A Decent Bomber
A Decent Bomber follows the fortunes of former IRA bomb-maker turned farmer Pat O’Carolan. Pat has spent the past thirty years or so on his smallholding up on the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary, looking after his 25 head of milch cows and generally getting away from the ghosts of his all too bloody past. He’s nicely settled down, thank you, his peaceful existence occasionally enlivened by visits from his favourite niece, red-headed beauty Orla. Studying animal husbandry at university in Dublin, Orla is to inherit the farm (not that Pat’s told her) when the time comes.
Meanwhile, Pat’s old colleagues in the ‘Ra’ have gone all political - Sean Driscoll is up for election and he and right hand man Brian MacNamara are all about the future and electoral solutions. The ballot-box instead of the gun, that sort of stuff. Pat and his like, the old strong-arm brigade buried firmly in the past, are something of an embarrassing anachronism as Sean and Brian get ready for political victory.
So when Dessie Quinlan, the man who has all the codes and knows all the caches, is murdered things rather hit the fan - because there aren’t supposed to be any caches anymore, not since Good Friday and all that love-in stuff - and Sean Driscoll would really rather the whole cache thing didn’t blow up - if you know what I mean - just before the hard-fought election that’s going to put him in power.
But as it turns out, that’s Sean’s bad luck, because Quinlan’s dead and he sang like a blood-spattered canary before he died and now a bunch of crazy Somali terrorist/extortionists not only know that Pat is the man who made the Manchester bomb, the one-tonne nightmare that blew the heart of the city, but they know where all the Semtex is, too. And they’re going to use anything they can to ensure that Pat makes them bombs like he used to make for the ‘Ra’ back in the day - including abducting Orla.
Things get pretty messy, pretty quickly…
Old terror vs new terror
A Decent Bomber is about a number of things, but at its core is the idea of old terror vs new terror, about how today’s terrorists aren’t actually very good - while the IRA were very, very good at what they did. I’m not condoning it for one second, but they sustained a decades-long campaign against the might of a G7 nation and its very well developed security apparatus and in the process developed some devastatingly effective techniques not only of acquiring, building and deploying viable weapons but also of managing and maintaining an effective organisation to deploy them.
My freedom fighter is your terrorist, by the way. The organisations that fought to establish Israel, the Haganah and the Stern Gang, were declared terrorists by the British. The French resistance were terrorists to the Germans. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist to the South African government. And so on, and so on. People who fight for change are almost always ‘terrorists’ until they become the change.
So we have the idea of a ‘decent’ bomber - decent in Irish slang is a compliment, ‘He’s a decent enough fellow’, it can mean pleasant, good, even effective. And in English, of course, it means a moral and respectable person. Pat, of course, is both. And reconciling that is just the way things are, sometimes…
Meeting the RA
I was having a bit of a hard time getting A Decent Bomber ‘right’ and needed to do something to shake things up a bit. I didn’t quite realise how much I would end up shaking things, but it was all for the best in the end…
Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had originally written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it and was somewhat cartoonish - and sent me back to the drawing board. It was all arranged by my sister-in-law who knew Brendan through her work in local government. She suggested the meeting when I was sharing that I didn’t think the whole thing was gelling - and boy, did she have the right idea.
I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting in his house, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the mantlepiece as he set down a coffee for me and posed the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?' in a thick Northern Irish accent.
Ulp.
It was pretty illuminating, that meeting. Brendan went down in Long Kesh and served 15 years of a (if memory serves me right) 27-year sentence. I asked him if he’d had time off for good behaviour and he barked laughter. “Good behaviour? Are youse fucking kidding me? We burned the fucking prison down!”
You sort of need to do that in a Norn Iron accent. It’s probably the best accent in the world for threatening violence, which in itself is part of the whole tragedy of the thing. Brendan opened my eyes to what it was actually like to be on the lam, on the wrong side of the law in a strung out conflict with a G7 nation’s security services ranged against you.
Our time together went in a flash. Fiercely intelligent, blunt and dispassionate about his long detention, Brendan talked about how the Brits would patrol the hilly areas around the border, how it felt to be on the run, the checkpoints and crossings, being the subject of a hit that, thankfully, went wrong. The overwhelming force arrayed against him and his ragtag comrades, jinking from one house to the next, nicking guns and passing information to each other to avoid the next clamp-down or raid. A life on the run for a cause that somehow got lost in the fear and challenge of each fresh moment.
I happened to mention the meeting had taken place to a friend of ours who hails from a Unionist tradition at a party in Dubai one night. She walked out and hasn’t spoken to me since. It’s a bit like Beirut - the fire’s out, but there’s heat underneath them there white ashes…
Things that go ‘bang’
It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.
Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate, semtex, plastic tubing and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...
I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...
My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself. They’re both wonderful places to be seriously pissed in. Hamra is in Beirut, which you’d know if you’d read Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Ahem.
It was all a bit like researching Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends in that very village high up in the mountains - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march that took place the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street. Novel research gold, right there - even with an evil hangover.
Beginnings
A Decent Bomber all started with me teasing my wife, Sarah, who is from Tipperary, about how her inoffensive Uncle Pat who had a smallholding up in Cummermore was really a RA man sitting on a huge arms cache. One day I sort of thought, well, what if he actually was? After all, Pat was green enough as a younger man, in common with most people from South Tip.
Pretty soon, Uncle Pat turned into, well, Pat. They never did find the fellows that made and planted the Docklands and Manchester bombs, the two largest explosions ever on the British mainland. So the idea that the people who made those huge bombs - each weighting in at about a tonne of explosive - would be farming somewhere in Tipperary is hardly far-fetched. And there have been finds of caches since Good Friday, too. Don’t tell me there aren’t more out there.
Like many other aspects of this whole writing thing, truth turns out stranger than fiction. Pat, bless him, ended up being put in care for his dementia and Sarah’s Uncle Roger has been managing the farm. We were up visiting a couple of years ago - this was years after I’d written A Decent Bomber, and standing chatting in the yard I spotted something green and conical and evil. “Jesus, Roger,” says I, “That’s the head of a rocket propelled grenade!”
“Is that what it is?” says Roger, fetching the thing a kick. “I did wonder.”
I shit you not. Kicked it. And what’s more, swear to God, he wondered why I ran away…
A cow. They’re quite big and actually reasonably hard to kill - unless, of course, you’re using an RPG…
Responsible
You do get some odd questions from people. I was once asked if it wasn’t irresponsible to show how to make a very large bomb in A Decent Bomber. The question sort of threw me, because if you’ve got a few tens of lengths of PVC tubing, a few kilos of Semtex, some radio activated detonators and a tonne of ammonium nitrate to hand, you probably don’t need much help from me.
Oh, and a large van or small truck. That usually helps.
I did a radio interview, in Dubai, about the book that happened to take place hot on the heels of a major terrorist incident in Paris, which was fun. Because the news was ‘too raw’, the decision was taken not to refer to terrorism or fundamentalism in the programme in an attempt to be sensitive to events taking place in Europe. I hasten to point out this wasn’t a ‘state censorship’ decision, it was all in the hands of the rather endearing booky types who ran the show. The whole thing left them with the interesting task of reviewing a book about a former terrorist who used to make bombs for a terrorist organisation who is coerced into resuming his old terrorist trade by a bunch of Somali and Arab terrorists. Without using the 'T' word. Which was fun, in its way…
Gosh, but you have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-bys of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.
And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.