Then the fairy spread her wings and flew off. People came from far and wide to hear the tale of their adventures, and when it was told, they grew up loving and loved, with the fairies for their friends and protectors, ever ready to help them if they were in trouble; in time they were married and lived happily together – that is the end of the story. (H.H.H. Nine Little Fairy Stories: A&C Black, London 1923)
London April 1919
Mr Mancini, the stout and mutton-chopped proprietor of the private hotel, had made an exception and allowed Henry Herbert possession of a front-door key, a privilege that was extended to no other of his residents. The outside doors of the slightly dingy establishment, with their stained glass panels and flanked by cream-painted Etruscan columns, were locked at 11pm every night and after that hour it was only Henry Herbert who was permitted the luxury of drawing up in a hansom and letting himself in, or, having walked home carefully in opera cloak and top hat and maybe a little woozy from the champagne consumed in the Crush Bar, of fumbling just a little with the key as he effected his independent entrance.
Somewhat willowy and slim of waist, with daintily barbered moustache (although he may have been getting a little thin on the top), Henry Herbert was a dapper fellow and while he might not have inspired an overriding impression of manliness, most onlookers found it gratifying to observe this tall gentleman with his neat cravat and swinging his cane as he bravely and confidently occupied the London pavements on his determined way to wherever he was heading.
Henry Herbert occupied the first-floor front, the finest rooms of the narrow five-storey building, overlooking the communal gardens with their protecting iron railings, their locked iron gates and their sooty plane trees. But this was in truth not to claim much, for the Frazer Private Hotel was, at best, a modest establishment in an unfashionable area and had few pretensions beyond its respectability and convenience. However, for Mr Mancini, Henry Herbert, with his fabled money and supposed connections was indeed a catch and an embellishment to the house, somewhat belied by his private ways and apparently modest way of life.
For Henry Herbert it was a two-way transaction. True, money was no object to him, but in exchange for what must at best be considered a somewhat frowsty dwelling he was given freedom from what could be called the attentions of the greater world and the demands of society as well as the quiet and peace he needed to finish his collection of Nine Little Fairy Tales and get them ready for publication. Although South Kensington was near to everything that the great world revered, and not half a mile from his place of birth and his childhood residence, it was, in 1919, a place in free fall from its glory days, the great houses being broken up into flats and rooming-houses, and its great cream stucco façades looking increasingly tired and begrimed as leases expired, families fled and ownership splintered.
On this day, in April 1919, at half past seven in the evening, Henry Herbert walked back to the Frazer Hotel after not having attended a concert of Mendelssohn and Schubert at the Aeolian Hall. The reason for his non-attendance was that the concert had been cancelled because of the “influenza epidemic” and, as he walked back to Queen’s Gate, past the groups of delivery boys waiting with their bicycles, the cabbies at the rank, the loiterers around the Gentlemen’s subterranean convenience and those few intent upon some business, he was for the first time hit with the realization that although the terrible war was over, something equally terrifying had taken its place, something that was evident in the subtly changed activity and atmosphere of the London streets. He had also taken note of a story that had been buried in the middle pages of most newspapers and variously reported as “General Dyer defends the Empire as illegal meeting broken up at Amritsar” to “Two hundred natives killed in the Punjab.”
Henry Herbert knew he was different from other men but after over 40 years of life still hadn’t quite worked out what it was that made him a constant outsider. Although he maintained decorous relations he was certainly at odds with his commercially-minded family to whom turning a decent profit took precedence over matters of the heart or art. As the only son of seven children, the preponderance of females put a terrible weight of expectation upon Henry Herbert’s narrow shoulders, far, far greater than the modest expectations placed upon his six sisters – that they should marry, and marry well enough not to bring disgrace upon the family. Four of them had accomplished what had been asked of them, not spectacularly but respectably, two were unmarried and certain to remain so, a disappointment to their parents but a minor one compared to Henry Herbert’s earth-shattering failure to do even the most miniscule part of what was expected of him, the only boy.
He loved his nephews and nieces, he adored his mother, he doted on his sisters, especially the unmarried youngest, Olive. He liked music and books, he loved pictures, he wrote fairy tales, he did illustrations, he collected engravings, he disliked sport, he was uninterested in politics, he was largely indifferent to the business that kept the great Empire turning. And now, for the first time, as he made his way through the streets of Kensington back to the Frazer Private Hotel on this day in April 1919, he had a flash of consciousness that not only had a major change come upon the world, wrought first by the terrible war that had just ended and now being consolidated with the palpable but hushed-up horrors of the influenza epidemic, but also that he himself, Henry Herbert, embodied this change in two ways. First in an awareness of how singular he was and the infinite vistas that opened because of this and how unlikely it was that the new world would be able to accommodate him, and second, that at the same time he was a part of this mass of human beings he encountered every day. This filled him with equal measures of fear and hope, putting him into a kind of stasis, and for a moment he was almost unable to breathe.
He stopped for a few moments by the church on the corner of Queen’s Gate to catch his breath and regain his equilibrium.
Having to some extent recovered, despite having soiled his lavender gloves on the sooty railing, he continued on the last stretch back to the Frazer Hotel.
This crisis of the imagination was to be replicated by real events a few moments later. Hardly had he put his key in the door than it was opened from within by Mr. Mancini. Behind the bewhiskered and sweating landlord centre-stage was a supporting chorus of residents and servants in what seemed like a tableau of outrage.
So what was this all about? After a lot of fevered explanation on the part of Mr. Mancini, it turned out that Miss Stratford-Tuke, the horsy girl from an impoverished county family who occupied the fourth floor back, had put in a complaint about a supposed visitor of Henry Herbert’s who had been encountered the previous day in the exceptionally dingy and dreary drawing room on the ground floor. This dark-skinned and hirsute young man, having been taken for a servant by Miss Stratford-Tuke and challenged for lolling in the chintz-covered armchair in front of the sulky heatless fire whilst perusing a year-old Illustrated London News provided by the establishment, had apparently proceeded to “insult” her.
After many fevered accusations from the angry chorus. Henry Herbert got to the bottom of it. The visitor was a acquaintance of his, a certain Tommy Stephanides, a young cockney Greek whom he had met amongst the etched glass and chandeliers of the Salisbury Tavern on St. Martins Lane. Tommy had been sitting at a nearby table with a glass of beer and a small volume of poetry which Henry Herbert eventually recognized as identical to his own copy of Towards Democracy, a revolutionary collection in the style of Whitman by Edward Carpenter. The sight of this familiar green book had the unusual impetus of emboldening Henry Herbert to initiate a hesitant conversation with the young man sitting at the next table.
From this interchange he learned to his amazement that the fellow had actually visited Edward Carpenter’s Uranian commune at Millthorpe in Yorkshire and the flyleaf had been signed by the man himself.
Tommy Stephanides with his crisp black hair and sharply defined moustache had something of the extremist about him, uncompromising and fundamentalist almost, no apparent softness and yet, somehow, the softest, most revolutionary person Henry Herbert had ever met. Clever and sketchily-educated though he was, Tommy negotiated the world in a way that Henry Herbert could only dream of. He lived with his mother in a tiny flat near the market in Spitalfields and he worked as a typesetter at a nearby press that turned out pamphlets and manifestos for revolutionary causes. He had been born in London along with the 20th century. He’d always felt constrained by his circumstances and had always felt that there must be something better for him and his mother. He had a Portuguese pal who had gone out to British East Africa and had made a better life for himself. But he lived his life as it was with a certainty and a commitment that seemed to spring from some source unavailable to Henry Herbert. He had a hunger for art and music and was doing his best to educate himself by attending evening classes at the Worker’s Educational Association, but his enormous energy still allowed him to find time to be outside the factory gates with pamphlets at least three evenings a week. It was, in fact, Tommy’s very certainties that made him able to be so soft. His negotiation with the world around him was without nuance, an absolute rejection of the rules by which the world was governed. This gave him an incredible freedom, including the freedom to be soft.
Henry Herbert found Tommy physically alluring and was also cautiously attracted by his brave radicalism and his uncompromising vision.
As the explanations unfolded against the background of anaglypta wallpaper, oleographs of Osborne House and gas mantles in the dreary vestibule of the Frazer Hotel, it soon became clear that the ‘insult’ to Miss Stratford-Tuke was entirely in the young lady’s mind and that while Tommy may indeed not have behaved like a gentleman, his comportment had been largely reactive, a modest response to the pent-up fury in the young lady when she perceived that her accusations were empty.
Henry Herbert had indeed invited Tommy to call on him at the Frazer Private Hotel. He loved the boy with the love of a true innocent. It was significant that it was Edward Carpenter that had brought them together. He knew well that he himself was not made for family life, the pursuit of money or the service of Empire but had never seen himself as any kind of revolutionary, while recognizing and accepting the fact that he was different. Picking up boys from the rich and hazardous street-life of post-war London, however tempting, was not Henry Herbert’s way. The terrible lessons of Oscar Wilde just over twenty years earlier had made him cautious. He sublimated his libido into his collecting, his daily routines and his fairy stories.
* * *
Glasgow docks, Berth 5, April 1923
Olympia Stephanides in her widow’s black waited at the foot of the gangway of the RMS Doric bound for Mombasa with her case and bundle while her son negotiated with a couple of officials. A motor taxi drew up and a dapper figure in a dark overcoat and with a cane emerged. The taxi-driver extracted a suitcase from the back. The man tipped the cabbie and took charge of the suitcase. He looked around and, fixing his eyes on Mrs. Stephanides approached her, took her hand briefly and inclined his head to hers. Tommy finished his dealing with the officials and joined his mother and the gentleman.
The ship’s horn sounded three times and suddenly the somewhat static scene of the wharf burst into frenetic life. The visually monochrome but socially divided crowd fast sorted itself into separate queues for the two gangways. To the observer it became evident that one was for steerage passengers, the other for first and second class. The man with the cane was seen to have a moment of hesitation, but after a brief consultation with Tommy, he joined the mother and son on the steerage gangway.
The rain which had been threatening to fall started as the ship’s horn sounded again. The comings and goings ceased, the crowds on the wharf dispersed and the Doric drew away from the wharf and heaved slowly off into the grey Clyde and the world beyond.
Whether the dapper gentleman had left the ship before it sailed or whether he had remained on board was not observed.
Feature Image: John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow Docks 1881.
To meet ex-prison officer Sean O’Brien for the first time I drove through a sparse landscape of family homes, outside the town of Clara in County Offaly. Miles of narrow roads ran through cold and wet pasture, bog, and occasional patches of woodland, typical of the Midlands.
On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien disclosed to the Department of Justice various wrongdoings he claims to have witnessed over his years of service in Portlaoise Prison. During his time as a prison officer, between 1981 and 1989, the Northern Troubles were raging, and what went on in the prisons was generally hidden from public view.
Behind locked doors, staff and prisoners alike endured a parallel conflict, requiring physical and psychological resilience.
As is already in the public domain, there was a “Heavy Gang” among members of An Garda Síochána operating at that time. There was also a group of prison officers who went by the same name operating in Portlaoise Prison, and which enjoyed the tacit support of prison management. They were notorious for ‘unconventional’ methods, embedded in the prison system.
Unsafe and alienating working conditions, widespread bullying from top prison officials, as well as being pressurised, Sean claims, to produce a falsified report about a shooting incident in which he was involved, all left their marks on his mental health. Like many others that served as prison officers, he still suffers from those experiences.
Portlaoise Prison.
The Prison
The Portlaoise high security prison complex is one of the oldest penitentiaries in the State. Built in the 1830s, it is still fully operational. Regarded as one of the toughest prisons in the world, it contains the notorious E-Block: a wing dedicated to dissident Republicans, predominantly ex-members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the INLA.
Parallel to the prison’s official organization, during the Troubles prison officers had to understand and operate alongside the Republican’s own strict command structure. In the case of the E-Block, the prisoners’ relations with staff were filtered exclusively through the highest-ranking members of the PIRA. In 1988 that was Martin Ferris, who went on to become a T.D. for Kerry North between 2002-2020.
The history of Portlaoise Prison is chequered with multiple escape attempt, riots and blanket hunger strike campaigns. Allegations of prisoner mistreatment by a Heavy Gang first appeared at the Prison Officers Association convention of 1984.
On that occasion a delegate from Portlaoise Prison, Larry O’Neill told the Prison Officers’ conference in 1982: “If Hitler wanted generals today, he would find plenty of them in Portlaoise. After the war the Nazis said many of them were doing their duty and that is what the management in Portlaoise are saying today”.
Away from the public eye, the working conditions of prison staff, especially South of the Border, have rarely been covered. An official inquiry was carried out in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, but for reasons that remain unclear, Sean O’Brien’s testimony was excluded after he had initially been invited to testify. The resulting report falls short of exploring the extent of the human rights abuses that seem to have occurred behind the prison’s walls.
Irish Press, May 25, 1988.
PO Sean O’Brien
From a working-class family, Sean O’Brien began his career as a prison officer on February 16, 1980, aged twenty. The ‘job’ consisted of dealing with the most problematic, and in some cases dangerous, individuals in Irish society. Due to staff shortages, this work was mostly given to young and inexperienced men in their late teens or early twenties.
The training was basic, lasting just a few weeks, and involved a few meetings, active service in different prisons, physical exercise, and simple inductions on the regulations of the institution. None of this offered much value to someone beginning their work in the State’s prisons.
Sean clearly recalls spending his twenty-first birthday on duty with colleagues; as well as when he had to wear riot gear for the first time during a protest, despite having received no training for what to do in that event.
He also recalls working through the so-called ‘dirty protests’, when officers were forced to use power washers to clean inches of prisoners’ faeces off the walls; and when he was involved in, and witnessed, prisoners receiving unwarranted strip searches, punishment beatings and enduring conditions which he describes as contrary to the Geneva Convention.
After one such strip searches, he recalls the Governor at the time, Bill Reilly – a man with a reputation for being particularly hard on Republicans – telling him and the late Chief Officer Brian Stack, who was working with him at the time, to “bait them again,” after Stack told him they had completed the searches. Sean recalls being reluctant to obey the order as his arm was exhausted from already meting out such beatings.
As a result of such distressing episodes, Sean claims that many prison staff turned to heavy drinking to cope with the stress that the ‘job’ entailed.
We cannot ascertain the extent of the human rights abuses in Irish prisons at the time as a veil of secrecy, or outright omertà, still hasn’t been lifted. In all likelihood, many episodes have never been made public, as it would involve the State accepting liability for its shortcomings.
What prison officers endured as a consequence of this environment ought to become public knowledge to ensure it does not re-occur, and so that the necessary redress process is put in place to assist victims of the State’s past failings.
Flash
In 1988, Sean O’Brien was living in a housing complex built by Portlaoise prison for officers and other employees a few yards away from the main gate.
Every morning on May 18, after the customary substantial bowl of porridge and large mug of coffee, the shift began as usual with a security search between the first two gates. This was followed by a meeting at the ‘Parade’, the canteen room, where all the officers on duty lined up to be assigned their positions and tasks for the day by the Duty Chief Officer.
That morning a crowd of protesters and foreign media had gathered at the main street entrance in front of the prison on the Dublin Road. Patrick McVeigh, a member of the PIRA – known as Flash – was scheduled to be released that day. However, he was expected to be re-arrested by the Gardaí as soon as he stepped outside the main gate, before being extradited to Northern Ireland.
Tensions were running high in the prison at the time, and the issue had garnered considerable public attention. McVeigh was a political prisoner, and extradition laws did not cover prisoners with such status. Nonetheless, the extradition machine was in motion, as well as another machine attempting to find a way to save McVeigh from the extradition.
As Flash left the building, a crowd of his sympathisers greeted him at the gate, along with media reporters and a Garda van, with doors open ready to receive the newly freed prisoner. Why there was no other way to handle the exchange remains unclear.
Sean had elbowed his way in through the unfriendly crowd a few minutes before McVeigh was escorted to the Gardaí waiting for him outside the gate. From there he would be conveyed to Court to finalize the extradition.
At this point McVeigh somehow evaded his escort and began running along the inner perimeter of the outer wall in the hope of jumping out on to the Dublin Road.
Contrary to the Governor’s orders, his Deputy Mick Horan physically pushed Sean and illegaly ordered him into a shoot-to-kill area of the prison operated by the Army, shouting, “after him”. Sean obliged along with prison officer Frank Muldowney.
McVeigh had earned the nickname Flash from his speed of foot. He ran along the inner perimeter of the outer wall, reaching the place where, from the outside, accomplices were hanging off the wall to lift him out, where a motorbike awaited.
It was then that Irish Army personnel, stationed on the roof of the prison at all times, shot a sequence of five shots, which can be clearly heard from RTÉ footage of the scene.
Sean felt the reverberations through his body from the flying bullets which, he says, only narrowly missed him. On the ground a few metres away, shots landed in a puff of smoke. Adrenaline overcame fear, and he managed to stop McVeigh before he could leap out on top of the wall.
With the help of Muldowney, Sean brought him into the custody of two Gardaí, and he then made his way into the main prison building to resume his shift.
Apart from O’Brien’s testimony, as of November 2022, we came into possession of two additional eye witness accounts of the events.
One is from Martin Ferris himself. In a letter he writes:
From where I was watching in recreational room E3, a number of bullets hit the space between Officer O’Brien and McVeigh. Pat McVeigh attempted to climb the farm wall onto Dublin Road with the help of some supporters from outside and certainly, would have succeeded only for Officer O’Brien grabbing his legs and preventing his escape.
The second source says he witnessed bullets hitting the ground and bits of tarmac flying up around Sean, and that the distance from Paddy McVeigh was seven feet. However, he wishes to remain anonymous, unless an official inquiry is carried out into why this version of events has been consistently denied by the Department of Justice, the Prison Service, and the Department of Defence.
Cork Examiner, May 25,1988.
Half Sheet and the Governor
Not long after Sean had caught his breath, he received an order from the radio room of E-Block to report to Governor Ned Harkin’s office. As Sean was on his way there he recalls being praised and cheered by some colleagues.
He had just prevented an escape. That would surely lead to a commendation. Instead what welcomed him as he walked into the Governor’s office was a freshly typed false version of that morning’s events, which Sean was ordered to make a copy of in his own hand-writing, right then and there.
That version of events – insofar as Sean recalls – would have protected Deputy Governor Mick Horan, the officer in charge that morning of the release (and re-arrest) of McVeigh, and would attribute most of the blame to another prison officer Paddy Dunne, who was by then already being suspended, as a suspected accomplice to the escape.
Sean refused to comply then, and on dozens of occasions during subsequent days.
According to O’Brien’s protected disclosure:
The purpose of the Prison authorities ordering me to collaborate with their account as to ACO Dunne was to have him dismissed as not to shine a light on Deputy Horan who would have whole responsibility for Prisoner McVeigh escort on that day. Deputy Horan did not chase after the escaping prisoner. This is what Governor Harkins was covering up.
In response to Sean’s refusal to provide a false testimony, threats of dismissal such as “leave your uniform at the gate on the way out” from the Governor Ned Harkin became more and more frequent.
From then on he was not allowed to work on the landings where the prisoners were held. This meant that he was left doing nothing during shifts; waiting in a backroom for the end of the day to arrive. Day after day.
In that situation the first indications of deteriorating mental health became evident. This included frequent nightmares and strong paranoia, which started to make his days unbearable.
Sean knew that he wasn’t meant to catch McVeigh, and besides it would be normal to expect animosity towards him from some Republican prisoners. On top of being bullied for carrying out his job, he sensed a target on his back.
As Martin Ferris, in the aforementioned account, dated 12 November 2022, writes:
Tensions were high within the prison in the aftermath of this incident, and I, as the spokesperson for the republican prisoners, suggested to prison Governor Harkins that Officer O’Brien should not return to the prison landings until things calmed down. I personally never saw prison officer Sean O’Brien within the confines of Portlaoise Prison from that day forward.
It was at that stage that he asked the Prison Officer’s Association Representative Noel Touhy for assistance. He was told that it was not possible for the prison to dismiss him in that fashion. The Association was already pressurising the Department of Justice to reinstate Paddy Dunne, and trying to bring to light the dynamics at play in the attempted escape.
The Department of Defence consistently denied that the shooting could have endangered an officer on duty, as reported by the Cork Examiner on May 25, 1988.
Cork Examiner, May 25, 1988.
As recently as July 2022, Brian Stanley T.D. and Chair of the Public Accounts Committee asked the Minister for Justice “if there are any files being withheld for national security reasons that relate to the attempted escape of a prisoner on May 18 1988 at Portlaoise prison.”
The Minister responsed: “I am advised that the record in question was previously considered as not suitable for release by the Irish Prison Service.” (05/07/2022, Question number: 539, Question Ref: 36042/22)
The Office
On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien attended a meeting with Noel O’Beara in the Department of Justice in Dublin in order to: ‘[…] make them aware that the “Prison Administration” in Portlaoise Prison were ordering me to make a false report surrounding Assistance Chief Officer (ACO) Paddy Dunne’s involvement in the escape, to have him dismissed.’
Prior to the meeting, Sean O’Brien says O’Beara shook his hand and congratulated him, stating words to the effect of “you are going to get a medal, what type we don’t know, as one does not exist yet. The equivalent for the Gards is a Scott medal. You are the first prison officer to capture an escaping PIRA prisoner.”
But by this stage O’Brien was feeling his options were running out. The office to which he had been invited felt wrong from the moment he entered. He found no sign of personal effects – a family portrait, postcards, a sporting trophy or anything of that sort – such as one would expect in a regular office.
Despite a suspicion of being recorded without his consent, Sean gave as many details as possible, as well as disclosing the many wrongdoings he had witnessed during his years of service.
Essentially, he blew the whistle on what his superiors wanted him to do, and the wrongdoing within the prison system, while O’Beara listened and took notes. The meeting ended with a promise the matters would be investigated.
Sick Record
After this meeting, Sean O’Brian patiently waited for a change in his circumstances. Then he went on sick leave on September 12, 1988, for a stress-related illness. At that point his previous poor attendance record, in part due to a certified injury he had received while on duty, suddenly became an urgent matter within the Department of Justice and Prison Service.
Sean had already been referred by the Prisoner Governor and the Department of Justice to a psychiatrist (who also wishes to preserve his anonymity). He visited for the first time on September 8, 1988. This resulted in the first suggestion of a diagnosis of post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD), following the shooting incident.
Nonetheless, behind the scenes, in a correspondence between the prison welfare office and the Department of Justice, his dismissal was being considered; while the full diagnosis of PTSD, resulting from a consultancy sought by the Prison Management itself, was completely ignored.
Correspondence which we have obtained includes a letter dated February 13, 1987, one year prior to the shooting, where the prison management tell Sean O’Brien that although the Minister had considered his dismissal, he also ‘noted the improvement in your sick leave record.’ It also states that his ‘late attendance has been unacceptably high since September 1986,’ and that his case will continue to be closely monitored.
Any management is likely to deal with a poor attendance record, but Sean O’Brien’s prior record seems to have been used to inform a response to his attendance after the shooting incident. It blatantly ignores the diagnosis of PTSD, or any other duty of care mandate that the prison service welfare office would have, or ought to have, had at the time.
A letter, dated March 29, 1989 directly from the Department of Justice, outlines the reasons why it cannot any longer accept the standard of the previous evaluation of a ‘marked improvement on an already atrocious pattern of sick absence.’
It continues by saying: ‘The result, if such a standard became the norm, would be to push the cost of absenteeism in the Prison Service from its present £3m. (approx) per annum closer to £4m.’
Thus, despite referring to sick absence, there is no sign of any attention to his medical condition to be found in this letter, which reads like a preparation for a dismissal.
In a subseqent letter, dated April 14, 1989, O’Brien’s dismissal was actively being sought. The prison’s Personnel Section writes to the Chief Medical Officer that:
It would be helpful if a definite medical opinion could be obtained as regards to the absences relating to the officer’s metacarpal injury as the orthopaedic surgeon does not appear to have totally ruled out the possibility that this injury could be a recurring one.
This injury occurred in 1983 and since then he had required recurring treatment and suffered constant pain. Thus, some of the absences being used to prove his poor record seem to have been a direct consequence of this injury.
The letter ends with a pointed request:
Perhaps you would confirm that Officer O’Brien does not have an on-going health problem.It would be appreciated if you would also say if you agreed that absenteeism is the problem in this case.”
Apart from the recurring physical injury, the year between the shooting incident and his dismissal is constellated with absences, arguably caused by his deteriorating mental health.
Debilitating insomnia, extreme paranoia, crippling anxiety, flashbacks; all these symptoms have led to a diagnosis of PTSD, but again there’s no sign of a duty of care wherein the psychological damage received while on duty is recognised.
Instead, on May 23, 1989, at approximately 3pm, a knock arrived on the door of O’Brien’s parental home. It was Senior Prison Officer Mick Horan and Garda Sergeant Kevin Ford. They are looking for Sean and Hugh O’Brien (Sean’s brother, also employed at Portlaoise Prison) to tell them that they were both being dismissed. They are asked not to turn up at work the following day. His parents are instructed “to tell Sean to leave his uniform at the gate”.
So Sean O’Brien and his brother were dismissed from the Irish Prison Service with a verbal notice delivered to their bewildered parents, without any official document being issued by the Cabinet of the Irish government.
Following this we discover from the letters obtained from St. Patrick’s Hospital that the prison’s chief medical officer John Geoghegan did not even see Sean O’Brian before his dismissal had been finalized. And we find more indications that his mental health injuries suffered while on duty had been completely ignored by the Prison Service in considering such a dismissal.
The Void
At the beginning of my interaction with Sean O’Brien, I timidly inquired about the long period running from his dismissal in 1989 to 2017, when he was approached by the former President of the Prison Officers’ Association P. J. McEvoy, who instructed a solicitor to pursue his requests for a Duty of Care under the 1956 Regulations, and recognition for his actions on duty, at a point when Sean’s mental health inhibited him from pursuing the case.
During that period, Sean O’Brien claims he was not in the right mental state to follow up on his case. It seems he let it slide. What he had endured by then in terms of psychological distress he is reluctant to recollect, apart from to liken it to hell.
After his dismissal, an alter ego emerged in his personality. All we know is that this alter ego opened a security firm with his brother and that at some point in 2007, he landed a helicopter onto the roof of a shopping centre, in his own words, to “collect a set of keys”.
The Missing File
The proceedings against the DOJ that began in 1991 were interrupted in 2008 when O’Brien’s solicitor, David O’Shey was placed under arrest.
Then, O’Shey’s documents, including those in relation to the case of Sean O Brien vs The Department Of Justice no.14045P, came before the Law Society.
Since then the file has disappeared without a trace.
It was only in 2017 that he was able to instruct another lawyer to pursue the case. By the time he served a notice of an intention to proceed, in 2019, twenty-six year had elapsed.
Thus far, efforts made by his new solicitor, Kevin Winters to find the file have been unsuccessful.
In the Court of Appeal Judgement, delivered on 27/01/2022 we read that ‘witnesses for the defence (Minister for Justice) cannot reasonably be expected to give evidence that could be regarded as reliable after such an interval.’
The Minister of Justice again denied many of the claims made by Mr O’Brien, including that he recaptured a prisoner who escaped and that he suffered PTSD after nearly being hit by bullets shot by the Irish Defence Forces, which also continues to deny responsibility.
Over the last few years, the case has gained a certain amount of media coverage, mainly concerning the dismissal and sick days. However, very little attention has been paid to Sean O’Brien submitting a protected disclosure to the same Minister of Justice two months after the shooting incident denouncing grave misconduct.
Nor has anyone considered that although O’Brien’s attendance record was certainly not exemplary – 682 days absent between 1980 and 1989 – some of these were due to an injury on duty which occurred in 1983: a fractured hand, and subsequently from 1988, symptoms of a psychological nature.
It would undoubtedly be difficult for any court of law to establish precisely what happened well over thirty years ago in such a complex and volatile environment, but this story seems to contain another lesson.
For many whistleblowers who feel that they have been wronged one of the most difficult challenges is simply to let go. To move on. The obsessiveness associated with their behaviour is often due to a lack of closure.
That Sean O’Brien is still pursuing a judgment in his favour thirty years on from his dismissal reflects this condition.
Only after an attempt is made by a State agency to delve into the historical context of these events can a sense of closure be achieved. A proximate attempt to do so by the Prison Service is what can be found in the Final Report of the Portlaoise Prison Staff Welfare Programme.
This a project carried out by the Prison Service, which recorded the testimonies of almost two hundred Prison Officers who served between 1973 and 1989.
Here we read that:
Portlaoise gave rise to practices that could only have existed in that particular context and the challenges it presented
…
In that time Knowledge and awareness of the lasting impact of occupational stress, of role ambiguity and role overload and of requirements for healthy, sustainable work practices have been transformed. Such knowledge and awareness were not widely available at the time. It is important to avoid judging the past solely in terms of present-day knowledge.
Thus, from this official source we learn that the working conditions were, indeed, unsuitable and outright damaging to officers.
It is reasonable to say we should not cast moral judgement on past practices during war time, but it still only seems fair that there should be compensation available for breaches of a duty of care that applied at that time.
Some respite from the silence that still engulfs this traumatized country should be available. Such is the long tail of war. You still see it slithering through the streets, long after the last shots have been fired.
Regarding the shooting incident, it is instructive to examine the Irish Army’s Rules of Engagement from this period (below). This differentiates between warning and containment shots. The first, as one would expect, are ordinarily fired into the air, posing no danger to anyone’s life, while the second ‘will be fired near to the person concerned,’ but ‘NOT’ ‘into locations where innocent persons would be endangered.’
Based on Sean O’Brien’s account, corroborated by other witnesses, it would appear that these Rules of Engagement were breached, including a prohibition against firing at a target that is running away.
The Irish Army’s Rules of Engagment/ Use of Force in effect in 1988.
Conclusion: Whistelblowing in Ireland
The title image for this article, was taken towards the end of our first in-person encounter. The names of the dogs are Squirt at the front, Maxine on his right arm and Freddy – who was the most protective of Sean as I recall – Beauty hiding in the background and Mighty Man, named in honour of Noel Tracy TD. Treacy has always been very supportive of Sean. Apparently he always started and ended a sentence with “Mighty Man” when talking to anyone.
Having the company of dogs has been an important coping mechanism for O’Brien, while he deals with the effects of PTSD to this day.
We can say that the context of the Troubles legitimately required a certain level of secrecy. There’s obviously more then meets the eye to the events that ultimately led to the non-extradition of McVeigh, which Margaret Thatcher herself was very keen to achieve.
The Department of Defence, to this day, refuses to release the records in relation to the shooting incident, requested through a Freedom of Information Request in 2016, saying:
The release of this information may potentially compromise the security of the Defence Forces in preparation for peace and security operations at home and overseas.
Meanwhile, the first legal file in relation to O’Brien’s case has disappeared without a trace.
Whistleblowers suffer repercussions all over the globe, but Ireland’s reputation for mistreatment of whistle-blowers has worsened inexorably.
In 2021 Ireland’s Protected Disclosure Act undertook reforms to comply with a European Directive. Even then, according to some stakeholders, the new legislation still falls short of providing adequate protection from the inevitable repercussions of such a radical act.
Beyond the legal frameworks, better outlined in David Langwallner’s article “Whistleblew in the face”, which appeared in Village Magazine in November, 2021, the corrosive effects on a whistleblower’s mental health is often overlooked.
All too often, when an instance of whistleblowing reaches the mainstream media, these negative mental health consequences are used implicitly to discredit the disclosures. One of the first questions the media tends to pose to whistleblowers is “Why did you do it?”; followed by: “Would you do it again, knowing the consequences you would face?”
Both questions, somewhat deviously, shift the focus away from any wrongdoings that have been exposed to the action of whistleblowing itself; subjecting the whistleblower to moral scrutiny. Those kind of questions seem designed to suggest a hidden motive for why an individual has become a whistleblower.
Being subjected to such questions – including from oneself – might lead most of us to assume a defensive posture. Over time one may construct an elaborate justification for one’s action, as if the disclosure was itself a crime, and not, only, a testimony to a crime.
With thanks to Ben Pantreyfor editorial assistance.
For a number of years now, I’ve been convinced (too fervently, in the opinion of some of my friends!) that Lana Del Rey ranks among America’s most challenging and skillful of contemporary wordsmiths: a singer-poet with a unique (and often unsettling) talent for cultural imagining.
Stylish, intelligent, irreverent, and vulnerable, her music packs a poetic punch, while also drawing on traditions of literature, film, and popular song, ranging from Bruce Springsteen’s glimmering highways of folk-rock to the Beat generation’s boundary-breaking visions of an embodied (and renewed) American spirit.
What “I really got from [Allen] Ginsberg was that you can tell a story [by] painting pictures with words”, Del Rey has said of her early song-writing practice: “It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry”, as a means of personal self-definition. The result has been a body of literary-musical work at once socially subversive and emotionally profound.
If Arthur Penn could envisage Bonnie and Clyde as icons of a generalised counter-cultural romance in the mid-sixties, painting the seductions of sexual liberation against a lavish panorama of eruptive killing, Del Rey’s albums adopt the motifs and then test the limits of that project (and projection), weaving the visceral mythologies of youthful passion and big dreams into a tapestry, scorched and frayed at the edges, of insidious and often compulsive “ultraviolence”. “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”, simmers her song of that name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbT30a7U0Cs
And lest we mistake such provocations for a merely personal fetish, we’re reminded of America’s own deep-running attachment to such obsessive fantasies. “Blessed is this union”, Del Rey lilts: “I’m your jazz singer, / And you’re my cult leader, / I’ll love you forever.” On “the dark side / of the American dream”, harm can seem heavenly, and the visions of art become entangled, intimately, with the realities of pain: Ultraviolence.
Some critics have objected to this album, interpreting it (and her work more broadly) as a glorification of domestic and patriarchal abuse. Others have accused Del Rey herself of misogyny, infantilising her female personae and reinforcing an already pernicious culture of male intimidation and exploitation against women. For all their persistence, however, these critiques frequently misread (or miss entirely) the complexity of cultural portraiture that Del Rey is attempting.
Del Rey’s back catalogue stands as a tour-de-force in self-invention, but also offers a subtle (and disturbing) diagnosis of the society she claims, always, as her own – “like an American.” “Elvis is my Daddy, Marilyn my Mother”, she says, in an artistic gestalt both parodic in its appropriations and compelling, in its assurance: “Jesus is my bestest friend.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCX86y8a9w
In the USA, that most image-saturated and fame-hungry of republics, Del Rey is a symbol striving to become a myth – in which we see ourselves in a new light, dreamily nightmared. “Every time I close my eyes”, she sings (partly in tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald), “It’s like a dark paradise.” To condemn Lana Del Rey, the singer posits, would be akin to renouncing America itself, love it or loathe it.
Del Rey, of course, famously featured on the score of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, crooning a two-dimensional, Daisy-esque plea to be loved forever “like a little child.” In its complicated glamour and wounded awareness of the pitfalls and attractions of “burning at both ends”, however, her work may be seen to inherit and examine (with an equal intensity) those same concerns dramatised by Fitzgerald, not to mention Enda St Vincent Millay, the originator of that smoky apothegm:
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!
There has always been more of Gatsby (whose most usual reiteration has resembled Don Draper in Mad Men) than Daisy in Del Rey’s song of herself, despite what her detractors may suggest. Like her, Fitzgerald’s titular everyman is, fundamentally, nobody special, who created the name, wealth, identity, and charisma he is mythically remembered for: something from nothing, and in his case, all for a long-gone lover, out of the past. Lana Del Rey likewise is a carefully curated, highly stylised, all-encompassing fiction (invented by Elizabeth Grant) – a romance, but one at the same time more palpably real than pop music, her chosen genre, can traditionally contain.
There’s a comparable sophistication of psychological portraiture in the work of both figures. The triumph of Fitzgerald’s late masterpiece, Tender is the Night, is not the protracted revelation of Dick Diver’s inner life and escalating crisis, which so fills the novel, but the later, briefer revelation of Nicole’s astute ability to see and dissect the manipulations and (self-)deceptions of her magnetic husband for what they are. Unbeknownst to him, she notes
[how] something was developing behind [his] silence, behind the hard, blue eyes […] it was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface. [She saw now that] his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.
Del Rey’s music shines with similar moments of life-altering clarity, seeing in the heroic other she once loved the havoc of destructions he, or their relationship, has become. “But I can’t fix him, can’t make him better, / I can’t do nothing about / His strange weather”. Her songs are dramas of mutual recognition and breakdown, of shared compulsions and irrevocable severance, or what Robert Lowell called (in his own poetry) Life Studies.
It is typical of Del Rey, moreover, that she can cite – too blithely, in the view of some critics – both Sylvia Plath (in “Hope is a dangerous thing…”) and Billie Holiday (in “The Blackest Day”) as inspirations for her own work, which also includes a cover of a track made famous by Nina Simone, “The Other Woman”. “I contain multitudes”, she has said, quoting Walt Whitman – and it is perhaps this audacious hybridity that generates the aura of authentic originality that surrounds her work.
Whitman himself is a resplendent ghost, looming at the margins of Del Rey’s amatory vision. “I Sing the Body Electric” is a direct quotation from his poetry, while “Music to Watch Boys To” might be taken as a riff on that section of “Song of Myself” in which a woman (a stand-in for the author) experiences a sensation of powerful erotic arousal when watching “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore”.
Walt Whitman.
Del Rey’s song, similarly, is suffused with sexual desire – albeit prefaced by the vital, and conscious, assertion, “I know what only the girls know” (emphasis mine).
The same recognition, both vulnerable and electrifying, deepens what would otherwise be the merely referential adaptations from Leonard Cohen elsewhere in her repertoire: when she embraces his (male) mantra as her own, “I’m your man”, and in offering her own haunted rendition of “Chelsea Hotel, No. 2” (which recalls a now-estranged lover “giving me head / on the unmade bed”). Far from perpetuating the presumptions of “the male gaze”, or solidifying its social perceptions, Del Rey subverts its power, wielding it for her personal self-expression (as one of “the girls”).
Relatedly, the blend of ecstatic remembrance and heart-sick yearning that pulses through Del Rey’s music has, at times, an explicitly religious (if also somewhat Nietzschean) dimension. “Faith, don’t fail me now”, as one prayerful, foreboding love song has it: even though, as star-split lovers, “we were born to die.” To wander for any length of time among Del Rey’s American monuments is to witness the singer herself repeatedly reaching for and casting off the old idols, in an atmosphere of passionate sexual and self-awakening that might, we’re lead to imagine, suffice where a previous “faith” (or love) has indeed foundered. “God’s dead, / I said: baby, that’s alright with me”, rings one propulsive credo. “When I’m down on my knees, you’re how I pray”, eddies another. And for the huddled, nameless voyeurs, her listeners (whose apparently insatiable “groupie love” hovers as a backdrop to all her songs), Del Rey reserves a glancing blue note: “Walk in the way of my sweet resurrection”.
As here, for all her sardonic self-awareness, Del Rey seems to claim De Profundis as an unspoken motto for her music: a cry “out of the depths”. When her shadowy voice rises – in a sudden, sky-coloured lift – with the plea and invocation, “Let there be light”, we believe not only in the force of her desire but in the power of song itself, to utter our truths.
Lana del Ray in 2014.
Her persona also displays a Wildean flair, a delicious ease, in skewering the prevailing moral codes and injunctions of her society. Del Rey expresses, with a kind of controlled but abundant intensity, what she sees as the psyche of American life, with the result that we can glance if we wish to, in the falling crystal of her music, what political militants have called the system, with its permeating paradoxes and devastations.
Del Rey frequently appears as both prophet and survivor of a Beat-like realm of experience, lived on the edge (or “on that open road”, as she has it), known only to the beautiful and damned. “In the land of Gods and Monsters / I was an angel”, she moons, “wanting to be fucked hard”. In her words, Del Rey is the self-described product – in the full and possibly uneasy sense of that term – of “a freshman generation / Of degenerate beauty queens”:
With our drugs, and our love, And our dreams, and our rage, Blurring the lines Between real and the fake…
Latent cultural pieties concerning (female) sex and celebrity, individuality and personal choice, are deployed and then exploded; whenever Del Rey looks in the mirror, we see all of America in vivid close-up, simultaneously trapped and liberated in a dream-landscape where drifters survive by “living like Jim Morrison”, made “degenerate” and luminous by yearning.
Part of what makes this extravagant concoction so fascinating is the combined subtlety and hellion irreverence with which the singer-songwriter theorises (and questions) the meaning of her own star-power. “Life imitates Art”, she declares, before exploring the full implications of such a behavioural pattern, in songs (like those above) as beguiling in their soundscape as they are troubling in the vistas they evoke – where culturally approved aspirations (towards fame or material self-satisfaction, for instance) can dissolve in bathetic fantasies at once lurid and seductive. “There’s nothing wrong”, she chants, as we find ourselves “contemplating God / Under the chemtrails over the country club.”
This is a music that sets out, with an appropriately expansive sense of cultural ambition, to dismantle and then re-conjure the edifice of American civilization in its own image, soaring to celestial heights of song and emotion, as the hell-fires of contemporary history burn on. “I can see my baby swinging”, Del Rey sings, in sweeping glissando: “His parliament’s on fire, and his hands are up.”
The potentially destructive fevers of young love are likened to, indeed are made to encompass and elucidate, the act and aftermath of a failed rebellion, in an image that also calls to mind the USA’s (literally incendiary) geopolitical relationship with Central and South American nations. Amid the ruins of a vaguely defined but still palpable political cataclysm, the cries of revolution are distilled down to a sultry whisper – for Del Rey, their essence – “I’m in love.” “Real love”, we likewise learn elsewhere, “is like smiling when the firing squad’s against ya, / but you stay lined up.”
And yet, the mythological potency of such images is counteracted by competing narratives, streaming through the work as a whole, of quest and longing, which elaborate, in turn, Del Rey’s self-styled brand of American hope. “I’m still looking for my own version of America,” she sings, drawing on both John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”: “One without the gun, where the flag can freely fly.”
While the atmosphere that most lingers in and around these tracks is of cinematic nostalgia, the intensities of past (or lost) intimacy montageing with the possibility of a redeemed, future love, the tone is in fact remarkably flexible, varying from elegaic to playful. “God Damn Man-child”, is the headline (the opening lyric) of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, a Trump-era album that may be read as a sometimes bemused, often probing investigation into American maleness and its social manifestations. “I watch the guys getting high as they fight / for the things that they hold dear”, Del Rey observes, adding characteristic nuance to the scene: “[as they fight] to forget the things they fear.” “There’s a new revolution”, we hear in another, more unsettling track, attuned to the #MeToo movement and its critique of an entertainment industry dominated by powerful, exploitative, and sexually rapacious men – a culture, in her words, “born of confusion / and quiet collusion / of which mostly I’ve known”:
Cause I’ve got Monsters still under my bed That I could never fight off (A gatekeeper carelessly dropping The keys on my nights off).
Such candid, emotionally complex confessionalism, and with regard to so intimate (and apparently traumatic) an experience of “gatekeeper” culture, arguably problematises critical arguments that cast the singer either as an apologist for patriarchal systems, or “tone-deaf” to the concerns and testimonies of women survivors. If anything, Del Rey has been consistently vivid and challenging in her portrayals of the music business – as well as American life more broadly – and in her capacity both to articulate and critique the promises of “Money, Power, Glory” that fuel it. “I Fucked My Way Up to the Top” can be understood as a deliberately inflammatory declaration of artistic self-fashioning, but also as a retort to a professional media prone to judging and dismissing female artists – an example of an indomitable diva taking ownership of the demeaning stereotypes and derisory language used against her.
“Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have”, Del Rey sings, in almost a whisper, “But I have it.” Her music subverts the preconceptions and prejudices of the narratives (concerning love, femininity, power, and song itself) that underpin Western modernity, even as it translates their key appeals into a new register of cultural emotion.
Listening to Lana, we see America’s most deep-rooted degradations and exultations writ large; but we also learn to view life itself as a lover’s covenant, demanding that we intuit, and then go on to risk, the shining path before us – leading, perhaps, to a more shareable world. “No bombs in the sky (only fireworks, when you and I collide): / It’s just a dream I had in mind.” Long may the dream continue.
And so the time came to rent an office space. We must all find our space. I wanted to read and create and explore, and where was everyone? Where were all the artists? Apparently they had ‘spaces’. One Friday evening I woke up in the National Library, my cheek pressed to the desk and a man’s face a few inches from mine. It was a big, sympathetic face.
“Are you alright?” he asked softly.
“I’m fine.”
The library clerk was picking up books, the room was almost deserted.
“You look awfully pale”, he said, and started gathering my books and papers for me. “Would you like to come and have a drink of something?”
I wanted a drink of something alright but not with him. The man was a regular in the National Library, and on Fridays these many regulars edged up to you and asked if you’d like to join them for a drink over in Buswells that evening, or in Kehoes or the Duke. Where were all the young historians, the promising intellectuals pursuing PhDs? Absent from here.
At this time I was reading many books on theatre, hatching my various theatre projects. I was going to the theatre too sometimes. I was definitely up to something, going somewhere, that was for sure. So I followed the inevitable drift into Stoneybatter. Everyone was in Stoneybatter, where rent was cheap. The artists, the few writers. They were all there. You passed them smoking rollies in the doorway of Walsh’s, or cycling down the easy hill that brought you into town, or they made you coffee in the friendly Italian place. In the mornings I would cycle in over the James Joyce Bridge with a mind full of ideas. I had big ideas for the stage then, ideas that collected in my head and conversed with each other; so many bubbling characters in my pot, for plays never to be staged. Never to be staged.
The office space was on that narrow, twisting street, paved with rubbish and closing in with redbrick houses. You might know it as a historic street, a street not bothered by the present day. It wasn’t unusual to see a piebald horse clapping down it with a boy riding bareback, and the hardware shop and the fishmonger’s and the chipper had handwritten signs in the windows. Whenever I left the office the prostitutes were waiting on the street. They sometimes stood in the rain, and the raindrops splashed down their faces and soaked through their little outfits.
The office had been set up by some business-like artists. I didn’t rent an office space because I wanted somewhere to work, but because I wanted a something like a husband, or just someone to have a kid with. Or just someone to bring me to the theatre.
He was waiting the day I went to see the place. The artist with the keys took me upstairs, past a heap of broken lamps and old rucksacks and art nobody wanted. She opened the door, and his head swung out from behind a silver Mac screen. Thick tanned arms were spread around the desk. Kind brown eyes smiled and twinkled under a helmet of rich dark curls. He looked around the room shiftily, in the way of a person suddenly forced to assess their surroundings, because they’ve been intruded upon. He was eating chocolate biscuit cake from tinfoil. I was this intruder and this was my home. He was my collaborator and this was our home now. I told the artist I’d take the ‘space’.
The rent wasn’t that cheap for a kip. The furniture was salvaged though it shouldn’t have been, and the bursts on the dog-brown arm-chairs were duct-taped. There were no floors, just bare concrete marbled with the remnants of older floors, the effect being that of a terrible skin condition, or gangrene. Lying here or there was your standard frayed Persian rug. The kitchen was a back-slum falling down with herbal teas and jars of delicacies, delicacies grown dusty with abandonment. These jars of dusty delicacies suggested there had been something like happier times in the building, but that those times had long passed, remembered only, maybe, on old Facebook pages. Everyone had moved on. Where were all the artists, who you saw outside Walsh’s and going somewhere on their bikes and serving you coffee all the other days? They didn’t have ‘spaces’ here. They were all in bed maybe. No one except the odd business-like artist with keys came into the building. But that did mean it was just me, and him.
He was an artist. He came from Coolock, and he worked on apps. It was hard to say what he did but he was there behind his computer every morning when I got in, hard at whatever it was. With that same wistful sparkle in his eyes when he looked at me. On the first day I placed my bike carefully next to his. On the second day I thought, Hell, and let my bike relax into his, so the pedal caught in his spokes. It was winter all year round in that place, and every morning we lit a wood burner. We took it in turns to make coffee in the repulsive little kitchen. The coal ran out, and he got his hands on an old heater and kicked it until it worked. There was a balcony where we sat sometimes when it was summer, looking onto the neighbouring yards. Sometimes the woman from the friendly Italian cafe barbecued sausages underneath us, and the smells of someone’s comforting meal reached us. We felt, I think, very happy.
He was handy around the place, as you might imagine. He installed apps on my phone. He gave me a cracked copy of Adobe Reader. He removed a virus from my computer. Pop-up screens had started appearing; dragons with spiked tails and little men bearing spears with ads for online poker, and then a real women with gold thighs straddling a heart-shaped chair. He ran a load of programmes and wiped them all from my machine.
There was a lot of sexual tension in that space, I was almost certain of it. The dank and wet afternoons heaved with possibilities, when we could do anything together – go for a swim in the sea, to Walsh’s for pints, go to see a play, any time of day. We could cycle to a stream I knew near the woods in the Phoenix Park, and fall down on a carpet of leaves and get this thing over with for once and for all. Or I could march up to his desk, take him by the collar and yank him up – then a terrific scene would unfold, a blaze of passion, an unplanned pregnancy, a life of hardship, community spaces, theatre.
We talked about our lives before Stoneybatter. London, Paris, Helsinki, West Cork. But Dublin was exciting, we’d say, and look up at the skylight that brought a single shaft of natural light into the rotting little room. There was loads going on in music, loads of art exhibitions, we’d say. The theatre scene was exploding.
Though when I mentioned theatre, the space went quiet. He was from Coolock. He played Gaelic football. He liked Quentin Tarantino films. He was a bit of rough, but he was also a bit cultivated. If he talked about his degree he would say, “I done my degree”, but he’d also say “prior to”, instead of “before”, moving to Helsinki. He had a pride you didn’t want to mess with. I knew he would feel awkward if he knew that I knew more than him about something. I didn’t want him to know how much more I knew. I had no wish to emasculate him. The thing to do was to just get him out and knock back pints with him, to be swallowed whole by some night of pints and noise and theatre and more pints, with him.
I trembled when it came to asking him for a pint. Some days, I was certain he was going to ask me, first. The room would howl with our silence and I’d catch him glancing over at me, then quickly back at his screen, and my chest would boil up unbearably until he stretched out his arms and said, “Aren’t there just so many passwords to remember? I have so many fuckin’ passwords”.
Then he’d get back to his screen. He was shy. And I was buying time, a lifetime – I let too many nights go by. I let months go by, tapping away at my fucking theatre projects. Finally one evening the minutes droned on and on and when it came to asking him, my breath got trapped. I was stiff, I was being seized and throttled. I stood at the door, my chest an ice pack breaking open.
I said: “I’m going for a pint in Walsh’s.”
He raised a drooping head. There was dejection, misery and boredom in his eyes, distaste in his hanging jaw.
“If you’re free?” I went on.
“I’m not actually – eh, just, really busy.” He went back underneath his screen.
This drove me wild.
I really wanted to drink a pint with him. I really wanted to order a pint with him, down it fast, and drown in a load of pints together; head to the theatre and hang there with our heads spinning at the bar and everyone around us watching and then sink down together under a universe of pints. I could taste the particular pint one evening. It was cold and bittersweet and so refreshing, I had a glorious thirst for it. I was standing at the door, dangling my bike keys. But I was stiff and hot and being throttled again.
“Want to just scratch all of this?” I asked.
“What exactly do you propose,” he asked.
“A pint,” I said.
“I dunno,” he said. “I’m strung out with…”
“I’ve tickets to a play,” I broke in – I couldn’t stop now. “Would you like to go a play?”
“Fuck it, yeah, why not,” he said.
He was getting up. Out of his seat. I needed to act on the panic before I could feel it, before it overcame us. I told him we had to rush – It started at 7.30. You could never be late to the theatre. Did he know that? They didn’t let you in. I wasn’t sure he knew that. He got the bikes ready and as I waited on the phone to Box Office – I didn’t really have tickets to a play, had to sort them then – he was downstairs, extracting the bikes from each other. We cycled through the city, me behind him – the heat was so unbearable I didn’t notice what was wrong until I pulled off my winter layers in the foyer. Tickets awaited us; the place was busy with half-familiar faces. It’s here, I thought. This is my home, and it’ll be our home.
The play was set in a pub in the west of Ireland. It was your standard Irish play. When the curtain rose he sat back and exhaled. I too was relieved it was set in a pub. A barmaid was leaning on the bar, gazing stoically before her. She wore a yellow pinafore, and had a face from another time. Country lads arrived in one by one from the fields or the mines or what had you – all from another time. The script was witty, the boy and I laughed at every opportunity. “Your man’s gas?” I whispered to him. His laugh was a muffled guffaw, a TV laugh, not a theatre laugh. The space between our arms was warm. I was pretty light-headed now, pretty thirsty. I decided I would let him buy the pints at the interval.
The first half dragged on and on. He checked his phone at least twice. I wished he had just switched it off.
There were fisticuffs and the barmaid went hysterical. There was fratricide. There was howling. It was a bloodbath, in the country pub. After the bloodbath, the barmaid resumed her poise at the bar and gazed stoically out. It had all happened in another time. He shifted around and clawed at his jeans.
The lights went down and everyone rose to their feet. We glanced at each other, then did the same. There were a lot of curtain calls, much bowing and beaming laughter from the people on stage. There was no interval.
It was cold outside, and almost dark. We strolled towards our bikes in a strange hell. At the corner of O’Connell and Parnell Street I asked him what he thought of the play. “Your man,” I said. “Blew my mind.” He agreed, haltingly, as he reached for, I assumed, his money with which to buy me a pint. We were outside Foley’s bar now, where smoking men eyed us with possessive smirks. Beer taps flashed around my mind, I wondered what he drank; I pictured the pubs of Coolock, the slabs of lager bought for the boys after the GAA finals, by uncles and loyal supporters. He would drink Carlsberg, and so would I.
He produced his bike keys then and nodded at Parnell Street. He was heading up that way, he said. I fished around for something to say. Oh yes.
“The one thing that confused me though was the ending. In the play the girl emigrates. They must have changed – .”
He stopped me.
“I don’t know the play,” he said.
He did not know the play: that much was clear. He said cheers for the ticket though. I watched him mount the bike, and rock forward on the handlebars. He cycled away and I went off fairly sharply myself. We never again mentioned the whole theatre thing. Even when we were lying in bed, we talked about Quentin Tarantino films.
