Ireland's OWN: Women Freedom Fighters

Ireland's OWN:
Women Freedom Fighters

For Rosemary
—by Richard Harvey*

Upstairs your office window blazes in the night
the squat grey armored landrover outside
ploughs the rain-slick streets of Lurgan. The prowlers
snug in flak jackets, check their watches,
note the hour and share a filthy joke,
chalking it up to your account.

Is this the crew that also watched in Portadown
while thirty young men punched and stomped and kicked
the life of Robert Hamill into the gutter?
Are these the four fine guardians of the law
who never shouted stop, nor called for back-up,
Sat simply in their steel cocoon and stared
As if the horror of this young man's death
was a drive-in movie on their windshield?

Upstairs, you read on, conscious of their unseen stares,
You focus on your latest client's case,
The photo-spread of cigarette burns and bruises
Looks like a file straight out of Castlereagh
Was that perhaps where the woman's husband learned
The subtler ways to torture body and mind?
No, that was yesterday's case; the RIR man's wife.

This one's man did ten years in the Kesh
A blanket-man who said she'd never understand
The hell he'd been through. Who, when he got out,
went straight back on the drink night after night.
Then this. The word 'wife-abuse' can't start to capture
the sheer, humiliating, guilty pain she feels.

Before you came, who could they turn to
In the male preserve of lawyer, doctor, priest?
Whoever talked of women's rights back then?

And what did Travellers do, the outcast tribe
Hated for their separate way of life and culture
the equal opportunity butt of all discrimination,
those gypsies, tramps and whores, those thieves and tinkers
Whoever heard of Travellers' rights before,
Before Rosemary Nelson set up practice here?

And when the loyal orange lodge Grand Master
Decreed a march based on their ancient rights
Their age-old custom of besieging
a whole community, threatening death,
Intimidating people from their houses,
Seizing their streets in the Queen of England's name
What other lawyer dared step forward
To run the gauntlet of weapons pounded
On the car roof, of chanted threats and curses?
Who else dared speak the words "minority rights,"
paid house calls to Drumcree's Community Hall?

As you survey the rampart of your desk
Alone behind a barricade of files
There's one more issue you can't leave alone
Another dirty truth in thirty years of war;
The role played by the officers of the law
In engineering death and cover-up from the top.
Sam Marshall killed and Colin Duffy framed
Two more republicans smoothly disposed of.

Until you did what other lawyers wouldn't;
You listened to your client. And you thought,
What if Colin Duffy's he's right? And then you dug.
The more you delved, the greater proof you found
That Sam was murdered by an undercover squad
And Duffy jailed on perjured evidence.

Now every week your clients report new threats;
That Branch man said you're not long for this world,
Isn't that the way they threatened Pat Finucane?
Shot dead at home in front of wife and kids.
And weren't his children just the age of yours?
Sure, the dogs in the street all know that was collusion,
But they'd not try that again, not now there's peace
Not with the UN and rights workers all reporting
Not with the US Congress looking on?

In the aftermath
The photographic image
Shows the rear-view mirror dangling
from the roof of your dismembered car,
the light refracting crazily.
It spins in desperation
looking for an image to reflect
a sign that could have warned you
before it was too late

Sure, you'd need your head examined, so you would
To talk of human rights in Portadown
Isn't it better to keep silent for your own good?
Not Rosemary, no; She was no croppie to lie down.

*Richard Harvey is the US spokesperson for The Rosemary Nelson Campaign for Truth and Justice. This poem was reprinted here with permission (2000).

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