Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 4, April 1980

The train of events leading to the present crisis had been set in motion several weeks before by a group of American Senators on a whirlwind fact-finding tour of Ulster and the Irish Republic. Like so many spinsters who feel qualified to advise on child care, these men proposed a simple solution to the six hundred year old Irish problem. They called for a meeting to clear the air, promote understanding. A chat around a table between leaders: political, para-military, church, including the Ulsterman Sean McNulty, the Protestant spellbinder whose sermons bore little trace of ‘Love thy neighbor’ should the neighbor embrace the Roman faith.

After much televised posturing and discussion at the UN, Westminster, and the Irish Dail, an agreement was reached. A time was set for the historic meeting that would forever lay sectarian unrest. Everything would be sweetness and light between Ulster and Eire, if one were to believe the good Senators in whose heads visions of the Irish-American vote danced like sugar plums.

To cut a long story short, an unknown para-military organization selected the meeting as the ideal occasion to make its name famous in song and story by eliminating Sean McNulty. The fact that the meeting was to be held in Dublin made the challenge convenient for the O’Houlihans, as the group called itself. Being more gung-ho than organized, the young men concerned parked their Hondas on Dawson Street, two blocks from the seat of the Irish Parliament, Leinster House, and made their way through police and protesters. Two of them were armed with revolvers jammed into pockets of raincoats similar to those worn at the time of the Easter Uprising. Another carried a strange arrangement of hand grenades wired together and camouflaged with a rumpled Tricolor, the flag of the Irish Freestate.

Eyes sharp above still downy cheeks, the three O’Houilhans: Arne Condon, Pauric Ryan and Bill Slattery waited in a prearranged formation near the gates that would place the motorcade within the sights of their crossfire. Around them the various factions held their protest aloft on placards, each group chanting: OUT BRITS or IRELAND THIRTY-TWO COUNTIES or OUT MCNULTY OUT OUT OUT. UP THE IRA added chorus to the choir.

As it turned out the assassination attempt was a fiasco in which three Irish Senators and four bystanders, including a pregnant woman, were blown into tweezer-sized bits to be collected in plastic bags. Unbelievably, the driver of the car sustained only minor injuries and, along with seven onlookers, was taken off to the hospital. Sean McNulty, the object of the exercise, trotted unscathed into the safety of Leinster House.

Some mix-up in the order of official limousines had turned the Senators’ black Mercedes, identical to the one in which McNulty rode, into the procession ahead of that carrying the Ulsterman. As the wrong limousine pulled into position, Condon and Ryan fired. Slattery pulled a pin and threw the ‘bomb’. In the ensuing melee Slattery and Ryan were arrested. Condon, dodging capture like a goal-bound footballer, gained his motorcycle and played fox to a pack of ululating police cars in a hair-raising chase through the streets of South Dublin. At last, with the law hot on his wheels, now spinning away the last drops of gas, Arne Condon abandoned the Honda and holed up in the Clinic.

At gun point he took over the pre-school playroom at the front of the central building where he found the three children and two female adults that he took as hostages. Condon allowed the building to be emptied of spina bifidas and spastics, mongols and the retarded. Along with the clinic employees, some were loaded into buses and driven off to safety, others were taken to the library to wait for transportation.

Five o’clock came. Six. Arne Condon, barricaded into the playroom remained incommunicado while the forces of law and order gathered.

At seven o’clock he opened the window slightly to shout for food. He held little Sandra Flynn against his chest in the fashion that was to become so chillingly familiar over the next hours and shouted that sandwiches would do and not to try anything strange or he’d blow a hole through the child’s head.

At seven twenty-five Ban Garda Kate Fallon, wearing civilian clothes, set a bag of ham and chicken sandwiches, three bottles of milk and a thermos of sugared tea on the window sill. Condon watched her through the glass, gun resting on the leather harness that fastened on the heavy calipers Sandy wore. “Okay, turn and walk away quickly,” Condon’s voice was barely audible through the glass.

By eight o’clock a canvas shelter had been raised at the far side of the courtyard. Inside, the parents of the three children waited. Outdoor lighting was plugged in through the windows in the wings of the Clinic that reached to the wrought-iron fence on either side of the large square of tarmac.

Nine o’clock. Time dragged; cold April rain shown silver in the artificial light. Ten o’clock.