The Snug: A Blog

In my first months in Northern Ireland I desired companionship, and feeling myself to be an honorable descendant of the hog-herding, Papist Boylans of Monaghan, I opportunistically sought out the Catholic side, because even in the narrowest and most provincial of Catholic minds, I thought, there remained that opening to the wider world and to the Western tradition that Rome represents, whereas an Ulster Protestant mind is barren of all culture, even at second- or third-hand, except the New Testament and, in rare cases, C. S. Lewis. Also, France and Italy, my favorite non-Irish countries, are, or were, Catholic. And dull and boring Finland and Norway, and work-obsessed toilet-trained mainstream America, are Protestant. It was, therefore, natural for me to return to Guinness, my first-ever tipple, and equally natural that I should eventually find my boon companions among the Catholic rebels. So two months into my Ulster sojourn I joined the IRA.

    Actually, it was the Official IRA I joined, the leftie armchair marksmen or Marx men, not the actual bomb-throwers: those guys were the Provisionals, or Provos. Both are now theoretically defunct—I stress the “theoretically”—but the Marxist Officials went under first, back in the 80s, simultaneous with the first hairline cracks in the pedestal of worldwide Communism. (As far as I know, my membership never lapsed, so I suppose a case could be made that I’m writing this as an old IRA man.) Anyway, a girl named Sinead, then the Mid-Ulster Step-Dancing Champion, led me up the garden path into that particular minefield. An ardent nationalist, as they called them, or IRA sympathizer, to be blunter about it, she was a fellow-student in my Modern Irish Literature class—which, by the way, wasn’t taught by an Irishman at all, but by Walter Allen, faculty star of the New University of Ulster. Allen, from some soot-stained corner of the working-class North Country of England, was a famous left-wing critic, a kind of poor man’s J. B. Priestley, author of All In a Lifetime and other forgotten gems, and who from the first insisted on calling me “Blazes” in his dense Leeds or Bradford accent and smoked filterless Sweet Afton cigarettes throughout his lectures and seminars (and to and from the train and in the pub and very possibly in bed as well), shoulders heaving with suppressed coughing jags, eyes bulging like a bulldog’s. I sat wordless, terrified of being asked a question, content to merely bear the brunt of Walter’s Blazes jokes (“as our friend Blazes here would no dawt agree”; “ask Blazes, any road”; “How’s Molly then, eh Blazes, lad?”) while Sinead loudly spoke up and argued, mostly politics; and this, along with her flaming hair and hourglass figure, charmed old Walter into backing down from any colonialist English Paddy-bashing (and proved a welcome distraction from his Blazes-baiting, as well). From the silence and cunning of my internal exile I admired her chutzpah. As for Sinead, she hardly noticed me at all at first—why should she?—and when she did she accurately spotted me as a reclusive weirdo who’d do anything for a smile from her and was, therefore, prime recruitment material for her little band of rebels. With these ulterior motives, then, she switched on the charm and managed to survive having a drink with me in the university bar, successfully keeping me at arm’s length when I shifted into Demon Lover mode and spilled stout all over my corduroys. Then she revealed her true purpose and inveigled me into attending a meeting of the local branch of An Cumann Gaelach, the “Irish Society,” local front, as it happened, for the Official IRA (Marxist-Leninist), of which she was vice-president, or honorary lieutenant-colonel (or commissar). A couple more pints, and bedad Oy was game, so Oy was. After all, the Officials were the good guys, the theoreticians, the bespectacled intellectuals, not masked marauders and granny-murderers like the Provos.

     And it was something larger than myself, a cause to serve, a place where one might make friends, meet girls….

    A brisk chap named Liam O Something was Operations Commander, or, more discreetly, “Secretary.” He was portly and seemed genial, but had cold blue eyes. He and Sinead cornered me and their softening-up barrage of aggressive Irishry made it impossible for one of my uninsistent nature, and one in the state of intoxication I was then in, to up and leave. After blathering away about how great I was and how fabulous was the Irish-American tradition of support for “Irish culture” and what a pair of grand old hoors we were altogether and how much I’d love his uncle Dan, who lived in Boston, Liam had me sign my name, Gaelicized to Ruadhri O Baoigheallan, and then led me in a solemn oath, right hand upraised, to the Thirty-Two-County Republic One and Indivisible, while uileann pipes burbled in the background and Sinead and her fellow officers looked on proudly, satisfied that another name was on the rolls. Liam gave me a tricolor lapel pin depicting the Easter Lily and told me to wear it on special occasions like Easter Monday and St. Pat’s Day but not on a regular basis, like, as it might inflame some of the local Prod loonies and/or Brit sympathizers and/or soldiers in H.M. Forces. My hand was shaken, again, vigorously, once by Liam and once by Sinead, whom I saw receding into the teeming netherworld of Girls I Fancied From Afar….then, from the shadowy corners of the room a high-pitched tenor suddenly broke into the nationalist hymn, The Soldier’s Song. All present fell silent and bowed their heads. I shivered ecstatically. It was a moment of ideal, pure Shamrockry.