The Eloquence of the Dead Read Free Page B

jubilee celebrations took place in June. But a combination of harassment and skilful use of the Coercion Act by the police forces ensured that Dublin remained a relatively safe enclave in a country racked by agitation.
    The plainclothes elite of the Dublin Metropolitan Police were housed at Exchange Court, huddled in against the dark, northern flank of Dublin Castle. The G-men dealt with both ‘special’ or political crime and ‘ordinary’ crime. They provided armed protection for the key officials in the Castle administration, the Chief Secretary, the Under-Secretary and their senior aides. They were also the administration’s eyes and ears, watching over the activities of the myriad groups and individuals across the city that might constitute a threat to security.
    â€˜A half day to go to a feckin’ paintin’ class? Are ye serious, Swalla’?’
    Detective Inspector Maurice ‘Duck’ Boyle was master of the Exchange Court rosters. Every week he contrived to skive a full day off police work proper, retreating to the warmth of the inspectors’ office to labour over the production of a duty timetable for the G-Division.
    He threw his pencil on the desk in exasperation.
    â€˜The city’s plagued be Fenians, land grabbers and dynamiters. There’s so-called intellectuals and fellas talkin’ t’each other in feckin’ Gaelic so we won’t understand them. There’s a new crowd of throublemakers now settin’ up some sort o’ spiritual debatin’ club.’
    He leaned back in his chair and joined his hands across his corpulent belly.
    â€˜Apart from that there’s the fuckin’ criminals. Scuts, gougers, knackers. The Vanucchi gang is out robbin’ houses in Donnybrook. And you want time to go to a paintin’ class. Jesus, how am I supposed to cover that?’
    â€˜I don’t want you to cover anything,’ Swallow answered testily. ‘Just give me the bloody Thursday half day and put me down for the night shifts. It’s a fair bargain.’
    It was more than fair, he knew. Every night G-Division was stretched, watching meetings and gatherings across the city. There was any number of extremists out to break with England. There were land leaguers trying to mobilise action against the big estates. Demagogues harangued crowds at street corners and in halls. American–Irish veterans from the Civil War delivered inflammatory orations at public meetings, promising dollars and guns.
    â€˜You need all the men you can get for the night shifts,’ he told Boyle. ‘I’ll do more than my share if you fix me up for the half day like I’m asking.’
    He ended up taking on five consecutive nights on the escort and protection detail.
    Senior Castle officials were under twenty-four-hour guard since the assassination five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish and the Under-Secretary, Henry Burke, by the Invincibles.
    Swallow had been part of the investigating team that tracked down five of the extremists. He watched them hang at Kilmainham for their crime.
    On a human level and as fellow Irishmen he felt pity for them, pathetic, misused pawns, sacrificed by men who were clever enough to keep their distance when there was killing to be done.
    He understood their convoluted motivation too, after long nights of conversation with the condemned men in their cells at Kilmainham jail. There was no love of England in his childhood home in County Kildare. His own grandfather had joined the pikemen in the rising of ’98. But violence was futile, he believed. More had been achieved for Ireland by the pacifist emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, he reckoned, than by all the hotheads who had led others to their doom in half-cracked plots and rebellions.
    The threat level against the senior figures in the administration was as high as ever. The Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour,