Getting to Good Friday by Marilynn Richtarik;

Author:Marilynn Richtarik; [Richtarik, Marilynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192886415
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Marilynn Richtarik, Oxford University Press.

© Marilynn Richtarik 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886408.003.0005

5

Drafting

‘On Bloomsday 1997,’ scholar Joseph Kelly recalls, ‘Danis Rose set off a bomb in the Joyce community by publishing his “Reader’s Edition” of Ulysses’, in which he ‘corrected all the mistakes that he found, even those made by Joyce, with the same license and authority that any editor would bring to bear on a manuscript submitted by a contemporary author’. The edition provoked an outraged reaction from Joyceans who hardly believed their idol capable of mistakes and were used to interpreting the novel’s words and phrases as if there were profound intention behind each one. Seamus Deane took a comparatively tolerant view of Rose’s enterprise, viewing it as ‘one of the most important editions’ of Ulysses ‘in a long time’. As a leading Joyce scholar, Deane attended the book’s launch and stood at ground zero of the controversy, but he found himself distracted by a literal rather than a metaphorical act of terror. In a crowded Dublin pub on 16 June, Deane heard ‘fragments of TV news’ about two policemen dead in Lurgan and thought ‘it must be a program that was replaying old footage’, but it ‘nagged at’ him that he could not recall any such incident: ‘It was only at dinner afterward that I heard the details and the full realization dawned.’ Journalist Deaglán de Bréadún recounts that two men had run up behind the policemen late that morning and ‘shot them in the head at point-blank range’, leaving ‘five children under ten without fathers’ and generating ‘a wave of helplessness and apprehension in the community at large, heightened by the fact that the annual Drumcree church parade by the Orange Order in nearby Portadown was now only three weeks away’.1

The predictably ‘anarchic’ effect of these killings, de Bréadún explains, raised suspicion that ‘a dissident element’ within the IRA was ‘trying to sabotage the peace process’.2 This was the only explanation that made any sense. On 1 May, the British general election had resulted in a resounding win for the Labour Party, pleasing republicans frustrated with John Major’s Conservative government. Sinn Féin had won two Westminster seats and 16 per cent of the overall vote—the third-highest share in Northern Ireland, ahead of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—and the party had gained twenty-three seats in council elections three weeks later. The new British government, headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, had indicated at once that the decommissioning issue would not be used to bar republicans from talks if the IRA renewed its ceasefire. Indeed, Sinn Féin delegations had already had two meetings with British officials in the Northern Ireland Office, the first such encounters in over a year. Furthermore, after a general election in the Republic on 6 June, Fianna Fáil’s Bertie Ahern appeared likely to replace John Bruton as Taoiseach, another change welcomed by republicans. Despite these promising developments at a time when, as Deane noted, ‘any

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