McKeown’s presence troubled Ian MacLennan.
As did the worried look on the face of the Taoiseach because it was unlike Seán Francis Lemass to betray anything of his underlying misgivings in the presence of the Ambassador of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
“Good day to you, Ambassador,” the Irish Prime Minister said in Gaelic, quirking a momentary wry grin as hands were shaken.
Ian MacLennan had not been a Gaelic speaker when he was posted to Dublin; since then he had acquired sufficient of the language to make polite conversation and to sometimes — if his interlocutors spoke slowly and they had Dublin accents — to follow the gist of conversations.
“And to you too, Taoiseach,” he replied in kind. His ghastly, very ‘English’ pronunciation rarely failed to raise at least a half-smile even on the lips of even the most partisan of Irish nationalists. “Might I inquire,” he went on in his own native tongue, “after the health of the President. When I left Dublin earlier in the week I was led to believe that Mr de Valera’s condition had stabilized?”
The sixty-nine year old New York born President of the Irish Republic, Éamon de Valera had been rushed to hospital over a fortnight ago and as yet, no public announcement had been made on his illness. The Republic — Eire — without the man who had been its guiding hand for the best part of five decades of war and economic and diplomatic struggles would be another, very different country. A country even less well understood both by its own people and by MacLennan’s clients back in England.
“The Uachtarán na hÉireann has not given up the fight,” the Irish Prime Minister said, as always insisting on using the Gaelic version of titles and ranks. “We pray that he will pull through this travail.”
The other three men nodded concurrence with this sentiment.
The four men in the cool, strained atmosphere of the Taoiseach’s comparatively old-fashioned, almost Spartan room understood only too well that relations between the British and the Irish governments had reached a new nadir that spring. The fact that the British Ambassador spent most of his time out of Dublin to avoid providing an easy ‘static target’ for an assassin in the Republic’s capital city was eloquent testimony to the ongoing crisis.
The chairs in the room were neither new nor threadbare, simply well-used and a little tired. The description might have applied to the nation beyond the walls of Leinster House; a country trapped in a cycle of dreary stagnation. The saddest thing was that Ian MacLennan knew that appearances were misleading and that but for the recent war and the troubles along the northern border, the Irish Republic might already be taking tentative steps towards a brighter, more optimistic and prosperous future.
Seán Francis Lemass had been born John Francis Lemass in Ballybrack, Co. Dublin in 1899. He was the second of seven children. As a child his family had called him ‘Jack’. At school he excelled at mathematics and history but aged fifteen he had lied about his date of birth and joined the rebel Irish Volunteers. Enlisted into A Company of the 3rd Battalion, whose adjutant was Éamon de Valera he had become ‘Seán’. Arrested after the Easter Rising in 1916 during which he and his brother Noel had fought at both Moore Street and at the General Post Office, the British had released him because of his youth. Nonetheless, he had spent much of the rest of his early life fighting the occupying power.
Lemass had been one of Michael Collins’s ‘Twelve Apostles’, men of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA responsible for a series of murderous attacks on British agents operating in the city. A veteran of the War of Independence and later the Irish Civil War, Lemass’s life had been unusually blighted by loss. He had accidentally shot and killed his own twenty-two month old brother Herbert with a revolver in January 1916. In 1923 his twenty-five year old elder brother Noel was kidnapped and later murdered by pro-Treaty men under the command of Emmet Dalton, a close confederate of Michael Collins. Those terrible days when true Irishmen had routinely killed each other over the clauses of a British mandated Anglo-Irish Treaty — over whether Ireland should, or should not be partitioned — still overshadowed later generations. The armed struggle between the Irish Free State and its colonial overlords was long over and nobody in that room in Leinster House wanted a return to those days, but the partition of the thirty-two counties of Ireland in the 1920s had settled nothing and they could never pretend otherwise.
The four men sat down, settling uncomfortably.
“You’d best tell Sir Ian the bad news, General,” Sean Lemass sighed, passing a weary hand involuntarily across his face.
Lieutenant General John McKeown sat stiffly upright his chair. His gaze zeroed in on the British Ambassador.
“You will be aware, Sir Ian,” the soldier prefaced, his tone businesslike and unapologetic, “that since the unfortunate incidents which occurred in December…”
“The attempted regicide of Queen Elizabeth and her family at Balmoral,” Sir Ian MacLennan interjected urbanely, unwilling to let the magnitude of the outrage pass. The attempted assassination of the Monarch was not an ‘unfortunate incident’ it was an obscenity!
“Quite so, Sir Ian,” the Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces agreed softly. “Since that ‘incident’ we have, as you know, at the request of Her Majesty’s Government, taken a close interest in traffic in and out of Casement Air Base, its associated logistics depot, and at the site of its sister establishment adjoining Shannon airport. At the same time Customs officers have been instructed to closely monitor trans-Atlantic shipping movements into and out of Irish ports.”
Sir Ian MacLennan’s expectations of a session in which he was to be the butt of his hosts’ displeasure began to dissolve. Something else was going on. The men around him were sending out unfamiliar signals. They were worried and perhaps, even a little afraid.
He said nothing.
The United States had taken over and massively expanded Casement Air Base in the months after the October War. Denied the use of its bases and facilities in the United Kingdom the United States Air Force had wasted little time upgrading its lodgements in Spain, and lengthening the runways at what had previously been a small Irish Air Force field at Casement, approximately nine miles from the centre of Dublin, hurriedly building a large prefabricated military camp which had grown to cover several square miles of the rolling green hills to its north and west. Giant radar and communication towers had sprouted from within the high-fenced compounds and hordes of American servicemen and civilian contractors now roamed the bars and streets of the capital most nights. The capital’s pre-war dingy back streets had spawned several new ‘red light districts’. Decent folk, especially women aged between eighteen and forty, ventured out alone onto the streets of Dublin at their peril after dark. It was well known that many of the well paid American GIs and ‘contractors’ treated ordinary Irishmen and women with condescension and openly expressed the view that they had been posted to a ‘third world country’.
The British Ambassador suspected that the attitude of senior American commanders, the Pentagon and many members of the Kennedy Administration was not dissimilar. Its recent track record in taking into account — forget ‘respecting’ — its allies interests and opinions was less than stellar. The Americans had gone to war without consulting their oldest, supposedly most respected Ally — whose armed forces, it had always been assumed would play a key role in any war scenario in which the Soviet Union was involved — so once the Pentagon had planted foot in the door to the Irish Republic it was hardly like to have grown new spots in the last seventeen months.