at Mad Dan with his cold eyes. ‘Sure, I want you to meet someone,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Mad Dan asked.
‘A kid called Sean Savage.’
Sean Savage loved his country. At twenty-three he was an incurable romantic who read voraciously about the history of Northern Ireland and travelled frequently across the Province by bicycle, his rucksack weighed down with books, as well as food and drink. He had done this so often that he was now considered an expert on Irish history.
With his vivid imagination Sean could almost see the island coming into existence at the end of the Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago, when the ice melted and the land rose up to fight the stormy sea. Cycling along the spectacular crags of the North Antrim coast, he would imagine it being shaped gradually over the years as the sea eroded the land on either side of the rocks, before human habitation was known. Northern Ireland’s first inhabitants, he knew, were nomadic boatmen who had crossed from south-west Scotland in 7000 BC and left the debris of their passing, mostly pieces of flint axes, in the soil along the rugged coastline.
Sean was particularly intrigued by those early explorers, often wishing he had been born in that distant time, sometimes even imagining that he had been one of them in a former life. One of his favourite spots was the crag surmounted by the remains of Dunlace Castle, where, sitting as near the edge of the cliff as possible, gazing down at the sea far below, he would imagine himself one of those early explorers, venturing in a flimsy coracle into the enormous cave that ran through the rock to the land.
He was a solitary person, enjoying his own company. Shy with girls and still living with his parents in a terraced house in Republican West Belfast, he filled his spare time with evening classes on the Irish language, cycling all over Northern Ireland, and exploring and reading about the formation of the land and how those early explorers from Scotland were followed by various invaders, including the Christians, the Vikings and, finally, the Normans, who had marked their victories by building castles along the coastline. The remains of those castles still covered the land, reminding Sean that Northern Ireland had often been invaded and was still a country ruled by hated foreigners – namely, the British.
Sean wanted to free his country. As he cycled to and fro across this land steeped in myth and legend – with ‘giants, ghosts and banshees wailing through the sea mist’, as one of the guidebooks had it – as he read his books and explored the ancient ruins or drank in the beauty of the Mountains of Mourne, the lunar landscape of the Giant’s Causeway, or the soothing green glens of Antrim, he wanted desperately to return to the past when Ireland belonged to the Irish. Like his early hero, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who had boldly captured Dunlace Castle from the English in 1584, Sean wanted to break out of his anonymity and achieve heroic victories.
‘Sure, you’re just a wee dreamer,’ his friend Father Donal Murphy told him, ‘wantin’ what can’t be had. You can’t get the past back, boyo, and you’d better accept that fact.’
But Sean couldn’t accept that fact. Like many of his friends, Father Murphy knew him as a reflective Irish-language enthusiast, rambler, cyclist, Gaelic footballer and cook. Still single, he neither smoked nor drank alcohol, rarely expressed political views, and was never seen at Republican functions. Not for one second, then, did the priest suspect that Sean was a highly active, dangerous member of the IRA.
The nearest Sean had come to recorded involvement in the ‘Troubles’ was when, in 1982, he had been arrested on the word of an unknown ‘supergrass’ who had denounced him as an IRA hit man. Resolute in protesting his innocence, Sean was strongly defended by many friends, including Father Murphy, who all viewed the arrest as yet another example of the British tendency to imprison innocent people on flimsy evidence. Released a month later, Sean returned to his peaceful activities and, in so doing, reinforced the conviction of most of his friends that he had been wrongfully accused.
‘They’re so keen to find themselves some terrorists,’ Father Murphy told him, ‘they don’t bother with facts. Sure, they only had to run a proper check and they’d have found you were innocent.’
‘Ackaye,’ Sean replied. ‘Sure, that’s the truth, Father. They probably didn’t care who they arrested – they just needed some fish to fry. We’re all at risk that way.’
In fact, as only a few, highly placed members of the IRA knew, Sean was a dedicated freedom fighter who would go to any lengths to get the Brits out of the Province. To this end he had joined the IRA while still at school and soon became an expert ‘engineer’, or bomb maker, responsible for the destruction of RUC stations, British Army checkpoints, and, on more than one occasion, lorries filled with soldiers. Thus, though he seemed innocent enough, he had blood on his hands.
But he was not a ‘mad dog’ like Daniel McCann and took no great pleasure in killing people. Rather, he viewed his IRA bombings and, on the odd occasion, shootings, as the necessary evils of a just war and despised the more enthusiastic or brutal elements in the organization – those who did it for pleasure.
As Mad Dan McCann was one of those whom he most despised, even if only from what he had heard about him, never having met the man, he wasn’t thrilled when, in early November 1987, after receiving a handwritten message from his Provisional IRA leader, Pat Tyrone, inviting him to a meeting in Tyrone’s house, he turned up to find McCann there as well.
Sean had long since accepted that once in the IRA it was difficult to get beyond its reach. Like the killing of Prods and Brits, he viewed this iron embrace as another necessary evil and was therefore not surprised that the message from Tyrone was delivered to him by another Provisional IRA member, nineteen-year-old Dan Hennessy, who drove up on a Honda motor-bike to where Sean was sitting on the lower slopes of Slieve Donard, gazing down on the tranquil waters of Strangford Lough. Braking on the slope just below Sean, Hennessy propped the bike up on its stand, then swung his right leg over the saddle and walked up to Sean with a sealed envelope.
‘From Pat Tyrone,’ Hennessy said, not even bothering to look around him at the magnificent view. Hennessy was as thick as two planks and only in the IRA because he thought it would give him certain privileges in Belfast’s underprivileged society. In fact, he would be used as cannon-fodder. As such, he would almost certainly end up either in a British prison or in a ditch with a bullet in his thick skull. It was an unfortunate truth that such scum were necessary to get the dirty work done and that most came to a bad end.
‘How did you know I was here?’ Sean asked as he opened the envelope.
‘Tyrone sent me to your house and your mum said you’d come up here for the day. Sure, what the fuck do you do up here?’
‘I read,’ Sean informed him.
‘You mean you beat off to porn.’
‘I read books on history,’ Sean said calmly, unfolding the note. ‘This is a good place to read.’
‘You’re a bloody queer one, that’s for sure.’
Sean read the note. It was short and to the point: ‘Sean: Something has come up. We need to talk. I’ll be home at four this afternoon. Meet me there. Yours, Pat Tyrone.’ Sean folded the note, replaced it neatly in the envelope, then put the envelope in his pocket and nodded at Hennessy.
‘Tell Pat I received the message,’ he said.
‘Ackaye,’ Hennessy replied,
