This wasn’t the first time the Slug had found himself thinking how Nipper’s tendency to slobber on, gilding the lily and then over-polishing the silver, had held the poor sod back, career-wise. Nipper was smart enough and he didn’t mind putting the hours in pounding the streets, at least he didn’t mind lifting the overtime for it. It was just his running on and on at the mouth that had kept him barely one step above directing traffic and doomed to stay there.

 

Then again this wasn’t the first time the Slug had missed the train of thought that carried promotion boards to their sometimes inscrutable conclusions. Not long after the Slug had written off his prospects Nipper found himself the chief Harrier in charge of the prison van carrying Martin Meehan, Anthony 'Dutch' Doherty and a number of other IRA men.

 

This shower of miscreants had been detained after a four-hour gunbattle with the British Army across the border. They were now on the journey back to Mountjoy from Dundalk Courthouse, having been charged with firearm offences.

 

Both Meehan and Doherty had already become famous having escaped from Crumlin Road prison in December 1971.

 

“Aren't they great men?” all the same, enthused Nipper, as he walked up and down the van admiring the prisoners. “Jeeeesus aren't they the fucking greatest thing, the mightiest men since the laughing boy, Mickeen Collins, himself. No, strike that, the mightiest fightingest men since fucking Brian Ború…Brian of the Tributes who went around the Banner with a sporran full of love and helped to end the Scandinavian menace. Like these men, Brian was a great yelp of a man and following him were other men like Turloch O’Brian king of Ireland, according to the annals of Lough Ce, who died at Kincora in 1086, the father of Murcertach, a highly intelligent man and a patron of Church reform. But then came in the historical void hundreds of years of tormented fabrication of stories peopled by unspecific personalities who engage in deadly conflicts and annihilations and acts of cruelty, fragmentary bawdy speech, all this littleness from Brian Boru until these men....”

 

“Is that the club?” asked a prison officer who had been trying to catch Nipper’s attention.

 

“Is what a club?”

 

“Brian Boru.”

 

“Is that the, is that the fuck, yeh ignorant lout, what school did yeh spend yer stupid days looking out the window. Jeesus I've a good mind to whip out me 38 and kneecap yeh except that yeh wouldn’t be worth the wasting of a bullet in fact you.....”

 

“Is it for those muck savage thick yokes who spend their absurd lives fumbling in the greasy till as they engage in a hopeless task of trying to add sense to their endless wordy-gurdy existence, is it for youse that these men have risked body and soul in their just war to throw and toss the little streets down the arsehole of the British Empire…” added Pah Wah who was also a member of the escort detail who had no intention of letting Nipper upstage him in verbosity and he the proud holder of a Leaving Certificate with an A in English.

 

“Didn't they give the Brit fuckers a pasting and have the cry-babies squealing so that they could be heard for miles over on the occupied side of our beloved Mother Mary’s lovely little country. C'mon lads, give them a round of applause, c'mon lads, louder, I can't fucking hear yis,” demanded Nipper as he strolled up and down his clapping hands held high above his head.

 

“These patriots shouldn't be in here, we should open the fucking emergency door and let them make a run for it,” shouted a young prison officer.

 

“We’ed need to get the fucking driver to slow down first. What’s he bombing along for anyway. Has he got something against us getting a bit of overtime chalked up like, does he not have any idea about the miserable wages we get an after a few scoops in the Hut it’ed be a visit to the credit union?”

 

“We'd all lose our pensions if we did that,” warned Mister Mahon.

 

“Don't worry, these lads will be released by the court,” advised Nipper, “remember no man can stop the march of a nation or whatever the fuck that whoremaster said. Let’s have a song for fuck’s sake. Pah Wah. The Bold Fenian Men, so. How’s about that?”

 

“What about the Wild Rover?” asked a prison officer.

 

“Ah, that's about a fucking grasping landlady who is looking for a ride and prays to the patron saint of cracked arses or something,” explained the young prison guard.

 

“Ructions, remember him, when he was in, in ‘68, was telling us about this English landlady who was throwing it about...”

 

“Go on Pah Wah, the Bold Fenian Men, and then we'll say a quick decade of the Rosary that these men's charges are thrown out by that fucking Blueshirt cunt of a judge next month.”

 

“And for the other lads on the landing,” said Bunhead.

 

“What other lads?” Nipper asked Meehan.

 

“Oh…Charlie O'Neill and Simon O'Donnell.”

 

“On your landing? There must be some mistake surely?”

 

 “How d'yah mean?”

 

“But sure they are, yeh know,” explained Nipper giving Pah Wah a wink, “fucking gangsters who don't go to Mass...they’re Cromwellian republicans an look at what he did to the Catholics here. My God up among youse!!”

 

“Don't go to mass me bollix,” quipped Pah Wah…” aren't they known to whore around the city with, yeh know, ladies of the night all the way up from the West and when they're not riding an’ strumming guitars in the women’s flats into all hours of the night with no respect for people who have to get up early an do a day’s work they can be found talking through their arses up in Gaj's restaurant about pussy and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall…”

 

“And more pussy.”

 

“And the externalisation of the relations of capital in the form of interest-bearing capital…”

 

“And more pussy…

 

“They hate Catholics more than Paisley, sure when good prison Chief Macker asked O’Donnell what he would write down for religion on the prison admittance form he said communist, then he changed his deranged mind and said atheistic communist and then he asked Macker to cross out religion and instead write scientific outlook!”

 

“The cheeky fucker.”

 

“They seem alright to me,” said Meehan.

 

“As down by the Glenside...” began the young screw in a strong melodic tone having become lost to the complexities of the otiose conversation and soon the prison van was rollicking down the Whitehall Road to the loud refrain of...'Glory Oh, glory oh to the Bold Fenian Men'.