Eighty years ago this morning, as the seconds to the Truce ticked by, Alexander Clarke, a middle-aged RIC man, was returning to his digs in Townsend Street in Skibbereen. He had been in the force for 34 years, and here he was, aged 52, and still a constable, though promotion opportunities must have beckoned. Many RIC men had enlisted in the Irish Guards during the Great War, but he had not been promoted. And nor had he been more recently, when murder and resignation had thinned the force considerably.
He was an insignificant Tipperary man, rather like the first two RIC killed in the Troubles 30 months before, but unlike them, he was going to survive. The terms of the Truce had been signed two days before, and it was now mere moments away from enactment. Did he perform a little skip of joy as he approached his lodging house, as he felt for his keys? Why not? The promise of peace and retirement into old age lay before him. What joy! At which point he was shot down, the last formal victim of the Troubles of 1919-1921.
Harmless man
In the coming years, how did his killer feel? Did he grow warm at the thought of how he had shot a harmless man, for no purpose but for the killing itself? Was he a hero locally, or was he treated with the silent disdain that many communities reserved for the doers of unworthy deeds during this period? Did he sit his grandchildren on his knee and tell them how one morning in July 1921 he had gloriously shot a policemen dead, yards away from his front door and minutes away from peace? Or did he stare silently into the fire, wondering about the reckoning ahead?
Obviously, I haven't a clue. What I do know is that poor Alexander Clarke vanished from the press almost immediately - this newspaper recorded his death briefly the next day, but made no further reference to him, his funeral or his widow and children over the coming days. Ireland was at peace, or so it seemed, and the Clarkes of this world were swiftly forgotten, not just then, but in the emerging narrative about those events which had consumed so many lives.
History is not predestined, and those who do evil deeds are seldom evil men, but merely fallible creatures who have, if only briefly, succumbed to the power of evil currents. No inevitable path leads from the killing of Constable Clarke to the formation of Fianna Fβil at the La Scala theatre in Dublin nearly five years later; yet the path did lie that way, and was littered with thousands of other bodies.
Sean Lemass
What marks La Scala as a special place on a special night was the sort of man who was there, who decided to put an end to the gun in his life, and in Ireland's - a man such as Sean Lemass, who had once gunned down a one-legged war veteran in his bedroom, or Frank Aiken, whose gang had been responsible for the deaths of many Protestants in South Armagh, or Sean McEntee, who had shot a captured policeman in 1916.
Gunmen do make peace; there are no better men for doing so. But the gunmen do have to become ex-gunmen, as those who gathered in La Scala were, by and large, determined to be. Dan Breen, the man who in 1919 had shot down the first policemen in the Troubles - James McDonnell and Patrick O'Connell, who were probably known to Alexander Clarke - in 1927 even took his seat in the Dβil long before other Fianna Fβilers. He apparently wavered in 1932, when he assembled a Thompson submachine gun in a telephone kiosk in the Dβil, but that was largely in case the Free Staters would not surrender power. They did; and he abandoned the gun.
La Scala represented a visible watershed in Irish life, perhaps the most important of the 20th century. It could be said that was when the majority of the gunmen of the period 1916-1922 finally abandoned the route they had taken during those years and instead reverted to the "discredited" path which had been laid out by the Irish Parliamentary Party. But for that path to make sense, the guns must be history; and as it was then, so is it now.
Talks in Shropshire
Gerry Adams says that the IRA is not represented at the talks in Shropshire. It is. It is represented by him, as a member of the IRA Army Council. This farce of pretending that the IRA is mysteriously absent when it is corporeally present in his person, and in Martin McGuinness's, and in Pat Doherty's, has got to stop. The media might not care to belabour this point, but a central truth to these talks, one known by every person present there, and by every unionist voter in the street, is that these three Members of the House of Commons are also members of the IRA Army Council.
I don't believe that this peace deal can stick, though I hope I am wrong. But if it fails, we must be clear why. It is because the present republican leadership has declined to have its La Scala gathering, preferring instead to retain the traditions represented by the wicked killing of a single harmless policeman 80 years ago this morning. For history tells us this: no democrat can possibly co-exist in the same political institutions with the unrepentant heirs of the murderers of Alexander Clarke.