Free The Death of an Irish Politician by Bartholomew Gill Page A

Dublin was the Shelbourne, in fact a suite of rooms on thetop floor overlooking St. Stephen’s Green. He had made his money by slippery practices. As the government’s lawyer, he had negotiated with a cartel of international oil companies the establishment of a deep-water port in Bantry Bay that could accommodate the supertankers of the future. When the combine came to purchase land for their storage tanks and refinery, David Horrigan’s father, mother, sisters, and brothers just happened to be the new owners of every square foot of waterfront property along the projected site. Horrigan had resigned his post and had remained unavailable for comment for nearly ten years, long enough time, he must have felt, for his gains to have become legitimized. He surfaced as a major contributor to the coffers of the Fianna Fail resurgence.
    To the carping queries of a journalist during a television interview, Horrigan, a man with a lively intelligence, had explained his checkered career so: “And how did those other politicians, the ones with the English names we still kowtow to and let control disproportionate shares of the countryside, gather their fortunes? They made laws that declared them more equal, allowed them to steal us blind, and when there was nothing left they clapped us into a slavery more vicious and pervasive than that of Czarist Russia. Why? Because we were ‘barbarous,’ which meant we no longer owned anything. When I was growing up,their cry was no different. The LAW!, they shouted whenever any of us started agitating for a redistribution of the country’s resources. I decided I would study this law which had been so good to so few. What did I learn? That the law was the tool by which the name Horrigan could appear on the deeds of several thousand acres of Bantry Bay shoreland instead of the name Guinness or Ormond or Watson. I don’t like the way things are any more than other patriotic. Irishmen, but, since they are, then I must conform until I enjoy a position preeminent enough to allow me and my people—the ones from the Dublin gutters like me, the ones from the rustic poverty of the country like my wife’s people—to effect sweeping change in this country. It is to this end I am working.” That statement and his stand on the Northern Ireland question gave him a seat in the Dail. His contributions to the party gave him his cabinet post.
    Handing McGarr the drink, Horrigan scrutinized the detective in a way that made McGarr self-conscious. He was still in his boating garb. “You don’t know me,” Horrigan said, pacing in front of the mantel, on which the gold balls of an eight-day clock spun silent in a vacuum, “nor I you, outside of the bare details of our lives. It’s because of our backgrounds—Dublin, poverty, the law—that I chose to call you and not somebody from Internal Security or some other agency. WhatI’m going to put to you, you needn’t accept, since my request cannot be official.” Horrigan turned to McGarr suddenly. “In this I’m thinking of you. If I have to go, no reason I should take anybody with me, much less you, who haven’t an idea of what’s happened.” Greying hair curled onto his brow. His face was characteristically Irish: bulbous nose, puffy cheeks and jowls. He was not a handsome man. His dark blue pin-striped suit was expensive, but he appeared uncomfortable in it.
    He turned toward the window. “Sometimes I wonder how things happen and why so fast. It seems only weeks ago that I left school, got married, felt so young and enthusiastic. Now”—he let his narrow shoulders fall—“I feel so old.”
    “How old are you?” asked McGarr, somewhat embarrassed at this confessional monologue.
    “Forty-three.”
    He looked at least fifty.
    “I thought I saw things a little clearer than other people, you know, what was happening here in Ireland, what I should do to get ahead, how I could help myself and the country, the sort of family I wanted, the friends, the