Fergal Keane captivates at Listowel
WAR CORRESPONDENT’S NEW BOOK EXAMINES CIVIL WAR IN NORTH KERRY
“HOME is where all my journeys about war begin and end,” Fergal Keane told a packed Listowel Arms Hotel on Saturday morning as throngs of his fans queued to hear the war correspondent talk about his latest book.
By 12pm there was standing room only in the hall as Fergal took to the stage, introduced by his cousin Joanna Keane. “If you drill down to the human experience you find things that are universal about war,” was Fergal’s opening line.
His latest book: ‘ Wounds: a Memoir of Love & War’, explores the antagonism, bitterness and hope caused by civil war in North Kerry where neighbours turned on neighbours, triggering a bitter conflict. Unlike other historians, Keane uses his experience of war zones around the globe to draw parallels between human behaviour and conflict in North Kerry. He cites Rwanda as the universal example of a fractured community; a place where genocide overran decades of communal harmony. “What neighbours do to each other is always the worst,” Fergal said.
For many in the hall, Keane’s voice was a sober reminder of human conflict and the countless RTE and BBC reports from places like Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine and the Balkans – reports that filled our living rooms with images of genocide, famine and human displacement.
“The act of killing reverberates through the generations. Today we’re encouraged to talk of our feelings of reconciliation. But this was not the case in 1920s Ireland in a country seeking stability.”
Suddenly, Keane is interrupted by a baby crying in the crowd - a sound eerily familiar with many of his war reports over the years. A woman carries the crying child in her arms from the hall and for a moment the combination of Keane’s voice and the crying infant are flashbacks of history’s darkest days in places like South Africa and Rwanda.
The basis for Keane’s latest work stems from a story told by his grandmother of an RIC officer stationed in Listowel – Tobias O’Sullivan – the son of a small farmer from Galway, “the same stock as my grandmother,” Keane says. Tobias was sent to improve the morale of the local RIC in Listowel but was murdered by republicans in the street where Keane’s grandparents lived.
His death became a childhood ghost story for Fergal growing up, eventually inspiring him to write a book about the legacy of political violence in North Kerry.
“To us, growing up in Listowel was a magical place to a city child. It was fertile ground. The story of Tobias’ death never left me.
“But the purpose of this book is not about who was right and who was wrong. It was only with the coming of peace that I was able to tell the story. The myth of the State’s origins took precedence over truth. History was fashioned to make this the case.”
Keane claims the arming of the UVF in 1912 was a significant juncture in armed conflict as it posed the question: “why not?” for many people in the south who were contemplating taking up arms; the kind of prelude to conflict Keane said he has witnessed in war zones all over the world once a radicalising moment makes ‘old history’ come to the fore.
Keane’s research of the Bureau of Military Archives Witness Statements also unearthed moments he describesd as “shared humanity” in time of civil war in North Kerry. Personal testimonies of kindness and compassion just moments before an execution is carried out provide a haunting narrative which is delivered with poignancy by Keane.
“Every act is the act of an individual. The effect of killing has a very two-way effect in that it also haunts the person who pulls the trigger,” Keane told his audience.
The event concluded with a standing ovation for Fergal after he took a number of questions from the floor. He was fortright in response to one questioner who asked how he felt about being a war correspondent.
“War disgusts me. Some journalists get a kick out of war reporting but my mission is to write it from a point of history.”
‘Wounds: a Memoir of Love & War’ will be published in September.