Voices from the Grave

Faber has just published Voices from the Grave, written by Ed Moloney and based on the testimonies of two senior figures in Northern Ireland’s long sectarian war, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine.  For many years Hughes was the close friend and brother-in-arms of Gerry Adams. Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA. Though no one believes him, the statements about him in this book are the first made by a republican central to the armed struggle, and Hughes’s account of his own part in the war is the first by a former leader of the IRA at the centre of the action. Until now silence and speculation has surrounded the leaders of the armed groups. Northern Ireland has had a purely political reconciliation accompanied by very little truth telling from those with blood on their hands.

Boston College years ago decided to fund a major series of interviews with former paramilitary leaders before too many of them passed away. They were encouraged to be frank; and to encourage honesty they were promised that nothing they said would be published before they died. Ervine died in 2007, Hughes a year later.

The book was eagerly awaited in Ireland, north and south. In one small bookshop-cum-newsagent in Andersonstown, the Republican working class estate in west Belfast, 85 copies were delivered at 8.30 on the day of the book’s release and were gone half an hour later. That pattern was repeated across the North of Ireland and throughout the south.

Ireland in the twentieth century was a place where the art of hiding crime and corruption in plain sight was brought to a very high level. And it demanded the willed blindness of those who couldn’t shoulder the consequences of seeing the truth and being forced to speak about it.

It was a common half serious threat – the last resort of a parent at wit’s end – that a child would be sent off to Artane or Daingean if they didn’t stop misbehaving. They were two of the ‘reformatories’ that everyone knew were hellholes, and that the people making them hellish were members of religious orders. But these grim oubliettes for the delinquent or orphan children of the poor were themselves immune to reform. Everyone could see, no one looked.

An Irish party leader and Taoiseach (prime minister), a modestly successful accountant before going into politics, was living by the early seventies the kind of life that Roman generals enjoyed after they’d plundered a province. He acquired a beautiful Georgian mansion with a 270-acre estate, a seriously large yacht, a string of racehorses, a private island off the coast of Kerry and a taste for very expensive old wine. He was tight with property developers, supermarket moguls, the big builders and their architects. Everyone saw what Charles Haughey was doing, but nobody dared look too closely. Writing about it could ruin your newspaper or your publisher and end your career.

The dogs in the street knew that Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy was a major figure on the IRA Army Council and in the South Armagh IRA, and that he ran a huge smuggling operation from his farm straddling the border with Northern Ireland, where crime and the armed struggle met. They also knew that Gerry Adams was the dominant personality in the IRA. Barking any of this aloud was a different matter.

As a young publisher, I was taught that staying away from Irish dogs that bark gives you one less headache in a profession already driven by anxiety. If the English libel laws are oppressive, the operation of essentially the same laws in Ireland is suffocating. The rich and powerful know they can intimidate journalists into cautious blandness. Much of the Irish Times, the best newspaper in the country, is written in an impenetrable language of court and tribunal reports, paraphrases of legal argument and studiedly careful allusion, with almost no explanation provided for the uninitiated of what is really going on. Meanwhile, paramilitary figures scan the index of every new book on the Ulster conflict while praying for a careless phrase that will allow them to sue.

Yet even the most cautious publisher has to get off the fence when what is hidden so publicly begins to become embarrassingly obvious, to stare you in the face. The first time I took such a step was when Fintan O’Toole began his vivid and scrupulous reports for the Irish Times on the so-called Beef Tribunal in the early nineties. This body was set up to investigate how one of Ireland’s then richest men, Larry Goodman, presided over a scam exporting substandard meat to Iraq. For this operation, which involved the detailed mislabelling of meat, Goodman was given incredibly generous export credit guarantees by the Fianna Fail government led by Charles Haughey. When Saddam Hussein failed to pay up, Goodman didn’t lose a penny. The question of who knew what was going on – who saw and bothered to register what they were looking at – was, as ever in Ireland, hotly contested. It was a huge political scandal, the first of many.

O’Toole was a brilliant essayist, cultural commentator and drama critic – his superb biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Johnston were yet to come – and sending him to cover this numbingly boring tribunal seemed like despatching James Wood to write about the inquiry into the third runway at Heathrow. But O’Toole had asked for this assignment: he saw its importance in exposing the way power and influence worked in Ireland. He wrote Meanwhile Back at the Ranch in a few months, a burning indictment of the system that had enabled the fraud.

I remember sitting at a dinner for the nominees of the Irish Times Literature Prizes beside Conor Brady, the then editor of the paper, who passionately admired Fintan’s work. When I mentioned that I was publishing the book – which touched on Haughey, his successor Albert Reynolds and other big fish in the stagnant pool of Irish power – Brady told me with great emphasis that I was taking a huge risk. ‘These are people who will spend a hundred pounds to take a penny off you’, he said. This was the received wisdom from the school of hard knocks. Few knew better how determined ‘these people’ could be. I spent some sleepless nights after that. Random House, for which I then worked, had an extreme aversion to libel risk.

But Fintan was very careful. Everything was sourced in evidence to the tribunal. A very clever lawyer who’s now a judge of the Irish Supreme Court read the manuscript for us as a pro-bono gesture to helping let more light into the murk. We published, the book became a best seller in Ireland and we waited for the legal letters. None came.

The second time I decided to step into an unsafe Irish area was in the tragic case of Eamon Collins. He was a low-level IRA man – the ‘intelligence officer’ of the Newry IRA – who had through his work engineered the murders of seven people. He had never pulled a trigger or planted a bomb, but he tracked targets and set them up. One of his victims was a colleague of his in the Customs Service, where he had his day job. Eamon had been arrested after other members of his unit had helped the South Armagh IRA in a mortar attack on Newry RUC station that killed nine officers. He was interrogated, manhandled a little, stressed and cracked. He talked and talked, and became briefly a supergrass, a pariah to the IRA. But then he was worked on patiently by those who came to visit him, and he withdrew his evidence. At his trial the judge, sitting without a jury, decided that the RUC evidence against him was tainted and the self-confessed conspirator in seven killings walked free.

Despite his change of heart, for most of his former comrades he was a ‘tout’, an informer, unreliable at best and at worst a traitor. He couldn’t take the ostracism. He had given his all, in his mind, for the cause of Irish freedom and now he was being treated like shit. So he started writing down what he had done, obsessive descriptions of his operations and his comrades, a weird mixture of gloating triumph, admiration for the hard men he had encountered – Eamon himself was a very small man with a desperate need to assert his toughness – and remorse for the people he had helped kill and bereave. He found his way to a TV production company and a diligent, patient researcher called Mick McGovern. They made a film, confessional and disturbing, and Eamon wanted to write a book with Mick’s help.

Until then no IRA man had given an honest, raw account of what his or her trade actually involved. Gerry Adams’s memoirs were masterpieces of sentimental obfuscation, and the novels of his cheery and ruthless sidekick Danny Morrison were even worse. Eamon Collins’s story was full of nauseating self-exculpation, self pity and bravado, but it was also relentlessly honest, packed with convincingly messy and squalid details about the stakeouts, the safe houses and weapons, and also about the cruel ineptitude of these part time guerrillas in a small northern town who couldn’t help fucking up: they killed a young boy in a bomb explosion because they gave inadequate warning, and a supposed RUC man who was in fact an elderly retired clerk. They occasionally got lucky, killing an actual armed policeman, narrowly missing a patrol of Royal Marines.

By the time Eamon found his way to me, two dozen publishers in these islands had turned him down. He was not a nice man. There was a demented, morally obtuse and childish quality about him, a lust for violence that came out even in his expressions of regret for what he had done. But he was driven to lay it all bare, and for me this was the first breath of truth about the reality of a dirty war from inside the group that was mainly responsible for prolonging it. Random House took a different view. The house was not yet the publisher by appointment to the court of Tony Blair, but by 1995 it was going that way, and sponsoring the memoirs of an unconvicted killer and terrorist would make for ‘very bad PR’, in the words of my otherwise supportive boss. And because Eamon was naming names, or barely disguised names, the cold lick of libel could be felt in all our discussions about the book.

Pressures like these, and the sheer boredom of working for a very large organization, made me move to Granta in 1995. Rea Hederman, the proprietor of Granta and the NYRB, had been a great newspaper editor in Mississippi and believed in publishing the truth and taking reasonable risks to achieve that aim. When Killing Rage was published, it was received pretty much as I’d hoped it would be, though we were denounced by Kevin Myers for pandering to obscenity. The obscenity was part of the point, and readers got it. The book has sold nearly 150,000 copies.

We were sued, but none of the libel claims amounted to anything significant, and it was possible to believe that one kind of Irish silence had been broken.

The book ultimately had a terrible outcome for its author. Republican writers attacked it, but none of Eamon’s revelations led to arrests or new trials. The ‘movement’, by then deep in the peace process, could treat the book as a work of ancient history and, as many of the principal actors in that process liked to say then and later, ‘move on’, with official amnesia intact. Eamon was less disposed to move.

He stayed put, against all advice, in the middle of a Republican estate in Newry, walking every day past graffiti denouncing him as a tout. He became something of a commentator for the newspapers. I think he thought that this public work and his successful book made him invulnerable. And he wanted to jerk the tail of the movement that he felt had betrayed him. When Tom Murphy sued the Sunday Times in 1998 over its claim that he was a member of the Army Council and Northern Command, among other things, Eamon gave evidence for the Times that he had met Murphy more than once in his capacity as an IRA leader. As he left the courtroom he called out ‘No hard feelings, Slab!’ Murphy lost his case, and at least half a million pounds. A few months later, after his family had been subjected to terrible bullying and derision for, Eamon Collins was stabbed to death as he walked his dogs early one winter morning on a quiet road outside Newry. No one has ever been charged with his murder.

Gerry Adams denied that the IRA had anything to do with his death, but in a chilling TV interview he declared that ‘that man’ (he refused to use Collins’s name) ‘had many enemies in many places’. This at least was true; and nearly all of them were in Adams’s party.

In the years since, much of what Irish people knew about their society has at last became sayable. Brave campaigners forced out the truth about the regime in the reformatories and Magdalene laundries and industrial schools. The sexual abuse of minors by men in positions of trust (not all of them priests) has become an international crisis for the Catholic Church. Charles Haughey, the great untouchable of Irish life, whose circle was considered to be so intricately mired in corruption that none of them would ever talk, had to endure in his final years seeing all his expensive linen being washed in public. Payoffs, kickbacks, overdrafts of half a million provided by compliant banks, enforced ‘donations’ from businessmen, money stuffed into brown envelopes: it was worse and more banal than anyone had ever imagined.

By then the Celtic Tiger was rampaging around the world. What started as a boom led by foreign technology companies and by EU investment seemed to promise a great new start for one of Europe’s most backward countries. That Beef Tribunal was such a big event, after all, because the export of cattle was still the country’s most important single industry in 1990. The Republic contained 3.5 million people and 8 million cattle. By 2000, young people had forgotten about emigration – their parents’ bad dream – and drank in bars staffed by Spanish and Polish immigrants.

A  different kind of hiding in plain sight now became obvious. Instead of investing in technology and education, those with access to capital embarked on a wild property boom that no sober economist should have viewed with anything other than alarm. Any naysayer was denounced as a traitor to the nation’s economic destiny. The government let the boom rip, refusing to regulate insane levels of debt and allowing banks to lend many times their capital to developers speculating on an unstoppable rise in property values.

Fintan O’Toole was one of the very few writers to challenge the official optimism, which had an almost North Korean tone, with paeans to the wisdom of the leaders and moguls. The wealth-creators were those with the capacity to innovate, to build and think big. You were not supposed to ask what was innovatory about a property bubble. When it burst, Fintan wrote Ship of Fools, a blistering polemic hammered out in an answering burst of creative anger. Even then, I had to listen to cautious Irish voices saying that Faber was being a little too brave for its own good. But there was little risk in telling the truth about this disaster. There was no hiding place for the reality of lost jobs, worthless building sites bought for €50 million an acre, the ghost estates built with tax breaks in desolate parts of Leitrim and Cavan.

Every other publisher who saw the proposal for the book turned down Voices from the Grave, as had happened with Killing Rage. The omertà of the ex-gunmen was again being matched by the caution of publishers. Whatever you say, say nothing: a Northern Irish mantra that has too often become a general rule of behaviour. Many publishers have in fact been very brave about publishing controversial Irish books, but sometimes there is a flinch away from trouble. I can understand this reluctance very well – who needs trouble, in this economic climate? -  but this seemed to me a potentially very important book, making it difficult for certain fictions to sustain themselves in Irish life. In that sense it may be historically significant. In its first week it entered the Irish bestseller list at no. 1, which does not happen very often. It will be interesting to see what effect the book has on our view of the Irish troubles and those who took part in them.