ESSEX QUAY

 

Dick Timmons in a dark gabardine with the collar up. Walking round by the Castle heading to Parliament Street. Trying to make up his mind, would he take his life in his hands calling into the Red Hackle or take the corner into Essex Quay and wait to see who turned up for Dennehy’s talk on Landlordism. The last time he risked the Hackle he’d nearly got brained with one of them ashtrays that some big oulwan threw the length of the bar at some little oulfella who she claimed was trying to look up her dress.

 

Just over a week, he’d been back from London. On the recommendation of Liam Walsh, Timmons had gone there as a sort of covert plenipotentiary to open up new contacts for arms deals after the collapse of the previous venture. That ended ingloriously with Jock Haughey and Martin Casey scarpering and scrambling across some flat roofs in London to narrowly avoid capture in an MI5 sting.

 

Although Timmons was wanted in England, having escaped from Wakefield Prison in the forties, his wide range of contacts, especially in left-wing circles, was considered a plus which could not be ignored.

 

Back now eight or nine days. And the weather hadn’t improved yet. Still wet, still cold, the sky was still cloud-shuttered and dungeon-dreary-Jaysus to think he’d been homesick for this! Just over a week in London and he couldn’t wait to get back to the big smoke. Back from the Brecknock and the Leighton Arms. Jaysus Christ all fucking mighty, he couldn’t be missing all that oul’ shite now, could he? The Holloway bloody Castle? Maybe the Hackle’s not so bad after all. A bit of life about the place at any rate.

 

Leaving his feet for once to their own devices, not thinking at all, he found himself at a heartbeat at the Red Hackle bar, waiting on a pint of porter, checking it out around him to see was there a table safe, out of the line of fire of numbskulls or knackers.

 

And it all seemed quiet, very quiet. Then of a sudden, he saw the probable cause. On a table in the darkest corner......a trilby. A trilby with an Easter Lily badge strategically pinned to the hat’s front. “Oh no!” he thought, “not him, not Tommy fucking Mmmm..”

 

Marsh had left his one-of-a-kind sort of maybe a fashion statement on the table while he took advantage of the facilities to point Percy at the porcelain. Pissing then and shaking he was all the time thinking. Cogitating the state of the world and how best to disturb it. Considering riot and disorder. Plotting mayhem and destruction. Fly fastening and leaving the jacks. Proving himself a man for the multitasking. Pity he’d forgotten his packet of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.

 

For the past few months, he’d been brooding about his arms dump in the graveyard at Mungret in Limerick. Was there anything still in among the bones or had Walsh moved the stuff for the beginning of the war? The war that was beginning but that nobody was calling it a war. It was a sort of mystery. He must check it out soon and mark it for development. If it was there at all. If he had seen it. If...

 

Time. Time and the tides of things that move through human affairs, shifting them about, replacing and misplacing them. Like that nail for the want of which the battle was lost. Like what your man said who never had it so good. Like events, dear boy, events. That kinda thing.

 

Regardless, it was surely time he went out that way to check was everything hunky dory. Ready for use and the day almost upon him, upon them all....when orders from the captain to be ready quick and soon, would the pikes be at Mungret cemetery at the rising of the moon. Not to mention Dominic Behan’s old parabellum or Ructions’ long-sprung alarum clock...

 

With his mind turning in the direction of Johnston’s motor car and his eyes on a glorious future he practically tripped over Timmons who was twisting such a corkscrew of attempted evasion that he move directly into the path of the disaster of what he was trying to evade.

 

“What the fuck kinda eejet are you?” Marsh growled at the flailing gabardine as it struggled to keep itself more or less upright. “Wait a minute, I know you don’t I ? Gallowglass or something like that. From the Liffey’s far side. One of O’Riordan’s Rapparees arn’t you?”

 

“That’s right, Tommy,” the face with the delicate smile replied gently, easing out a hand, “I’ve come over from the North side to see how the rich are surviving in these hard times over here....”

 

“Of course you have,” Marsh interrupted, ignoring if not exactly refusing the proffered hand of friendship. And maybe that explains the fallin’ all over yerself like stringless Punchinello. You can tell me all about it over a coupla pints. Well, what are yeh waitin’ for? Get ‘em in so.”

 

With which imperative Marsh headed to the corner and his trilby hat bedecked, albeit liquor-free, table to wait upon mature Timmons improving the situation with pints of the quality. As Timmons in all sharp order quickly did.

 

Some few pints later and then some, Timmons had put be his apprehension concerning flying ashtrays and glasses. All those tears over spilt beers, to say nothing of the blood and washed-up molars. None of that mattered anymore. Not at all. The only danger Timmons was bothered about now was sitting in front of him, giving his shoulder the odd twitch and slurred telling him, almost in riddles the details of his revolution and the rural arms dumps that would outfit and finance it.

 

“You know like in the Bible Dick, they all coming up out of the ground on the last day well’ed be like that but these geysers will be bursting out of the vaults fully fucken armed.”

 

“If I get through this day in one piece,” Timmons thought, “I’m never setting foot in any Munster graveyard. Not in Limerick. Not in Clare. Not anywhere. Not ever!”.

 

Then it occurred to him that it was well over an hour and Dennehy’s lecture should be underway. Not the most cheerful topic in the world. Something about landlordism in County Clare during the Famine. But as good an excuse as any, he thought, to leave Marsh and his revolution to their own devices. “Listen Tommy,” he said a bit tentatively, “there’s a meeting round on Essex Quay I should be heading to. It’s been great seeing you and hearing all about your graveyards and....all that stuff...really interesting but I’d better be getting along.”

 

“OK Dick,” Marsh responded, “but remind me now before you go, what is this meeting all about?”

 

“Oh not the most scintillating. Just Dennis Dennehy talking about how landlords in Clare behaved during the Famine.”

 

“Famine me hole! You should know better than that. The Starvation it was. Fucken genocide! Like Mitchell said, God blighted the potato, British politicians and landlords murdered the people. And sure don’t I know Dennis and me on some of the housing marches with him.” Marsh rose delicately to his feet, finished his pint and moored his trilby. “Let’s move on.”

 

On the way over he leaned into Timmons. “O’Connell Dick, dirty Dan is the man. Him an’ his Catholic Emancipation did terrible damage to the Irish people. He saw the revolutionary ire of the sans-culotte in France and what they did to his class and it scared him more than Spratt scared Bates when he put the cocked .38 to his balls in the Bridewell cell. That’s why he opted for religion instead of freedom Dick so that before him it was Saggart, the priest landless and hunted, part of the common people, are you with me Dick?”

 

“Sure, Tommy.”

 

“Good ‘cause after him Dick it was Father if you don’t mind. Athar me bollix. They were then property owners, like O’Connell the landlord, and had become part of the establishment...see where I’m going to Dick?”

 

“Yes, Tommy.”

 

“So when the people were starving and the food was been exported and in places, crowds began marching to attack food stores the Athar's came out and instead of fucken leading them like Saggarts they told them to go home and obey the law of God. The leadership Dick. Landlord Dan took away the leadership that the people needed then which would have released the food and ended the Starvation and probably British occupation. You see Dick it’s all in the soil. In the soil is where you’ll find it.”

 

“I can’t disagree Tommy.”

 

That night’s Essex Quay meeting was grist to Marsh’s in a number of ways. For some time the strategic element of his political thought had been centred on a kind of renewal of the Munster Republic. Since the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising he had been working on a revolution which would avoid any material commitment in Dublin: a rural revolution rooted in the soil that would make the citiphiliacs come to it, that would face the bleeding hearts, dreamers and useless fucken intellectuals into willies and arm them with spades and picks for building an Ireland not merely free but Culchie.

 

And, for once he had transport. His Darling Honda was parked just off Fishamble Street, well tanked up with enough petrol to carry him into the heart of Munster. It could be that Dennehy, who was no kind of urban pouftah, would prove just the man to inspire him with the vision that would set County Clare aflame. The Shannon might yet turn out to be his Rubicon.

 

Having ambled around the corner of Essex Quay they entered a dreary tenement building there. The hall, no doubt once the height of Victorian or even Regency elegance, was now a prime example of Free State rag-and-bone ramshackle. They were surprised to find the rickety stairs cluttered with people. In the hall, the smells of sweat and cigarette smoke blended with the stale stench of the Liffey, the kind of thing Coco Chanel could maybe bottle and sell as some exotic class of post-modern perfume, Eau de Dub perhaps. They tried, with only limited success, to push their way through the crowd towards Dennehy’s lecture.

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Essex Quay

 

“And now comrades,” said a voice from above, Dennehy’s voice, and him speaking in his characteristically strong Kerry lilt, “I’ll read to you how the Young Ireland leader, John Mitchel, spoke of this foul work of that great enemy of our class and nation in his book, ‘The Last Conquest of Ireland, Perhaps’. He said, and I quote....’I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island, that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English indeed, call that famine a ‘dispensation of Providence’ and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe: yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter then, is first, a fraud- second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine!”

 

“Now then, listen to that rare creature, the honest priest, a man of his People who was born in 1839, on the eve of that Peoples’ greatest trial An tAther Peadar O’Laoghaire, who wrote this in his autobiography in a chapter called simply The Hunger:-

 

“ ‘One day when I was eight years of age (I seem to remember that I was standing at the corner of the haggard), I saw a woman coming up towards me up the hill. She was barefoot, walking very slowly and panting as if she had been running. She was blowing so much, her mouth was wide open so that I had the sight of her teeth. But the thing that amazed altogether was her feet. Each foot was so swollen, from the knee down, it was as big and as fat as a gallon- can. That sight took such a grip on my mind that its on my mind now, every bit as clear-cut as it was that day, although it is around three score and five years since I saw it. That woman had been fairly independent and free from adversity until the blackness had come upon the potatoes.

 

“Another day- I can’t tell if it was before or after that- I was inside our house, standing on the heartstone when a boy came in the door. I saw the face that was on him and the terror that was in his two eyes, the terror of hunger. That face and those two eyes are before my mind now, as clear and as unclouded as the day I gave the one and only look. Somebody gave him a lump of bread. He snatched the bread and turned his back on us and his face to the wall and he started right into eating it so ravenously that you would think he would choke himself. At that time I did not realise that I was so amazed by him or his voracity, but that sight has stayed in my mind and will stay as long as I live...

 

“ ‘The famine came. Sheila and her father and mother and little Jeremiah had to go down to Macroom into the poorhouse. No sooner were they inside then they were all separated from each other. The father was put among the men. The mother was put among the women, Sheila was put among the small girls. And Jeremiah was put among the very young children. The whole house and all the poor people in it was smothered in every kind of evil sickness, the people almost as fast as they'd come in, falling down with a malady and- God bless the hearers! – dying as fast, as fast as the fever came on them. There used not be room for half of them in the house. The amount that would not be able to get in could only go and lay themselves on the bank of the river, on the lower side of the bridge. You would see them every morning after the night was over, stretched out in rows, some stirring, some quiet enough without any stir at all in them. In a while, certain men would come and they would take them who were not stirring, and they would put them into trucks. They would take them to a place beside Carrigastyra, where a great, wide, deep hole had been opened for them, and they would put all together down into the hole. They would do the same with all who had died in the house after the night.

 

“ ‘It was not long, after their going in and after his separation from his mother, that death came to little Jeremiah. The small body was thrown up onto the truck and taken to the big hole, and it was thrown in along with the other bodies. But it was all the same to the child: long before his body was thrown into the hole, his soul was in the presence of God, in the joy of the heavens. It was not long until Sheila followed little Jeremiah. Her young body went into the hole, but her soul went up to where little Jeremiah was, in the presence of God, in the joy of the heavens, where she had solace and the company of the saints and angels, and the company of the Virgin Mary...

 

“ ‘That was the way things were then, ugly and hateful and loathsome, round about the area where I was reared. I understand that the story was exactly the same all about the whole of Ireland. And, to make matters worse, it was not really by the will of God that things were so. It was that way because of the will of people. They were sent out from Ireland that year as much – no! Twice as much- corn as would have nourished every person living in the country. The harbours of Ireland were full of ships and the ships full of Irish corn: they were leaving the harbours while the people were dying with the hunger throughout the land.

 

“ ‘Why wasn’t the corn kept here? Someone will say, perhaps

 

“ ‘It was not kept here because it had to be sold to pay the rent, and the butter and the meat and every bit of produce from the land, excepting the potatoes. The blackness took away the potatoes and then there was no food left for the people to eat.

 

“ ‘Someone will say, perhaps: ‘Why wasn’t a law made to protect the people from the injustice that forced the people to sell the corn and not to keep anything for themselves to eat?

 

“ ‘I’m sorry for your want of knowledge! A law to protect the people you say? Airu, if you had spoken to the gentlemen of England at that time of a law to protect the people, they would have said you were mad.

 

“ ‘It was not at all for the protection of the people that the English made laws at that time. To crush the people down and to plunder them, to put them to death by famine and by every kind of injustice – that’s why the English made laws in those days. It is a strange story, but the English had a sort of proverb then. Here’s the proverb: To give the tenant his rights is an injustice to the landlord.”

 

“ ‘As Dennehy’s recital of Canon O’Laoghaire’s account of the working out of the Starvation in his own small part of County Cork proceeded, strong men, albeit there were many of them taken in drink, wilted and sobbed on the stairs, shaking with emotion and holding on for dear life to the decaying wooden banisters. Stronger women than these quivered in the anger of a risen people ready for tumult and riot and the hanging of landlords and lawyers from lamp posts.

 

“By God,” thought Marsh, “That’s the stuff. That’s just the text for some mighty propaganda of the deed. Fucken miseries corded and cellotaped up for the landlords of Munster. There’ll be no pity in this heart or by the time I’m finished in any other. Not for those bastards! No, by Jaysus. No!”

 

When his excitement faded and his attention returned to the lecture, he discovered that Dennehy had moved on, into the heart of the Banner County.

 

“Let me outline for you now,” said Dennehy, “the most straightforward evidence from a complex man. Dr Richard Robert Madden was a Dubliner born and bred, an Irish patriot who wrote a history of the United Irish Movement. He was also a civil servant in the British Colonial Office, but one who worked in the administration of the ending of slavery in the West Indies, who fought slavery in Cuba and gave evidence in America in support of the wrongly accused slaves of the Amistad. In 1848 he went to Western Australia as Acting Governor and Colonial Secretary and engaged in a doomed struggle to protect the lives and establish the rights of the aboriginal people there. A year later when his eldest son drowned in the Shannon near Tarbert, he took leave of absence from the Colonial Office and returned to Ireland, where he gathered evidence of the situation of the people in the years of the English directed Starvation. After writing a series of letters under the pseudonym “X” in the Freeman’s Journal he prepared a Report for the Government which detailed the devastation and distress of County Clare, dated February 7th 1851 this Report was not published until after Madden’s death in 1886. I’ll read some extracts from it now, and I warn you it's not for the squeamish. Madden himself witnessed this...

 

“ ‘The parent workhouse in Kilrush in the month of February last presented on the days for receiving applications for admissions, spectacles of the most extraordinary description that were probably ever witnessed in any Christian land; such as I never beheld before, and pray that I may never witness again. On the occasion referred to there was a multitude of human beings, exceeding a thousand, congregated around the building, men, women and children, in every state of famine, debility and disease, arising from want of food, want of sufficient raiment, and in many cases want of shelter fit for human beings in that inclement season.

 

“ ‘There was a considerable number of low-backed cars from which the horses had been unyoked ranged along the wall in front of the entrance. On these cars, applicants for admission were lying stretched on straw, chiefly aged people of both sexes, and children, even infants. On some cars, there were as many as four or five pallid, listless, emaciated, ragged children, on others, famished creatures, far gone in dysentery, and dropsy, unable to walk, stand or even sit upright, and these sick and famishing creatures were brought there, as I was informed by neighbours who had lent cars to convey them to the Poorhouse, and a great number of them, to use their own language, ‘for a coffin.’

 

“ ‘On surprise being expressed at hearing this reason given for the removal of these people and the question being repeated, one of these moribund applicants for admission in order to get a shell and a grave- a man more like a skeleton than a living man, yet not much more above forty years of age- said in a low, hollow tone of voice- ‘yes to get a coffin, your honour!’

 

“ ‘There was a vast number, moreover, of others apparently in the last stage of destitution who had crawled from distant places, that seemed to be nearly in as bad a condition as those stretched on the cars. They were squatting about the outer walls waiting their turn to be called, while the courtyard was thronged with a dense mass of misery which was not only shocking but terrifying even to look upon and to pass through. And yet these applicants for admission into the Kilrush Poorhouse, so frightfully earnest and eager to get into that asylum, clamouring and pressing forward, the less weak were thrusting aside the infirm, the young hustling the old, the women pulling back the children, larger children pushing back the smaller, uttering confused cries of pain, impatience, anger and despair, had not come there when every other means of sustaining life had failed. There was not one of those I questioned who had not a mortal terror of the Poorhouse of Kilrush, and had not overcome it, only when the charity on which they eked out a miserable existence had been fully exhausted, or when the boiled nettles and other weeds which had been their food of late had brought them to the brink of the grave. A close observer could tell those among them who had been so subdued by starvation to this last resource not only by the sight of their form and features- hardly those of human beings- but also by that peculiar smell of mouldy substances which is perceptible about the persons of starving people.

 

“ ‘The tumult round the door was almost equalled by the turmoil and confusion that reigned in the hall, where the guardians were assembled deciding on the claims of the famished multitude, and applying it to each case ‘the workhouse test’.....It was surprising amidst and horrid strife of shrill and most discordant cries out that any business could have been transacted there.

 

“ ‘........But what adequate idea would any words convey of the frightful condition of the people of those districts which constitute Kilrush Union that could furnish such an appalling spectacle of human misery as I have referred to on this occasion, resulting as it did to a very great extent, from acts that have assumed in this locality the character of settled policy- the destruction of the houses of the poor.

 

“ ‘The Poor Law contemplated a provision for the destitute on whom the hand of God had fallen heavily in time of great calamity,- for the poor thus stricken down who could not live by labour. But the work of eviction has so augmented pauperism that the Poorhouse accommodation in the land proves insufficient to afford shelter for the poor who have been unhoused by their fellow-men. The whole of the West of Ireland, and above all the County Clare, at the present moment can be best described by comparing its position to that of a weak man dying slowly of chronic disease for which there is no remedy deserving that name had been applied, sinking gradually by the most hideous of all deaths- that of starvation daily becoming a more appalling spectacle, a more frightful spectacle, a more frightful spectre of humanity,- going down in a prolonged agony by a process of inanition to the grave.....’”

 

Marsh grabbed Timmons by the shoulders, shook him and stared into his pale face. “Kilrush! Clare! The West! We have to wake the West. We’ve got to get to Clare Dick because these fuckers need fixing. Yeh know, real fixing. The professional boot. Super wellie. To do that to our people. Bastards!”

 

“You can head off to Muck Savagery and do whatever you want but I can assure you that you won’t find a stain of them now,” said Timmons chancing the length of the life of him. “I’ve a bit of fiddle-faddle to be getting on with, a bit of this and d’other for a Derry chap so I’ve got to be getting along.”

 

“Well yer no use to me then,” Marsh hissed. “Yere a skivin’ wee git of a revolutionary dosser. Just because you did your Fenian stint in Wakefield doesn’t mean you can hide from the Cause!”

 

“I haven’t taken the pension yet.”

 

Marsh shrugged. Then, flipping Timmons the Tyburn Tinker’s farewell he climbed up a few steps and broached an intense, intellectual-looking fellow with a long thin nose, straggly hair and rimless spectacles. “Did you get a name Pal?”

 

“What?”

 

“From Dennis, did he put a handle on any cunt? A fucken landlord responsible for this....”

 

“Oh, he did yes. Stacpoole. He mentioned a Stacpoole. Which is a coincidence. I did an essay on that family a couple a years ago. Interesting family to be sure. Very interesting.”

 

The intellectual, O’Connor by name, hadn’t had a chance all night to practise his vocation of incidental antiquarianism. So, not giving Marsh a moment to withdraw, he straightforwardly launched into a breathless flood of not entirely irrelevant circumstantial detail.

 

“So let me tell you now, but succinctly mind, for I’m not into twittle twattle, or run on or ramble, about the Stacpooles and the wealth of them, being notorious, was established back in the days of the Kilkenny Confederates, when the Covenanters were on the rake and razzle. Established in the Parish of Kilmoon and the townlands of Lisdoonvarna and Ballyteige. In those days when Denis Cloghessy built a castle for Fineen FitzPatrick in 1619, I think it was. And in 1646 the same Fineen, along with Bartholomew Stacpoole of Limerick, signed the Declaration of Catholic Demands that was presented to King Charles the Headless, I forget in what year. Oh yes, you’re right, I just said it was 1646. That same Barty Stacpoole being the ancestors of the Earls of Limerick. Then it was no petty thing that in1659 there were seven Stacpooles living in the Barony of Tulla. At about the same time in Kilfinaghta Parish, in the townland of Ballybroughan there were more to be found. And shortly after they were to be found in Doonbeg and Labasheeda and other places. Proliferating they were. Around about then, they turned, not so much for the soup as the sheer socio-economic sense of it. And started signing sureties for Popish priests in the likes of Kilmurry and Kilfarboy. Then they were justices of the Peace and Members of Parliament. And High Sheriffs too they were. And son following father down the line they served on the County Clare Grand Jury like Richard Stacpoole junior, of  Edenvale served in 1805....”

 

“Not low sheriffs if you don’t mind,” muttered Marsh. Flabbergasted by the intricacies of O’Connor’s bombast, too flummoxed to pummel the source of it he grabbed the antiquarian by his intellect and made sure he’d gathered the jist of his rambling runaround.

 

“So its Stacpoole then is the landlord, the geyser responsible for all that kerfuffle in the Kilrush area. Down in Clare?”

 

“Well yes,” said O’Connor planning to launch into a history of the Vandeleurs who were the main landlords in the Kilrush area but before he could get more than a decent intake of breath Marsh was pushing his way down the stairs and glancing back he shouted, “ Thanks Pal you’ll fly yer Leaving Cert,” and turning to Timmons who was also hurrying out he quipped “ You’re a disgrace to yer Uncle Joe.”

 

“......the screams of children being taken away from their mothers, the shrieks of daughters parting with fathers whom they knew they would never see again....” Dennehy continued to enlighten by way of horrifying the masses as Marsh disappeared out the hall door into the crowds and cacophony of the Quays. Himself to be just another episode in an ongoing Dublin Friday night. Momentarily part of the entertainment. A brief skip and a hop, here and there the odd collision, “watch it for fuck sake” took him to the other end of Essex Quay to Fishamble Street and his transport.

 

“I’ll bury the fucker’s seed and breed rump end up and roast them,” Marsh muttered to himself as he started up the Honda and headed off to the Peacock.

 

Dick Timmons in his gabardine with the collar askew. Walking up Parliament Street, having no intention of going back round to the Castle. Not feeling any great need either to call into the Red Hackle. Just relieved to be clear of Marsh and the imminent prospect of not so much violent death exactly as more likely the Bridewell, the Dock and a hanging judge. It didn’t bear thinking about. So he stopped thinking about it as he turned left along Dame Street. Thinking instead about historic Dublin drinking dens that had more about them of a sense of the culture of the thing, that knew themselves as line-breaks, full-stops and new paragraphs in the ongoing development of an Irish literary tradition.

 

Nearys maybe for the theatricals. Or Davy Byrne’s for a gay old time of it, it being Friday night after all. The Old Stand maybe, or the International. He couldn’t make up his mind.

 

Then turning off Great George’s Street into Exchequer Street, the same changed, changed utterly, and a terrible turmoil began in Timmons’s brain as he remembered to think of a historic street. Henrietta Street. It was getting on and he had to still head there.

 

After crossing the Halfpenny Footbridge he hurried down Capel Street and tipped a nod to Tony McMahon, box player and republican, who was gabbing with some musicians outside Slatterys. Soon after Timmons slid around the corner into Henrietta Street.

 

Timmons had organised a pied-á-terre in one of the houses for Eddie Collins, a tall chisel featured Derry man. Collins had a warrant with his name attached because the RUC considered the fiery orator to have abused the right to the freedom of the Queen’s English by calling down on them the wrath as vengeful as the Old Testament on what he referred to as their sectarian rump of a blue, white and red ghetto.

 

A faint smile crept across the face of Timmons. It had occurred to him that in the palatial days of the street in two of the then elegant houses there lived, belched and farted Speakers of the Irish House of Commons.

 

“Two of Ireland’s pathological liars with unrestricted freedom to make a highly paid career out of telling porkies and here in the same house now is a man who for calling a spade a spade is wanted in one jurisdiction and gagged by the West Brits and Poppy huggers in the Dail in another.” he thought.

 

Of course, these were only two of Dublin’s and Ireland’s foremost figures of the church, the military and other affluent sections of society who also wined, dined, laughed and cried in the luxurious piles.

 

Timmons, like a ghost, melted into the shadows of the shabby hall door of number 3. His design was on the far side of the street and further up. As he fixated on the opposite hall doors and on the parked cars to see if any contained a watching Branchman he was probably unaware that the early Dublin Georgian street may have been named after the wife of Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton. She was in all probability too old to be banged by Lord Kingsborough who had a reputation for rutting with the ladies of the street or indeed with any lady regardless of what street she may have hailed from. A close second to Kingsborough’s licentiousness was neighbour Henry O’Brien, 8th Earl of Thomond who was perhaps keeping up with family traditions because not all eminent historians hold with the Brian Boru praying on his knees in the tent story.

 

The elegant street two centuries before Timmons began stalking it was inhabited by the carpet baggers of the day. An unholy alliance of property tycoons, clerics, merchants, celebrated military men, peers, money lenders and social climbers, all rubbing shoulders with the capital’s beau monde and portraying themselves as a grandiloquent toast to power and privilege.

 

But, but, but, even the most advantageous alliances are subject to the ravages of time and human frivolities and can sometimes end in bitter rivalries. These are then replaced by new loyalties and convivial networks but become in turn, the creation of cliques and cabals and cohorts.

 

The passing of the Acts of Union on the 31st of December 1800 which abolished the Irish Parliament and created a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland brought a profound change to Dublin and to Henrietta Street. Now with the parliament moving to Westminster, Dublin’s government class began their lock, stock and barrel withdrawal but Henrietta Street not knowing when it would end faded slowly and slowly a metamorphosis crept over it so that by 1900 some of the houses had over one hundred people in the now slum tenements.

 

Timmons decided that none of the parked cars contained Spratt or the sniff of a Branchman. Nor was Spratt like a doppelganger of Timmons standing in the shadow of another hall door. Timmons crossed the road smartly and after giving the emptiness a final glance he skipped up the six steps and pushed in an unlocked hall door which closed slowly of its own accord behind him.

 

Timmons stood motionless in the dark stone-flagged hall. He was looking towards the steps at the back of the hall which led to the basement or what in more fashionable times would have been busy kitchens.

 

Timmons jumped as something darker still than the darkness called out.

 

“Dick?”

 

“Fuck! Is that you Eddie?”

 

“Aye,” said Collins stepping forward.

 

“Are you long here?”

 

“Bout fifteen minutes.”

 

“Sorry. I ran into Marsh,” explained Timmons. He struck a match. The pair left shadowy movements on the wall above the stairs as Timmons opened the door to the front room which looked out onto the street. After switching on the light he pulled across the curtains.

 

“There’s food in the fridge. Be careful of the woman upstairs, she’s a man-eater,” Timmons chuckled.

 

“I will.”

 

“Good, we don’t want a rerun of O’Casey’s gunman.

 

“I’m an orator, not a poet.”

 

Timmons headed off at a fast pace towards Dorset Street thinking of the longitude and the latitude of the evening. Simply put there was no way of figuring out the mechanics of it, the fragility which is when the penny dropped. Timmons sighed in relief, thinking “Well at least its not the DTs then. And I’m not mad. I’m not. Its just an oul enchantment. And thank God for that. I’m not raving I’m just enchanted while all those around me are changed.

 

Enchantment is that once-upon-a-time thing. Springing up in the time of once upon a time. In a place where those once upon a times pass each other in a long, the line of which we are each upon each by all enchanted. Singing, ch...ch... Time and place, both illusions now. All changed.

 

As it was. Time and place. All changed. When Timmons of a sudden felt the sodden wet cold of Dublin in his throat and lungs again and looked around him he was sitting in some incarnation of The Meeting Place with a pint in his hand and him gasping for it.

 

It wasn’t the great John Ryan’s Bailey. Not a writers and artist’s hang out by the look of it. It seemed later. The early seventies maybe. More metallic posh and lino than wooden pillars and floors. More like English tabloid than Irish Press. But never mind all that. The pint was black and collared and ready for swallowing. With the eternal now of holy hours, he could become happy laid end to end, rolled up and pocketed forever. He gulped in the flow and went with it. As earlier, he found himself gifted with knowledges that were new to him. They were also useless to him like the history of religion he’d borrowed from the Phibsboro Public Library when himself and Walsh were trying to get the Mormons to marry O’Donnell or somebody to prevent the bride being deported or was it Jones and the French one? Aliens or something! The bulk of this now was definitely biblical, and the scattered rest, scholastic theology. All of which you might call archival, so’s to speak For example, he now knew that he was a respectable distance into his pint when a man about his own age sat in beside him.

 

“Do you mind if I sit here?” the man inquired.

 

Timmons accented with a nod. The man was thin, had high shoulders and a stoop which gave him a slight vulture-like appearance. His fairish straight hair was pasted down and brushed forward from the back to camouflage an ever-expanding hairless pate.

 

“I was sitting over there,” explained the man who introduced himself as Ryan or Brian Brown. “I was sitting over there and I was watching you...”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes and I think you spoke the word ‘theology’ to yourself.”

 

“Was I talking out loud?”

 

“Oh no. To yourself. I’m a lip reader.”

 

Timmons chuckled. “Do you go around pubs lip-reading people?”

 

“Not at all. I only focus on interesting or troubled people. Are you troubled?”

 

Timmons shook his head and grinned. “No. I gave all them away years ago.”

 

“Good. Did you know that what you might call archival, that the New Testament was to a very large extent, composed of material taken from its own relation? And that this was a natural consequence of the New being constructed to fulfil the prophecies contained in the Old? The most of those being from Isaiah?”

 

“Never dawned on me.”

 

“Well what I find myself investigating is not from Isaiah as such but one of the harper-king’s finer efforts: Psalm 22, which took it upon itself to prophesy some of the finer details of the crucifixion. Beginning....”

 

“I think Bacon’s triptych in which the eviscerated figure has been hung upside down fairly gets across the.....”

 

“Well, Bacon the atheist yes but the Psalm calls out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Sound familiar? Of course, it does. ‘They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots! Prophecies from the Old Testament which will be fulfilled in the New. Along the Messianic model of the suffering servant from Isaiah. As opposed to the Conquering King, the Messiah of the eternal throne. Is that clear enough? Soooo.....did two Messiahs then die in that time? Within not much more of a century of one Another: one at the place of the skull, the other among the last of the Zealots at Masada. Does that make sense? Thinking of which then, was there maybe another Messiah died at Montsegur? And what about the really intriguing lines in the psalm: Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the second coming of de Valera.”

 

Timmons nodded. He was within some seconds or so, of a proposition or two, from a full-blooded epiphany; epiphanies being something to which mere sensitive Dubliners are prone, and him a Dubliner born and bred. But sensitive? Well.....

 

And it had been a long day, a stressful day, and remembering bits and pieces of books he would read and conversations he would have in the future, not to mention being enchanted, had really taken it out of him. Reaching into some beyond or other after the which of a thread of the one memory which might have revealed to him whatever before sliding back into the mundane present.

 

Timmons excused himself on the realisation that his glass was as good as empty. He headed for the toilets. There over a contemplative piss, he decided that when he came out he would have a quick gander around the bar to ensure that he wouldn’t land himself in some more quanda of temperish/ spatial kinda bollocks. And while he was pondering this he noticed the bar volume increasing and taking on a more bacchanalian character.

 

A group of obvious Trinitarians, duffled and scarved to beat the band, had ensconced themselves at a corner table where they were drinking the health of the College Historical Debating Society. One of them, referred to by the others as Sir Donnell, was extolling the eccentricities of a republican member who always spoke at meetings with his scholar’s gown. Fair enough: but then Timmons noticed that Sir Donnell was dressed as a Right Honourable Lord Justice of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal. And heard someone else in civilian clothes say that the republican in question was called Ernie Bates. Oh shit. Having just escaped from Tommy Marsh and an unhinged drinker he wasn’t about falling into the clutches of Bates who was now addressing the vociferous gathering in a booming Belfast drawl: “They did not die in vain, they did not...............”

 

Dick Timmons and a gabardine he was half in and half out of fleeing down Frederick Street hoping he would be in time for a late pint in the Peacock, thinking “I’ve fucking had it with this fucking deranged town.” And he had. Had it. As much as he could take of it. Well for the time being anyway...

 

While Timmons was passing opposite Oisin Kelly’s flapless swans in the Garden of Remembrance, Tommy Marsh was hurrying across the Liffey, along O’Connell Street, making a jerking turn around Parnell into Parnell Street towards the immediate reality of the Peacock.

 

He brought the Honda to a shuddering halt outside Kennedy’s bakery yard at the bottom of Hill Street. There was no point in letting the branch think that his balls were on fire as he hopped about trying to negotiate his left leg over the back seat as he alighted. Not that the Castle bothered about motoring offences. Didn’t they regularly follow a licence-less O’Donnell in his badly driven Consul without ever bothering about a speech on the ethics of the road traffic act?

 

Nevertheless, there was always a first time. What if a new rookie of a Branchman had somehow managed to get someone he knew who had more than the normal two brain cells to do his Templemore exams for him and made it to a peeping Tom job outside the Peacock? What then? What if this intellectually unarmed sleuth called for a uniform to have him charged with being rat-arsed and speeding at the controls of a Japanese death machine? Unlikely. Surveillance was their imperative. Surveillance and information. Surveillance and betrayal.   

 

John ‘Shankers’ Ryan a former British Army serviceman doing surveillance in the shadows around Gloucester Street. He sees Peadar Clancy, no 2 in the Dublin Brigade and founder and partner of Republican Outfitters shop on Talbot Street entering the house of Sean Fitzpatrick there, along with Dick McKee. Clancy, a native of Carrowneagh, East Cranny, West Clare, served in the Four Courts Garrison and was sentenced to death, later communed, in 1916.

 

On Shanker’s information members of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary arrested, tortured and murdered both along with a student of Irish, Conor Clune in Dublin Castle.

 

Soon after Ryan is taken out of Hynes’ pub on the corner of Railway and Lower Gloucester Street and shot. No redemption remains. Well only for his sister perhaps.

 

His sister, a Monto bella donna strumpet, made it into the world’s literature. As Kitty Ricketts in Ulysses. Á la Helen’s Place in Beckett’s Mercier and Camier and in the song Dicey Reilly:

 

Long years ago when men were men and fancied May Oblong,

 

Or lovely Becky Cooper or Maggie’s Mary Wong,

 

One woman put them all to shame, just one was worthy of the name,

 

And the name of the dame was Dicey Reilly.

 

And in doggerel:

 

Italy’s maids are fair to see

 

And France’s maids are willing

 

But less expensive ‘tis to me:

 

Becky’s for a shilling.

 

Almost fifty years late the same surveillance raising the hackles, ruffling the feathers. No prisoners now just volunteers. Uninvited, strolling across the Castle Yard Walsh and O’Donnell. In the lair of the beast to confront the Chief. The Chief looks like a bank manager. A silk sky blue tie makes the white shirt glow. The talk is measured. The surveillance cars are parked too close to the houses which could lead to raised tempers and confrontation. Nobody wants unpleasantness and compromise must be the order of the day. Details of the impromptu meeting were not divulged but soon after Magill reports:

 

“I had a visit from a security chief who told me that a group in Saor Eire were planning armed robberies, that his own men were showing signs of the jitters and that lives were at risk. He told me that some of the group were psychopaths and that, short of placing them in detention without trial, he knew no way of containing them except by having each individual followed by day and night...”

 

When Marsh walked round to the Peacock there was no surveillance visible. No one following or watching.  “Still better safe than sorry,” he told himself as he entered and surveyed the company with a forensic stare.

 

“Who are yeh looking for?” asked Redican.

 

“O’Donnell, Frank. Good looking fellow to the other fucker. A pint Jimmy please.”

 

“I think he might be gone up to the dog pond in the Phoenix Park, “said Joe Edwards.

 

“What?” Marsh shouted. “What the fuck would he be doing at the dog pond at this hour? Didn’t know he had a mutt.”

 

“He doesn’t,” said Redican. “I think he was taking measurements.”

 

Marsh looked at him in astonishment. “Jimmy, have you put magic juice in the drink? Fucken measurements in the dark!”

 

“I think he has 20/20 vision,” explained Edwards. “He had Johnnie Flood with him.”

 

Marsh was puzzled and exasperated. “Measurements for what?”

 

“Its about the Islington and Dagenham civil rights fellow who was taken out of here along with Frank, some time back, remember that?” asked Frank Davis.

 

“Oh yeah. They came in for Frank and the civil rights guy protested and they took him as well, Denis Casey, I think was his name. That’s right well the crowd in England got pissed off about it and they’re looking for details.”

 

“That’s right Tommy.” agreed Edwards. “The Branch have a thing about conscientious objectors.”

 

“Oh they have and that’s why they gave the civil rights guy loads of welly somewhere around the dog pond,” said Marsh. “They didn’t touch Frank.”

 

Tommy Byrne with his pointed pale face arrived in, “That’s because he’d give them welly back,”

 

Marsh shook his head. “They told him they were taking him to the Featherbeds to shoot him in the head unless he told them where the other fucker was.”

 

Sutcliffe arrived in his long cream Mackintosh and black beret, “You couldn’t give anybody welly if you got shot in the head.”

 

“What yeh want him for anyway?” inquired Redican.

 

“Didn’t he live in Clare?”

 

“Oh, he did. Sure I was down on the farm when I was doing the deep sea diving in Kilkee. Good spot and Keane’s pub in Lisdeen has eaten an’ drinking on the pint,” said Redican.

 

“Ah, I just wanted him for a bit of local info. You know. Who’s who, what’s what, what’s up, what’s down and in around. That fucken kinda thing. Sort of in relation to a talk I was at earlier by Dennis Dennehy in Essex Quay. Very mind-opening.”

 

“About what?” asked Jones.

 

“Fucken landlordism in Clare in the time of the great Starvation.”

 

Heads turned as Bates entered with the strange-looking gown flowing over him. “Starvation. That’s the name for it, Tommy. No way was it a famine. Even the whoreson perjured bastards of Free Staters understood that. Even the one that wrote Michael Collin’s freedom to be free bloody book knew that. Piaras somebody or other..”

 

“Beaslai,” said Redican.

 

“That’s right. Piaras Beaslai,” Bates continued. “ Even the Free Staters knew how the English took advantage of the blight to cut us down to the size it suited them for us to be. Even now we’re nothing like the population we were back then. Over six million of us there was. Barely three million now. Bastards! English politicians and English and Irish landlords. Bastards every one of them.”

 

“They wanted the land cleared of us so that Ireland could become England’s bread basket and they manipulated the potato blight to this end,” added Byrne.

 

At which point Bates coming out with his heavy academic artillery that had stuck to him from his handling of antiquarian books and which such learning he loved to share said,” I was reading recently that the Ottoman Sultan Khaleefah Abdul- Majid the First, for all he was a Moslem Turk, declared his intention to send ten thousand pounds to aid Ireland’s farmers. The English Queen fatso Vicki of Starvation for everybody but herself requested that the Sultan only send one thousand pounds as she had only sent two thousand pounds. So the Sultan only sent one thousand smackers but he also secretly sent five ships full of food. The English Courts attempted to block the relief efforts but the ships and the food arrived in Drogheda harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors.”

 

“I never knew that so I didn’t,” said Davis.

 

“Ah yeah, sure Joyce mentions it in Ulysses,” confirmed Bates, cracking his knuckles, preparing to quote, “Even the Grand Turk sent his piastres. But the Sassenach tried to starve the people at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas brought and sold in Rio de Janeiro.”