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CHAPTER THREE

Armies of the Night

I

When Mrs Thatcher, the then prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, met two Irish clerics, Cardinal Ó Fiaich and Bishop James Lennon, on 1 July 1981 at Downing Street, she was, according to David Beresford,

waiting for them at the top of the stairs, on the first-floor landing, and gushed a welcome … They started with the usual pleasantries, but quickly moved onto the prison issue.

‘Will someone please tell me why they are on hunger strike?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘I have asked so many people. Is it to prove their virility?’

Two months earlier, following the death of Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes had died on hunger strike, and in the month of August Tom McIlwee was also to die. Hughes and McIlwee were cousins, in their mid-twenties, born within a year of each other (1956 and 1957), from Bellaghy, County Derry. They were buried together, ‘in a new section of the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church’:

Their tombstone is inscribed in Irish which Tom – battling to learn the language even as he was dying – would have particularly appreciated. And Frank would have liked the wording: ‘Among the warriors of the Gael may his soul rest’.

David Beresford’s Ten Men Dead is full of such chilling contrasts. How is it possible, one asks, for two islands so physically, economically, culturally and socially close as Britain and Ireland, to be so grotesquely divided. History and language?

In his collection of essays, Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky often returns to the inextricable mesh of expression and experience. Discussing Andrei Platonov, he sees the Russian novelist as ‘a millenarian writer if only because he attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language itself – or, to put it in a more graspable fashion, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language’. Brodsky goes on to define the roots of Russian millenarianism in the following terms:

On the mental horizon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God’s city being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervour in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a change of the entire world order, and a vague, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of getting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destination.) When such a movement succeeds, it results in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into utopias, to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle soot-covered embers. It’s either severe oppression of the population, a real, most likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some substantial chronological event, like the end of a millennium or the beginning of a new century.

Somewhat later in the same essay, ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, Brodsky remarks that the

first casualty of any discourse about utopia – desired or attained – is grammar; for language, unable to keep with this line of thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate toward categories and constructions of a rather timeless denomination. As a consequence of this, the ground starts to slip out from under even the simplest nouns, and they gradually get enveloped in an aura of arbitrariness.

Platonov, according to Brodsky, ‘was able to reveal a self-destructive eschatological element within the language itself, and that, in turn, was of extremely revealing consequences to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as the subject matter’.

The image of Platonov which Brodsky presents, in contrast to Kafka, Joyce or Beckett, ‘who narrate quite natural tragedies of their alter egos’, itself verges on the apocalyptic:

Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become the victim of its own language ... he tells a story about this very language, which turns out to be capable of generating a fictitious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.

The ten Republican paramilitaries who died on hunger strike in 1981 were mostly from old country families. Three were Belfast men and one was from Derry city. The oldest of them was born in 1951 and the youngest in 1957. With remission, nine of the ten would have been out of Long Kesh in 1987. Ten Men Dead moves with close and careful reconstruction through the awful months when the prisoners inside the prison fought off attempts at ‘criminalisation’. ‘Instead of pulling out, Britain dug in even deeper, reimposing direct rule after a brief experiment in power-sharing and devising the three-prong strategy: Ulsterisation, normalisation and criminalisation – which found one form of physical expression in the building of the H-Blocks.’ The criminalisation policy, according to Beresford, sought to deny

a belief held dear by Republican Ireland – that husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who had suffered and died for Irish independence had done so in the high cause of patriotism.

As Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, had put it in his inaugural speech (1920): ‘the contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.’ And, in an essay, MacSwiney hailed ‘the day when the consciousness of the country will be electrified with a great deed or a great sacrifice and the multitude will break from lethargy or prejudice and march with a shout for freedom a true, a brave and a beautiful sense’.

First by refusing to wear uniforms, then through the ‘blanket’ protest, the ‘no wash’ and the ‘dirty’ protests, the Long Kesh prisoners were finally cornered, through failure to achieve their basic objectives (‘the five demands’) which were for recognition of their political status. Rather than ending the blanket protest, abandoning the hunger strike and organising themselves very much as the British had done in prisoner of war camps during World War II, the Republican prisoners were, as Beresford states, drawn back to MacSwiney and those who endure the most.

It was not a practical approach [one of the prisoners maintained] ... you came out of it with moral superiority, but the Movement already has that ... and so did not need to do it. What the prisoners had to do was win the battle and in order to do that they needed to be more flexible, to adopt a two-pronged approach – try to destroy the system by working within it while at the same time standing outside it.

The harking back to previous generations and times so totally different from the present gives a kind of hallucinatory quality to the story. The isolation of the Provo leadership ‘living in something of a political cocoon’ is compounded by the innocence of the hunger-strikers. Hardened by injustice, risk, guilt and insularity, their expectations of life were heavily guarded from childhood by sentinels of nationalist piety. That religious force which Father Denis Faul refers to when blaming churchmen ‘in a way for what happened: saying that, after all, they taught people to imitate Christ, so the Church can hardly complain when they go out and do just that’ blends with the established, traditionalist cultural imperatives of the Irish language and the GAA to reinforce the utopianism instilled in the Catholic youth of Northern Ireland. When this confronts a force, state or system totally hostile to such things, redress seems to follow the logic of utopianism itself. The future (a United Ireland) matters more than the present (a divided province). So one gives oneself literally to posterity – ‘those that can suffer most ... will conquer’. The grammatical dependence is already there; the prejudice, bigotry and oppression hang like a cloud constantly in the background. A new ‘pure’ world can be generated in its place:

Hunger-striking, when taken to the death, has a sublime quality about it; in conjunction with terrorism it offers a consummation of murder and self-sacrifice which in a sense can legitimise the violence which precedes and follows it. If after killing or sharing in a conspiracy to kill – for a cause one shows oneself willing to die for the same cause, a value is adduced which is higher than that of life itself. But the obverse is also true: failure to die can discredit the cause. To scream for mercy at the foot of the gallows – or nod at the saline drip as kidneys and eyes collapse and the doctor warns of irreversible damage – is to affirm that there is no higher value than life and none worthy of condemnation than those who take it.

Inevitably, David Beresford’s book makes one ask: what did these young men die for? But no answer presents itself. Instead, Beresford’s strict grasp of narrative falters in the concluding pages and blurs into a self-enfolding, fatalistic assumption that Irish history is duty-bound to repeat itself ad infinitum. The hunger-strikers ‘died for a cause far more ancient than the grey walls of Long Kesh prison’. But people do not die on hunger strike for a cause because it is old. Perplexed by the precise reasons and the political significance of whatever they may be, Beresford inserts clichés: ‘the age-old struggle’, ‘time immemorial’, the ‘centuries-old struggle’ – all subsumed in the stretched theatrical context of W.B. Yeats’ play The King’s Threshold:

When I and these are dead

We should be carried to some windy hill

To lie there with uncovered face awhile

That mankind and that leper there may know

Dead faces laugh. King! King! Dead faces laugh.

But the point of The King’s Threshold is lost: Seanchan, the poet, stands up for poetry, the imagination, and refuses to become a mere crony of King Guaire and his council-chamber.

At times, Ten Men Dead reads like the literature the prisoners were themselves reading: Kipling, Wilde and Eilís Dillon. Bobby Sands makes a special request:

I was wondering ... that out of the goodness of all yer hearts you could get me one miserly book and try to leave it in: the Poems of Ethna Carberry – cissy. That’s really all I want, last request as they say. Some ask for cigarettes, others for blindfolds, yer man asks for poetry.

In some way that I have not been able to define, the lives of these ten men were surrounded by a kind of estranged ether, an emotional and intellectual current no longer earthed to the core realities of Ireland as it is today. Unquestionably, they knew and had unforgettable first-hand experience of sectarianism and militarism. Equally, the cultural idealism that has emerged out of this situation has brought with it a sense of dignity long denied by the political state of Northern Ireland. It is, though, the complex contradiction which manifests itself through their double life, as bombers and murderers and as freedom-fighters and Irish soldiers, which defeats me. It seems fuelled by the early tragic world of Irish peasants that was converted into the poetic stock of Yeats’ revivalist prose and ballads of the late nineteenth century. It defies any bearing to the social and cultural reality of the country as a whole, and even less to the deprivation of Belfast. Rhetoric is a pitiless word when lives are laid on the line: ‘We re-confirm and pledge “our” full confidence and support to you and march on with you to the Irish Socialist Republic.’