. “Even if they’d nabbed you, there’s no guarantee they wouldn’t have lifted me as well, for my part in it. My willing participation.” Tom’s expression was bleak. Brennan said then, “You don’t have to come back, Tom.”
“I can understand why you wouldn’t want to see me, Brennan. I —”
“No, that’s not it. But it won’t do either of us a bit of good. Stay away from it all.”
And that’s how they left it. By the time Brennan raised his hand to bless his young relation, Tom had turned away, despondent, didn’t see it.
At the céilí that evening Brennan gave them a song. He stood and apologized to the audience for the fact that it would be Brennan singing this aria and not the incomparable soprano, Kiri Te Kanawa.
Turlough responded, “Kiri broke out of here in the great escape of 1983. Hasn’t been seen here since. So you go ahead, Brennan.”
“Thank you, Turlough. This is ‘Vissi d’Arte’ from Puccini’s Tosca.” Brennan put his entire heart and soul into the song, every word of which resonated with him more painfully than ever.
Sempre con fè sincera la mia preghiera ai santi tabernacoli salì.
Sempre con fè sincera diedi fiori agli altar.
Nell’ora del dolore perché, perché, Signore,
Perché me ne rimuneri così?
Always with true faith my prayer rose to the holy shrines.
Always with true faith I gave flowers to the altar.
In the hour of grief why, why, o Lord,
Why do you reward me this way?
Monty
When Maura and the kids returned to Halifax from Ireland, Normie decided to go to her regular school to spend the last two days of the term with her friends. At the end of the second day, she called Monty’s office and said, “You guys have to come and get me after work.” So Monty and Maura walked over to Saint Bernadette’s Choir School just before five o’clock. Their daughter had been watching for them and met them at the door. “Guess what? We have a surprise for Father Burke! He’s coming home soon, right?”
Monty had a sick feeling in his stomach. Maura had obviously been able to keep Normie away from the papers and the news broadcasts when they were in Dublin, and he had no desire to bear the bad tidings now.
Normie was nearly beside herself with excitement. “Come on in and see! We made a great big poster showing an old-fashioned church like they have in Rome. Then we drew a whole bunch of angels with hymn books and their mouths open. They are his new choir in Rome. Except guess what? We cut out our own faces from our school pictures and put them on as the angels’ heads, even though we can’t go to Rome with him.”
She led them into the art room where a bunch of the other kids had gathered. She showed her parents the poster. “See? They’re all angels except one. There’s a little red devil in the back row. Guess who it is? Not me! It’s Richard Robertson!” Richard was well known as a character in the school.
“And we looked up something in Italian to write on it. It’s a blessing. Listen to me say it: Il Signore ti benedica e ti custodisca. It means the Lord bless you and keep you. Mummy? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, sweetie. I just . . .”
“So anyway when we bring him in we’re going to show him the poster, and then we’re going to sing two songs for him. ‘Regina Coeli,’ which means Queen of Heaven, which is the name of his church, and ‘The Lord Bless You and Keep You,’ because of the saying on the poster, and it was written by Saint Francis of Assisi. He was Italian. Father Burke’s going to love it, right?! And he went to school over there and got a degree from a college in Rome called the Angelicum. Remember when I was little? I thought he was an angel himself!” She leaned towards them and confided, “I still do!”
Monty could not bear the thought of telling his daughter what had befallen her angel now. Could not bear the thought of telling her that Father Burke, with his outstanding musical talent, his lifetime of service to God, his doctoral degree from the Angelicum in Rome, was now languishing in a prison, dirty, depressed, and afflicted with delirium tremens, charged with being a terrorist.
Chapter XXXIII
Brennan
Brennan looked upon Redmond O’Reilly the way he had hitherto looked upon the risen Christ. In O’Reilly resided Brennan’s every hope of a future life. O’Reilly would be — would have to be — his saviour. That this trial might only be the beginning was simply unthinkable. The solicitor’s handsome face was lined from a lifetime of experience in this state and its system of trial and retribution. The shining hair brushed back from O’Reilly’s forehead gave him a fearless but dignified appearance. Brennan did not think he, himself, would be able to project a dignified image when he entered the courtroom. If he looked the way he felt — seedy, soiled, depressed, and sick from occasional jars of illicit drink and delirium tremens when the stuff had run out — his appearance would likely convey “This sad bastard must surely be guilty” to judge and jury, press and public.
“So, Brennan,” O’Reilly said to him at the Kesh two days before the trial, “let me apprise you of what you can expect in the Belfast Crown Court on the Crumlin Road. First and foremost, of course, there will be no jury.”
Brennan had of course heard of non-jury trials here but wasn’t that just for . . . “I’m not a paramilitary. I’m not charged with blowing up a bar full of innocent people. Wouldn’t I have a right to be tried by a judge and jury if —”
Reddy O’Reilly shook his head. “You’re in Belfast now, Brennan. You are in a different world from the justice system with which you are likely familiar.”
There went Brennan’s slim put persistent hope of explaining to a box full of jurors, as earnestly and reassuringly as he could, that he had not had a gun in his hand, had not behaved in a threatening manner in any way, had not caused any damage. He didn’t know quite what he would say about the motive for his visit to Saint Matthew’s, what he would say in order to save his own hide and that of Tomás. But he would work it out with O’Reilly. Lawyers couldn’t knowingly let you lie on the stand, but . . . now there was no jury. A judge might not be so easily charmed.
“This is a Diplock court, remember, Brennan. The system was formulated more than twenty years ago by Lord Diplock, a Law Lord, member of the House of Lords. I shall spare you the details but juries have been abolished for trials on charges relating to terrorism.”
“Terrorism! I may be guilty of bad judgment, stupidity, sentimentality, in agreeing to distract the secretary, but surely even in this jurisdiction I cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a terrorist.”
O�
��Reilly looked at him with something close to pity and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Brennan. The threat charge and the possession of a firearm in a public place are enough to bring this into the Diplock court. Judge alone. The stated reason for this is that jurors can be too easily intimidated and threatened in the current climate of sectarian violence.”
“But doesn’t the same argument apply to judges? Can’t they be threatened as well? And their families?”
“They can be and have been. Not merely threatened but murdered. Judges who hear these cases are under twenty-four-hour protection. What you have to understand about the Diplock courts is that they act more like an arm of the security forces than courts of law even-handedly dispensing justice. That’s easier done by a judge than by an unpredictable box full of jurors.”
“Are there any conscientious judges who come to the trial with no preconceived notions or alliances and who weigh the evidence, try the cases fairly, that class of a thing?”
“There are.”
“But there are many who do not live up to those lofty ideals.”
“There are.”
“What you’re saying, Reddy, is that I’m fucked.”
“Notwithstanding all the odds that are stacked against us, we shall do our utmost to see that you are not fucked, Father Burke.”
* * *