Tale 20
REVOLUTIONARY CITIPHILIACS
Ructions, along with the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty, paid an unexpected visit to O'Donnell in the Curragh Military Detention Centre in November 1973.
Speaking in code he told O'Donnell that the irregulars had now merged with the anarchist Angry Brigade and had adopted the Black/ Scholes mathematical formula of the value of derivatives. That is C= Sn(d) Le-Rn(d-q)T). This really angered the Cork based Saoirse Eire who held with Louis Bachelier that each FT is an X valued random variable.
O'Donnell confirmed that Bachelier was a chancer, the kind of fellow who would be able to factor simultaneous equations in two unknowns onto quadratic expressions and accumulative frequencies in imaginary tangents and Bob's your uncle, the buckos in the revenue commissioners wouldn't even notice that he'd square rooted the modulus without removing the brackets. He pointed out that the F in Bachelier's equation only stood for “fuckability” and wondered, as he rolled a cigarette, how a man who never wrestled with a shovel in a pile of dung on a mucky day could be anything but...iffy.
“That's from Paddy Kavanagh's poem,” announced the military policeman triumphantly. He was desperately trying to take notes of the conversation.
“Ah yes,” agreed Ructions. “The man who doesn't dig in the dung deep is only fooling himself.” Then he absented himself before O'Donnell could ask if he had left in any tobacco.
Ructions, acting now as bursar, was as tight-fisted about funds as O’Donnell had been in his holding of the purse strings. Ructions had not forgotten when almost three years earlier he had called to Hangover Haunt looking for a few bob and O’Donnell handed him a fiver with the fiduciary advice to “use it wisely.”
“He just wants that for the Peacock,” O’Donnell said to Bates.
Indeed Ructions had complained to Marsh. “Sure that’s nothing Sean. What about when Long sought a few bob to buy his destitute girlfriend a pair of jeans and she after holding jelly for us until the headaches got to her, didn’t he ask Long to fucken bring her around to Hangover in the jeans so that he could have a good gander at them before he parted with any funds. Long said that he was staring at her arse which as arses go was up there or should I say down there with the best of them.”
Ructions gave a belly laugh followed by a bout of coughing. “How’ed he get the Bursarship anyway?”
Marsh expressed surprise. “Him! Sure wasn’t he on all of them from the very first when the rest of the crews were rotated? He was always fucken there. The bagman The athletic leap onto and over the counters. Unmisfuckenstakable. Sure you were on Newbridge for the army payroll attempt?”
“Yeah.”
“An he was there. I mean when was he not there? Remember that Ad in the late sixties for some kind of beer or lager and the gang all in Lone Ranger masks rush out to the getaway car with the keg and led by the blond-haired actor? Who the fuck was that based on only him!”
“That’s right an it sort of broke the mold in advertising at the time. Well Long got the dosh after he had a good look at her arse....that place is always full of women,” he added in a conspiratorial tone.
Marsh gave his shoulder a twitch. “Didn’t Lenin say something about free love,” Marsh joked. “But that was Bates mostly.”
“Bates?”
“Yes. He was giving tutorials to the Trinner girls.”
Ructions scratched his beard. “Wonder how they were paying.”
“Oh, you dirty bastard. They were free. Free education like they have in the Soviet Union, like the free health an all the other freebies. And remember Ernie was doing a Masters in Trinity on that Dowden fella....”
“Was that the pervert fucker?”
Marsh laughed. “No. Dowden the ecclesiastical historian who was born here but served in the Scottish Episcopal Church as the Bishop of Edinburgh and unlike our gang he fathered six legitimate chisellers.”
“Ah yeah. The highland fling fucker. He told me all about him one night in the Peacock. What a heap of shite an I had to listen to him as he fucking drivelled on an on on account of it been his round coming up by slow fucking train. Steam engine.”
“Remember Sean that while technically Bates is not on the run, for O’Donnell’s security he’s keeping low in the basement.”
“That must cost a few bob, Harcourt Street!”
“And the other flat.”
Ruction’s eyes widened. “What other flat?”
Marsh was taken aback, “I thought you knew. If you go out the basement back door...”
“I know another time zone...” he joked.
“Sort of. There’s an unlocked door into the next garden and another unlocked fucker into the next again courtesy of the Dublin fire chief. Galvin got it done on safety grounds an sure half the Dublin brigade in the very same fire brigade.”
“That’s right,” agreed Ructions. “Sure didn’t Des Keane say it should be called the Dublin IRA fire brigade.”
“Well Bates and O’Donnell in the event of the branch hammering down the front door, go out the back door through the two gardens and open the back door with their key two down and make a cup of coffee for themselves in the top flat which is ours.”
“Yeh mean theirs.”
“Remember then the whole operation was moved to Leeson Street where they were working on all this complex Marxist stuff that Brendan Clifford and his crowd were churning out?”
Ructions grunted. “Ah the inexplicable nature of being and not being fucked.”
Noel Lynch was sitting in O’Donnell’s cell in front of a chess board when he returned from the visit. “He was gone so fast and Coyle said the fucker left nothing in. Reminds me of the story by Joe Keegan with Ructions in Saor Ulaidh years ago,”
“What?”
“He was up on a charge of breaking into an FCA armoury to steal weapons. His bailsman didn’t turn up, fucking typical, isn’t it?”
Lynch nodded in agreement.
“Well the presence of the bailsman was obligatory on that day and Sorahan, the legal eagle, asked Keegan if he would go bail. Of course Keegan being a republican socialist was delighted to oblige. Then there was a lull in the proceedings for legal technicalities or whatever and the court was cleared. Ructions had a smoke outside.... the fucker left me in nothing.....so when the court resumed Ructions tapped and stubbed the cigarette and put it in his pocket and took his place. Keegan said soon after he noticed a peculiar smell that hadn’t been there earlier. The next thing the oul judge pointed down at Doyle, who was looking all around him as he thought the fucker was pointing at someone else and the judge was shouting ‘that man is in contempt.’ Ructions didn’t seem to notice that he was sitting in a cloud of smoke and the courtroom was quickly cleared again as the fire in his jacket was extinguished.”
“What did he want?” asked Lynch, when he stopped laughing.
“Some row about derivatives, he was gasbagging in code, talking in a language of wind and water.”
“A polyglot! Thales of Miletus.”
“What? Who the fuck?”
“Greek way back. He is reported as saying that all things are made of water.”
“I know fellas that are full of piss so he could be bang on.”
“He is recognised in Greek tradition as one of the seven wise men.”
“Really!”
“Yes. And from Herodotus we know that he predicted an eclipse of the sun around 585 B.C. Imagine fucking that?”
“How can anyone be sure of that Noel?”
“Astronomers. They have computed the year when it occurred as that. Hard to say that Thales would have had a theory of eclipses but he must have been familiar with the Babylonian records on them and as luck would have it this one was visible in Miletus.”
“Some egghead!”
“He sure was. Unlikely in geometry that he had established the theorems concerning the similarity of triangles but nevertheless he applied the Egyptian rule of thumb for finding the height of a pyramid. He thought that magnets had souls because they could move iron.”
“So he didn’t know everything. How the fuck do you know that.”
“I read it somewhere.”
Lynch was about five foot ten inches in height, of lean build with a fairish complexion. Both he and O’Donnell were of a similar age. Lynch was from Ballyfermot. Like O’Donnell, he was a founder member of the Portlaoise Prisoners’ Union. And in later life, he was to become one of Ireland’s best-respected chess players. He was considered by the cops to be highly intelligent.
Lynch was serving a ten-year prison sentence after been found guilty of an armed payroll robbery at the Master Stevedores on Alexandria Basin in Dublin in which shots were fired. He was seen getting the Dublin Liffey Ferry, a service which had begun in 1665. Lynch was arrested on the other side of the Liffey. The judge told him that it was one of the worst cases of armed robbery that had come before him in recent years. It was not but what really got under the judge’s wig as well as probably not getting a ride that morning, was that Lynch refused to cooperate with the gardai or give the names of his accomplices who had escaped.
Lynch had a non-combative personality when he was going about the normal run of things. He was refined and polite. He was not the kind when under interrogation who would abuse the investigating senior detective. He would just decline apologetically to remove his eyes from a certain spot on the wall. It would not be Lynch who would snarl at the questioning officer, “I wonder, Festy while you’re in here for the last few hours trying to bamboozle me with fucking nonsense how many of the lads off the night shift are in your bed right now rattling the arse of your missus or Festy, how d’yeh know she’s not giving Pah Wah a blow job right now?”
That would not be Lynch at all. Much too earthy and lacking subtlety. Lynch was a man who even in moments of high drama never discarded or abandoned his impeccable behaviour. In the payroll robbery when the guard insisted on holding onto the bag of cash it was one of Lynch’s jittery accomplices who fired the shots. Lynch didn’t go hopping about the place bawling incomprehensible imprecations in stammering blabber and driving everyone else, who are only there to do a normal honest day’s work, hysterical. No sir, not the Lynch oeuvre. Lynch just put his hand on the bag and said, “Let it go,” and the guard, quite wisely, let it go.
Lynch had effulgence, he had inspiration. He walked around with an aura of innocence about him as if he had found a new meaning to life. He was a being who in confrontation with himself had replaced deadly boredom and melancholia with an experience of inner peace, known paradoxically as Benedicta viriditas. Vulgar exclamations were not an integral part of Lynch’s vocabulary. But O’Donnell’s incapacity to not allow the variations of the chess openings to control him was putting Lynch’s patience to its limits. And chess is why Lynch was now standing in O’Donnell’s cell with an agonised expression on his lean features.
Two weeks earlier the Curragh chess tournament had begun. Out of the thirty-four or so prisoners, seven took part. This had been preceded by the draught’s competition which Tom Savage won easily. The chess tournament, like the draughts, was run on a league basis in which everyone would play everyone else. Two points for a win, one point for a draw and zero points for a loss. In the event of two or more players finishing level, play-offs would occur until a winner was declared. Now with one round of games to go the most likely winner, Tom Golden, a Kilkenny prisoner, became a problem.
Golden was a man whose interiorized world was embedded in a craving for competition in all things and for himself to come out in first place in all things. He had an inextinguishable desire to win regardless of what sport was involved. Handball, running, boxing and oh, yes, chess. For instance, he could spend an hour, alone, in the wearisome task of ceaselessly slapping a ball made of elephant skin up against a wall in a handball alley. Through this multiplicity of what many people would describe as a torment, he made himself the Prime Mover whom everyone wanted to unperch.
In game three of the chess league Golden played Lynch, the winner of the title the previous year. Golden himself was the holder of the Evening Herald newspaper postal chess competition, the first and probably the only prisoner to win. It was an unusually mild November day when Golden bumped into Lynch on the prison compound. “Come into me cell Noel and I show you something.”
From his locker, Golden took out a book on Alexander Alekhine the former world chess champion who was known for his intense attacking style. Alekhine took the title from Jose Raul Capablanca and was the only player to have died while holding the world title. Lynch leafed through the book. “Very nice Tom, don’t forget me with a loan of it,”
“Of course. D’yeh know what, I’ll push over the door an block out the sound of those fucking eegits outside an’ sure we could play the game here, what yeh think?”
“Fine by me,” agreed Lynch in his ever-gracious manner.
Golden set up the board.
“Did I not get white?” Lynch asked.
“No remember, I called heads.”
“Oh was that it!”
The game was in its early stages when Lynch noticed that the cell was very stuffy and there was a strange smell in the air.
“Tom can you open the window and what’s that smell?”
“The window is fucking stuck Noel. Maybe they’re afraid I’ll escape,” Golden laughed, “and the smell, ah some incense the missus left in, nice, isn’t it?” he asked as he was now sitting in just his shorts.
Lynch removed his cardigan and concentrated on the game. He noticed Golden sometimes after making a move get up and root around in his locker. Then he became aware of lots of flies flitting around the cell. “Jaysus Tom! What the fuck?”
“What, the crippled knight on b3?”
“No the fucking flies.”
“Sure there’s always flies at this time of the year. I didn’t notice the fuckers.”
Lynch’s concentration and his psychological equilibrium became unbalanced between the fly nuisance and Golden who intermittingly gave his bare skin a hard smack with his open palm followed by a satisfied mutter of “Gotcha yeh little black bastard.”
The fastidious Lynch studied the board and after reasoning that the White King could drive the Black King out of the way and escort the pawn till it reached the eighth rank and became a Queen he conceded. Later he claimed that the fly swarm came from matchboxes that Golden had in his locker and this explained why every now and again he was rooting in the locker, releasing the flies.
“He must have had the boxes stuffed with them,” agreed O’Donnell.
“So now, one more time, if he does the fianchetto which is likely you play the Dragon Variation of the Sicilian,” explained Lynch. “That’ll go Bishop e3, Bishop g7. 0-0.Queen d2 knight c6. Bishop e4 Bishop e6. Knight xcb Bishopxcb. Bishop c4 Bishop c6. King b1 Rook b8 are you with me?”
“1 think so....”
“Good. Well, then it should go more or less Knight e4 Queen c7, Bishop b3 Rook d7 Knight xf4e x f42. Queen e1 Bishop d5. See now the Bishop on g7 sits on the long diagonal and helps checkmate the White King. You did say he has white, didn’t you?”
O’Donnell studied the board for a long time with a troubled look on his face. “White,” he said slowly.
“Did he toss and call heads.”
“Yeah.”
“Bet he was using the two-headed penny that he caught me out with.”
O’Donnell turned away from the board. “It doesn’t matter a fuck, Noel, what colour he has I haven’t a hope in following all that.”
They both looked blankly at each other. A Golden win would leave him on full points. Lynch had no doubt about winning his last game but he would finish two points behind Golden. If O’Donnell could beat Golden a play-off would be necessary and Lynch would this time have the game played out on the prison compound with no flies or flagellation.
Lynch jumped up. “Plan B it is so.”
“Is there a plan B?”
“I hope so. We need a small blackboard. D’yuh know if there’s one around.”
“Yep. Pat Beirnes has one. Uses it to chalk off each day every night,” O’Donnell laughed.
“So if I go on the landing outside Kevin Redmond’s door and look down on the game I can chalk each move for you. Think you could manage that?”
“That is genius. Just make sure that you write the moves clear enough for me to see and remember I can’t sit opposite Golden staring up for more than a second or so.”
The game began with Lynch on the landing above looking down on the chess board. O’Donnell facing towards the landing and Golden with his back to it. Everybody in the prison, including the few military policemen on duty, was aware of what was going on. Everybody except Golden, that is.
O’Donnell played his own game in the opening period and then let Lynch take over. All was going fine and Golden was beginning to look a little anxious when O’Donnell missed one of Lynch’s moves. He jumped up after giving the board a long look, “Going for a piss Tom. Don’t let him move any of those pieces,” he joked to Kevin Redmond who was watching the game.
He wasn’t long in the annex where the showers and toilets were when Tom Savage came in. “Why are you taking so long on that move?”
“I missed the fucking move. He took the board away too quickly. Go up and ask him to write out the move again.”
O’Donnell breathed a sigh of relief as he read Kt – KB3.
They were now well into the game and Golden was fidgeting in his chair and staring at O’Donnell.
“Are you all right Tom.”
“Of course I’m all right, why wouldn’t I be all right?”
“Of course. Its just that you don’t look all right.....”
“We’ll see now whose all right,” he said gleefully as he moved B- QR4.
Lynch was taking quite some time with his blackboard move and then he appeared like the Pope on the Vatican balcony at Easter and the blackboard read P- KR2. Golden had been watching O’Donnell carefully over the last few moves. Very carefully. O’Donnell pretended to be stretching his neck as he looked up. Golden swung around. Lynch went to pull the blackboard in. It hit off one of the steel landing pillars and almost hit Golden on the head as it clattered to the floor. He stared at it wide-eyed. P-KR2 was clearly written by a confident hand. He jumped up and galloped in triumph around the compound whooping to his heart’s content. “Fucking cheaters,” he shouted, “an youse were all in it. Every one of yis. This camp should be closed down and fucking fumigated, fucking fumigated!!”
END GAME
After his quick Curragh visit Ructions headed straight for the Peacock. There he joined the Black/ Scholes faction seated at the table near the door. It was a week after an anarchist was dangled over one of the top balconies of a Ballymun tower block and asked if he could fly.
Those seated at the table were discussing the Apparition at Knock with Denis Dennehy and Tommy Byrne.
“Before science came magic,” said Byrne, “Magic is proto-science which is based on a recognition of the principle of causality, that given the same antecedence conditions, the same result will follow.”
“I couldn’t disagree with that,” said Dennehy.
“Yes, and religion springs from a different source. There, the aim is to obtain results against or in spite of regular sequence. Religion functions in the area of the miraculous and this involves the abrogation of causality. Two different ways of thinking but both offer good life-long careers with a little bit of this or that on the side if there’s a convent nearby.”
“Ah now less of that debauchery talk now and we all know nuns can’t have sex,” Long appealed mirthfully.
“I know an ex-nun had three babies but that’s another story,” said Dennehy.
"It was Kavanagh, the priest, who used what they called a magic lantern at the time, that projected the image on the gable wall of the church," Long explained, "and remember that Kavanagh was known to be friendly to the landlords and against the Land League which he considered to be a dangerous socialist idea."
"Isn't it fucking amazing," remarked Ructions, "that these apparitions always appear in the back of beyond, to peasants who are already stuffed with religious superstition, you know, how come they never appear in Times Square to millions of city slickers?"
“Even better,” added Byrne. “Why did they not appear at the Teachers's Ballroom without cloven hooves.”
The others laughed. All around them wisps of cigarette smoke made silver spirals in the air. Outside, in the darkness, the pavement began to glisten as the first hard frost of the winter hammered itself home.
“They were all there on the whitewashed wall in gleaming robes, Mary, Joseph and John the Evangelist,” mocked Ructions, “and all looking like pale Europeans when in real life if they ever existed, they were probably a bunch of shabbily dressed, Aramaic speaking Jews from Palestine.”
“The hundredth anniversary is coming up in '79, we should picket that,” suggested Byrne.
“What would you have on the banners?” asked Dennehy.
“How about 'Knock is a load of Cock'?” ventured Bates who heard it from John Minahane. He had just arrived, having encountered Galvin behind a lamppost further down the road. But first, he told them about a friend of Miss Reid who had only lately endured a visitation from the Legion of Mary.
“She had an abortion and some pervert from the Legion got wind of it. He called to her flat and laid into her for all kinds of a baby-murdering whore.”
“Isn't it strange,” mused Dennehy, “that those who shout loudest about rights for the unborn are very quiet altogether about their rights when they're actually fucking born and living here amongst us? They're all fucking right-wingers who support the death penalty. They support the right to life until it's time they want to hang some poor bastard of a former foetus. Far as those fuckers are concerned we give up the right to life the instant we're alive.”
“A bunch of aul' popers mad keen to be flogging paupers,” said Byrne a trifle indistinctly, and laughed.
“That is because, in their world, religion and all the ridiculous emotional paraphernalia of it trumps rational thought. They elevate a foetus, a zygote, a non-human, to the status of a full-grown, fully human woman,” Bates explained.
“Humanity is socially, not biologically, determined,” added Dennehy.
“These nutters can't grasp that the foetus is an inert biological subject of ideological speculation. It can, maybe even will, become human, but it isn't conceived in full possession of the rights of man and the citizen.”
“Not to mention possession of any more gray matter than the Slug or Pah Wah.” interjected Marsh. “And anyway, what about Galvin?”
Bates told the company how Galvin had given him a fright. How he was walking past a lamppost near the pro Cathedral humming the Dominic Behan song 'Limerick Green' when he heard a voice hiss “Dan.” He looked around and saw no one and then he heard it again. “Dan,” low but clear out of the dark shadows of the dismal street. A chill ran up his spine and he was about to question his militant atheism when he lowered his gaze and there he was, Galvin, with his weasel features, peeping out from behind a lamppost. Then Bates asked Marsh to follow him out to the toilets.
While this did not apply to Bates, some people were afflicted by what was called ‘Harrieriti’'. These were people who were obsessed with seeing Special Branchmen everywhere.
They sat in pubs claiming to have seen Branchmen hiding behind lampposts, bushes and trees, on streets, and in public parks. They saw them peering in windows when they were having their hair cut by their local barber: they saw them pretending to fix slates on the roofs of tall buildings: they saw them digging up roads, staring down basements, running after busses, standing on street corners and sitting in doorways begging with febrile expressions on their faces.
Then, as the night gathered dust and the drinks mounted up the hectic harrier sightings became more unusual. Branchmen were spotted driving up Baggot Street while chewing their toenails: Branchmen in soutanes were seen slipping into confession boxes in churches situated adjacent to Sinn Fein offices, or Branchmen, disguised as postmen, were seen removing bags of post from public post boxes.
However, what was most annoying of all were the fellows who saw Branchmen in pubs. A drinker would feel a slight tug on his sleeve and a voice, close to his ear, would whisper: “Follow me out to the jacks, tell the others.”
Five or six people would then, like Browne's cows, file into the pub toilet. There they would be told that the fellow at the end of the counter accompanied by the large, red-haired woman whose donkey-like laugh stiffened drinkers in their seats, was a Branchman. This could happen many times in an evening. These coming and goings of serious-faced men in tight groups to the toilet often brought suspicious looks from customers and bar staff alike. And, especially when it occurred in a small public house with a small gent's toilet.
This portentous observation would take precedence over all other news. Even if an eminent scientist was to rush in off the street with cast iron proof that the end of the world was scheduled for dawn the following morning, he would be directed towards the toilet to hear about the Branchman at the end of the counter.
Bates gave Marsh a brown envelope. There was an address of a flat in Glasnevin on it. Marsh looked at the address.
“It's from Galvin. Some of the Saoirse Eire crowd is holed up there at the moment. Take note of the address and swallow the envelope.”
“I've had me dinner,” said Marsh as he crumpled the envelope and threw it into the toilet bowl. “How would you know where that little fucker had his hands,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Send Edwards in.”
“Glasnevin!” said Edwards. “That's handy. Right beside the jaysus cemetery.” He headed off to acquire transport. Davis left with him. He had to pick up a number of small arms.
By ten o'clock the gang had transport and were all tooled up and ready to leave the pub. Most of them were soused.
“Jim, don'tsh leh any cunt tooch dem pint...we aah won't besslong,” Davis splurged.
Eight giddy irregulars squeezed into the stolen Cortina. Three sat in the front and five managed to jam themselves into the back, two sitting on the laps of others.
“Jaysus, Jimmy yev an arse as big as the moon.”
The car shuddered and then took off urgently up Parnell Street. Suddenly the Parnell Monument seemed to veer up in front of the bonnet. The car lurched sideways narrowly missing it.
“Steady fucking on Joe, that whoremaster's ballocksing monument is made of solid stone.”
“Just like his conjoculars,” quipped another.
One of the passengers had just finished reading a book ‘Seize the Time’, by Black Panter leader Bobby Seale. “Burn baby burn...baby burn,” he chanted in mantra fashion.
As the car careered up Parnell Square the prattling occupants assured each other that all the signs were propitious and they repetitiously swore that tonight, be Jaysus, they would douse the glim of the Saoirse Eire reactionaries. The windows began to fog up as they passed Hugh Lane's Municipal Gallery.
“There's fucking nude paintings in there, tit galore,” one jabbered.
“Watch the cunt on the bike,” someone shouted.
Edwards swerved. A line of cars, whose owners were merrily dancing the night away in the National Ballroom, were more or less written off in three to four seconds of crunching and tearing.
“Everybody fucking out,” Edwards commanded in an authoritative slur.
Semi-drunk and drunken figures stumbled out and staggered around. One was gasping for breath. The impact had thrown Jimmy's arse into his stomach like a giant medicine ball. A passer-by grabbed a man: “Hold it there head. What's going on?”
“Just something political-like,” an anarchist slobbered.
“Like what?” inquired the baffled citizen. Before he could utter another syllable he was sent flying with a vicious kick from behind.
“Like fucken that, Pal.”
Davis, who had seven different kinds of steam coming out of his head, the result of the drink and the car's stuffiness interfusing with the sudden rush of cold, fresh air, stared at the prostrate figure. He despised inquisitive, law-abiding citizens and he only resisted an overwhelming urge to boot-massage the hapless individual, because he felt a more urgent desire to scarper before the arrival of the gardai. Jimmy scratched his arse, took a deep breath and legged it to the Peacock.
Minutes later the Special Branch arrested Edwards, one of the joy riders, in nearby Dorset Street, whereupon he was subjected to a forensic cross-examination. On mature recollection, he heard, knew or saw sweet “fuck all.” He happened to be in the environs because he was going to a “swearing competition.” However, he got sidetracked and after drinking more than he needed he was beset by a ravenous hunger that could impel him to devour a farmer's arse through a blackthorn ditch. Because of this, he was on his way to see an aunt who, as luck would have it, lived in the vicinity and whom he had not seen for about thirteen years. He thought that the line of smashed cars outside the dancehall was probably a crocked car convention going on inside. He considered the suggestion that he only used the truth in emergencies because he held it in such profound reverence as scurrilous. Soon after he was released.
Within an hour the others were all back at the Peacock. Although they had somewhat sobered up they were bent double in hysterical laughter.
“Jaysus Joe. You must have a distinction in the scrap business.”
They got a special laugh out of the idea of the carefree rural dancers, or culchies as they called them, who were still knocking spots out of the floor, trying to impress their dancing partners, female culchies who were also living and working in the city.
“Begob Mary,” they laughed, mimicking country accents, “I have a lovely, snazzy little runner outside an' sure after the dance sure maybe you'll come for a ride in, I mean, to the Phoenix Park.”
“Go on yah muck savage yuh or I'll tell me mother.”
“Sure she's spanking new, not a scratch on her. Never even had a hoggit in the booth. Isn't that right Scober.”
“She's pure mule Mickeen, pure mule.”
“Did anyone see where the fucker on the bike vanished to?” Davis inquired.
“No. Musta been a culchie to be abroad in the city without lights, the cunt.”
By the year's end, the Angry Brigade still managed to have O'Connell Street closed off to pedestrians and traffic on two consecutive Saturday nights on December 2nd and 9th as gardai hunted for their incendiary bombs.
The Angry Brigade campaign continued into 1974. In March, they firebombed the Spanish Institute in retaliation for the execution, by garrotting, of Barcelona anarchist Salvador Antich.
In April the gardai again toured Dublin with loud hailers after firebombs exploded in some stores. Commandant Henry McGuinness said that the devices were the most dangerous and best constructed he had ever seen.
By July most of the anarchist leadership was imprisoned in the Curragh Military Detention Centre for conspiracy to cause explosions.
On June 27th, Saoirse Eire announced that it was disbanding in the interests of the working class. The statement followed the murder of its leader, Larry White, who was shot dead on Mount Eden Road in Cork on June 10th 1975 by the Official IRA.
Later, ex-Officials, Noel and Marie Murray were sentenced to death after they were convicted of the murder of Garda Michael Reynolds following a bank robbery in Killester in September 1975. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The arrest of the Murrays effectively brought an end to the Angry Brigade campaign.
