Jack Byrne

Most readers of this blog will know by now, that one of my my older brothers committed suicide while in the British Army in Ireland. He was nineteen at the time, I was three days short of my fifteenth birthday. At the age of thirteen I read the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, and then followed up with all the socialist literature I could get my hands on. I thought my contribution to the world would be to change it, so people, families, like mine, didn’t have to go through the shit we had. It wasn’t the fault of my parents, they did their best in diffiuclt circumstances.

There are other stories to be told, and maybe I’ll get round to them, one of which is how I was charged with Grievious Bodily Harm at fourteen but… I was fifteen and in grammar school, we were given an essay ‘to write about a memorable moment or day’.

I wrote about the day I came home from school to be told my brother had died in an ‘accident’. Of course he hadn’t. But I wouldn’t definitively know that for over a decade, when I got the Coroner’s report of his suicide, with detailed witness statements. He died after being out on patrol in Derry, coming back having three pints in the NAAFI bar in Ebrington barracks, retreating to his room and using the rifle given to him by HM Government to kill himself. The school never marked, returned or even mentioned the essay, it just disappeared.

I have recently read, and highly recommend Kevin Toolis’ book My Father’s Wake, among other things it is about the necessity of shared grief.

Unfortunately through emigration or emotional ignorance those traditions had been broken and so didn’t exist in our Irish Catholic family. My parents decided I was too young to attend the funeral, and within an hour of hearing of his death I was taken out of the family home not to return until after the funeral. So he had gone, the whys and wherefores, the effects and consequences, in fact the whole experience, was for me, emotionally, null and void.

As an adult I spent years campaigning for Troops Out of Ireland, in electronics, engineering, and car factories all over the country. It wasn’t always easy, and I never used my brother’s death in arguments, in fact I never spoke of it. Somehow it was a private grief, not for public display. I think this killed any emotional or cultural connection to Ireland, which is why I found it easier to connect to Sinéad than to Shane. It was only with the passing years that I began to appreciate the poetry of Shane, and the country and culture from which all my forbears came. Even though by then I was fluent in its political and social history.

Dealing with Peter’s death has been a lifelong journey, the final key to emptying the black hole, created by the null and void reaction in my childhood, was having my own kids. Eventually the dam broke and without being conscious the unresolved and unacknowledged grief was at last allowed to play out. For me this partly played out in the three novels that make up the Liverpool Mysteries, novels of a diaspora I am now happy to be a part of. A key conclusion of Kevin’s book is that without accepting death we are unable to fully live. In celebrating, Peter, Sinéad, and Shane I am celebrating life.

My books of the Irish diaspora are available here