In 1982, my struck-off solicitor father, fresh from bankruptcy, allegations of fraud, incarceration in a mental institution, all the stark wayposts of a life out of control, starts a bureau de change on Water Street in Newry. The first one on the Border. It was a brilliant idea. Changing money was difficult then, subject to restrictions, bank hours. It was the kind of maverick enterprise he excelled at.
From the start, the bureau was about one thing – money, the getting of it, the love of it, the spending of it. If money had a religion, then this place would have been its church, its grimy roadside chapel, godless.
These chapels attract their own larcenous congregants, Paddy Farrell among them. Paddy was a lorry driver turned professional criminal. The writing of my new book The Bureau started when I came across a letter to my father he’d written from remand in Cork prison: Dear Brendan, I thought I’d drop you a few lines as its sunday here and we have time on our hands … The letter was oblique, coded. Names are dropped in, fraudulent doings are alluded to, there’s a whispery ill-intent running through it, a side-of-the-mouth Border conversation. I wonder how they got on with that business I had arranged? Did you speak to your wee man?
Paddy was only one of a cavalcade of bent cops, alcoholic judges, diesel smugglers, dodgy businessmen, shake-down merchants and thieves that were drawn to the bureau. Seen from behind the abraded perspex of a bulletproof moneychanger’s screen on a Newry backstreet, everyone has their hand out. Everyone’s on the take.
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Paddy’s life was to end in an episode both lurid and arcane. In September 1997 he is found dead in an upstairs bedroom in Drogheda. He’s lying on a bed, masked and naked, when he is shot in the head. His 29-year-old lover, Lorraine Farrell, who is no relation despite the name, lies dead on the bedroom floor on top of a discharged shotgun.
In the literature, women who kill men and then kill themselves are primarily victims of domestic abuse, harried into the jaws of death. Lorraine Farrell doesn’t fit the pattern. The neighbours said she was “a lovely girl”. They said she always had a smile for you. She was a daily Massgoer, the house she was found in close to St Peter’s church, where Oliver Plunket’s head is on display. But she bought a double grave a week before the killing and she borrowed a shotgun.
There were anomalies. Money was allegedly missing. Paddy’s attache case which never left his side was also missing. Senior gardaí said they were treating the case as a murder-suicide, “in the absence of further evidence”.
And here’s his associate Brendan McNamee, hard drinking, hard gambling, in a once-good suit with cigarette burns on the cuffs. He’s the clever, admired young solicitor cutting bright arcs through a legal system degraded by discrimination, bent to political and sectarian ends. He’s the jaded Border operator centred in chaos. He’s seen too much, been party to too much. You drag yourself down, or the Border does the job for you. You could say corrupted, or you could turn to poet Anne Carson’s observation that he had no home in goodness any more.
‘This story is as true as I can make it. The events dictate their own telling, the possibilities of fiction exhausted’
Your own get harmed when you’re in the orbit of men for whom harm was all there was. When Brendan went bust again, this time having gambled hundreds of thousands in Border money, the owners of that money came looking. I was in Spain, isolated in a mountain retreat, writing poetry that had yet to find a level, oblivious. But the rumour spread, as Border rumours do, that I was abroad stashing cash. Poetry not in the eyeline for these men in those vigilante days.
They came looking for me in Newry, and when they couldn’t find me they bundled my youngest brother into a car, put a bag over his head and took him to the Border. They held him in a shed still hooded, still in darkness. I’d like to believe that Brendan worked every Border contact he knew to get him back. That he went to senior people and said speak to your sons of my son. I was told afterwards that police and paramilitaries both sides of the Border brought pressure to bear. I don’t know if they saw him as the innocent that he was. More likely he was no use to them, and nobody needed the hassle of another body on the Border. They released him, running him through fields at night clinging onto the tailgate of a pickup and dumping him on a lonely road.
[ The North Road: A short story by Eoin McNameeOpens in new window ]
They could have told Lorraine. In those days they killed for politics. They killed for money. Nobody killed for love.
This story is as true as I can make it. The events dictate their own telling, the possibilities of fiction exhausted. Pretty much everything related in the book happened. It may not have happened in the order dictated by the writing of the book, but it did take place. And the people are real. Paddy and Lorraine. Brendan. There’s Border raider Dominic McGlinchey, killer of more than 30 people, Speedy Fagan, and others less well known. There’s a composite character, Owen, who represents my brother and myself. My brother is the Owen in the Border shed with a bag over his head awaiting his fate. I’m the 15-year-old Owen in the roof space of John Of Gods psychiatric hospital looking for incriminating files hidden during one of Brendan’s incarcerations, the wind howling outside, the voices of bedlam rising up from the wards below. Or crouched in the back of a BMW 7-series, surrounded by bags of cash, crossing the Border in a high-speed pursuit.
You question your right to suborn people’s lives to make art. You can say that it is a sin and you shouldn’t do it. Or you can say that these people can’t break the law of God and man and then dictate the consequences, whether that be prison or a bullet in the back of the head. And if one of those consequences is a young writer watching and listening, gathering material for a book unknownst to himself, then what of it?
‘Someone says, do you realise how many people in your father’s circle died violently? That much is true. They were gunned down in front of their families, their bodies were dumped on lonely Border roads’
It took 30 years to come back to this material and find a light to shine on it. A few years ago I had a conversation with a film producer during a break in a Netflix writer’s room. I told her some of what had happened at that time. “That’s the Sopranos!” she said. It wasn’t the Sopranos, but something in that comment opened the story out into events that could be written. I found the poetry in the end, even if that was a baleful poetry.
Someone says, do you realise how many people in your father’s circle died violently? That much is true. They were gunned down in front of their families, their bodies were dumped on lonely Border roads. They died in bedrooms and bathrooms, public spaces and private spaces. I said that that was just the times. But if it wasn’t just the times, then what was it? When Dominic McGlinchey was assassinated in Drogheda, police arrived to find his young son rifling his dead father’s pockets, as he had been instructed to do. A son’s task? To remove what is incriminating from the person of the father, to kneel in blood in the street and take up an unspeakable burden?
I saw Paddy for the last time at Brendan’s funeral. Brendan’s body was light enough that cancer floated it away in weeks. Besides, his soul was a husk. I said hello to Paddy. He commiserated. That was it. But at least he was there. Many people that should have been weren’t. Brendan was a brilliant lawyer in his day, involved in far-reaching legal decisions, some relevant to this day. Plenty of people owed him. But that isn’t the way it works.
In any work of art there are levels hidden even to the artist. Months after I had finished the book, I realised how much of it concerned masculinity, or at least the kind of men who hunger for what belongs to others, whether that be their property, their money or their lives. What men feel entitled to, what dark tribute they levy from those around them. Because the kind of men who hungered in those times are once more at work in these times, and they are insatiable.
In 1984, I was a law student at Trinity. I called into the bureau on my way to Newry train station. Paddy was there. No need for the train, Brendan said, Paddy’s going to Dublin. Normally Paddy had high-end motors, but this time he was going incognito in a battered Corolla. We crossed the Border by the side roads. We were stopped at checkpoints three times, and each time he used a different fake ID. We got to Dublin and ended up driving down the Quays past the Four Courts, joking that in years to come he would be the defendant in the dock and I’d be the wigged prosecution. He didn’t make it that far, and I never went to the law, but you do wonder, why would a father put his law student son in a car with a known fugitive and send him into the borderlands? I like to believe he didn’t think it through. I hope he didn’t.
The Bureau by Eoin McNamee is published by riverrun
