Blood-Dark Track

"Blood-Dark Track. This is a fascinating account of personal growth as the author seeks out dark secrets from his family’s past and thereby undergoes a process of self-discovery. O’Neill tells the story of his two grandfathers, one a Christian Turk running a hotel and an import-export business in Mersin, Turkey, and the other one, the one who mattered to me, a fiercely devout republican from Cork. Both grandfathers were locked up by the authorities, who, suspecting they had nationalist sympathies, saw them as threats. Both these lives had remained shrouded by a veil of silence which the author slowly lifts. The book heightened my own unease at the way an odd veil of silence, ignorance even, had descended on the murders of my family. I needed to confront this silence and seek the truth with a level of detail that had never been attempted before. I needed to come away with a new level of forgiveness based on a knowledge of what had happened in Ireland, a knowledge of who I was forgiving and what they’d done. I found that by the end of my year I could actually enjoy being in the West of Ireland once more, in these places that had been so full of horror. Now I can have a great time there on the beach with my kids. O’Neill brought a penetrating, forensic, lawyer’s mind to his quest. He dug up a mountain of personal history from his family and welded that with the history of Irish Republicanism. Of greatest significance to me, he managed to maintain a balanced if not quite detached view. He went back to the places and deeds of his forebears in Ireland, aware of his own prejudices, not least among them his ingrained prejudice against violence. And that was part of my own conundrum. I was very attached to the Irish way of life, but rooted in that way of life is a deeply-held attachment to republicanism. And the IRA was the epitome of armed republicanism. I had to resolve this. O’Neill was able to peel away layer after layer of what republicanism meant to different people at different times. I began to see that it wasn’t always a monstrous thing and for many it was seen as a high-minded tradition, ‘cavalier’ even. That made me stop and think. I knew I could never identify with the IRA, but his account helped me see why at least some people saw the brutality of the IRA as something that always had to be forgiven, however unpalatable that might seem."