Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love

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Fergal Keane. Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

We Killed All Mankind

The Night Sweats with Terror

The Ground Beneath Their Feet

My Dark Fathers

Revolution

Tans

The Abode of Wolves

Sunshine Elsewhere

Assassins

Between Gutter and Cart

Executions

The Republic Bold

The War of the Brothers

A New Ireland

Inheritance

Afterwards

Acknowledgements

A Short Note on Sources

Notes

Chronology of Major Events

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

By the Same Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

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Title Page

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The Troubles confounded my father. He and my mother had visited Belfast the year before I was born. They’d stayed in a theatrical boarding house on Duncairn Gardens in the north of the city. It was run by Mrs Burns, a kind-hearted Protestant woman who had welcomed generations of actors. But less than a decade later, the district had become a notorious sectarian flashpoint. Near where my parents had once walked freely, a ‘peace’ wall would be erected to keep Protestants and Catholics apart. My father’s romantic nationalism could not survive the onset of the Troubles. He veered between outrage at the British and outrage at the Provisional IRA. When IRA bombs killed civilians he would insist that these new guerrillas had nothing in common with the ‘Old IRA’, in which his mother Hannah and her brother had served. My father believed in the story of the good clean fight. He denied any kinship between the IRA Flying Columns of north Kerry and the men in balaclavas from the Falls Road and Crossmaglen. By then, the rebel in him had vanished.

How could he rhapsodise about the glorious dead of long ago while we watched on the nightly news the burned remains of civilians being gathered up on Bloody Friday? Neither my father nor my mother, or any of my close relatives, understood the north. Until 1969 it had had no practical impact on their lives. They watched from Dublin as curfews were declared and the first British troops arrived. Then came refugee camps in the south for embattled Catholics: 10,000 crossed into the Republic in 1972 – the year of Bloody Sunday, and Bloody Friday;* the year my parents broke up; the year we escaped my father’s headlong descent into alcoholism. The north was burning and blowing up but I was lost in the small room of my own sorrow. Nothing made sense.

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