Page 210 of The Missing Sister

UCD STUDENT JAILED FOR ARSON ON PROTESTANT HOUSE

Bobby Noiro, a twenty-two-year-old student of Irish Politics at UCD, has been sentenced to three years in jail for attempting to burn down a house in Drumcondra. Telling the court he was a member of the Provisional IRA, Mr Noiro pleaded guilty to arson. The house was unoccupied at the time.

During sentencing, Mr Noiro had to be restrained as he attempted to break free of the guards. During the struggle, he shouted IRA slogans and made threats against leading members of the Democratic Unionist Party, the DUP.

On sentencing him, Mr Justice Finton McNalley said that he was taking into account Noiro’s youth and the fact that he may have been influenced by his peer group.

Judge McNalley also cited the fact that nobody was injured in the fire. The Provisional IRA has denied any part in the attack.

‘Helen...’ I looked up at her. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Does it surprise you?’

‘If I’m honest, no. Was he released after his three years?’

‘Well, when Mammy first went to visit him in prison, she came back in bits, crying buckets. Said Bobby had been ranting and raving, and the guards had had to take him away. “He’s not well in the head, like your daddy,” I remember her saying. And sure,’ Helen sighed, ‘he caused so much strife in the jail that they moved him to a high-security prison where he could be better controlled. When he was released, they tried to re-introduce him to society, but he accused one of the men at the halfway house of being a “bastard Proddy” and tried to strangle him. After that, he was assessed and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was moved to the psychiatric hospital in Portlaoise in 1978. He’s never come out,’ she said grimly, ‘and nor will he. After Mammy died, I went up to see him. I’m not sure he recognised me, Merry. He sat there and cried like a baby.’

‘I... I’m so sorry, Helen.’

‘Turns out the madness runs in the family. You won’t be knowing this, but Cathal, our daddy, committed suicide; he set fire to our barn, then hung himself inside it. Mammy also told me that our Great-Uncle Colin – Christy’s brother – was stone mad too, and ended up in an asylum. That’s why Christy came to live on the farm after his mammy died of influenza and grew up with Nuala and her brothers and sisters.’

‘Bobby told me your daddy had died in a barn fire, an accident,’ I breathed. ‘Maybe that’s what he was told by your mammy.’

‘Yes, we both were, Merry, though I was just a babe when it happened. Did Bobby ever... how can I put this? Hurt or threaten you?’

‘He did, yes,’ I said, and the words came out of me like a boulder that had held back a river of emotion. ‘He’d found out about... something I’d done that he didn’t approve of. He had a gun, Helen, which he said had been given to him by the Provisional IRA. He put it to my throat... and... and said that if I carried on seeing this boy he didn’t like, h-he’d have him and all my family sh-shot by the people he knew in his terrorist organisation.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘Of course I did, Helen! Back then, the Troubles were just beginning. Tension was running high in Dublin, and I knew how passionate Bobby was about the North being returned to the Republic of Ireland, and his anger at the way the Catholics were treated across the border. He’d joined one of the more radical student groups at UCD and was always asking me to go with him on his protests.’

‘Merry, I think he must have used the old pistol that had belonged to Finn, our grandmother Nuala’s first husband. She kept it and passed it on to our father, Cathal. When he committed suicide, it passed into Bobby’s hands. So now, I suppose he wasn’t lying to you if he said that it had been given to him by the IRA, but it certainly wasn’t during the recent Troubles. ’Twas ninety years old, Merry, and I doubt Bobby knew how to load it, let alone fire it.’

‘Are you sure, Helen? I swear he was involved with what was going on at that time.’

‘As a student rebel, maybe, but no more. If he had been, the Provisional IRA would have taken great pride in announcing they were responsible for the burning of that Protestant house in Dublin. When I came up to support Mammy during the trial, I met one of his friends from UCD. We went for a chat and Con told me that everyone who knew him had been worried about his mental state. He’d lost his girl; I’m realising now he might have meant you...?’

‘I... I think he probably did but, Helen, I was never “his girl”. I mean, Bobby was a childhood friend,’ I sighed, ‘but everywhere I went, he seemed to be there. My friend Bridget used to call him my stalker.’

‘That would be Bobby, all right,’ said Helen. ‘He’d have fixations and would have believed that youwerehis girl, and that he was part of the Provisional IRA. But it was all in his mind, Merry, and as the psychiatrists I’ve talked to since have told me, it was part of the delusions.’

‘I never, ever gave him any kind of sign that I wanted to be with him in a romantic way, Helen, I swear,’ I said, gulping back tears. ‘But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then when he found out about me and my boyfriend,andthat he was a Protestant, he said he’d kill us and our families. So I left Ireland and went abroad. Ever since then, I’ve lived in fear, because he told me he and his friends would hunt me down wherever I tried to hide.’

‘Leaving was probably the sensible thing to do,’ Helen nodded. ‘There was no doubt Bobby was a violent man when he was in the grip of one of his episodes. But as for his IRA terrorist friends hunting you down – ’twas all nonsense. His friend Con confirmed that. When the police interviewed one of the real Provisional IRA mob after the fire, he swore blind he’d never even heard of Bobby Noiro.’ She took a sip of coffee, sympathy in her eyes. ‘So you left, but what about your boyfriend? Him being Protestant and all – now that was like a red rag to a bull for Bobby.’

The boulder had settled back in my stomach again, and I could barely speak. ‘We lost touch,’ I managed, because that was a different story. ‘I married someone else and was happy in New Zealand.’

‘Ah, ’tis good you found a home and a husband, so,’ said Helen. ‘There now, Merry, you have every right to be upset,’ she said, reaching out to put her hand over mine. ‘’Twas terrible what Bobby put you through,’ she continued, ‘but the signs were always there, weren’t they? Like on all those walks home, he’d be racing like a mad thing across the field ahead of us, hide in the ditch, then as we passed by, spring out and shout, “Bang! You’re dead!” ’Twas a childhood game that became a lifelong obsession, fuelled by our grandmother and all her talk of war. I don’t often go to see him, but now Mammy’s dead, ’tis me who gets the reports from the hospital. He still talks about the revolution, as if he’s part of it...’ She shut her eyes for a moment and I took a deep breath, simply glad to be with someone who understood exactly who the person that had haunted me for so long actually was.

‘Did he harm you, Helen?’

‘No, thanks be to God, he didn’t, but I’d learnt from the cradle to be invisible. If he was in one of his tempers, I’d take myself off and hide. Mammy protected me too; what a terrible life she had, what with Daddy not right in the head, then her son. I do remember her saying...’

‘What?’

‘Well, how upset she’d been that your mam, Maggie, hadn’t come to Daddy’s funeral. He was her half-brother after all – Nuala’s son with Christy. I’d reckon that was the reason we were never allowed to come near Cross Farm.’

‘Family members not turning up for funerals has caused a lot of grief in our family,’ I sighed.