On a summer’s night in July 1976 two women walked home from the bingo in the Ancient order of Hibernians Hall in Randalstown, Co. Antrim. They were deep in conversation about who won the bingo and how close they had come to winning. As they passed the village butcher shop ,which had been in the same family for five generations, a simple sign in black and white was evident above their heads. “Apprentice butcher required. No Catholics Need Apply’. If the women had chanced to look over the hedge, on the side of the road, as they passed they would have spotted a twenty year old man crouched low in the grass. Though the night was warm, the M1 Garland rifle trembled slightly in his hands. Hearing the women discuss the bingo the thought went through his mind “that’s normal life and you have a chance of being part of that normal life; instead you are waiting in a hedge for a police Land Rover to come along” (Irish Times). A half an hour earlier, as he was leaving home, he had watched through the window, his mother Margaret and his father George watching The High Chapparal.
Every day we make decisions in life, some small, some by necessity, some of no consequence, some with huge consequences.When that young lad leaped over the hedge to attack the RUC Land Rover, his life would change forever.
In 2016, forty years later, almost to the day, I stood on the pier at Rerrin, on magical Bere Island, in West Cork, on a hazy July evening waiting for the ferry to dock. Lost in thought I felt a tap on the shoulder and a strong (its always strong in comparison to the Cork accent) but gentle northern accent said “Are you Geoff, I’m Laurence McKeown.“That young man in the hedge in Randalstown had come a long way in those forty years.
After the attack on that Land Rover Laurence was given a prison sentence of sixteen years in Long Kesh. Laurence served those 16 years, five of them naked under a blanket, the walls covered in excrement, no television, lights out at seven, regular beatings, a seventy day hunger strike and a coma which ended with his mother Margaret saving his life, by taking him off the strike.
Laurence was on Bere Island to promote his play Those You Pass On The Street. After finishing his term at Long Kesh he went to Queen’s University and did a Doctorate and began writing. He is involved with a group in the North of Ireland called Healing Through Remembering who strive to ‘deal with the legacy of the past’.
Coincidently the cove that Laurence had just arrived at is called Lawrence Cove. The island was one of the last locations in Ireland handed back by the British in 1938 and here was Laurence, telling his story in, ironically, what was once one of the largest British Army bases in Ireland. Beara people don’t suffer fools gladly and their post-show questions left no stone unturned resulting in a facinating night for all.
There is always a danger with someone like Laurence that his work would be eternally linked to his past but thankfully for him, Laurence is being nurtured and developed by a great theatre company called Kabosh Theatre in Belfast, under the stewardship of Director, Paula McFettridge.
His new play Green & Blue is confirmation that Laurence is a playwright. While the play is based on the border between the North and the South and the main characters an Irish Garda and an RUC man it is much more about decisions we make and how we can fall into wearing a uniform and that ‘uniform’, be it worn by a Garda, a soldier, a nurse or a national teacher, can define our lives. Laurence’s past defines him now as a playwright and he has the potential to say a great deal on the stage. Like the old Chinese folk tale A Blessing in Disguise states ‘you should not lose your will to continue if an unlucky event happens’, thankfully Laurence McKeown didn’t.
Citations:
Moriarty, Gerry.The Irish Times.’A Former IRA gunman and hunger striker tells his story’. Saturday, August 13th, 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/a-former-ira-gunman-and-hunger-striker-tells-his-story-1.2754240. Newspaper.
The Bay Wolf 