Free Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) by Cindy Brandner Page A

still had not come to fruition. They were outnumbered twenty to one but managed to hold out for a week before admitting defeat.
    Sixteen of the Rising’s leaders were executed, some so badly wounded from the fighting that they had to be propped up in chairs to be shot. Suspects, innocent or guilty, were rounded up and jailed in British prisons. Brendan Riordan, twenty-six years of age, was one of these. While he sat without trial in a British prison, his father was shot through the head twice and killed. It wasn’t known who the shooter was, but beside Daniel’s lifeless body was left the message, ‘Fenian lie down.’ Brendan, unable to attend his father’s funeral, vowed from his prison cell to never lie down. He was released three months later because of a great tidal wave of public anger, from both the Irish and American sides of the Atlantic, directed towards the governments of England and the United States. The Irish immigrants were an important electoral body to a president trying to win support to go to war. The prisoners, for reasons having little to do with justice, were released. By force of charm and family legacy Brendan, without actually intending to, gathered about him a group of young insurgents and became their unofficial leader.
    Brendan went to Derry, a northern city that was a hotbed of sectarian strife. Catholics there lived under the some of the worst discrimination in Ireland, consigned to ghettoes called the ‘Bogside.’
    The remnants of the Rising’s leadership formed the Irish Parliament, ‘Dail Eireann’ in 1919, with Sinn Fein as its ruling party. The elected President, a gentleman with an ungainly figure and an even unlikelier name, Eamon de Valera, was absent from the Dail’s first sitting as he was locked up in prison, a rather inauspicious beginning for a man who would rule, on and off, for much of the century. In fact, on that twenty-first day of January many people were absent. The Unionist party, though invited, didn’t even bother to refuse, they simply didn’t come. When the roll of Sinn Fein representatives itself was called the words ‘ fe glas ag gallaibh’ , ‘jailed by the foreigner’, were called out thirty-six times. ‘Ar dibirt ag gallaibh’, ‘ deported by the foreigner’ was another oft-used phrase that day. In fact, there were only twenty-eight deputies present out of the one hundred and four names called.
    De Valera was not to rule for long that first time. The Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood melded at this point to become the IRA. Michael Collins, a man of no small brilliance, was the commanding officer of the army at this time and he and his colleagues brought the British to the table to hammer out a treaty. The Irish got less than they hoped for but it was enough to cause Collins, never a pushover, to accept the terms of a limited form of government for the twenty-six southern counties with full recognition of the existing powers and privileges of the British-Loyalist government in the north. Collins saw it as the first step in a long and bloody process. His friend and rival, Eamon de Valera saw it as nothing less than treason and resigned as president of the Republic. Those who followed him became the Anti-Treaty faction, those who stayed with Collins, Pro-Treaty. Ireland went to war with herself. In the end the seven hundred who died, the hatreds that were inflamed and the divisiveness that would taint Irish politics for decades served little purpose. Ireland remained partitioned.
    Brendan, after much soul-searching, found himself fighting under Michael Collins. It was here he would learn many of the skills that he would need in the years to come. He would see prison twice more in his lifetime, would survive beatings and floggings and hunger strike and tear his own soul apart in trying to separate his political ideals from the course of armed struggle he had chosen to follow. He would die from four bullets to the