God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism, by Martin Dillon Orion, 320pp, £17.99 in UK
`Close the curtains, have a brandy, a good wank, and forget about what's out there!" This is the advice Father Pat Buckley claims he received from a fellow priest when he first arrived in Belfast. The anecdote at least has the merit of giving the Irish hierarchy something to concern itself with apart from the iniquities of Father Ted.
The story appears in Martin Dillon's book, one of his best books, an important work, containing interviews and material as disturbing as they are significant.
There is case of the loyalist murderer, Kenny McClintock, for example. McClin tock was "born again", partly because of a horrific incident he was involved in, partly because of the disillusionment expressed in one of his prison verses:
`Kill to stay British,' they pleaded hard.
To Britain you must be true."
Yet, most of the stick I am getting here,
Is coming from some English screw.
He finally became convinced that he was in a tug of war between Satan and the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit had triumphed when he survived an attack by Republicans in the prison tea hut: ". . . a bucket of boiling water was poured over me from behind. It stripped the skin from my neck and back. I was beaten with a hammer and lengths of wood. I lifted one of them up by the ankles and threw him over my damaged back, then ran at the rest of them, bowling them over. I ran out of that tea hut. When the burning water was poured over me, I never felt a thing . . . absolutely nothing. I knew I had been roasted."
One of the most important and intriguing figures in the ranks of loyalism is Billy Wright, the "King Rat", now in prison, who, along with David Trimble, played a large part in the first, critical confrontation at Drumcree. Wright, after his release from prison in 1983, had decided to "live quietly through Christ". Dillon, who conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with him, says that "the catalyst that returned him to a paramilitary lifestyle was the Anglo-Irish agreement of November 1985". Wright regarded the agreement "as a call to arms".
Wright said he felt like "an ex-alcoholic trying to live in a bar .. . I was emotionally torn in two. The British government betrayed our people, and our community had been rewarded with an act of treachery. I was gutted. It created bitterness in my heart, and I knew that was a contradiction in relation to trying to live a Christian life."
Protestants, Wright says, feel "their very existence" under threat. In taking up arms "they felt they were defending their faith also. They felt that the Roman Catholic Church or its people would take over Ireland in its totality, that the faith of the Protestant people would no longer exist. It's about a defence of the faith, its culture and its politics."
On the Catholic side, Dillon also has some terrifying insights. A priest told him: ". . . the minds of people prepared to kill and justify it to themselves are tortured minds, almost detached from the soul. I don't mean the soul is not there, but the connection is damaged. I alone can't repair it. I can only re-state the Christian message about love, forgiveness and the sin of killing. The leaders of society must embrace those principles so that society's own damaged soul can be repaired and, gradually, the souls of the tortured minds."
One such tortured mind was that of a parishioner to whom the priest was brought to administer the Last Rites by the IRA before they shot him: "You've got five minutes, Father. Don't try to be heroic or we'll kill both of you. Just get on with it." The victim was "badly bruised and his eyes were so swollen he could hardly see me . . . I put my arm around him. It seemed the only loving thing I could do. His lips were swollen and I heard him murmur `Please help me, Father'."
The priest heard his Confession, and then pleaded with one of his captors - whose voice he recognised - saying to him: "This is against the law of God." The man replied: "You look after the law of God, and we'll look after our business." The business finished in an unmarked grave.
The priest was limited in what he could say about the episode. Confession is the natural secret of the Church and any betrayal of what one learns in the Confessional is forbidden. That is part of the torture such episodes inflict on a priest. Another priest told Dillon: "There are two issues here. One is that I am taking the Confessional to someone. To play the role of the policeman would potentially lead to a situation in which other poor unfortunates are denied a priest. Then there is the society, divided as it is. If I play the policeman in my community, I put all priests at risk, I alienate myself and make it impossible to function. That's a harsh reality, but it is the reality. There is no way around it."
That priest had been brought, blindfolded, at the point of a gun, to a farmhouse. When the blindfold was removed he saw a sight from which nothing in the priesthood had prepared him: "In the kitchen a young man was being held down in a chair. His hair was caked in blood and I couldn't see his face. He was dressed in underpants." One of the armed men who had brought the priest to this scene cut through his protests: "Shut up and listen. He's a tout and we're gonna nut him. Now we've been kind enough to get you here, so do the business. We don't always do this."
The priest recalled: "I looked at the pitiful figure in front of me. He couldn't lift his head for the pain. Some of the bruises looked like cigarette burns. The only tears were mine. He couldn't cry or speak . . . Christ, what can anybody do in those circumstances? That young man never spoke. When I got up to go, he squeezed my hand. I didn't know how to reply . . . God was there in the serenity of that handshake."
This book should be read. If the peace process breaks down, there'll be more such handshakes.
Tim Pat Coogan has written a number of books on the IRA