The Sound of the Shuttle. Gerald Dawe

organising themselves very much as the British had done in prisoner of war camps during World War II, the Republican prisoners were, as Beresford states, drawn back to MacSwiney and those who endure the most.

      It was not a practical approach [one of the prisoners maintained] ... you came out of it with moral superiority, but the Movement already has that ... and so did not need to do it. What the prisoners had to do was win the battle and in order to do that they needed to be more flexible, to adopt a two-pronged approach – try to destroy the system by working within it while at the same time standing outside it.

      The harking back to previous generations and times so totally different from the present gives a kind of hallucinatory quality to the story. The isolation of the Provo leadership ‘living in something of a political cocoon’ is compounded by the innocence of the hunger-strikers. Hardened by injustice, risk, guilt and insularity, their expectations of life were heavily guarded from childhood by sentinels of nationalist piety. That religious force which Father Denis Faul refers to when blaming churchmen ‘in a way for what happened: saying that, after all, they taught people to imitate Christ, so the Church can hardly complain when they go out and do just that’ blends with the established, traditionalist cultural imperatives of the Irish language and the GAA to reinforce the utopianism instilled in the Catholic youth of Northern Ireland. When this confronts a force, state or system totally hostile to such things, redress seems to follow the logic of utopianism itself. The future (a United Ireland) matters more than the present (a divided province). So one gives oneself literally to posterity – ‘those that can suffer most ... will conquer’. The grammatical dependence is already there; the prejudice, bigotry and oppression hang like a cloud constantly in the background. A new ‘pure’ world can be generated in its place:

      Hunger-striking, when taken to the death, has a sublime quality about it; in conjunction with terrorism it offers a consummation of murder and self-sacrifice which in a sense can legitimise the violence which precedes and follows it. If after killing or sharing in a conspiracy to kill – for a cause one shows oneself willing to die for the same cause, a value is adduced which is higher than that of life itself. But the obverse is also true: failure to die can discredit the cause. To scream for mercy at the foot of the gallows – or nod at the saline drip as kidneys and eyes collapse and the doctor warns of irreversible damage – is to affirm that there is no higher value than life and none worthy of condemnation than those who take it.

      Inevitably, David Beresford’s book makes one ask: what did these young men die for? But no answer presents itself. Instead, Beresford’s strict grasp of narrative falters in the concluding pages and blurs into a self-enfolding, fatalistic assumption that Irish history is duty-bound to repeat itself ad infinitum. The hunger-strikers ‘died for a cause far more ancient than the grey walls of Long Kesh prison’. But people do not die on hunger strike for a cause because it is old. Perplexed by the precise reasons and the political significance of whatever they may be, Beresford inserts clichés: ‘the age-old struggle’, ‘time immemorial’, the ‘centuries-old struggle’ – all subsumed in the stretched theatrical context of W.B. Yeats’ play The King’s Threshold:

      When I and these are dead

      We should be carried to some windy hill

      To lie there with uncovered face awhile

      That mankind and that leper there may know

      Dead faces laugh. King! King! Dead faces laugh.

      But the point of The King’s Threshold is lost: Seanchan, the poet, stands up for poetry, the imagination, and refuses to become a mere crony of King Guaire and his council-chamber.

      At times, Ten Men Dead reads like the literature the prisoners were themselves reading: Kipling, Wilde and Eilís Dillon. Bobby Sands makes a special request:

      I was wondering ... that out of the goodness of all yer hearts you could get me one miserly book and try to leave it in: the Poems of Ethna Carberry – cissy. That’s really all I want, last request as they say. Some ask for cigarettes, others for blindfolds, yer man asks for poetry.

      In some way that I have not been able to define, the lives of these ten men were surrounded by a kind of estranged ether, an emotional and intellectual current no longer earthed to the core realities of Ireland as it is today. Unquestionably, they knew and had unforgettable first-hand experience of sectarianism and militarism. Equally, the cultural idealism that has emerged out of this situation has brought with it a sense of dignity long denied by the political state of Northern Ireland. It is, though, the complex contradiction which manifests itself through their double life, as bombers and murderers and as freedom-fighters and Irish soldiers, which defeats me. It seems fuelled by the early tragic world of Irish peasants that was converted into the poetic stock of Yeats’ revivalist prose and ballads of the late nineteenth century. It defies any bearing to the social and cultural reality of the country as a whole, and even less to the deprivation of Belfast. Rhetoric is a pitiless word when lives are laid on the line: ‘We re-confirm and pledge “our” full confidence and support to you and march on with you to the Irish Socialist Republic.’