Tale 39 - PART 1

INTRODUCTION  - PART 1

“Okay, okay,” said Marsh, his white cheeks darkened by stubble, “will yez give over fussing? I’m ready. Alright. Now for Jaysus sad sake will yez get the fuck on with it. Wakin’ a fellah up from the vasty deeps of his final kip an’ then keeping him hangin’ about like a nun’s cunt on a convent hook,” he shook his head and adjusted his trilby, “sure that’s the Revolution for yeh, can’t organise a haunt in a graveyard.”

“Just another minute or two Tommy, we’re waiting on Ructions,” said Redican.

“We’re waiting on Ructions. Well, well well. Fancy that now. Doyle! So we’re waiting on Doyle, are we? And why may I ask?”

“He didn’t say, Tommy,” O’Donnell replied. “Just said to wait for him, wasn’t that’id Noel?”

“That was the jist and the joust of it alright.”

“Well, its good to see how little changes. I’m dead an eternity, and still, I have to stand here waitin’ on Doyle without as much as a bottle of stout to add a wee bit of wet to the peeled dry bones of me.”

“Have this pint,” said Redican.

“And a Powers Tommy,” added O’Donnell holding out a glass and slyly pouring another large measure for himself.

“I didn’t hear a ting-a-ling of the till,” observed Marsh.

“They’re doing hearing aids in Spec Savers now,” said Redican, giving a wink to O’Donnell and then muttering, “all the bleeden times I got the wrong change.”

Marsh drank deeply, quiet for a moment, appearing almost content. “So I’m dead. I’m dear departed but Doyle is just late or maybe he’s the late belated...”

“That’s it Tommy,” sure we were all at the funeral, “didn’t Eddie Collins, the orator, say he was an irascible punctuated equilibrium or was it an unreliable degenerate protuberance or...”

“Leave it fucken out,” demanded Marsh. “And what about youse pair a cunts are yiz dead as well?”

O’Donnell helped himself to another bottle from the top shelf behind Clarke’s snoring head. “You’ve been resurrected Tommy, like the others or most of the other pricks...”

“That’s right Tommy. You an Ructions an Bates an...”

Marsh held up a pale hand. “What about youse fucks?”

“We’re just here as go-betweens kind of thing. Going between our present and your past or something like that. The unknown author didn’t .....it wasn’t fucking explained very clearly. Maybe Bates will be able to get a handle on it.”

“I don’t like the sound of any of this bollocks. Smells like religion to me. Resurrected!!! I’m not having any of that oul superstition stuff and nonsense and Bishop’s balls the lot of it.”

“No, no Tommy its not religion mumbo jumbo, or bishops’balls its this here book,” Redican interjected.

“Well, that’s saying something because when Collins and his desperadoes sold their arses to the property brigade those fucken bishops showed their true colours.”

“They bared their souls Tommy and exposed a bleak rationality,” said Redican.

“The fuckers denied the sacraments to the republicans, the majority I should add, who continued on the war of independence struggle against England’s proxy led be Collins.”

“I couldn’t have put it better meself,” O’Donnell complimented, “and remember Tommy that as crazy as that is to us now, that many, if not most, of those freedom fighters, then saw themselves as fighting for the Church as well as the Republic

Redican shook his head. “Their enemies!”

“Sure their religion was like a second clip of ammo and even though they were refused Christian burials, confession and communion they continued on the fight and when they were arrested and tortured the same bishops closed their eyes to murder as they put politics ahead of Christianity.”

“If they ever knew what that was,” Redican scoffed.

“Convenient pragmatism was what they were serving and this allowed them to even deny priestly comfort to one on the way to a firing squad wall,” said O’Donnell as he placed a Bushmills in front of Marsh. “That’ll put hairs on yer bollix Tom.”

“Be Jaysus I’m getting white hot as it is with waiting for Ructions and thinking about those poxy bishops and what they teach as history in schools which is fantastical fucken fiction for the most part, which is propagated by the ruling class to hide their reprehensible actions by which they achieved power and to justify them in maintaining it. This version is peddled out by the obedient mainstream press and revisionist historians who want to tell us who should be remembered and who should not.”

“The unquestioning, self-proclaimed intelligentsia,” remarked Redican.

“Tommy!!” Clarke shouted. “I like yer drift. Get up on the counter for fuck sake and give it hell. Give it fucking hell. C’mon, c’mon givim a hand up, sure he’s a born orator of the Fenian tradition.”

“He has a subtle way with language which only comes from a finely attuned ear,” said a man whose bloodshot eyes exuded an image of crushing pathos.

Another, unable to conceal the wounds of age, sang out in a fluttery register, “That he be never dumbstruck.”

Marsh was helped to the beer-sodden counter via a wobbly stool. He threw back the whiskey and adopted an arms-outstretched pose reminiscent of Jim Larkin when he addressed the locked-out workers on O’Connell Street in 1913. He stared down at the swelling mass of pallid faces below and thought of Conchobar mac Nessa who on his deathbed saw crowding quickly around him the ghosts of the foes he had slain.

“The other history, our history, is one that will not be found in the corridors of power or in the hallowed halls of academia. This history is absent from the gilded ceilings of financial institutions,” he declared in a hollow drawl. This history does not sit comfortably in the gombeen man’s mentality because this history does not bend the knee or bow the head to a foreign monarch. This history is not the history of the incorrigible or the squeamish or the scared.”

Angry shouts of “Free state cowards,” and “Chancers!” rose from various parts of the shambolic premises from people who had almost become shadows.”

“It is not a history of half-truths and lies,” Marsh continued in a tempestuous tone.  “While they’re history, free state history is a history of treachery against the men and women who held out for a republic against traitors whose republican ideals had fragmented into a kind of hodge-podge state that pledged its subservience to the British Empire. They abandoned their oath they had sworn to the republic and instead swore an oath to a foreign monarch.”

“Fuckers!” the usually dignified Miss Reid shouted.

“Correct. And those same fuckers armed themselves with British guns and raised a mercenary army to kill those who had remained faithful to the oath they had sworn to the republic. A devastating betrayal backed by the bishops,” said Marsh, his brittle words accompanied by a wealth of gesticulating.

“Shouts of “Fucking murderers,” and “Mother fuckers,” filled the ominous desolation.

“The people who tied republican prisoners to a mine at Ballyseedy and detonated it were on the wrong side of history. And Ballyseedy was not the only time. The people who took part in the firing squads and fired the deadly volley at republican prisoners were on the wrong side of history. Those who tortured prisoners and who put British bullets into the heads of republican teenagers before dumping their bodies into Dublin ditches were on the wrong side of history. And remember comrades there is also a right side of history,” Marsh finished to loud cheering.

“Hear Tommy, have a pint,” said O’Donnell as he helped Marsh from the counter.

“That fucken counter is like an ice ring, I nearly broke me bollocks on it,” Marsh muttered.

“I’ll give it a wipe,” promised Clarke, “It wasn’t meant for oratory.”

Redican excused himself as he greeted the white-faced doddery intellectual Colm Long who made a timid entrance. As usual, as he had done in living life, he nursed a thick bundle of newspapers under his oxter. He greeted Redican in a voice which sounded like it rose from the inside of a hollow tree trunk.

“Its been a while Colm,” said Redican as he studied the slight figure in the black turtleneck sweater. We all got a shock that day when the news broke.”

Long still sported a thin covering of grey hair which fell forward in Beatle’s style.

“Fuck! I was just outside the gates of Trinity talking to Tommy Smith, Etáin Clarke and Paula Keenan when bang! Out of the blue!”

Redican nodded. “Yeap, out of the blue and into the dark.”

“Into the dark is right!”

“Into the black dark. But you hung on for a short time you stubborn bollix, was there any chink in the blackness?”

“Not a fiddler’s fuck!”

“Not a flicker?”

“No light at the end of the tunnel. No bleeden tunnel! I was in the middle of explaining how the Empedoclean revision of the materialist doctrine fails to meet the criticism of Parmenides.”

Redican clicked his fingers. “Oh yes. Paaaaarmenides, Parmenides. Wasn’t he the guy that some philosophers claimed was mad for his hole?”

“Cosmology! Black holes!”

“Black or white. I guess he wouldn’t be particular.”

Long grimaced. “I suppose, I...”

“Actually its coming to me now,” Redican cut in. “It is yes because I recall Clarke saying that you had been explaining the general trend of the Parmenidean argument which was sort of a development of eh, fucky the ninth, oh yeah, Heraclitus, who described the view that all things are made of some bleeden basic stuff and at the same time bladdering on about empty space.”

“Oh, I see,” enthused Long as a kind of lively deadness swept over him. “Yes. Yes. We can describe the material as ‘It is’ and empty space by saying ‘It is not’. Actually, Heraclitus, a bit of a wanker if you ask me, could be described as saying it is and it is not both at the same time.”

“Bit of a fucking conundrum there!”

“Fucking sure. But to avoid falling into that linguistic trap Parmenides simply asserts that it is. The point is that what is not cannot even be thought of.... for how can one think of nothing?”

Redican laughed. “I knew a few gougers who could do that all day long.”

Timmons arrived over and gave Long a friendly clap on the back. “Good to see you Colm. Still exploring the unknown?”

Long smiled.

“I recall meeting Clarke sometime after that eventful day and she told me that you were in great form saying that you were talking nonsense about the Parmenidean not been a dead end because in its linguistic form it simply amounts to that when you think or speak of something you think or speak and therefore the objects of what you think or speak of must always exist. Change would be impossible because on his view he could never deny anything as this means he would have to say what is not. Right?”

“I think so,” said a hesitant Long.

“Well if that’s the case, which it is, one can never assert anything either.....so all speech and all thought becomes impossible as all one is left with is ‘It is’.”

“Reductio ad absurdum,” announced Sutcliffe, wrapped shroud-like in his long white Mackintosh. “Before Parmenides Tommy Smith said that you were gasbagging on about Anaxagoras.”

“Who?” asked Long as the sound volume grew in tune with the growing number of dead voices.”

“Anaxagoras,” repeated Sutcliffe. “The first philosopher who came to live in Athens and who remained there from the end of the Persian wars to the middle of the century, a period of about thirty years.”

“Not sure about that,” said Long.

“That means nothing,” replied Sutcliffe. “What are you not sure of? The discussion or Anaxagoras?”

“I believe he came in with the Persian army,” Redican chipped in. “I’m sure I heard Bates saying once that he became a teacher and a friend of Pericles and some claimed that Euripides was a pupil of his.”

Long shook his head. “I don’t recall talking about him that day.”

“Maybe it was the discussion after you collapsed,” Timmons suggested teasingly.

There was a guffaw of hollow laughter.

Sutcliffe stared at Long. “Maybe it was that Greek sham, yeh know, the fella who was studying the theory of the boundlessness of competing opposites?”

“The ectoplasmic materializations of form?” Long inquired, his face a study of puzzlement.

Redican noticed Marsh looking over O’Donnell’s shoulder at Long. It was a gimlet stare. He had heard the land of the living story about Anti Duhring and the Docker’s pub. He caught Long by his free arm. “C’mon over here and I’ll introduce you to Manus O’Riordan. Manus is a fucking divil for the research. A divil.”

 Redican then re-joined Marsh and O’Donnell.

“Just discussing the book with Timmons and Sutcliffe.”

“What fucken book are yis blattern on about and the two of youse known to be notorious illiterates. So go on tell me, what’s all this shite about a book?” inquired Marsh as he gulped into the pint.

“Its like this Tommy,” O’Donnell tried to explain, “this bunch of geezers, intellectuals and that sort of thing have written about you and Ructions and Timmons and Casey and Bates....”

“Quite a lot of people really,” added Redican, “women like Marie McMahon, Briege O’Doherty, Marie Murray, Kitty O’Kane and much more terrible revolutionary long-haired Galeens that if Yeats had happened upon them his poetry would have pinnacled to a higher level.”

“Along with something else,” suggested Marsh.

“Well in this book which also mentions lots of other ne’er-do-wells, suggests that we were lax on the theory of yuh know, the revolutionary theory. Sort of hints that we were a bit clueless who couldn’t make a Republic out of the freedom to be free and not only are we not free now we’re not Gaelic either and its a bit loose on the language as well as in the construction of the words, yeh know Tommy, the way the words should, taking sense and grammar into account, follow one another rather than tumbling out to fuck....”

Marsh gave a knowing nod. “I think I get yer drift. So where’s this group of intellectuals then? Bring the fuckers onto me now til I refute one by one their treasonous propositions, til I expose their fallacious reasoning, til I tear somebody’s fat-brained noggin off an’ feed it up to him through his arsehole. Give the rest of the fuckers something to chew on an’all when his IQ can only be measured by holding him upside fucken down.”

Redican shook his head. “Naw. Not on Tommy. The Hungry Brigade Collective, that’s what they call themselves, they’re dead shy in meeting up with dead people who are doubling up as characters in a book they’ve written.”

“ Its very confusing Tommy, it really is.” O’Donnell gave a faint laugh.

“Confusing, it fucken is. I’m dead, Doyle’s dead. If some cunt’ed put the heads of youse on a poster it’ed make a good add for being dead. So why can’t this bunch of intellectuals or whatever they are show up to fucken account for themselves like the rest of us?” Marsh’s pint of stout and his glass were both empty at this stage which was leading to a certain fragility about the integrity of his being in the world; and a consequence loss of his never-extensive reserves of patience.

O’Donnell moved behind the bar in an attempt to rescue the situation. Pints regularly pulled without a bother and why would there be with him having being around and behind a counter in Kildimo and now filling halfuns that were well on their way to being fulluns contributed to the success of the manoeuvre. As the newest, albeit oldest, potboy on the block helped himself to another bottle of the good stuff that Clarke in his exhaustion from the late night before was failing to keep an eye on.

Redican ventured to improve on his previous answer. “Well spotted there Tommy, It’s a question of the meaning of death. For most people death is a different thing, a mere kinda final thing, to the way death is to us...I mean to you.”

“Whatta fuck are yeh blatherin’ on about, a different kinda death? Dead’s dead...isn’t it?” Marsh was beginning to find the afterlife at least as complicated, certainly every bit as perplexing, as its forerunner had been. “Isn’t it?” he repeated.

“No it isn’t,” Redican retorted. “You see there’s the Fenian dead and then there’s everybody else that’s dead, which Ireland holds the graves of them and isn’t free, Ireland can never be at peace...”

“Sure everybody fucken knows Pearse at O’Donovan Rossa’s graveside. Jesus if I had been there that prophetic day I would have smashed some fucken DMP heads in honour of the Lockout and Larkin. I’d bleeden....”

“Will yeh shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m trying to explain,” Redican requested.

“I am listening.”

“You’re running off in tangents. What I’m saying is that with the Fenian dead and Ireland unfree holding the graves cannot be at peace.....well the Fenian dead cannot be at peace either. Get me.”

“Sort of.”

“Jesus!! Tommy. Your Fenian dead so you cannot be at peace.....never, never until Ireland is free.”

Marsh went silent and looked into the whirling gloom. “Oh right. Well, I suppose that’s all right then. Nothing to do with religion. Nothing at all sure wasn’t it some fucken bishop that said hell wasn’t hot enough or eternity long enough for the Fenians....”

“Moriarty the fucker that was in Kerry Tommy.”

“He’d have deserved a kick into the bollocks by Mick O’Connell, so its politics, just politics, the politics that fucked up me fucken life and now its fucken up me fucken death but that’s all right. Once its nothing to do with bishop’s balls. I can live with that.”

Speaking so glibly than of living, the dead Tommy Marsh grimaced a spectral grin around the bar and growled a greeting. “So yer here at last. What the fuck kept you?”

The late Ructions Doyle moved hugely through the penumbral gloom, throwing back what was left of his unruly hair with a wave of his hand. “Evening comrades. Long time no see. I’ll take a seat here and a pint of that there and what’s that you’re trying to hide behind your back O’Donnell, a bottle of Coleraine’s finest and blackest, is it? I’ll have a drop of the Bush as well then.”

Marsh gave O’Donnell a questioning look and then studied the calm still centre of a freshly pulled well-collared pint like a quality control expert. “I asked you a question, Doyle. What kept you?”

Ructions took a newly pulled pint from O’Donnell and then devoured half of it. He gave his beard a rough wipe and then sucked his trigger finger. “The world Tom,” he said wearily, “Its not good out there...I was in Barney Kiernans earlier.”

Clarke came alive and told O’Donnell to fuck off back to the respectable side of the counter. “Barney Kiernans,” he echoed. “Ulysses among other unprintable things.”

“The Citizen,” laughed Redican. “Ensconced within and watching Bloom stroll up and down outside as if he was on point duty and, ‘begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slither off again.’ That was the citizen a ruthless cadger.”

Marsh gave a guffaw. “Go on. I think I know this citizen or his double.”

“Well the rumour is that Bloom has been given a tip on a horse which has come in at good odds and he might have won as much as a fiver, big money in those days, so the citizen is hoping that he’ll come in and buy a round and he’s fucking him from a height about him being a freemason and a Jew and telling Lenehan that it’ed be an act of God to take hold of a fellow like that and toss him into the sea.”

“I know plenty of fellahs who’d shy a round and were not Jews, not any faith,” O’Donnell remarked.

“Well a jaunting car arrives for Bloom who is on his way to Sandymount to offer condolences to Duignam’s widow,” continued Redican, “and now the citizen, puffed up with the drink and enraged that there’s none coming from Bloom’s winnings rushes out and launches a ferocious verbal assault at Bloom largely aimed at his Jewishness. Bloom tries to be reasonable saying to the citizen ‘your God was a Jew, Christ was a Jew like me’ begob shouts the citizen running back into the shop ....I’ll brain that bloody Jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him and he throws a biscuit tin after the jaunting car while his dog Garryowen gives an ineffectual pursuit.”

“I must read that fucken book sometime,” Marsh promised as the laughter subsided.

“Different clientele now,” Ructions muttered. “I was halfway down on me pint when a shower pushed in all on bail from Green Street, the Special, and all with ignominious faces on them. All I could hear was this fucker is a grass and so is the other bollix and this other fellow has to be clipped and someone else has to be wasted.....”

“So that’s what kept you.”

“No, because then I went into Dolans on Marlborough Street.”

“Who were you seeing in Dolans?”

“Nobody. I was commemorating.”

“Yeh have me bet there Sean because I’m fucked if I can think of anything to commemorate in Dolans,” admitted Marsh.

“Does June 2nd 1953 mean anything to your general ignorance?”

“Can’t say it does. Sure I was only a nipper then.”

Ructions took another gulp from the glass. “It was the day of the inauguration of Queen Betty 2nd of England.”

This surprising titbit of royal history was met with a general guffaw.

“I didn’t know that happened in Dolans,” O’Donnell laughed.

“Well it was about to happen but thanks to Geroid O’Broin, a patriot in a long white dustcoat who pulled a hammer out of his pocket as he pushed his way through the crowd and just as the crown was about to be placed on Betty’s head the hammer bet the shit out of the snowy screen. There was bedlam as these Buckingham Palace addicts looked gobsmacked at the black hole in front of them.”

Marsh grinned. “Sexton eh. The pub on the quays....The Dockers?”

“What was that?” asked Redican.

“The TV screens when the BBC played God Save Betty at the end of the evening,” explained Ructions. “If the barman wasn’t fucking quick enough to the off button well a stool could hit....”

“Or a half full pint bottle in the case of Sexton,” said Marsh. He told the others of the night in the Docker’s pub when they helped Sexton to break the record. We were swinging it that night, weren’t we Sean... only for Sexton to miss the target.”

“What happened to him?” asked Redican.

“Dead. A long time ago. He might turn up tonight.” suggested Ructions.

Marsh dismissed the idea. “Out of the question, sure if what youse say is true he’s not Fenian dead.”

“He is Fenian dead Tommy,” O’Donnell contradicted, “sure he was with me at the Behal argy-bargy in Mountmellick and Portlaoise in 64.”

“Yeah, but he was court-martialed after that. You see the problem with the TV stuff is that the God Save Betty bit was on late and by the time it arrived, Sexton was gee-eyed and seeing two television screens or maybe even three. Anyway, this oulwan got a smack on the forehead of a pint bottle one night and the Army Council...well complaints were made and he had to go. A fucking flagless coffin. So there died his Fenian death.”

A tear mosied down Miss Reid’s cheek as she heard of Sexton’s mishap. “That’s a sad story.”

“Ah yeah,” O’Donnell agreed, “and you came here from Dolans?”

“No,” said Ructions, “I looked into Grogans. Bates was holding forth in the section known as Grattan’s Parliament with a number of other heads.”

Redican laughed, “That’ed be Ernie.”

“He was talking about some fellow who held like the utilitarian movement that apparently could be linked back to Hutcheson....”

“Georgia Hutcheson?” inquired Marsh.

“Hardly,” Ructions replied, “because this Hutcheson was scratching about around the 1750s according to Bates. He held the theory that good is pleasure and that bad is pain.”

“We could all go along with that,” agreed Redican.

“Well this fellow was above all interested in jurisprudence and his main inspiration for this were two fuckers called Helvetius and Beccaria.”

“Never heard of either,” Marsh announced with complete indifference.

“But what was the name of the geyser Bates was talking about?” O’Donnell asked.

Ructions gave his beard a scratch as the others looked on. Then he lit a cigarette and blew a thin column of smoke past Clarke’s head. “It’s eh....its eh...Bentham,” he spat out. “Bentham! That was the fucker.”

Clarke sprang to life. “Bentham? Jeremy Bentham?”

“That’s it, Jimmy. I distinctly heard the word jerry and not as in piss-pot.”

“I saw him,” announced Clarke who was now as alert as a cock in a farmyard of cackling hens.

The others laughed. “C’mon Jimmy. We know yeh look zonked out but yer not that much zonked out.”

“Well youse see now smart arses,” Clarke responded, “When he died in 1832 he stipulated that they dress up his skeleton and do a wax mask of his face and sit him in a showcase at University College London as a permanent memorial to one of the founders, which he was in 1825. That, yez shower of bollixes, is where I laid eyes on him. Did any of Grogan’s intellectual retards say anything else?”

Ructions sniggered. “Yes, Jimmy. Some fucker who knows everything, there’s always one, said that this Bentham fellow was the leader of a group of men who were known as the Philosophical Radicals.”

“That’s correct,” agreed Clarke. “They were really big into social reform and education and despite the poxy times that were in it then, they opposed in a reasonable way the authority of the Church. Actually, in later life, Bentham became quite an aggressive atheist. The group were also hostile to how the ruling class of society protected itself and how it bestowed upon itself privileges that did not apply to the other sections of society. Bentham himself was really into education and remember at that time England had only two fucking universities and only professing Anglicans had access to these and this lasted until the latter part of the nineteenth century.”

“Yeh have one on us there James,” Redican acknowledged while O’Donnell went behind the counter and was passing out dripping pints to Miss Reid who was dashing in and out of the pulsating gloom. Ructions may have been about to testify some more but as the wisp of some such thought or other worked itself up to crossing his mind he was momentarily distracted. Propped against an adjacent bar stool and in danger of a trampling stood an old no-frills acoustic guitar he remembered from the sixties.

Some singer chap he couldn’t quite put a name to had bought it from Ned Bulfin for three pounds in Portarlington. He’d borrowed it from Christy Moore, that was the fellow’s name but had somehow allowed himself to be persuaded to give it back. “That was my road less travelled moment,” he thought. “I could have been a contender. Ructions Doyle and the Planxties, something like that, concerts, records, money, women, drink I coulda had all that but I took the other road.” He picked up the guitar and examined it closely, looking between the frets and the strings for some sign of the might have been. He could see no sign of it. He leaned his ear against it. All he heard was an accent from the Tyrone side of the border as Clarke lectured to the grimness and the greyness of the growing crowd:

“Bentham’s philosophy owes much to two leading ideas that hark back to the early eighteenth century. Hartley gave prominence to the first which is the principle of association and this in turn derives from Hume’s theory of causality which is about explaining the fucking notion of casual dependence in terms of the association of ideas.”

“Is he talking about alcoholism?” Redican wondered.

“Whatever the fuck it is, I’d hate to get it up me hole,” said Marsh.

“Bentham put the raw material provided by experience as been the primary source of consciousness in the mind and this allowed him to give a deterministic account of psychology which knocked involving the fucking mental concept on the head. It led to the theory of the conditioned reflex which was later developed by Pavlov,” Clarke continued. “And the second principle is the utilitarian maxim of what men and women try to do is to attain for themselves the greatest possible happiness which is taken to mean by Bentham as not orgies but a state in which the function of law will ensure that in striving for this one does not impair of fuck up this same pursuit for others. Sounds a bit like paradise, especially when in England then the society was so brutal, Dickensian and the death penalty dished out like snuff at a wake for trifling offences. Bentham himself opposed the indiscriminate infliction of the death penalty and held that the function of the law concerning crime should be guided towards prevention and not punishment.”

While Clarke spoke on with a throng of the curious gathering around him, Marsh welcomed in the Fenian ghosts with a brisk shake of everyone’s hand.

“Of course this fucking everybody happy clappy idea was grabbed by the liberal economists to mean individualism for all, ‘laisser faire’Goldman Sachs, a race to the bottom. Isn’t it amazing how there’s always some bollocks who is ready to bounce on a great idea like the greatest happiness for the greatest number and turn it into a fucking pigsty? Because of this Bentham’s overriding considerations were equality and security and politically he favoured a sort of benevolent despotism rather than democracy. He saw liberty as somewhat metaphysical and romantic believing that democracy would only be controlled by the governing class which would only govern in their own interests. That’s what I remember of Jeremy Bentham. Not the worst!”

This was followed by a round of applause as O’Donnell handed Clarke a brimming over fullun of what was left of the black Bush. “On the house Jimmy.”

“Democracy is an invention by the ruling class, they own it an its not democratic,” said Redican.

Clarke stared at the glass O’Donnell had given him. “On the fucking house. On my fucking house! Get out from behind that counter now yeh fucking pig’s arse of a barman.”

“There’s more important things than the talk of Bentham in Grogans when the Fenian Dead has to account for itself,” said Bates, appearing living or dead, it was hard to pin down exactly the existential state of him, to take to the centre of the floor. “Its not enough to say Ireland Unfree and expect the listener to

understand we’ve embarked on a syllogism the final term of which is written in bombs and bullets and as it is written so must, so must it be read and spoken.”

Marsh scratched under his hat and stared at Bates. He gave a sort of yelp. “I like it Ernie yah bollix yah!”

“Bombs and bullets,” continued Bates. “Okay, that’s how it worked out. Bombs and bullets. But that’s not the irregular point we started from. We have lived with lies, damned lies and whatever fucking completely awful thing that de Valera saw when he looked into his heart, the appalling thing he mistook for the aspirations of the Irish people. Growing up with that, seeing what he saw, knowing what he knew, concentrating on the light at the end of the tunnel we forgot about the people, our people in the North.”

Marsh gave another shout. “Yer right there Ernie.” He was now feeling as comfortable as ever he had been with the vague generalisations and abstract formulations that pass for theoretical on the left wing of the Irish political pitch.

The bar was groaning now, with the weight of dead generations popping back from the skeletal into the pale avoirdupois of resurrected life. Some of the mortality-challenged travelled light enough. Carrying just pockets enough and bags for the duty-free they had somehow picked up on the way back from whichever other side they had got to. Others, besides duty-free bottles of all brands and every brand, cigarettes, cigars and boxes of Belgium chocolates, had picked up retinues of hangers-on who were helping themselves to everything they could get their hands on, be it duty-free or duty pilfered for perhaps who could say how long the night was going to last. All eventualities, even a session later on in York Street, had to be taken into consideration.

It could be said the situation was getting out of control. Things were falling apart as the centre failed to hold. Anarchists who were half Fenians were materialising out of thin air to abolish the scepticism of despair.

Sutcliffe in his long white Mackintosh and black beret quoting Protagoras shouted, “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.”

“No more drink for him,” Marsh whispered to Bates.