Our hostage, Susan, was sitting up in a bed I’d not seen before. She was watching a large color television that had not been in the cottage. A box of candy and a vase of flowers rested on a nearby bedside stand. She was wearing a shortie blue nightie — and a gold bracelet I didn’t remember seeing before. As I looked around the room I saw a large refrigerator, an electric stove, a homemade bookcase filled with books and some storage shelves loaded with cans of food. An electric heater had been placed near one wall and there was a vanity covered with perfumes, combs, lipsticks and a large oval mirror. The sight sort of stunned me because the last time I’d seen this room it had contained only a table and three chairs.
Susan, startled, looked up and stared at the blanket under my arm. Her eyes were wide, frightened. I placed the blanket on the floor and grinned sheepishly. “I thought you might want another blanket. Winter’s coming.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I turned and went out, locking the door again.
Sam had his own key to the bomb shelter, of course. And he wasn’t as dumb as he’d sometimes seemed. He’d thought of the best way to kill our hostage: keep her well fed and let her die slowly of old age during the next fifty or sixty years.
Siege in Dublin
by Jean Darling
Condon invaded the preschool playroom and took three children and two female adults as hostages. If his terms weren’t met, the hostages would he killed! Under circumstances like that, who could blame Garda Shay Kelly for not following orders?
“Come out, Condon, give up now before someone else gets hurt. You know you haven’t a hope in hell they’ll meet your demands.” Garda Superintendent Patrick Foley spoke into a loud hailer. He was standing in the courtyard of the Irishtown Rehabilitation Clinic. Nearby, on the black tarmac, several news cameras flashed the scene onto film.
“He must be jokin’, it’s the kids haven’t a hope in hell,” came softly from a bystander on the far side of the wrought-iron fence. The narrow street behind was clogged with squad cars, emergency vans, ambulances, a fire engine, two army Land Rovers, dozens of uniformed police and the curious, some of whom had stayed throughout the night. Radio and television crews moved restlessly to and fro attached by slender umbilical cords to the external broadcasting units that had bulled their way into the congestion.
“It’s diabolical for those poor little tings,” a housewife from the flats wailed theatrically as a passing microphone and shoulder borne Tee Vee focused on her briefly before zooming in on the window-framed Arne Condon. He held a small girl as a shield from a possible sharp-shooter.
“You know my terms, Foley. You have until twelve noon,” Condon shouted through a slash of open window. He lifted a gun to the child’s head, mouthed the word ‘BANG!’ and moved back out of sight.
“The Irishtown Siege is entering its eighteenth hour,” an announcer said, voice clipped with urgency. “Since yesterday afternoon at seven minutes past three, Arne Condon, self styled leader of the O’Houlihans, a hitherto unknown para-military organization, has held three children and two women hostage. Two of the children suffer from spina bifida, the third has been severely brain damaged since birth. Here beside me, braving wind and rain, is Garda Superintendent Patrick Foley who has been in charge throughout the long and harrowing night. Superintendent Foley, would you—”
“Get that damned mike out of my face!” Foley interrupted, dropping the bull-horn to one side. “You there! Guard! You’re not here for crack! Get those mikes and camera on the other side of the fence. NOW!” He spoke towards the nearest uniform which, in this case, contained Seamus Kelly, a foot patrolman from the Irishtown Barracks. Amidst rude gestures, protests and flashes from news cameras, Shay Kelly herded the media men onto the sidewalk outside the wrought-iron barrier.
The train of events leading to the present crisis had been set in motion several weeks before by a group of American Senators on a whirlwind fact-finding tour of Ulster and the Irish Republic. Like so many spinsters who feel qualified to advise on child care, these men proposed a simple solution to the six hundred year old Irish problem. They called for a meeting to clear the air, promote understanding. A chat around a table between leaders: political, para-military, church, including the Ulsterman Sean McNulty, the Protestant spellbinder whose sermons bore little trace of ‘Love thy neighbor’ should the neighbor embrace the Roman faith.
After much televised posturing and discussion at the UN, Westminster, and the Irish Dail, an agreement was reached. A time was set for the historic meeting that would forever lay sectarian unrest. Everything would be sweetness and light between Ulster and Eire, if one were to believe the good Senators in whose heads visions of the Irish-American vote danced like sugar plums.
To cut a long story short, an unknown para-military organization selected the meeting as the ideal occasion to make its name famous in song and story by eliminating Sean McNulty. The fact that the meeting was to be held in Dublin made the challenge convenient for the O’Houlihans, as the group called itself. Being more gung-ho than organized, the young men concerned parked their Hondas on Dawson Street, two blocks from the seat of the Irish Parliament, Leinster House, and made their way through police and protesters. Two of them were armed with revolvers jammed into pockets of raincoats similar to those worn at the time of the Easter Uprising. Another carried a strange arrangement of hand grenades wired together and camouflaged with a rumpled Tricolor, the flag of the Irish Freestate.
Eyes sharp above still downy cheeks, the three O’Houilhans: Arne Condon, Pauric Ryan and Bill Slattery waited in a prearranged formation near the gates that would place the motorcade within the sights of their crossfire. Around them the various factions held their protest aloft on placards, each group chanting: OUT BRITS or IRELAND THIRTY-TWO COUNTIES or OUT MCNULTY OUT OUT OUT. UP THE IRA added chorus to the choir.
As it turned out the assassination attempt was a fiasco in which three Irish Senators and four bystanders, including a pregnant woman, were blown into tweezer-sized bits to be collected in plastic bags. Unbelievably, the driver of the car sustained only minor injuries and, along with seven onlookers, was taken off to the hospital. Sean McNulty, the object of the exercise, trotted unscathed into the safety of Leinster House.
Some mix-up in the order of official limousines had turned the Senators’ black Mercedes, identical to the one in which McNulty rode, into the procession ahead of that carrying the Ulsterman. As the wrong limousine pulled into position, Condon and Ryan fired. Slattery pulled a pin and threw the ‘bomb’. In the ensuing melee Slattery and Ryan were arrested. Condon, dodging capture like a goal-bound footballer, gained his motorcycle and played fox to a pack of ululating police cars in a hair-raising chase through the streets of South Dublin. At last, with the law hot on his wheels, now spinning away the last drops of gas, Arne Condon abandoned the Honda and holed up in the Clinic.
At gun point he took over the pre-school playroom at the front of the central building where he found the three children and two female adults that he took as hostages. Condon allowed the building to be emptied of spina bifidas and spastics, mongols and the retarded. Along with the clinic employees, some were loaded into buses and driven off to safety, others were taken to the library to wait for transportation.
Five o’clock came. Six. Arne Condon, barricaded into the playroom remained incommunicado while the forces of law and order gathered.