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For me it began in far-off Mesopotamia now called Iraq, that land of Biblical names and history, of vast deserts and date groves, scorching suns and hot winds, the land of Babylon, Baghdad and the Garden of Eden, where the rushing Euphrates and the mighty Tigris converge and flow down into the Persian Gulf.

It was there in that land of the Arabs, then a battle-ground for the contending Imperialistic armies of Britain and Turkey, that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland.

– Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland

At some point in my childhood, perhaps when I was aged ten, or eleven, I became aware that during the Second World War my Turkish grandfather – my mother’s father, Joseph Dakad – had been imprisoned by the British in Palestine, a place exotically absent from any atlas. A shiver of an explanation accompanied this information: the detention had something to do with spying for the Germans. At around the same age, I also learned that my Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, had been jailed by the authorities in Ireland in the course of the same war. Nobody explained precisely why, or where, or for how long, and I attributed his incarceration to the circumstances of a bygone Ireland and a bygone IRA. These matters went largely unmentioned, and certainly undiscussed, by my parents in the two decades that followed. Indeed, the subject of my late grandfathers was barely raised at all and, save for a wedding-day picture of Joseph and his wife, Georgette, there were no photographs of them displayed in our home. Dwelling in the jurisdiction of parental silence, my grandfathers remained mute and out of mind.

Partially as a consequence of this, it was not until I was thirty that the curious parallelism in my grandfathers’ lives struck me with any force and that I was driven to explore it, to fiddle at doors that had remained unopened, perhaps even locked, for so many years; and not until then that I began to make out what connected these two men, who never met, and these two captivities – one in the Levant heat, the other in the rainy, sporadically incandescent plains of central Ireland.

As will soon become apparent, I wasn’t bringing a reflective political mind to bear on my grandfathers’ lives, or any expertise as a historian, or even any abnormal inclination to wonder about what might lie behind a closed door. In general, I’m as content as the next man to proceed on the footing that any information of importance – anything that has a bearing on my essential interests – will be brought to my attention by those entrusted with such things: families, schools, news agencies, subversives. This is so even though the information I have on most historical and political subjects could be written out on a luggage tag; is almost certainly wrong; and, at bottom, probably functions as a political soporific – which perhaps explains why the insights I gained into my grandfathers’ lives often took the form of a slow, idiotic awakening. It took anomalous forces – a writer’s professional curiosity turned into something like an obsession – to push me, reluctant and red-eyed and stumbling, into the past and, it turned out, its dream-bright horrors.

Two inklings set me on my way, one for each grandfather.

My Turkish grandmother, Mamie Dakad – mamie being French for granny – had an extreme attachment to a set of keys. She clung to them from morning till night and then, secreting them under her pillow, from night till morning. When she mislaid them, all hell broke loose, in multiple languages. She would shriek first at herself in Arabic (‘Yiii!’), next at her family, in French (‘Où sont mes clefs?’), and finally – with terrifying loudness and venom – at the nearest servant, in Turkish: ‘ANAHTARLAR NERDE?’ The loss of keys was not the only thing that would set her off. My grandmother yelled frequently and for a whole variety of reasons at the waiters, maids, managers, cleaners and cooks whom she employed to staff her hotel and to attend to her personal needs and the needs of her family. All day they scurried in and out of her apartment in a sweat, delivering panniers of toast, bars of goat’s cheese, lamb cutlets, fish, aubergines, meat pancakes, melons, watermelons, water, glasses of lemonade, bottles of Efes beer, sodas, Coca-Colas, Turkish coffees, Turkish teas. You could never have enough to drink. Mersin, the port in south-east Turkey where my grandmother lived, is as humid a spot as you’ll find in the Mediterranean, and in August, when my parents and their four children arrived for their annual holiday, my grandmother’s breezeless apartment on the top floor of the hotel was as hot as a hammam. Fans vainly circulated warm air, and the trickle of coolness produced by the grinding air-conditioning machine escaped ineffectually through the windows towards the harbour, where Turkish warships sat on the still water like cakes on a salver. When we were not immobilized on the divans, pooped out, stunned, minimizing our movements, we were opening one of the refrigerators – the doors, tall as ourselves, swung out with a gasping, rubbery suck – and taking long, burning slugs of the freezing water that filled the Johnnie Walker and Glenfiddich bottles jammed in the rack. My grandmother’s outbursts were all the more terrible for their suddenness and unfairness, the minor domestic booboos, if any, from which they sprang (a fork misplaced in a drawer filled with Christofle silver, a floor-mopping delinquency) shockingly disproportionate to the condemnation that followed. I have never really understood why she was prone to these authoritarian rages. She was loving and unstinting with her friends and family and, it so happens, a loyal employer. Perhaps the heat played a part, and racial and class contempt. Either way, Mehmet Ali, Mehmet, Huseyin, Fatma and the rest of them got it in the neck.

As I said, Mamie Dakad carried a bunch of keys about her person at all times. She never jingled them or fixed them to a pretty ring. She strung them around a bare loop of metal and gripped them – even in her old age, when arthritis had curled her fists into strengthless talons.

One morning, in a summer of the late ’eighties, when I was in my mid-twenties, there occurred an episode which might have belonged to a kids’ mystery story. My cousin Phaedon (the son of my mother’s sister, Amy) and I decided to take a look around a storage room in the hotel known as the depot. We knew that family stuff was kept there and we were curious. So we asked our grandmother for the key to the depot.

‘Why?’ she asked. She was getting her hair cut as she sat in the hot dining room, a white towel over her shoulders, a spectacular length of ash hanging crookedly from a butt in her mouth. Even though she was nearing the end of her career as a smoker (forty years of seeing off at least forty, preferably extra-strong Pall Mall, non-filters a day), she was still able to suck back an entire cigarette without touching it with her fingers.

I explained why. Mamie Dakad looked at me sceptically, then wordlessly pointed at her keys, which lay on a nearby table. I brought them to her. She plucked out a skeleton key. ‘Bring it back,’ she said.

We walked down the long corridor outside Mamie Dakad’s apartment. Ashtrays filled with sand were fixed to the walls, and dead, half-buried cigarettes protruded from the sand. The depot was half way down the corridor, next to the staircase that led to the roof of the hotel. From that scorching roof you saw, heaped on the northern horizon, the cool Taurus Mountains, whose name, spelled in phonetic Turkish, my grandfather Joseph gave to the hotel: the Toros Otel.

The depot was a stale, hot space overlooking the hotel’s oven-like internal yard. We found neat piles of sea-stained old paperbacks from the ’seventies; snorkels; junior-sized flippers; my mother’s schoolbooks and school reports. Then I noticed, on top of a trunk, some papers held together by a large, rusting safety-pin – sixty or so pages extracted from a ledger book, with columns for debits and credits and totting up. But if this was an accounting, it wasn’t of the financial kind. In place of figures, lines of elegant manuscript Turkish filled the pages.

Phaedon took a look while I peered over his shoulder. After a minute or so, he said that the writing had to be our grandfather’s. It was an account, Phaedon said slowly, of his arrest, in 1942, and his subsequent imprisonment. We looked at each other. We knew we were entering, maybe trespassing on, a dark corner of the family history. Then we read on. Flicking quickly through the pages, Phaedon reported the main features of the story as best as he could; he had difficulty in understanding the old-fashioned, Arabic-influenced Turkish.

What Phaedon said was this: in March 1942, my grandfather went to Palestine on a business trip. He spent some time in Jerusalem, where he associated with Palestinian Arabs and a female acquaintance. On his way home, he was arrested at the Turkish – Syrian border by the British. He was taken to Haifa and then to the British headquarters in Jerusalem, and then detained elsewhere for the rest of the war. Phaedon couldn’t figure out what the exact nature of the document was. ‘It seems to be addressed to the Turkish authorities,’ he said with a shrug.

By the time we returned to Mamie Dakad’s apartment, the hairdresser was clearing up and my mother was laying the table for lunch for twelve: chicken, stuffed peppers, tabbouleh, cucumber and watercress salad with a lemon dressing, beans, lentils with rice, yoghurt, bread. A rubble of watermelons, grapes and peaches was piled up in the kitchen. For my grandmother and the community she belonged to, nothing, not even cards, was of greater social importance than food.

When I broke the news of our scoop to my mother, she reacted in a curious way; that is, apart from a raising of her eyebrows, she did not react. Almost as if she hadn’t heard me, she continued to set out the forks and knives. Unabashed and excited, I turned to my grandmother and asked about the document. ‘Don’t speak about it,’ my mother said sharply to me in English, which was not one of Mamie Dakad’s languages, ‘it’ll upset her.’ It was too late. My grandmother was already in tears. ‘Le pauvre,’ she said, her face wrinkling and her hand raised in a distressed gesture of explanation, ‘le pauvre, il a beaucoup souffert.’

‘You see?’ my mother said. ‘You see what you’ve done?’

I returned the key to Mamie Dakad. Joseph Dakad’s papers were locked away once more, not to be seen again until years later.

My first moment of access to the life of my Irish grandfather, Jim O’Neill – and my first clue as to what may have formed his life’s hard, insubstantial heart – was also fortuitous. It took place in The Hague, the city where, in 1970, after series of migrations that had bounced us like a skipping roulette ball through South Africa, Mozambique, Syria, Turkey and Iran, my family came to a permanent halt. In the top shelf of the bookcase in the dining room was a hardback entitled Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although as a teenager I’d read most of my parents’ books, I’d never been enthused by this one. It had an uncompromising black cover and an unappetising introduction by one Avrahm Yarmalinsky, and Dostoevsky himself, the balding, anxious man in the jacket photograph, whose writing I had not read, did not look like a lot of fun. The Hague, however, is an uneventful place, and eventually I found myself idly leafing through the Letters; and I encountered, trapped in the book’s thick pages, two newspaper clips.

The first read as follows:

O’NEILL (Cork and Ardkitt, Enniskean) – On September 6, 1973, at the South Infirmary, James, beloved husband of Eileen (née Lynch), Dún Ard, Southlodge, Browningstown Park (1st. Batt., First Cork Brigade, I.R.A.). Deeply regretted by his loving wife and family. Funeral on today (Saturday) after 2.30 o’clock Mass at our Lady of Lourdes Church, Ballinlough, to St Michael’s Cemetery, Blackrock.

The second cutting was an article headed Around the G.A.A. Clubs.

St Vincents. It was with the deepest regret that we learned of the passing away of our esteemed member, Mr. Jim O’Neill, during the past week. Beannacht De ar a anam.

For many years Jim had been a staunch worker in our club. He held many positions over the years, but for him no job was too big or menial where St. Vincents was concerned. He was behind much of our early plan making, nevertheless when those plans dictated the arduous work it took to fulfil them, Jim was oft times only too willing to undertake that work. Over a period of 22 years in which I knew him, he proved to be a true Gael. Ever mindful of our beautiful Gaelic culture, he had a life-time dedication to the cause of one united Ireland. In character he was straight and true. I remember 12 years ago being in employment with Jim. I happened one day to remark to him the briskness and dedication he put to his work. He replied that he was morally bound to give a just return for his pay. This was the honesty and directness I learned to expect always from him. Four of his sons, Brendan, Padraig, Kevin and Terry, have been stalwart members of our club down through the years. On behalf of St. Vincents I tender to his wife and family our sincere deepest sympathy.

The sudden palpability of my grandfather, of whom I knew and remembered next to nothing, caused in me a lurch of proud affiliation. First Battalion, First Cork Brigade, IRA. There was something appealing about this simple and assured assertion of his soldiership, and there was poetic force in the phrase a true Gael. To me these were glamorous texts, calls from a gritty world of hurling and revolution that was thrillingly distant from the bourgeois, entirely agreeable environment of The Hague. My vague imagining of my grandfather’s rebel world was in terms of the jacket illustration for Guerrilla Days in Ireland by Tom Barry, a tatty paperback memoir that had always occupied an incongruous niche between my mother’s multilingual dictionaries and volumes of French literature. The illustration is of an IRA ambush at dusk on a deserted country road in West Cork, the sky burgundy, the sunken day a low-lying mass of yellow. A convoy of trucks is turning into view, and waiting to jump them are a smart officer in a blue jacket and a tie, who is holding a pistol, and two sturdy, rifle-toting fellows in rough shirts. It is a colourful, quasi-fictional scene in the style of a boys’ comic, and speaks of cold, adventurous nights and clean-cut valour.

Hurling, on the other hand, I knew something about. Hurling was the fastest field sport in the world and required great skill and guts from its players. It was a wild, precise game in which the ball was kicked and fisted and swiped with flattened hockey sticks, the object being to score in goals that combined rugby uprights and soccer nets. It was gorgeous mayhem. My father, Kevin O’Neill, had played top-class hurling for his club, St Vincents, and county, Cork, losing half a mouthful of teeth and gaining a network of forehead scars in the process. I had played the game myself in the field behind my grandmother’s house, and knew the pleasure of juggling the ball on the hurley and skimming it through the air with a cack-handed thwack. The O’Neills were crazy about sports. They played Gaelic football – at which my father had also fleetingly represented Cork – golf, athletics and, in the case of my younger uncles, the English games of soccer and rugby. Grandma O’Neill’s house, the detached house where she has lived since the ’sixties, was full of the prizes her seven sons had won; entering her dining room felt like entering the trophy room of Real Madrid or Manchester United, the walls densely hung with ribbons and medals, the fireplace loaded with pewter cups on which silvery hurlers and footballers teetered.

Their love of games apart, I knew little about the O’Neills. By contrast with Mersin, where I had spent practically every summer of my life, I had only visited Cork intermittently. My father had nine brothers and sisters (in order of seniority: Jim, Brendan, Padraig, Terry, Ann, Declan, Angela, Marian, Fergus) who between them had nine spouses and more than thirty children, and keeping track of them all from Holland was a tall order. I knew my uncle Brendan and his family, but after that it became trickier. My aunts and uncles were warm but inevitably distant older figures, my cousins youngsters and elusive; at any rate, more elusive than my Turkish cousins, whom I saw most summers and whose itineraries as students of medicine, economics, dentistry and computer studies fitted easily into the professional grid with which I was brought up to view the world. And whereas Dakads were to be found in Paris, Nice, Lausanne, Istanbul, Lyon and San Francisco, the strewage of work and study and marriage, the O’Neills stayed put in Cork.

A decade or so later, I re-opened Dostoevsky’s Letters. The death notices were still there. No doubt my father had received the cuttings from his mother, who snips out and files newspaper articles that catch her interest. Often, these have to do with her grandchildren – the musical exploits of Seán, who was briefly a rock star, the swimming results of Ciaran, the picture of Deirdre at the pony club, the mention of Clodagh in her school magazine – but just as often they have to do with politics. You’ll find reports on the jailing of uncle Brendan for refusal to pay services charges imposed by Cork City Corporation (‘Union Chief Jailed’, Cork Examiner); on the welfare of the South Yorkshire miners during the year-long British miners’ strike (‘A Conquered People’, Irish Times); on the decision of the Irish government to inform the British government of IRA plans to mount a military campaign in Northern Ireland (‘A People Betrayed’, Irish Republican Bulletin, 1957); on the life and death of Mairead Farrell, the IRA volunteer killed by British forces in Gibraltar (‘From Teenage Recruit to Prison Leader’, Irish Times).

There is a pronounced, almost comical, contrast between, on the one hand, Grandma’s appearance and civilian goodness and, on the other hand, her militaristic political stance. To appreciate the contrariety, you have to understand that Grandma is five foot nothing and a wonder of friendliness. She has curly white hair, clear blue eyes and a girlish, irresistible chortle. Aside from occasional attacks of sciatica, she is a model of health and energy which, even in her late eighties, she devotes to organizing meals on wheels for the elderly, going to Mass, promoting raffles and lotteries in good causes, visiting the sick, and saying rosaries for friends and family in need. All day she receives a stream of visitors – neighbours, children, old pals – in her kitchen, fixing them up with snacks and cups of milky tea. She remembers every birthday of her ten children and thirty-six grandchildren and ever-multiplying great-grandchildren, and she remembers every person who has lived on her street and every disease that has afflicted them. She is unflinching in her love of her family and, remarkably, is somehow able to care for all of us deeply and appropriately. She follows all major international events at which Ireland is represented, from the Eurovision Song Festival to the soccer World Cup to the women’s 5000 metres in the Olympic Games. She is an honorary member of British National Union of Miners, South Wales Area (in 1984, she put up striking miners in her home for months). She boycotts retailers such as Dunnes Stores for breaking the South African trade embargo and mistreating their employees. She is an unblinking supporter of the cause of a united Ireland. She is a veteran of Cumann na mBan, the women’s republican organization. She has given shelter to the most wanted men in the country. She has stored guns under the floorboards.

By the time I went back to the newspaper cuttings about Jim O’Neill, I had already started to mull over my grandfathers’ double troubles. This led me turn to the actual contents of the Letters of Dostoevsky and to read Mr Yarmolinsky’s introduction: hadn’t Dostoevsky himself been in a political jam of some kind? I still barely knew anything about Fyodor Dostoevsky. I certainly didn’t know until Mr Yarmolinsky told me about it that, in April 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned in Petropaulovsky Fortress, accused of ‘having taken part in conversations about the severity of the Censorship; of having read, at a meeting in March 1849, Bielinsky’s revolutionary letter to Gogol; of having read it at Dourov’s rooms, and of having given it to Monbelli to copy; of having listened at Dourov’s to the reading of various articles’. In December 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky received the death sentence – which, luckily for him, was commuted moments before he was due to be shot; less luckily, the commutation was to four years’ hard labour in Siberia.

I felt a tingle: there was synchrony in the cuttings being lodged in a book that touched on political radicalism and the loss of freedom. I turned to a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Michael on 22 February 1854, when he had finally served his sentence and was able to write for the first time in years. In the letter – a lengthy and somewhat frazzled dispatch, voicing a jumble of anxieties and needs – Dostoevsky outlined the conditions of his imprisonment and the tribulations he had undergone. In its jittery and unstyled way, the outline was deeply affecting and for a moment plunged me into the cold pool of my grandfathers’ imprisonment. For the first time, albeit for only an instant, I was alerted to how forsaken they must have felt; for the first time, and with a shock, I sympathized with them.

I am not sure why it took a stranger’s letter, and one written in the middle of the last century, to stir my compassion (or, indeed, whether such a roundabout stirring is perverse or heartless); but a clue to this aloofness, may, I think, also be found in Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother.

One midwinter night on the way to Siberia, the horses and sledges transporting Dostoevsky to his exile became stuck in the snow. This happened in the Urals, and as the prisoner waited in the snowstorm for the horses to struggle free, he was struck by the melancholy realization that ahead lay only Asia, and that Europe and his whole past – his whole existence, by implication – were now behind him. Dostoevsky never lost this feeling of disconnection and isolation, which engendered in him the particular fear that he had lost his brother’s love. To combat this fear, he asserted the contrary in his letter (‘I know that you love me, and keep me in kindly remembrance’); but a telling moment of uncertainty arrived when, having furiously criticized Michael for not writing to him in the prison camp, he begged for news:

Write and answer me as quickly as possible; write, without awaiting an opportunity, officially, and be as explicit and detailed as you possibly can. I am like a slice cut from a loaf nowadays; I long to grow back, but can’t. Les absents ont toujours tort. Is that saying to come true of us two?

The lingering phrase, here, is the one in French: ‘les absents ont toujours tort’. As it happens, the use to which it is put is ambiguous: one cannot be sure whether Michael is the absent wrongdoer, or Fyodor. Either way, the saying resonates in the context of my grandfathers.

An element of the taut silences that enclosed Joseph and Jim – surrounded them almost completely, like seas around peninsulas – was that of condemnation. Normally, we may count on an afterlife as a mouthful of stories, but for Joseph and Jim it had not worked out that way. It could be said that there is nothing unusual or wrong about this. If we are lucky, we have better and more urgent things to do than indulge in the regressive business of dwelling on the dead – children to raise, homes to keep up, work problems to figure out, spouses to love. My parents, for example, have been this lucky. However, I had always felt, growing up, that there was more to their silence than distraction or coyness. Nor was it the case that my grandfathers’ absence was due to my grandmothers’ engulfing presences. No, the silence meant more than that. It meant, I sensed, that Joseph and Jim were each in some way in the wrong. Les absents ont toujours tort.

But I didn’t know this for a fact. Actually, I knew just about nothing for a fact – nothing about these men, and very little about the historical circumstances of their lives.

Some might consider ignorance a virtuous trait in an inquirer, a clean slate on which evidence may impartially be inscribed. But it doesn’t work like that, at least it did not in my case. I was, of course, prejudiced; and, like most prejudices, mine found an infantile manifestation. It was not simply that my grandfathers stood accused in my mind of offences that I had not even formulated: it was that I didn’t like their faces. I didn’t like Jim’s face – there was something frightening about his handsome, tooth-baring smile – and I didn’t like the face of Joseph either, in particular the black moustache that made me think of Adolf Hitler.

What had they done wrong, though? Was it connected to their imprisonment? What were the facts?

It so happens that I am, by my professional training, supposed to be equipped as anybody to answer these sorts of questions and set to one side the kind of prejudice I have mentioned. I am a lawyer; more precisely, since lawyers are varietal as butterflies, I am a barrister working mainly in business law. It is a charmless but profitable field. There are countless commercial transactions effected every day, and they give rise to countless disputes. Were the goods defective? Did the surveyor give the bank negligent advice as to the value of a property development? Was there a material non-disclosure entitling the insurer to avoid the policy? For much of my working life I have gone into my chambers, pulled out ring binders from my shelves and tried to get to the bottom of these sorts of hard-boiled questions. After I have gone through hundreds of pages of correspondence, pleadings, affidavits and attendance notes, and sifted the relevant from the discardable, there are further, more finicky sub-questions. What was said in the telephone conversation of 14 February 1998? When did the cracks first appear in the wall? Who is Mr MacDougal? Often, meetings with the client are required to fill in the gaps or to quiz him closely to make sure nothing of significance has been left out. What one learns, pretty quickly, is that frequently the truth remains anybody’s guess – even after all the documents have been scrutinized, all the witnesses have been grilled, and all the solicitors, juniors, silks and experts, racking up fees of hundreds of thousands of pounds, have trained their searchlights into the factual darkness.

Sometimes, however, something is illumined that is strange and unlooked-for and that, although perhaps not decisive of the hard-boiled question, twists the case and gives it a new meaning. This is, in a sense, what transpired after I began to look into the unknown lives of Joseph and Jim, following the narrow beam of their coincidental imprisonment. It led to times and places in which politics might have dramatic and personal consequences; in which people might be impelled to act or acquiesce in the face of evil and embark on journeys of the body and spirit that to many of us, living in the democratic west at the beginning of the new century, may seem fantastical; and in which people might through political action or inaction discover boundaries in themselves – good and bad – that we, casting our vote twice a decade, or losing our temper at the dinner table, or shunning the wines and cheeses of France, maybe cannot hope to know. Maybe. It may be, in fact, that our lives are thrown into greater ethical relief than we suspect. We may be judged strenuously by our descendants, who will perceive distinct rights and wrongs, shadows and crests, that we failed to notice. In part, my grandfathers’ predicaments stemmed from what they saw or did not see around them. To this extent, they stand as paradigms of political and moral visions of different sorts, the blind eye and the dazzled eye, each with its own compensations and each with its own price.