Читать книгу Ruairí Ó Brádaigh - Robert W. White - Страница 11

INTRODUCTION

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1971, was an ugly day in Northern Ireland. In the four weeks since the introduction of internment without trial, gun battles on Belfast streets between the British Army and the IRA had been a daily occurrence. Similar violence was widespread throughout the province. On that Friday morning, three Provisional IRA gunmen shot dead 23-year-old Frank Veitch, a private in the Ulster Defence Regiment, who was on guard duty outside a joint British Army/Royal Ulster Constabulary base in Kinawley, County Fermanagh. He lived with his widowed mother and sister. The shooting was condemned by his neighbor and MP, Mr. Frank McManus, as “shocking and dastardly.” That afternoon, in Belfast, 7-year-old Paula Gallagher was out for a walk with her 17-month-old sister, Angela. They were visiting their grandparents. As Angela pushed a doll’s pram along the pavement, a sniper took a shot at British troops. The bullet ricocheted off a wall, passed through Paula’s skirt, and struck Angela in the head. She died in Paula’s arms.

That night, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, stated that “Nothing—no motive, no ideal—can excuse the killing of this innocent of the innocents. Cannot even this shameful act bring home to these men of violence the evil of the course they have taken? The sacrifice of this innocent life must surely convince them of the futility of their actions. The sympathy of the whole country goes out to the parents and family of this child.” The minister for community relations for the Northern Ireland government at Stormont, David Bleakley, stated that those responsible for Angela Gallagher’s death should be treated “like the lepers they are. They deserve neither comfort nor shelter—only cold contempt and utter rejection.” The Daily Mail reported that Pope Paul VI condemned the shooting and quoted from his address to pilgrims and tourists, “We hope that this innocent blood may be worthy to beseech from God a true and just reconciliation among the people.” Although the IRA’s Belfast Brigade denied it, the evidence and the historians record that the sniper was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

The next morning, John Shaw of the Press Association telephoned Ruairí Ó Brádaigh at his home in Roscommon. Ó Brádaigh was president of Provisional Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Questioned about Angela Gallagher, he stated that what “happened was one of the hazards of urban guerilla warfare … it was one of those unfortunate accidents.”

The sound bite was picked up and condemned in the tabloids and by Ó Brádaigh’s political opponents. Even the Provisional IRA chief of staff (C/S), Seán Mac Stiofáin, phoned and berated him for the comment. The rival Official IRA, which would later kill a number of civilians with its own activities, released a statement that included, “We have consistently attacked in the strongest possible terms all activity which would jeopardise the lives of innocent people and we do not subscribe to the policy of those who attempt to excuse death and injury to innocent civilians as the fortunes of war.” Tomas Mac Giolla, former president of Official Sinn Fein, draws on incidents like this, describing Ó Brádaigh as “a very cold kind of person in many ways like that. Lacking any sort of human compassion.” From an outsider’s perspective, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is the quintessential Irish nationalist who lives in the cloistered confines of the West of Ireland and clings to the myth that physical force can lead to a united, Gaelic, Catholic Ireland.

Yet there is more to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. He did regret Angela Gallaghers death. He had spent about half of an hour on the phone with Shaw and the conversation had ranged from Dublin in 1920–1921 (when a number of civilians were killed) to Nicosia and activities in Cyprus to Saigon in Vietnam; the sound bite was the only part to be published. On the day Angela Gallagher died, Ó Bradaigh was 39 years old, married, and the father of six children—the oldest was 11 and the youngest was 18 months. He also told Shaw that what had happened was extremely regrettable, that nothing “would relieve the grief of the parents about the death of their child” and that “I would know how I would feel, and I have six children myself.”

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is a complex man. While raising a family and pursuing a career, he also lived the public life of a revolutionary political figure and the very private life of a guerrilla soldier. He is a second-generation Irish Republican and a second-generation college graduate. He joined the IRA and Sinn Fein in the 1950s and became a major figure in each; his tenure on the IRA’s Army Council spans decades, he was the first president of Provisional Sinn Fein and is currently president of Republican Sinn Fein. He has lived most of his life in a small town in the West of Ireland, but he has also traveled the world—in support of the Republican cause and to examine other political systems for insight on how to achieve a lasting peace in Ireland. He is a conscientious Catholic, but his family background includes Swiss Protestants, and he publicly challenges the authority and the ethics of the Catholic hierarchy. Interpersonally, he is routinely described as polite and courteous, and countless articles have noted that he is a nonsmoking teetotaler. Even his political enemies comment on his humorous side. Tomas Mac Giolla also remembers Ó Bradaigh as “an individual you could get on with, have good fun with, and that.” He is known to refer to himself and fellow Irish Republicans as “madmen like us,” and in speaking about his children he is quick to laugh at how awkward it must be for future in-laws to meet for the first time a man vilified as one of the world’s chief terrorists.

This biography is an attempt to understand the complexity of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and modern Irish Republicanism. Aside from his own importance, Ó Brádaigh is the public face of a generation of Irish Republicans which, having fought in the IRA’s Border Campaign in the 1950s, founded the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein in 1969/70 and the Continuity IRA and Republican Sinn Fein in 1986. Ó Brádaigh’s life is a window for understanding his generation of Irish Republicans and how they received the values of a previous generation and are transmitting those values to the next generation. He represents IRA and Sinn Fein members who, no matter what, will not “give up the gun” short of a declaration of an intention to withdraw from Northern Ireland by the British government. Because of people like him there will never be peace in Ireland without such a declaration—no matter the outcome of the current peace process.

Paula Backscheider, in Reflections on Biography, states that “getting to the person beneath, the core of the human being, is the biographer’s job.” Understanding the complexity of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and those like him requires an in-depth examination of the personal and political events that shaped his life. In presenting this life, I have tried to describe his actions and choices as he experienced them, to understand his decisions based on the context and information that he had at the time rather than with the benefit of hindsight. In this process, I have relied as much as possible on contemporary accounts of events, including direct quotations from him at the time of a particular event. These accounts are complemented by hours of interviews with Mr. Ó Brádaigh, as described under “Sources.” The reader will determine if the core of Mr. Ó Brádaigh has been revealed.