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

whole…works.” He let out a little laugh. “You know, I was wrong. It made me happy thinking I knew, and in that way I deluded myself no less than the dreamer who crawls into the amber world of a porter bottle.” He moved tothe sideboard and poured himself a whiskey.
    “Certainly that won’t help,” said McGarr. “Tell me why you’ve called me here.”
    “I’ve watched you work. You’re from Swift’s Dublin. That’s the sensibility I work in, but being a public man, I keep my kit bag of verbal palliatives close by.”
    McGarr shook his head. “I’m from McGarr’s Dublin.”
    “That’s what I mean, just what I mean!” Horrigan sat opposite McGarr in a wing-back chair that wrapped him in shadow. He took a sip of whiskey and shuddered as he swallowed. “We deal in the real, no—”
    “Bull shit,” said McGarr.
    “Exactly. Now, this is what has happened, why I called you here. Did you work on the Bombing Report?”
    McGarr nodded. He had headed the investigation, and he knew Horrigan knew that.
    “Then you know it blames the IRA, says it was a cheap political ploy. They had hoped to blame it on some one of the ‘loyal orders’ or some Protestant extremist group and thereby bring the fighting home to the Republic. They hoped to arouse public sentiment and support. Do you know my position?”
    “On the IRA?”
    Horrigan nodded.
    “Not in so many words.” The IRA was as complex an organization as could be devised by the Irish people, who are an enigma untothemselves, since, unlike the government, it claimed to represent their dreams as well as the most glorious moments of their past.
    Horrigan said, “I support them.”
    “All of them?” Some IRA elements were committed to urban terrorism.
    “ All of them. The rhetoric means nothing to me, nor the violence. For every drop of British blood now being shed up there, they have sucked buckets of ours. People say, why those British colonists have been living in Ulster for three hundred years! That just goes to show how tight is the iron grip those patriots, who now call themselves Proves or Maoists or whatever, are trying to break. In 1916 the average Dubliner thought the show at the GPO was a bloody farce.”
    McGarr nodded and sipped from his whiskey.
    “In any case, my copy of the report is missing.”
    McGarr looked up. To his knowledge, the report was still most secret and political dynamite of the worst sort, since it blamed the IRA for the blast. And for the government it was a no-win situation: they had seemed to sit idly by while this organization, or some part of it, bombed downtown Dublin during rush hour.
    Horrigan continued, “It was a question of degrees—how much of the report we were going to release, how much innuendo we might have been able to create.”
    McGarr furrowed his brow. He didn’t care for politics or politicians one bit. He had seen too many competent policemen become patsies for wily politicians.
    “You know, we could go to the IRA and say, look, we know some part of your outfit did it, but there’s no reason to bring down the government too. We’ve been good to you. The arrests we’ve made, as you well know, have been pro forma . Here are your options or we’ll round up and intern every single IRA suspect we can find and then release the whole report: one, give us the names of the bunch of bastards who did it along with the evidence to hang them; two, give us some evidence to blame it on a British provocateur or any other organization but the IRA and its affiliates. Of course, we’ll hope they don’t just laugh at us. Mass arrests and internment would bring this government down in days. The people wouldn’t stand for it.”
    McGarr felt very uncomfortable and needed another whiskey badly. Politics blurred things so. He had been one of the first to arrive in Nassau Street after the blast. He had found a little girl with a leg and a hand blown off. That was wrong, no two ways about it. He wanted to get back to