Tri-Colour and Double-cross

By mervyn curran

Brexit is about to become reality and certain people within the EU are determined to give Britain a very public telling off. Other European nations must be diverted away from following Britain. Special investigators are on their way to Northern Ireland. Their mission is to gather evidence of illegal state collusion between the British establishment and Loyalist paramilitary gangs that operated in The Six Counties during The Troubles. Agents of the state, tasked with covering the tracks of their political masters, are gathering their assets and putting in place schemes to thwart the investigation. A small group of Army officers, facing the prospect of being prosecuted for Human rights violations, come up with a treasonous plan to protect themselves. While serving a life sentence after being convicted of multiple murders, ex- IRA man and notorious killer Francis Mc Carron became disillusioned with the Republican ideals that had, years before, driven him to commit ferocious acts of aggression. In the fight to free their country from foreign occupiers, he and his comrades had bombed and shot people on both sides of the sectarian divide. Twenty years ago, he was released early from prison as part of the Good Friday Agreement. Since then, he has been living a quiet life, determined to stay away from the violence and mayhem that defined his former existence. But, he has attracted the attention of people operating on the dark side of society, they want to make use of his skills. To these agents, Francis is a tool to be used and then discarded. Trapping him in a situation to coerce him into cooperating, they instead force him to revert to his old ways. Cunning and ruthless, Francis will fight to survive. With Government agencies working against him and his hastily assembled team, he finds himself forced to place his life in the hands of people he previously spent years trying to murder. And together, they become caught up in a race to get to Europe where they can hand over a dossier of damning information in exchange for immunity from prosecution. On the scales of justice, the international reputation of a proud Nation and the personal freedom of some of its most senior politicians is being balanced against the lives and liberty of a ragtag band of reformed killers and semi-retired British army officers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: mervyn curran
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215196090

mervyn curran

Hello, my name is Mervyn Curran. I am 52 years old and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I am married to Rachel and we have three children ranging in ages from 32 down to 22. We are also guardians to Rachel`s 12 year old nephew who lost his parents eight years ago. So, having gotten used to our kids being mostly grown, we suddenly had a four year old on the Autism spectrum to enjoy raising. Rachel has worked wonders with him as he needs a lot of structure in his day. I work as a nightshift manager for a fresh produce distribution company in Dublin and Rachel is an in-home carer to her elderly mother and the aforementioned nephew. Its challenging but in a good way, mostly! I`ve always dabbled in writing but never really took it seriously until about four years ago. I had a couple of good ideas for stories and I decided to see if I could develop the ideas into full length novels. I managed to do that and produced two books. I enjoy the process of writing insofar as I like trying to expand an event or a character to the level of actual story telling. I like encountering obstacles in my story that I have to work my way around in a believable way. It seems to me that a story unfolds as it will, and characters develop in their own time and in their own way. I had only a vague idea of how somebody would behave or how their part in the story would play out and I`m always fascinated to watch the story spin out. I once read Stephen King basically saying how he wasnt always sure how a story would end and he just wrote it as it wanted to be written. I didnt understand that until I tried to write for myself. It seems to me to be an organic process in that it changes its shape and size as you write. I hope I`ve written stories that people can enjoy reading and I hope I can keep writing in the future. regards, Mervyn. 

Book preview

THE CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE FICTION.

EVENTS DEPICTED IN THE BOOK ARE PRODUCTS OF THE WRITER’S IMAGINATION.

Blood, sweat and tears.

The thought of a person shedding them makes us think of a person giving their best effort in some monumental tasks. It’s a sacrifice to be proud of, to glory in. It evokes images of a struggle in trying times and makes one think of heroes. In other circumstances, however, it can be that they expel these precious fluids as the result of hostile external action. Without consent and as a violent prelude to an act of life-ending finality. When two big men drag another man into a room and secure his legs and arms to a sturdy chair, the tied man is making a sacrifice that is neither willing nor heroic. His blood, sweat and tears will not be memorialised in folk song or legend.

Francis Mc Carron never enjoyed taking part in the brutal interrogation of overweight truck drivers and sweaty builders. Those men that got caught supplying goods and services to the British security forces in Northern Ireland. They stood accused of defying the IRA rule against collaboration with the enemy and such an offence was punishable by death. Francis did not enjoy being involved, and he was always glad to be the one asking the questions, and not the one tied to the chair. The officers commanding IRA units insisted that this violence against the civilian population was a necessary contribution to the success of the IRA terror campaign. Like the way the bombings and shootings carried out by Francis and his comrades in Ireland and in Britain were parts of that success. Francis had caused many men to bleed, to sweat, and to cry stinging tears as they begged for a second chance. For these beaten, tortured and murdered men, their blood, sweat, and tears were nothing more than the last imprint they made on the world of physical things as they departed that world. Sadly for the men, his captors quickly rinsed even this pathetic stain from sight and memory with a garden hose and cheap bleach. 

They brought a man suspected of informing to the enemy before a paramilitary tribunal. For that to happen, a small team of men will go to the accused person’s home and collect that person. There will be little conversation; the men sent to collect the accused never want to be too friendly towards the guilty person. These men of few words, sent to collect another condemned soul, rarely must brandish the guns they carry. They use something deadlier, a weapon that persuades people to walk willingly to the car outside. This weapon is the false hope that the doomed men allow themselves to feel, the hope that this was all a mistake. They hope to rectify this mistake if they just go along with these men. They hope they will clear up the confusion. They just need a chance to explain to the people in charge. They hadn’t known it was wrong to be collaborating with British forces. They hope for mercy.

This is the same hope that is held onto by the wives after the silent men take their husband away. The women hope that their man may return home soon. The hope slowly fades when their husband has been gone all night. The hope silently expires as the wives conclude that going along quietly has been quite the wrong option for their husband to choose the previous evening. Sitting by the window and watching as dawn bathes the streets in cold light, they understand it is now too late for hope. It is time now to think about how to tell the children their dad will not be coming home. In homes where money is invariably in short supply, it is time to add more worry to the list of worries. It is time to make funeral arrangements.

There is no shortage of widows on the estate from whom to ask advice about making funeral arrangements for murdered husbands.

Some had a grave to visit within which lies their husband’s remains. There are some that buried an empty coffin and tried not to think about where their husband’s killers dumped his body. They try not to imagine what the killers have done to their man before they ended his life. There are horror stories that circulate in the housing estates, of how much damage they had done to those found corpses. But rarely do the stories match the truth. The stories become distorted and exaggerated by their re-telling. And in this way, the murders and the stories serve their purpose, which is to instil fear in the population. Francis interrogated the men and did his share of the beatings because it’s what his commanders ordered him to do. They knew the answers would be the same each time they beat and shot the man tied to the chair, regardless of how much he talked. The IRA kept the pretence that one of these men would reveal useful information they learned while working in a barracks or police station. It was a brutal process and Francis had realised the nasty truth a long time ago. It wasn’t about getting information, because in most cases there wasn’t any information to be had. It was about punishing the man, damaging him in obvious ways as a warning to the locals.

Sometimes, the IRA made a person disappear, and such an act sent its own dreadful message that spread terror among communities. Locals recalled these events the next time the Brits offered a couple of hundred pounds to a local man to drive a truck to supply the British forces. Or the British asked a builder to do some work in a barracks or police station. Local people always decided they were too busy to accept the job offer. This would force the British to bring in labour from elsewhere. These foreign workers and contractors then became targets for the IRA who saw them as being the enemy.

The aim was to make the entire province ungovernable for the Brits and it had to start and finish within each local area and population. It was vital the citizens spoke about the gory injuries suffered by these broken and dumped men. The details were exaggerated and spread by many people. Even the quick, clean killing of a man by a single gunshot to the head became gossiped into something much worse when they found his corpse. People would exaggerate the actual wounds and say that he had no head, he had a head but no eyes. His face showed the extreme agonies he had suffered while dying. The stories were mostly bullshit that fed upon themselves. But they served their purpose and created a barrier to locals agreeing to work for or with the British.

The IRA was both bogeyman and protector, like a hooded and gloved minor god. They enforced their own rules and standards of behaviour in neighbourhoods where they held a powerful presence. Punishment beatings and shootings of thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators, and car robbing teens were commonplace. And there were, over the years, a few lads that found themselves on the ferry to Britain or the Isle of Man, having made the choice of walking away. It was that or never walking properly again. Being shot in the knee had left many men with lifelong mobility issues. The IRA knee-cappers, being decent lads, at least phoned for an ambulance afterward.

It has been this way throughout human history; it is the civilians that suffer the most in times of conflict. Often, it is the case that the freedom fighters commit the worst atrocities against the native population. Such has often been the life of the civilian population when their homeland becomes a war zone. Even in places where the war is not officially recognised as a war.

––––––––

Fast forward to the present time, and people have optimistically left The Troubles in the past. The politicians declared the fighting to be finished. Men like Francis Mc Carron are seen as having paid their debt to society. These men are living quiet lives, collecting social welfare money and drinking most of it. Francis supplemented his welfare money, working on building sites. He had no skills when he left prison, but the younger men on the sites helped him learn. Many ex-prisoners were unemployed and almost wholly reliant upon the generosity of the State payments to make ends meet every week. Republican prisoners saw no ideological conflict between collecting dole money and the fact that the British exchequer funded the payments.

Francis had, along with scores of men like him, walked out of prison several years ahead of his original release date, thanks to the Good Friday Agreement.. He was determined not to be one of those former prisoners that re-offends and gets returned to a cell. Many people had criticised the British and Irish governments for their part in negotiating the Good Friday agreement. They said it allowed the early release of killers and bombers. The politicians were doing everything in their power to silence the critics by ensuring every support was made available to the released prisoners on both sides of the political divide. It was hoped the prisoners would avoid any return to criminal activity or sectarian violence. In order to take advantage of the various support services being provided to ex-paramilitary prisoners, there were, of course, conditions to be met by the men.

These conditions included attending meetings with officious case managers from the department of social welfare. These managers struggled to hide their fear and distrust of the tattooed, heavily muscled former prisoners and usually failed to ask even the most basic questions during the interviews. It became an open secret among the ex-prisoners that you only had to show up and act a bit intimidating for these civil servants to sign your forms and allow you to collect your payments. Even with this knowledge, a lot of the men did not attend the interviews for fear it would force them to sign up to training courses or complete piles of paperwork. Francis was one of the few that actually kept his appointment with the social services officer assigned to him. The manager mumbled some warnings about the consequences if he failed to stay out of trouble. They provided him with a flat and a payment to buy essentials. They gave Francis the contact details of a site manager on a building project. The case officer told Francis to get himself settled in his accommodation and then to start work.

Having followed instructions on getting his flat sorted, Francis went to the building site to start his new job. Upon arrival, he found he knew less about construction than even the newest and most raw apprentice. However, he had always been a quick study and once the men on the site, mostly Irish Nationalist in their politics, discovered who he was, they were quick to offer advice and to pass on their knowledge of construction to help him settle in.

Middle-aged now, Francis found that working in the city in these modern times was a very different experience from years ago. He recalled his short lived employment in a timber yard as a young man years before. Back in those dark days, the almost fully Unionist workforce bullied Francis and his catholic co-workers. He and the other Nationalist workers had gotten the jobs through a positive action initiative by local government. These initiatives were common in the months before The Troubles flared into real violence. The hard line Unionists openly sabotaged the work of Nationalist employees and made it very clear they would be happier if they just went away and found employment among their own kind.

A few years after his bitter experience in the timber yard, Francis was part of an IRA unit. Operating in the badlands of County Fermanagh, his unit had forced a minibus to stop on a rural road. The bus was carrying a Unionist marching band to an event at which an Orange lodge had invited them to perform. Shooting from the doorway of the bus, Francis and his comrades had killed six of the men and left four others seriously injured. Francis hadn’t recognised the bus passengers as men from the timber yard where he previously worked. To him, these men were Unionists, and therefore legitimate targets. The third man they shot and killed had time to look his attackers in the face. He recognised Francis, and the man died believing that the little Irish bastard was getting his revenge for the bullying and abuse they subjected him to during the few months he had worked among them in the timber yard.

In the modern day, Belfast was in the middle of a building boom after years of stagnation and zero investment. There were new structures already completed or in the final stages of completion.  Housing estates were under refurbishment, or the entire estate was being demolished and then rebuilt. This was to provide housing for the released prisoners and their families, and to display the new modern Northern Ireland. The council renovated the run down dockland area and cleaned along the river. Areas were being gentrified to bring in tourists that had returned in huge numbers to this city that had been a no-go area for decades. Glazing firms that had for years survived on replacing windows broken by sectarian bricks and bombs, now thrived on the income from supplying modern pre-glazed window units to the firms involved in building office blocks, hotels and retail units that seemed to spring up everywhere overnight.

However, among this new and very welcome prosperity in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland, there remained a powerful undercurrent of fear in those people that had lived through the Troubles. In homes across the province, people would still jump a little and feel anxious if there was a loud knock on their front door. People kept their faces averted when passing unfamiliar people on local streets in case the other person might be someone they hurt in the troubles, and were now out looking for revenge. There was bad blood on both sides of this divided city. Many people did not believe the Good Friday peace deal did anything other than make some politicians look good and give them something to brag about at election time. The peace agreement had secured the early release of a lot of violent, dangerous men from prisons in Northern Ireland, and there was serious doubt that these men would ever stop fighting. The people on either side of the wall had not forgotten or forgiven those on the other side for sectarian attacks that ended lives or maimed people. Or for the properties bombed and burned to the ground. Clearly, it would take a lot more than some politicians claiming that they had brought about a peaceful settlement to persuade people that trouble wouldn’t break out soon.

It would require a couple of generations to pass for the memories to fade to where the feelings of hatred and fear became more reminiscent of old family photographs. Someday, there would come a generation that still knew who the people in the photos were. They would know some of the history of the people in the photo. But these children hadn’t been living while those people had been alive. So, they wouldn’t feel connected to them in the same way as those that had shared a home with them. New generations would have a chance at a clean start. Already, religious faith was reportedly falling from favour in a large part of the population and those future kids would hopefully feel no obligation to keep the flames of sectarian hatred burning. Men like Francis Mc Carron were living links between the newly peaceful present, back to the violent recent past. Civilised people could only hope that he and his ilk were the last surviving remnants of dying tribes.

Francis was born in the North, but after his family moved south, grew up in the Republic of Ireland. Living in Dublin, he was aware of the fighting, but on a superficial level. He could not fail to hear the almost daily news reports of bombings and killings in the North. Most of it had passed over his head while he, like most young men of his age, chased girls and spent hours figuring out what to do in his life.

Francis's father Martin, a civil servant in the Irish government, had met Francis’ mother Gloria, a newly qualified teacher in Belfast, when they both attended a church function in Newry. Gloria came from a long established Northern Irish family where there was a strong tradition of involvement in Irish Nationalist politics while Martin’s family were Wicklow farmers. Both Martin and Gloria were Irish Catholics, but that they came from quite different worlds was a fact Martin failed to appreciate until they married.

Martin Mc Carron assumed they would live in Southern Ireland and raise their family there. But shortly after their wedding, he found himself applying for a position in Northern Ireland to allow his new wife to be near her parents. Her elderly father was suddenly in poor health and her mother needed help with his daily routines of medication and cleaning. Gloria’s brother John, while still living at home, was often away for long periods as he developed his political career. He did little to assist his parents around the family home. Their father became ill, and their mother needed help from someone in the family, so John wrote to Gloria telling her to come home. His work was too important to give up, he claimed, and he expected everyone else to sacrifice their time instead. John was busy raising money to help finance the legal team that fought for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Before they could arrange this move, events gave Gloria an additional reason to remain in the North. The security forces arrested her brother John for possession of materials useful to terrorist operations. John was the passenger in a car being driven by a young activist in the civil rights movement. Approaching a security checkpoint, the young man attempted to drive through without stopping as ordered. The soldiers had fired upon the vehicle, wounding John in the shoulder and killing the driver. When the soldiers searched the vehicle, it was clear why the activist had decided not to stop for the checkpoint. He was carrying an arsenal of illegal weapons and bomb-making materials. John was now on remand in a high security prison and was unlikely to taste freedom for ten years or more.

Martin, seeing their planned move south swiftly evaporating into the smoky air above Belfast, made a determined effort to persuade Gloria to relocate to the south. He said they had to move away from the poisoned atmosphere in order to protect their sons from the same fate that her brother and countless other young Irish men had already suffered. Gloria finally agreed, but only on the condition that she could travel back up North regularly to visit her brother and to continue assisting her parents. Her parents, of course, refused to move South.

Martin applied for a transfer from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland and the government granted it quickly. He had secured a house from the local authority in Dublin that they could move into immediately. With the removal truck loaded, they headed south to start what they hoped would be a better life for them and their two sons. The fact they were leading their boys into a life of drug addiction for one boy, and for the other son, murder, and many years in prison, was not part of their plan at all.

The trouble involving Ciaran started almost immediately after the family moved into their new home in Dublin. It wasn’t long before it had gotten so bad that it became a regular occurrence to see a Garda car at the kerb outside. Inside the house, there would be two big Garda officers taking up all the space in the small hallway in the Mc Carron home. Almost from his first day at the local primary school, school bullies had singled out Ciaran, and he had come home on two occasions with a marked face, a bloody nose, and a split lip. Quickly, he had decided that it would be less painful if he were to join the little gang that, until then, had been picking on him daily. His way in to their affections was a bottle of whiskey stolen from his father Martin’s cupboard and given to the gang leader as a peace offering. It had certainly gotten the bullies’ attention and had resulted in Ciaran finding himself standing with the gang under the small stand of trees on the riverbank well out of sight of any adults that might walk by. They were not used to drinking strong alcohol, and the boys were soon feeling the effects. Although most of them were soon throwing up, they appreciated the gesture by Ciaran. From that day, they included him in their gang when bullying other teenagers.

Ciaran went from being a victim to being the instigator of the serious unruliness the gang committed. It wasn’t long before the school authorities and the local Garda were hearing his name regularly and soon his destructive behaviour had become too much, even for the young tearaways that had been his inner circle for the past couple of years. They all now found reasons to be elsewhere whenever Ciaran called around to their homes to embark on more mayhem.

Ciaran found a harder gang to run with. Older lads that were already involved in criminal activity, drinking and pill taking and Ciaran fit right in. He quickly got into the habit of being drugged or very hung over on attending school, if he actually made it that far. This uneasy state of affairs continued until, at sixteen, the Garda caught him red-handed as he clumsily climbed out through the broken window of the school he infrequently attended. His equally stoned accomplice was waiting on the inside of the ransacked main office, to hand out the few saleable items they had found in a supply cupboard. The Garda waited until the other boy handed the stolen goods over into Ciaran’s hands, and then they arrested both robbers. Convicted of burglary, the two young men waited to hear their sentence. The courts were reluctant to send such young men to prison, so instead; they got passed into the hands of the notorious Christian brothers for reformation.

The court allowed Ciaran Mc Carron home to collect clothing and to say goodbye to his parents and to his younger brother, Francis. He could not have visits for the first month in the reform school. This period of isolation was to allow the school to get the newly arrived student settled. They would instil the correct behaviour by imposing a brutal regime of near starvation, daily beatings and long prayer sessions in cold rooms, followed by manual work in the fields and workshops run by the Brothers. It wouldn’t be a good idea to have the parents and family being witness to the bruised faces and bodies of any young man that wasn’t fast enough adapting to the harsh routines that were imposed. There was a darker brutality also carried out behind the locked doors of the isolated school building and although this depraved practice left no obvious outward signs on its victims, it marked and scarred a lot of boys so deeply, that they carried its trace for the rest of their lives. A few of these boys, after release from the home, took their own lives rather than suffer the shame and guilt any longer. Ciaran never revealed to his parents just how bad his time in that reformatory had been and what the priests had done to him. He only admitted it to his brother Francis years later, after their parents were both dead and buried, and Ciaran, unknowingly, was approaching the end of his own life.

Their lives had been changed by their move from Northern Ireland to the Republic, and Ciaran’s life was further altered by the consequences of his own behaviour. As soon as he was released from the reform school and the untold hell that he had endured there, his mother Gloria began agitating for another family transplantation back to the North to be with her family again. Her husband Martin might have put up a stronger argument against this move, but he had been badly shaken by how much Ciaran had been changed by his time in the reformatory. Martin couldn’t avoid feeling guilty that Ciaran’s problems wouldn’t have happened if they had stayed in the North. They had moved South at Martin’s insistence and now his eldest son looked haunted and sounded like a terrified child when he awoke yelling and sobbing in the middle of the night.

Again, they moved jobs and home. Francis began attending the catholic secondary school in Belfast. Ciaran was too old for secondary school now and had applied to a trade school to learn a skill that might be useful somewhere other than Northern Ireland. He had been talking to the career guidance counsellor at Francis’ school about emigrating to Australia or America. The teachers told Ciaran it wouldn’t be easy to gain an entry visa to