A requiem for an Irish revolutionary
And the bohemian world of my childhood
My first memory of Mick is not actually a memory of Mick. It’s a memory of a prison — the infamous La Santé in Paris, which my father took me to on his first visit to meet Mick, in February 1983.
I remember walking with my parents down the dank hallways, my mother translating for my father at various security check points manned by surly guards. Having reached the inner part of the prison, my father went on without us, to meet Mick and interview him in his capacity as a journalist. I — a little girl of seven years of age — remember to this day how relieved I was to be out of such a dark, frightening building. My father would later recount that, when he finally got into the room where the interview was to take place, Mick lunged at him in a rage — mistaking my father for someone who had double-crossed his side in one of the many feuds that plagued Irish republicanism. True to both Mick and my father’s character, though, they went on not just to make peace, but become friends.
Mick Plunkett was a family friend who died last month. I hadn’t seen him for ten years, but he was a presence in my childhood and my youth and I was very fond of him.
He was also a left-wing revolutionary.
The political world that Mick Plunkett grew up in, fought for, and to which he gave the prime of his life, is long gone. It predeceased him by several decades. The bloody struggles of his generation are just a footnote in history now, and the Ireland that he and his comrades fought for no longer exists.
The Ireland that is in its place is unrecognisable, in ways good and bad. The hated border still divides the island, of course. The southern side is a model of corporate progressivism: all shiny and inclusive and right-thinking on the surface — riven with an ugly economic imbalance and all its attendant ill-effects underneath. Ostensibly the “Free State” but actually totally beholden to EU bureaucrats. On the plus side, people are no longer blowing each other up, and women are no longer being locked up in indentured servitude by priests in league with the state, so that is good.
At Mick’s funeral last month, there was plenty of opportunity for reflection on this sea-change. It was the best funeral I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to many. Whisky and tobacco on the coffin and a friend singing a moving rendition of an Elvis song at the service. Thankfully, Mick had the good sense to walk away from his Irish Republican paramilitary affiliations thirty years ago, recognising its descent into pointless murder. So there was no hypocritical peans to the “freedom fighter” cause that killed thousands of people. There was, though, a somber, if modest, tribute to the left-wing politics that Mick had fought for, growing up as a working-class kid from a big family in a port town outside of Dublin. There was also a recognition of the state retaliation he experienced. In Mick’s case, that included torture and being framed for a terrorist attack he had nothing to do with, and spending a year in that horrible French prison.
We got to know Mick mostly in Paris, where he lived in the same bohemian milieu my parents cultivated in New York and in Italy. At his funeral I met a woman my age, whose father is a Dutch artist who befriended Mick in the 1970’s. Like me, she felt close enough to Mick — despite not having seen him in years — to want to travel to his funeral to say goodbye. Together, she and I shared stories of the fun we had with him as kids, how he always was happy to see us and made us feel included.
We also shared another common experience: how different things were for kids like us in the 1980’s, the children of bohemians, artists and itinerants. How convivial and adventurous our lives were, with parents who seemed to fear nothing other than conventionality, or boredom. Friends would turn up in the middle of the night, unannounced, for a weeks-long visit, and they would be welcomed with open arms — beds made up on couches and on floors for the kids, bottles of wine opened for the grown-ups.
Maybe there are still families like us out there: not trust-fund hippies or conspiracy theorists living off the grid but yet outside the mainstream, political but not tied to a party, artistic but not beholden to a government grants or non-profit jobs. But I doubt it. I genuinely think that world is gone.
Once, when I was only thirteen, I travelled alone on an overnight train from Rome to Paris. Mick met me at Gare de Lyon and squired me about the city all day, carrying my suitcase, chain-smoking and drinking coffee and regaling me with stories. He treated me — just a kid — as his equal, as his friend. It was both a comfort, as I was nervous about being alone in a big city, and a thrill. At the end of the day, before dropping me off at my next destination, he pulled a cassette tape out of the pocket of his jean jacket. It was a copy of Sinead O’Connor’s first album, The Lion and the Cobra. I went on to listen to her music obsessively throughout my adolescence.
From the perspective of a parent in 2022, this is almost unthinkable. That a) I spent a night in a sleeper car with five strangers, all adults, on an overnight train at the age of thirteen and b) that my chosen chaperone upon my arrival was a man with a lengthy history of, shall we say, negative interactions with law enforcement. But none of that was a worry to my parents. And I have a cool story as a result.
When we became friends with Mick, in the early ‘80’s, his companion was a woman active in Irish socialist politics: Mary Reid, who died in 2003. Mary was a teacher and a pamphleteer of ferocious intelligence, a warm heart and a wild spirit, and she was also caught up in the police framing scandal that came to be known in France as Les Irlandais de Vincennes. Along with Mick, she was dragged away by French police as her young son watched, and she spent a year in prison for a heinous crime against the Parisian Jewish community that she and Mick had nothing to do with.
My father wrote extensively about the scandal — which reverberated through the upper echelons of the French state until the 1990’s — and he wrote a book about the ill-fated attempt by Mick and others to forge a working-class revolution through the lens of Irish republicanism and all-island unity. And while my father maintained a cold contempt for the pious hypocrisies of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, he always had a soft spot for a tiny handful of working-class lefties of the 1970’s Irish republican movement, like Mick and maybe two others, even as he chronicled the wider movement’s debasement and cruelties as it bombed and shot its way into political irrelevance.
After hearing that Mick had died, I found a photograph taken by my mother in 1985 or 86 of the three of them sitting together a table in Paris — Mick, Mary, and my father. Three brilliant Irish people from extremely humble backgrounds who each played a different role in the conflict that tore their tiny country apart. Mick — a participant; Mary, a propagandist, and my father, a somewhat neutral observer who recorded it all of posterity.
I like to think of them all together now, reunited for one more wine-drenched debate.
