Читать книгу Charlie One - Seán Hartnett - Страница 12

1 UP THE ’RA

The Sinn Féin office in Cork city at that time was located on Barrack Street, just across from a pub called Nancy Spain’s, which was a favourite drinking haunt for us UCC students. In spite of my naivety, I wasn’t daft enough to just walk in there and ask to join the IRA. I actually did a bit of digging first and got the name and phone number of a local Sinn Féin figure whom I was told would be able to help. We arranged to meet on a Sunday morning in April 1995.

I got up that morning having spent the whole night going over in my head what I was about to do. I had never been in trouble with the law, hadn’t even had so much as a bad report home from school, and yet here I was with a half-baked plan to join one of the most notorious terrorist organisations in the world.

The closer the time came to leave for the meeting, the more insane the idea seemed.

*

There weren’t many clues in my past that I would end up where I did.

I was born in 1975 in a small village in Co. Cork, into a family of six girls and three boys, a good Irish Catholic family. In the old days, as the youngest son, I might have been sent off to join the priesthood.

Back in November 1968, my parents had returned to Cork from London, where they had met and married two years previously. They were both from families whose roots were firmly in Cork and it was practically inevitable that they would end up there themselves. My oldest brother was the only one of us to be born outside Ireland, the rest of us were Cork-born and bred.

My father got a job in the booming textile industry that had sprung up all over the county, and seemed set for life. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t last, and in 1981 he was made redundant. That was the last proper job I remember him having: he spent the rest of his days on the dole, occasionally picking up some work on the fishing boats, either with his brother or another crew, but it was never steady work. In these circumstances, like so many other men of that era, he took to drinking, and the responsibility of providing for the family fell to my mother. She worked a variety of cooking, cleaning and secretarial jobs over the next thirty years, and it was all down to her that we got by and that my siblings and I all managed to get decent educations.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Ireland was tough; money was tight and with so many mouths to feed my mother often struggled to make ends meet. As it continued, my father’s drinking sapped the family finances – a fact that never seemed to bother him much, and we were often left hungry. Each of my older brothers and sisters had a part-time job from an early age and their wages were used to supplement my mother’s meagre income. My turn came too; I took my first job at twelve years old, working two hours a day after school and a half-day on Saturdays in a fish co-op, where my two older brothers had also worked. It was tough going but I loved it; the craic was always good and my wages of £20 a week, stuffed into a brown envelope, I handed over to my mother with pride. Many of the families on our small housing estate, one of the many built as part of the government social housing initiative, were in the same boat, so we didn’t stand out. We had the advantage of having great neighbours, with everyone pitching in to help each other out; and forty years on, they remain just the same.

My home life, however, was not so happy or supportive; my father was argumentative with drink on him. He was the classic street angel, house devil, and as a result many of my early years were spent outdoors with others of my age, escaping his influence. This was before the days of Xbox and PlayStation, and we made your own fun out in the fields and woodlands that surrounded the village. On free days, we would head off at first light, only returning for meals and sometimes not even then. I loved the outdoors and in fact was just as happy out wandering about on my own as I was surrounded by friends. There may have been a soldiering seed planted in those days; but of course a seed needs more than planting.

Things came to a head with my father one night when he came home with drink on him. I was sixteen years old, and as usual he was being an ass, picking fights with anyone who would take the bait. That night it was I who bit, and out of a sense of frustration and perhaps a desire to stand up for those who couldn’t defend themselves as well, I landed a punch square on his jaw, sending him to the floor. I had been a karate student with the local club since I was eleven, training two or three times a week, and I knew how to throw a punch. It would be the first of many fights between us over the next few years, with family members often having to intervene to keep us apart. Looking back, I think it might have been an urge to right things, to intervene to try to sort things out once and for all. Most of all, though, I think I just hated bullies. It’s been almost twenty-five years since that night, and I have never spoken a word (other than in anger) to my father since. My parents separated some years later, and while the rest of the family have stayed in close contact with him, my antipathy towards him remains.

Like every other boy in our village, I was educated by the Christian Brothers both in primary and secondary school. I was a bright student and so managed to avoid the wrath of some of the sterner brothers. I loved studying history, in particular Irish history: the accounts of Michael Collins,Éamon de Valera and the Easter Rising sparked my imagination, and from there I became a prolific reader of Irish history. By that time, of course, the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their worst, with Provisional IRA bombing campaigns spreading to the UK and Loyalist murder squads operating across the North. I became fascinated by it, and had a sense of watching history unfold before my eyes on the TV screen and in the newspapers every day.

I sat my Leaving Certificate in 1993 and got enough points to study science at UCC. In truth, I had little interest in the subject, but I jumped at the chance to get away from home, which at that point had become unbearable. I would have taken any option open to me. My first year at university went well, I enjoyed the freedom that came with living away from home for the first time and made good friends. I passed my first year exams without any problems but by the second year I was spending more time at history lectures with my friend Norah than at my own science ones. It was one day during a laboratory session towards the end of that year that I looked around and just knew that it was no longer for me. The thought of spending the rest of my life cooped up in a lab was too much to take. Breaking the news to my family was, I thought at the time, one of the hardest things I would ever have to do. But actually, there were even harder things ahead.

Looking back at the uncertainty I created in my life at that stage, I realise now how lucky I was to have got to where I am today. It could have been very, very different if I’d gone through with my first plan.

The origins of that plan probably go back to 8 May 1987, when British Special Forces killed eight PIRA (Provisional Irish Republican Army) volunteers at Loughgall, Co. Armagh. One of those killed on the day was Seamus Donnelly, aged just nineteen. He was a neighbour and first cousin of my uncle’s wife, who was from a staunchly Republican area and a staunchly Republican family. My family therefore felt close to what had happened. I could feel the anger in the room as we watched the news reports, and it created a hatred in me from an early age for ‘the Brits’. Needless to say, we only saw how these men had been butchered under an SAS shoot-to-kill policy, not how their plan to murder RUC officers had been sabotaged.

This wasn’t my family’s only link to Northern Ireland, either. Another uncle had married into a Republican family from Carrickmacross, and an aunt had married a man from Castleblaney in Co. Monaghan, near the border. Like most Irish families we were very close to our uncles, aunts and cousins, and through those connections with the North we grew up hearing many stories of British army raids on homes and of the oppression of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland.

My first plan, stemming from all this, was to join the IRA and the fight to get the British out of the North and reunite the country. I knew that was the idea, but I hadn’t actually put much thought into it. It was more that I found myself swept along by romantic notions of being a freedom fighter, fighting for justice against an evil oppressor, and this was the nearest such opportunity to home. The reality of actually blowing people up and taking someone’s life, and living with the consequences, hadn’t registered fully in my young mind.

Fortunately, on the day I was due to start the process of joining up, I bottled and didn’t go to the meeting. Luckily, too, I hadn’t told a soul what I had been planning, so I didn’t have any explaining to do.

Where did that leave me? I had left university and was working in a factory. Although the money was good and I had moved into a house with some friends, I wasn’t happy. The thoughts of settling down in a small town and spending the rest of my days in a mundane job began to frighten me. I longed for travel, adventure and a greater sense of purpose.

I decided to join the army.