PROLOGUE

The story has two versions. In the first, a Viking war party in a lean, ­dragon-­headed longboat closes with the coast of northern Ireland. It is hunting priests’ gold and ­red-­haired, ­smooth-­skinned slaves. The leader of the fierce Northmen urges on his warriors: the first man to touch the sweet Gaelic strand with his hand or foot takes possession of it. He gets to keep whatever is there – precious metal, cattle, women, boys. There is a man aboard the longboat called O’Neill. It is an Irish name and, perhaps, in the style of slithery allegiances in Ireland, he is a turncoat. He has abandoned his family and sept and gone over to the Norse raiders, wilder even than the wild Irish. This man desires plunder and the haven of his own piece of land. It seems he craves those things more than reason, certainly more than any Viking aboard. As the longboat approaches the shore, the crew strains for the jump and its prize. Then O’Neill, the man from Ireland, lays his arm along the bulwark. He severs his hand with one swift sword blow and throws it ashore onto the sand before anyone else can make the leap. His Viking chief keeps his word. He gives that part of Ulster to his mutilated mercenary, and O’Neill takes the bloody hand as his crest and ­symbol.

In the second version of the story, two rival Scottish clans race each other to Ireland across the twelve miles of the ­wind-­whipped North Channel. They have agreed that whichever reaches the Ulster shore first will take the land. The leader of the MacDonnells lusts for it just as O’Neill did – like the intense desire some men have to keep living when death comes to claim them. He’ll do anything for it. But his boat lags behind and he sees beautiful, wild Ulster, rich in cattle and slaves, sliding away from him. He severs his hand with one swift sword blow and throws it ashore onto the sand. He claims the land for himself and takes the red hand as the crest of the MacDonnells of ­Antrim.

Ireland has a long and complicated history of conquest, rebellion, endemic violence, and political tumult. The Irish struggle against English invasion and occupation now has the aspect of an old story–of history. The people of the independent, and now prosperous, Republic of Ireland see it more and more in that way, too. But the severed red hand still seems to be a perfect symbol for the province of the United Kingdom known officially as Northern Ireland. Its six counties, with their Protestant majority, were partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1920 in the course of the Irish war of independence against Britain. In the North, the malignant motifs of the Irish past hung on: sectarian hatred, ­oath-­bound private armies, guerrilla war, atrocity and outrage, riots, bombings, British soldiers on Irish ground, political dysfunction, walls and barbed wire, segregation of Protestants and Catholics, war drums and triumphalist parades, forced population movements, propaganda – the whole apparatus of civil ­war.

Low-­level conflict went on inside Northern Ireland and along its border from the time of its inception, but chaotic and terrible open war began in 1969. It went on for thirty years and is known, with quaint understatement, as “the Troubles.”* Now they’re probably over – although perhaps not. To the outsider, their longevity and intensity are almost incomprehensible. It’s as if O’Neill or MacDonnell never stopped hacking off their own hands. They saw away at their flesh, driven on by fear of losing the thing they desire most. Through historical accident during the seventeenth century, the red hand became the exclusive totem of the Protestants of Northern Ireland. It fits them well: Celtic in origin but denoting loyalty to Britain. Yet to the British people it has no meaning. It is, therefore, a ­near-­perfect expression of the strange, ambiguous claim by Ulster Protestants – whose roots in Ireland go back three or four hundred years – that they are “British” and not ­Irish.

Nevertheless, the bloody red hand is an apt symbol of what both Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland have done during the thirty years of the Troubles. Viewed from outside the province, the ­hard-­liners on both sides (who, in Northern Ireland, constitute the majority) seemed to be acting out a part in some bizarre and bloody anachronistic pageant. Could this terrible hysteria really be taking place in Europe in the late twentieth century, among people who look just like us, in a region of Great Britain, supposedly one of the most civil of ­societies?

The Protestants, in particular, have created an appalling public image for themselves. They look like unreasonable and unreasoning bullies and bigots who refuse to share political power with Catholics, shout “No Surrender!” and “What we have, we hold!” loud and often, and insist on marching through Catholic neighbourhoods in peculiar parades that mix bowler hats and rolled umbrellas with the harsh, primitive rattle of the giant Lambeg battle drum. Many of them follow the preacher Ian Paisley, who isn’t kidding when he calls the Pope the Antichrist. During the Troubles, they tortured and killed Catholics and set off bombs in Catholic pubs and sports clubs. On the gable ends of their mean little row houses they painted murals depicting a ­seventeenth-­century Dutch prince called William, whom they idolize. They sprayed graffiti on walls that said “No Taigs on our streets!” (“Taig” is an abusive term for a Roman Catholic and is the insulting equivalent of “Prod” for a Protestant); “Fuck the Pope!” or just “FTP!”; “Remember 1690!” (the ­long-­ago year of a battle on the River Boyne); and “Still Under Siege!” (referring to the Catholic siege of Protestant Derry three hundred years earlier). They formed numerous paramilitary militias–one of which called itself the Red Hand Commandos. They swore loyalty to Britain, a country whose people and government detested them and who thought they were just another bunch of violent paddies. For fifty years, until their sectarian regime went under in 1972, they ran a government that kept Catholics down, using a Protestant police force that looked like an army, with its heavy weaponry, and auxiliaries who were always ready with the truncheon and the ­gun.

The Catholics have always looked better. They appear to be conducting a version of a political movement – and a guerrilla military campaign – for civil rights and equality, for “liberation,” that resembles many such struggles around the world. Their fight also looks like a continuation of the ancient Irish striving for autonomy from British control–or from domination by those British stooges, the Ulster Prods. Catholic ideology and goals appear rational and comprehensible in a way that those of the Protestants do not. However, as we’ll discover, that rationality is more apparent than real. And, of course, “there’s bad bastards on both sides,” as someone once said. No one could outdo the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the IRA) or the Irish National Liberation Army (or more recently, the splinter groups, the Real IRA or the Continuity IRA) for atrocity. The IRA acted at first as a ­self-­defence force to protect Catholics from Protestant pogroms, but it soon branched out into sectarian outrages of its own. It invented the car bomb, the mainstay weapon for all contemporary terrorists. Its hard men, too, killed, tortured, and bombed, often at random. Almost sixty percent of the military, police, and civilian dead of the Troubles were killed by Catholic gunmen whose violence–compared with the sporadic activity of Protestants–was sustained and unrelenting. Their goal was to shoot and bomb the Prods of the North into a united Ireland against their will. The IRA and its offspring, like their Protestant paramilitary equivalents, degenerated into criminal gangs and mafias years ­ago.

The numbers involved look small (almost 4,000 dead, 40,000 wounded) compared with the casualties in other places – the Balkans, some African countries, the Middle East. But there aren’t many Irish (or, if you like, British) in Northern Ireland. If the numbers of casualties during the Troubles were proportionately reckoned in the United States, they would amount to almost 800,000 dead and more than eight million wounded. The effect of such killing was intensified by the small size of Northern Ireland – it’s half the area of the state of Maryland. And a majority of the casualties were suffered within a segment of the population: among the farms, villages, and little market towns near the border with the Republic, and especially in the crowded, scummy city precincts of the working class. In the narrow streets of Belfast and Derry, the cramped sectarian territories abut each other in ­close-­by chunks and blocs. The slaying was sometimes intimate–the killer and victim well acquainted, perhaps neighbours. That fit into the ancient Irish pattern; it was a sort of comfortable tradition. But things were worse, went the old saying from some previous insurrection or sectarian outrage, when the hard men began killing people whose names they didn’t even know. During the Troubles, both forms of communal murder happened all the ­time.