Free Irregulars by Kevin McCarthy

Ginny Dolan has lowered herself, painfully, onto her upholstered chair, and then takes a seat on a settee facing her across a low, cherrywood table. Smiling, he plumbs his imagination for what his father might have done to lead his son to this house—taking tea in a parlour room as if calling on an aunt or widowed family friend—and finds only the warp of shadow. Nothing good could have indebted his father to this woman, warm as she seems. As a G-man—a political detective in the DMP— Daniel O’Keefe would have been as familiar with whores and their pimps as with solicitors, priests or republicans. Good G-men had contacts and touts on every rung of society’s ladder. But it was an axiom of the detectives’ trade that these souls remained indebted to the detective, and not the other way round. Still, every copper makes mistakes and some mistakes could lead a man places where he wouldn’t normally go. In thinking this, O’Keefe decides that he doesn’t want to know what debt his father owes. He will repay it and that will be the end of it.
    ‘I hope business is good for you,’ he says, by way of saying something. He notes the sacred heart picture on the wall over the mantelpiece; the tended fire grate laid with turf and coal for the evening’s fire; the stuffed chair in which the woman sits; the flowered wallpaper. And on the wall behind her, another posed photograph in an expensive frame—Ginny Dolan and a young boy of eight or nine years old. The same boy in the pictures in the hallway. He idly wonders who it is, assumes it is her son and wonders is she married.
    ‘Ah well, you know yourself, Mr O’Keefe. Nothing’s the same since all the trouble’s started up again. Even when the boyos were fighting the Tommies and Tans, business was business and no politics was spoken in my house. Tommies and Tans and Shinners … Sure, gunmen of every stripe and hue …’—she gives O’Keefe a bold smile that makes her, for the first time since he has met her, appear the pimp she is—‘… all of them need a taste now and again and, sure, what harm? Live and let live and let there be no ideologies under the counterpane.’ She laughs and O’Keefe smiles politely.
    ‘But now people are afraid to go out as much as they used to. No one’s sure who’s on whose side any more and who’s carrying a gun and who’s not. Times are hard, Mr O’Keefe, and only in Ireland, I think, can men let politics come between them and a screw.’
    Despite himself, O’Keefe laughs at the truth of the woman’s words.
    ‘Now …’, she continues, taking a cigarette from a silver case and waiting while O’Keefe leans across and lights it with an ornamental lighter from the table. Exhaling: ‘… now there’s some who’d say auld upstairs girls like myself have no place in the new Free State, or whatever it is they’re calling it. Can you imagine? A free and independent Ireland without her upstairs girls? And let me tell you, when the Dáil is sitting, Ginny Dolan’s shop is still as busy as fleas on a fat man. Politicians are politicians no matter what colours they paint their posters. And the young gunmen do be just as bad for riding, for all their talk of God and independence. They’ll happily take their cut of protection money from the likes of poor Ginny, a gratis poke at one of her girls and then turn round and curse her for a Free State spy or Republican whore or just plain bad for the morals of the country. Truth be told, since they shelled the Four Courts and started this blight of a civil war, I don’t know who’s the worst.’
    It is not the first time O’Keefe has heard this said. Independence is a fine thing, if you can put bread on your table without being shot at for your troubles. And O’Keefe knows at first-hand how much the average gunman cares about the troubles of the common people of Ireland. About as much as the average politician, he thinks. ‘It’s hard to tell all right,’ he says. ‘Strange