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I
never got to meet Sean Kearney until the final year
of his life. He had reviewed a book on Joe Cahill
in Fortnight which interested me, and the magazine’s
editor, Malachi O’Doherty, suggested that I give
him a call some day. I did just that and he invited
me over to his home in North Belfast. It was a warm
Sunday afternoon last year and the tumours that would
finally overpower him had begun their remorseless
march through his body. Yet if they preoccupied him
he showed little sign of it. If his ordeal concentrated
his mind, it was on living purposefully rather than
on dying.
Much
of that first exchange took place through the medium
of Irish. I had never attained the level of fluency
that he had and he sensed it without saying as much.
We conversed easily because he had glided the conversation
down the levels to where I was comfortable. If there
seemed anything of the religious about Sean it was
his passion for the language. But even here his sense
of the secular prevailed and he remained resolutely
opposed to making Irish compulsory. Forcing sectional
values or preferences upon others was something he
found repellant. And when our conversation drifted
to topics associated with authoritarian imposition
his spirit would flare up in clear rebellion against
the 'saved and the sanctified' who believe they are
ideologically ordained to decide what the rest of
us should think, feel or do.
It
was an ethos that caused Provisional republicanism
to acquire an anathematised status in his eyes. On
the penultimate visit to him before his death, he
told me he had worked with Families Against Intimidation
and Terror (FAIT), a body that had vigorously challenged
the Provisional IRA on its use of punishment beatings.
Henry Robinson and Vincent McKenna were the names
that sprang to my mind when I thought of FAIT, not
Sean Kearney. But other republicans remember his involvement.
I had always despised the group and told him as much.
I said it was an NIO front - he accused me of peddling
Provo propaganda. He denounced the immorality of the
IRA beating innocent kids with iron bars and baseball
bats. I protested that I knew many on the receiving
end of a punishment beating, but none who were innocent.
He defended FAIT as being balanced in its criticism.
I asked him when had it ever spoken out about the
punishment attacks carried out by the Northern Ireland
Prison Service. And so we battled, lobbing charge
and counter-charge back and forth across the perspectival
net that divided us. Despite being gravely ill, his
eyes blazed with lucidity and his mental faculties
remained undiminished. The only thing we agreed upon
that day was that punishment beatings were tantamount
to torture and can have no place in post-caveman society.
But when we parted, it was on the most friendly of
terms.
Sean
Kearney had twice served prison terms for republicanism
in the 1950s. A short sentence in Crumlin Road and
then as an internee in the same jail. He devoured
books and told me it was through reading that he had
moved beyond republicanism towards a more leftist
politics. He judged the former to be imbued with right
wing Catholicism and narrow-minded self-righteousness.
When I asked him if he now described himself as a
socialist, he merely said he was a democrat. He seemed
to have little time for isms; the flesh, blood and
bones of people were what mattered.
Nor
had he time for religion. It struck me that he viewed
it as some form of mentally debilitating affliction
and was perplexed that people still clung to the smell
of incense and the comfort of crosses in today’s
material world. Being wholly averse to priestcraft
myself, there was nothing that he could say on that
topic that would strike me as disagreeable. Most inspirational
of all was that while he used up every second of life
productively, he had no fear of death. Last October,
in a very moving piece of writing in Fortnight, he
penned an article entitled ‘I am dying and I
can live with that.’ The last time I spoke with
him, about seven weeks before he died, he was preparing
to get married to his partner Liz that very weekend.
Sean
died last week. In his typical no-frills style he
donated his body to medical science. In death something
of him has managed to live on by ensuring that his
contribution to humanity lies in continuing to replenish
the fount of knowledge and reason he so valued while
alive. His task remains one of assisting in that process
through which 'free-thinking, independent men and
women, will defeat ignorance.' Now in his deep sleep,
his manner of retiring for the final night, should
reassure those of us still terrified of being tormented
and tortured by devils and gods once our lives elapse:
My
death won’t launch me into any ‘journey’
to confront demons or wrathful gods who might fling
me into hell fire or a limbo of tortured souls consumed
with hatred and fear. On the contrary I consider
it the end of a journey. Many who choose to believe
in some mythical paradise or demonic hell, must
experience great apprehension and terror, based
on the fear of God’s wrath. For my part, I
know that nothing shall disturb my sleep, and that
when my body disintegrates there will be no soul
left, to be goaded and tortured in some after life,
in the way that non-believers were burned in medieval
times.
When
our time comes we only go to where we were before
we were conceived. And who has bad memories of that?
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