There is a part of Kildare that for ever will be England. Turn right off a main road in west Wicklow, then left, pass through a crossroads, then turn right again and down a narrow road where one county feathers into the next, to a handsome house overlooking the Barretstown demesne. “Four out of five people fail to follow the instructions and get lost,” barks Ireland’s most reviled columnist on the phone. “Mainly women, I have to say.”
Beyond the electrified fence, a Kerry blue terrier scampers around the gravelled drive as Kevin Myers emerges from the house. “The fence is to keep the dogs in,” he says. Inside the house, Broccoli, the dog, pads around the kitchen as Myers makes coffee. A Fortnum & Mason hamper sits in one corner, a Home Counties complement to the tasteful Victorian salvage decor of the house that Rachel, his wife, designed. It is a perfect rural idyll, yet almost as soon as he begins to speak there is a palpable sense of siege; three times in as many hours, he describes himself as a wounded man.
It’s a consequence, in part, of the controversy that dare not speak its name, as Myers refuses to discuss, directly at least, the especially piquant column in The Irish Times last year in which he referred to children born outside marriage as bastards and warned of the social dangers of fatherless families. “From such warped timber, true masts are seldom hewn,” as he put it.
As phone-in programmes and other outlets fed a frenzy of protest, Geraldine Kennedy, The Irish Times’s editor, scrambled to limit the damage with two rambling justifications of her decision to publish it. Eventually, earlier this year, Myers moved to the Irish Independent.
“The lynch mob forms every second week in Ireland now and looks for a target,” says Myers. “It has become habitual. Do we have calm, dispassionate dissection of issues? No, we don’t. We have emotionally violent hysteria. Real issues get lost in the heat of emotion. I’m not saying I’m innocent in all of this, but we’ve got serious issues ahead. People dare not discuss immigration because they’re called racist, as I was last year by Michael D Higgins, an allegation faithfully carried by The Irish Times.
“I’m a human being, I get things wrong. I use language that is sometimes wrong. I don’t deliberately try to lose the argument by using stupid words. I have lost arguments. But one is entitled to make mistakes. Unless you make mistakes, you get nothing right. You live within the consensus and go nowhere.”
It’s a belief forged 35 years ago in the nihilistically violent stasis of the Northern Ireland conflict. After graduating with a history degree from University College Dublin he was hired by the RTE newsroom despite his lack of journalistic experience. Sent to Belfast in 1971, he worked a grim frontline beat for which he quickly showed an aptitude. “I was determined to see as much of the action as I could,” he says.
The memoir of his seven years in Belfast, Watching the Door, is one of the most extraordinary Irish books of recent years. In part it is the coming-of-age story of a sex-crazed satyr developing an intimate relationship with alcohol. “I was ravenous for women the whole time,” says Myers. “I was a handsome young man and not unsuccessful with women.” However, his sexual adventures are just the interludes in a relentless catalogue of death and suffering, for which Lost Lives, co-authored by David McKittrick and three others and published in 1999, is the palimpsest.
Prior to Belfast, the closest Myers had come to death was at the age of 15, when his father died. By the time he left the city he had seen eight people die alongside him; apart from those, 40 people of his acquaintance were killed in the conflict. “I saw too much violence,” he says. “You can’t see that much violence and not be affected. You can’t see a boy being shot beside you and not be affected. Maybe this book will explain to people why I write what I write.”
The son of a doctor who moved to England from Dublin during the second world war, Myers grew up in Leicester. “One of the caricatures about me is that I’m Anglo Irish,” he says. “I’m the English-born son of a GP. I can’t be Irish in the way you are.”
At UCD he was an isolated figure, made more so by what he describes as his aloof manner and supercilious speech. Having slumped academically after the death of his father, he expected to scrape a pass degree at best, but instead left with first class honours. With no career in mind — he says his only interests were women and socialism. “I would have tested positive on all the symptoms of leftiness,” he says.
At RTE he impatiently left for Belfast in February 1971 after two months’ training just as the Provisional IRA began an armed campaign that was to last 26 years. “I thought the Troubles would end in 18 months,” he says. “We all did. Nobody had any idea of what was unfolding.”
He witnessed his first killing on May 22 that year. Earlier that Friday afternoon he had spotted a report in The Belfast Telegraph about stone-throwing youngsters stopping a police patrol in the Markets area of the city. He suspected they were a decoy for an ambush. Myers got a taxi to the Markets, arriving at Cromac Street just as an army patrol came under fire. Robert Bankier of the Royal Green Jackets was already hit and died as he looked directly at Myers.
“Every day of my life I go back to Cromac Square and that man’s death. One man died because I did not act on what I suspected was going on. There is no way I can resolve that. I was deeply traumatised. I went back to my bedroom, sat down on my bed and cried. There was no way I could have prevented the killing and have been an honourable journalist, because it would have been to intervene and that is something we cannot do.”
In another incident, in July 1972, he chanced upon an IRA ambush on Shaws Road just as an army foot patrol threaded its way towards it. As the patrol drew closer, Myers took cover behind his car door and switched on his tape recorder, reinforcing what he describes as his passive complicity.
“I can’t say there was a legitimate war going on, but there was a war going on,” he says. “If I was prepared to warn a British Army patrol of an ambush, would I be prepared to play that role indefinitely? And how long would I remain alive had I done that? Two soldiers were shot. I could have prevented that, but at the cost of my own life. I feel guilty. I live with the consequences of having done nothing.”
When not working, Myers tended to avoid the company of other journalists, preferring to socialise with republican and loyalist paramilitaries, a few of whom became friends. “Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle, who became a friend of mine, ran killing gangs,” he says. “The UDA killing gangs from the Shankill, of which Lyttle was a member, beat their victims for hours and then killed them. He was a violent man, but I liked him. I liked my (IRA) friend Seamus, whom I had seen shoot a soldier. One of the lessons you learn about Northern Ireland is that nice people do terrible things. Seldom did I come across people who were conspicuously evil.”
One figure whom Myers regards as evil, a UDA commander whom he calls Rab Brown, came close to killing him at the end of a night’s drinking. Myers was tipped off by one of the killer’s associates while having a pee and escaped out of the side door of the pub.
Another time, in a pub on Donegall Street, a visit to the lavatory saved him when the premises were bombed, killing two. “I didn’t die that day because a man stopped me while I was having a piss,” says Myers, before suddenly breaking down. “The Donegall Street explosion comes back to me,” he says after a moment.
After helping the ambulance crews following the bombing, Myers went home and got drunk with two women friends. “I did two 45-second reports for NBC (for whom he was a freelance reporter). Then I got hammered and got up the next morning and continued working.
“I recognise now I was traumatised and should have had counselling. The drinking I did subsequently, in Dublin in the 1980s, was horrifying. When I went to Belfast first I didn’t drink, not even a glass of port on Christmas Day. I knew nothing about alcohol when I went to Belfast, but by f*** I knew about it when I left. I’d sit up drinking until quarter to four in the morning. Quarter to four was my cut-off point. I’m not sure I’ve dealt with the trauma. When I wrote the book I thought I was exorcising something rather more completely than has been the case.”
Myers resigned on principle from RTE in 1972 after the government sacked the RTE Authority following the broadcast of an interview with Sean McStiofan, the IRA’s chief of staff. Myers expected others to follow but none did. “I was dismayed by the moral dishonesty of my colleagues. They said, ‘We’ve got to take action,’ but they were just lying.”
As he began to establish himself in print journalism, he began a relationship with a women to whom he gives the pseudonym Roisin, a doctor with whom he was besotted.
“I was madly, madly in love,” he says. Gradually she grew bored with him, however, and as he became more desperate to maintain the relationship, she became more disdainful. In addition she had been diagnosed with a progressive illness, only for it to turn out to be a one-off episode. “That was the hinge of my life,” he says. “ Roisin getting what turned out not to be a progressive illness.” He abandoned a move to The Observer in London and bought a house in Belfast but all in vain, as Roisin dumped him.
“The break-up flattened me,” he says. “I was a broken-hearted man for fully five years and was incapable of engaging with anyone emotionally for six, seven years. I was just passionately in love with her and it came to nothing. She’s not to blame. She had to take the decision she took. She wasn’t to know it was going to be so devastating.
“I had no career, no girlfriend, no means of living. I had sacrificed it all in a couple of months of folly. That is the platform from which the rest of my life took off.”
He left Belfast in 1978 and began working shifts on The Irish Times the following year, going on to report from Sarajevo and Beirut and to become a columnist, phases of his life to be included in a follow-up volume. “It took me many years to recover,” he says. “But I was alive whereas thousands were not because of the violence. And that was a corrective to whatever self-pity I felt."
Watching the Door is published by Lilliput
