AUDIO AVAILABLE ON SPOTIFY 
https://open.spotify.com/show/3rPOUxETn2sKAWSDEnBpyg




REQUIEM FOR A HOTEL




NARRATOR: GERALDINE ZECHNER


OTHER READINGS: PAT MC CABE, TED MC CARTHY


PRODUCED BY: DAMIEN BRENNAN


SPECIAL THANKS TO PADDY GOODWIN






[SINGLE GIRL: SANDY POSEY fade in]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KD8gptsQJA
From beginning, fade out at 0:41


NARRATOR:


On a bright September afternoon, Jacqueline Scollan was driven by her father Hugh, to the Dublin bus. Hugh wore his back suit, not just because it was Sunday, or because he was the proprietor of the Foresters Hotel, but because he was still in mourning for his wife Ann, who had recently died from pneumonia, brought on by the after-effects of the TB she had contracted as a child.


Jacqueline had enrolled in a secretarial school in Dublin, where she was to begin lessons on the following Tuesday. Her father had arranged for her to stay the first week in a hotel run by a friend of his, until she could find her feet. She was to come home for the first few weekends.


Jacqueline got off the bus in O Connell Street, but instead of going to the hotel she took a taxi to Dun Laoghaire, form there the boat to Holyhead and the train to London, where she started work on the Tuesday as a chambermaid in a hotel in Edgeware. When his friend phoned to ask why Jacqueline hadn’t shown up, Hugh went to phone the gardai. Beside the phone he found a note, which told him what had happened and why.


Hugh and Anne had married late and had one child. The swinging sixties hadn’t reached the town, and Hugh was a traditionalist. He’d told his daughter that he was going to leave the hotel to her future husband, and that if she didn’t marry, it was to be sold and the money given to her.. either way, the name of the hotel was to remain unchanged – the Foresters.


From that moment, Jacqueline has decided that if she couldn’t own the hotel outright, she didn’t want it. She kept this to herself. She had grown up in the hotel business, and knew that she could run it at least as well as anyone else. So she made her plans, and on that Monday morning, she finally fell asleep on the London train. And Hugh Scollan woke up alone.


Jacqueline worked hard and prospered, as she would have done at home. She rose to be manageress of one of the top establishments in London. And having proved herself, she could have come home, but never did. She and her father were cut from the same cloth, proud, stubborn. Willing to suffer more than their adversary. By the time Hugh’s health began to fail, she was married to a research assistant with a daughter of her own, and Ireland no country for such a family.


3
And although the record wasn’t released until several years after she’d come to London, she always thought of Sandy Posey’s ‘Single Girl’ as her song. More than any Irish song, more even than those she’d heard growing up behind the long bar, this brought home to her the pain of exile. 


[SINGLE GIRL]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KD8gptsQJA
Fade in from 2:17 and play to the end


Many years later, Jacqueline’s daughter stood in the cellar of the Foresters, now the shell of what became the Harp Hotel. Around her was the detritus of one hundred years of the life of a town.


And what town is this? America has its Smallville, its Springfield. England its Casterbridge. But since here names are so important, so freighted with history let’s call it simply Baile an Scéil. Ballinscale. The town of our story.  


And where? Somewhere neutral, if such a thing is possible. Somewhere in the midlands. Unless you’re from the midlands, in which case, it can be anywhere else.


And so, here, in Ballinascale, a small damp room with a dim bulb. Barely enough space to walk in. Jacqueline’s daughter, Ann-Marie, picks her way through these odds and ends – old table cloths, banners, the words national Foresters Association just about visible. And under one, an old revolver. She picks it up, wondering at how dangerous it would be if a child were to come across it. But it’s been made safe. The firing pin has been removed, and the trigger is so stiff it would take the thumb of a strong man or woman to pull it back. So the gun won’t be fired in the future. 


But what of the past?


Her sight is drawn to one corner, which is littered with records. Singles, albums, 78s. and an old record player. She find a plug, picks one at random – not that she can make out a label in the half-light. And puts it on. She knows by the weight of it that it’s a 78. She adjusts the speed and drops the needle as she goes about examining what’s around her.








THERE WAS I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS-I2uz6d6c
From beginning and fade out at 0:43


NARRATOR:




And by sheer chance, she picks the oldest record of the bunch. From a time when the Foresters was the Commercial Hotel, opened in the 1890s to catch the railway trade. A time when the countryside around sent cattle to England, and horses to the Curragh and beyond. Years later many of the men from the area took the train to Powerscourt to work as extras in Olivier’s Henry the Fifth. The Commercial prospered, and was a favourite with salesmen, tourists, and sometimes disreputable characters who frequented the long bar before moving off to do dubious business deals. 
The more upmarket visitors lodged on the Cotswold Arms. Almost all were English or Anglo-Irish. A few priests or upper middle class merchants from Dublin constituted the few catholic visitors. The Commercial and the Cotswold outdid each other in Union Jacks and bunting when King Edward came to Dublin. And it has to be said, the same were to be found in practically every house in the town.


But things were changing. Tom Scollan was a prosperous farmer who wanted to make his way among the merchants of the town


TOM SCOLLAN:  


I had my eye on the hotel from the start, even as a young lad. I was seventeen when I inherited part of the family farm. I sold my share to my older brother and decided to go into business. The protestants had a monopoly of trade and I thought why not have a go at it? 
At this time the trade was in the hands of two families, the Grays and the Mc Coys. Most people were heavily in debt to them in their books. Still our people rose to the occasion and made a great account to have their debts settled and transfer their trade to us. And I loaned some people the money to clear their debt if they come over to me. This was the first occasion for a catholic of any standing to capture a share of the trade of his own people.
They were that grateful they elected me to the council for many years.


The town could not support three businesses. As I expanded, so the others fell away. I bought out mc Coy, his business, house and farm. He had other concerns in Belfast and I think was glad to get back there. I moved my family into his house, a big place on the edge of town.  


Mc Coy was a harder nut to crack, as he got the most of Gray’s trade. I didn’t mind. All I wanted from him was the Commercial Hotel. He owned both, and the Cotswold was for his own kind, Protestants and a few Catholics who had notions of themselves. Not but was always got on well. Gray was on the council too, under the King and for a while after the Free State. 


When I got the hotel, it was too much to run along with the land and the shops. I left it to my son Hugh. The National Foresters Association started to hold their meetings there, and the started to call the hotel the Foresters. So I made it the official name.


Hugh did a great job with it, I must say. But we didn’t see eye to eye with the IRB. I was a Redmond man but after 1916 he went the other way. I was always worried that he’d get into trouble, and I had to use my position on the council to keep him out of harm’s way. But most of the time I turned a blind eye to some of the goings on in the hotel during the war and the civil war. He turned out a good lad and the place did well.




[HALF AS NICE AMEN CORNER]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWre8UTCjo
From beginning and fade out at 0:33


NARRATOR:


Hugh Scollan is not far off seventy in 1969. It’s beginning to dawn on him that Jacqueline won’t be coming back. He spends sleepless hours reliving the past, regretting decisions, wondering what might have been. He contemplates leasing the hotel, so as to have it for her if ever she should change her mind, but can’t bring himself to do so.


The town is changing. Hair is getting longer, skirts shorter. The long bar has a jukebox. Boys now seldom collect empty bottles and bring them to the hotel for a refund. Occasionally, in the long bar, amidst the air heavy with untipped cigarette smoke, you can catch a faint scent of something not unlike incense, always when a couple of the younger generation have sneaked in for a quick pint. Some are old schoolfriends of Jacqueline’s. Hugh dreads being asked about her. He can’t remember which half-truths he’s already told.


The Foresters and Cotswold compete to be the first to have a colour TV. The Cotswold wins, but Hugh compensates by buying a huge-screened, colour TV. The atmosphere is relaxed – even GAA stalwarts crowd into the bar to watch the FA Cup final live from Wembley.


Then suddenly everything changes. In a matter of days, the screen is full of news reports from the North. Rows of burning houses, reports of stonings, beatings, shootings.


The top floor of the hotel is made ready for people fleeing the violence. Refugees in their own country. Soon afterwards the town sees a number of young men passing through. Some stay. It’s noted that many of them are painters who can’t paint, carpenters who can’t hammer a nail. But jobs are found for them. The records on the jukebox change. The Men Behind the Wire. The Sniper’s farewell.




CARN MAN


The situation across the border went from bad to worse after that. The television screens were filled with images of burning barricades and cruched squaddies at street corners. Mobs outside burning terraced houses. Distraught women clutching mystified infants. In the meat plant canteen, workers were stunned into silence by the story of three young Scottish soldiers who were lured from a public house to their deaths. Then when news came through of the British army's behaviour in the Catholic areas of Belfast, vengeance was sworn. Fists were clenched in the Turnpike Inn, Republican songs resounded bitterly. A number of Belfast men came to work in the factory, bringing with them tales of assassinations and burnings, of horrific beatings and torture at the hands of the authorities. These men, because of what they had endured, for a time were almost worshipped. It was considered an honour to buy tem a drink. They brought their own songs with them, beside which the older bllads favoured by the Carn men seemed inspipid and outdated. The Turnpike Inn was filled with the sound of The Sniper's Promise and The Weary Provo. Benny became very friendly with one of the northmen, having spent a fortnight with him in the boning hall, listening to him describe how he had been pistol whipped in front of his wife and children, his house torn asunder before the soldiers left, spitting on a family photograpf before they left, vowing to find evidence the next time they came.


NARRATOR:


The town settles after a few months. The border begins to seem a long way off. But Hugh Scollan knows in his bones this is the beginning of the end, for him and the hotel. Already the number of customers has dwindled. Travelling salesmen, regulars, occasional callers, like the man in the mackintosh. Every year, fewer of them appear.
The Foresters seems a hopelessly antiquated name. the Northmen take to calling it the Harp. So too, do others. By default, the Foresters has become the Harp. Hugh, powerless to prevent it, falls into a slow decline, mirrored by the building.


But in all the turmoil, one thing remains constant. The bridge club has for years met at rotating venues, including the Cotswold, its shabbiness slightly more genteel than the Harp; and the Harp itself. The meeting room is available on the last Thursday of the month, no matter what the situation. The game is led by the last Mrs. Mc Coy. Known locally as the Queen Mother; she in turn, will always insist that the game takes place in the Commercial Hotel. For one day a month the meeting room has the odour of forgotten days; expensive cigarettes, old perfume, brandy and port.
For some who were children then, the merest hint of these scents and being back in a rush the entirety of those fleeting years.




 BOTTLES
 
I grew up in a time of subtle
change, when bringing back bottles
for thruppence each was going out
of fashion. Their thick tapering necks,
their mouths, had the perfection
of a volcano, and the stale,
sticky perfume of sugar or stout.
How heavy they were in the hand!
Dark, brown or green, they reminded
me for some strange reason
of velvet, thick, rich, impenetrable;
was it the forgotten smell
of brandy at a card table?
Money of our own for bringing back bottles.
It was a time when everything was possible.




[IF YOU WERE THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_76Orifags
Start at 1:10 and fade out at 1:32


NARRATOR:


At the beginning of the First World War Tom Scollan had his first major run-in with the authorities. Recruiting sergeants found a ready ear when they came to the Cotswold Hotel. They found a steady line of young men eager to join up.


It was a different story in the Foresters. Although Tom was officially a Redmondite, he refused to let his premises be used by the Army.


As he later recalled:


TOM SCOLLAN:
I refused to take part in the recruiting campaign. I was approached several times but refused, stating that I was not prepared to ask any man that which I was not prepared to do myself, to ask my sons to volunteer for service in the English army. England never kept faith with Ireland and as matters turned out broke faith this time as per usual and betrayed the leaders and people of Ireland by not putting into law and carrying out the terms of the Home Rule bill.


I further refused to allow my premises to be used for the purpose of recruiting or to allow any officer accommodation or hospitality. They did not take it well. My Protestant neighbours took it worse, as they had sons who had joined up, some of whom lost their lives. But so be it.


NARRATOR:


His son Hugh was taking an increasing part in running the hotel, which became a hotbed of nationalist feeling after the 1916 rising. It was increasingly patronized by Sinn Fein sympathisers and men who had links to the IRB. During the war of independence rooms were kept free in case of need; ambushes were planned, money hidden.


These were years in which sudden noises from rooms in the night were best ignored. When for example one travelling salesman, the worse for drink or the DTs, had nightmare in which he saw a read stain spreading on the ceiling above his head. After a sleepless night in an armchair he was sent on his way with a warning, the ceiling repainted and the upstairs carpet replaced.


Tom Scollan was consumed by fear that his son would be taken by the Black and Tans. And it was known that Hugh slept with a gun near at hand. But the hotel was never raided, much to Tom’s relief and surprise. It may have been connected with a number of visits by an anonymous-looking gentleman who met alone with Hugh and the brigade’s intelligence officer.


The gentleman was Alfred Cope. A man largely unknown to most people, but who was playing a strange but pivotal role in establishing communications between London and the IRA leadership. He was loathed by some on his own side, who viewed his activities as little better than treason.


For example: 
From the papers of British Army captain Robert Jeune:




DUBLIN CASTLE OFFICIAL


In September 1920, a raid took place which had a significant result. It was decided to raid several houses in the Drumcondra area. Particular attention was paid to the house of a man called O’Connor, known to us as an active Sinn Feiner…There was no hostile reception, however, and the search went on. 


While this was happening I was standing talking to Boddington, who was in charge of the raid, when a letter was brought to him which he read and handed to me saying: ‘Money for Jam’. 


It was on official Dublin Castle paper and was in these words: 
Dear Mr O’Connor, I am having the papers you require sent up to you. 
Yours sincerely A.W. Cope 


This was distinctly interesting. Here was the Assistant Under Secretary writing to a notorious Sinn Feiner ,with whom he had obviously already been in contact. 


After this I made a point of trying to find out more about this individual’s doings, and found that he had done some rather strange things, such as arranging for some electricians of known Sinn Fein views to come into the Castle at unusual times.


Also he was one of the few castle officials who could safely walk about the streets of Dublin.


But it was decided that no drastic action could be taken against him ,as it turned out he was a protégé of Lloyd George, who picked him out of Fisheries and sent him over to Ireland under Sir John Anderson in order to get a foot in the Sinn Fein Camp.






Within four months of his appointment, Cope was passing information, much of it secret, to Sinn Fein, and giving its members unauthorised access to Dublin Castle. His ability to do this was a direct consequence of the role that he had carved out for himself. Mark Sturgis’s diary for 22nd September 1920 revealed the institutional channel he used: 




DUBLIN CASTLE OFFICIAL


He (Cope) has now taken over RIC transport and correspondence branch en bloc!




NARRATOR:


By September 1920 senior castle officials claimed to know of Collins’s movements, including the fact that he would be at a particular address on the same night each week. Cope was allowing IRA men access to the Castle. It is highly likely that messages were passing indirectly between the two men. The Foresters was one of the few hotels which never claimed that Michael Collins spent the night there, but one of several which were used indirectly by Collins in the run-up to the Truce.


Hugh Scollan would never speak about his role in this. But it’s possible that Cope’s visits put a restraint on possible raids or reprisals.






[COUNTRY AND WESTERN MUSIC – FOR JIVING]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cawV9Y5aWSM&list=RDcawV9Y5aWSM&start_radio=1
From start and fade out at 0:24


NARRATOR:


Like all hotels, the Foresters witnessed all the small dramas of town life – christenings, funerals, and above all, weddings. In the days when professional photographers had window displays in the main street, never a week went by without a couple posing under the branches of either bougainvillea or, in the winter, holly. While the Cotswold Arms catered for what was considered ‘society weddings’ the Foresters was much more popular, especially with families from the surrounding countryside and beyond.




Niall Sweeney was a young man from the North who played in a number of local bands. He was fine guitarist and was first choice to play at functions; he had a good ear for a tune and could fit in at short notice with any band. A quiet-spoken lad, he had been going out with a local girl or several months.




Before playing at a wedding one evening, he asked Hugh if he could use a spare room for the night, and as an extra favour that Hugh tell no one where he was staying. He owed a bit of a debt, he said, and needed a couple of quiet days to get the money together. Hugh was surprised when Niall turned down the offer of a short-term loan to help him sort things out.


After midnight, just as Hugh was about to lock up, three men appeared. Strangers. They asked politely where Niall was, and when Hugh said he didn’t know they asked again. Not politely this time, and with a gun. Hugh had no choice. They told him to stay in the bar, and on no account to move for an hour. 




He heard footsteps scraping along the fire escape, and lowered voices, but apart from that, nothing. The following morning he went up to Niall’s room, it was empty. There were no signs of a struggle, which was a small mercy. Outside, he noticed that two spades were missing from one of the outhouses.


Niall never appeared again. He was missed, briefly. But it was a time when certain things were not spoken about, and others spoken only in whispers. 


In the cellar, under a wall of cardboard boxes, and covered by a tarpaulin, is an amplifier and an electric guitar, unplayed for forty years.


[I’M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY] 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WXYjm74WFI
Fade in at 2:05 and play to the end




[OLD COMRADES]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXH3QJrx98U
From beginning and fade out at 0:42


NARRATOR:


One evening in October 1938, a man stands at the middle of the long bar. The town is slowly getting back to economic normality after the long economic war. Cattle trains are one more appearing at the station.


This man, stooped, old beyond his years, has a small audience, the regulars plus a few men who have called down for a quick drink while waiting on a connecting train. The man in the mackintosh has made one of his occasional visits.


JOHN GLEESON (Tipperary)


You hear this? This rasp? Any of ye know what it is? I’ll tell ye. A tube down the throat, day after day. A rough tube with a funnel at one end. Oh, yes. None of ye have had that around here, eh? You’ve heard of the Connaught Rangers? Yes? No? some of ye. Well, I was one of them. John Joseph Gleeson 8519. With the Munsters in the trenches. Got a bullet for my troubles and like a fool went back again. Ended up in India with the Rangers. We read about what was going on back here and decided to make a stand. Mutiny. A capital offence. They shot poor Daly. I heard the volley from my cell. We’d all had the same sentence but they made an example of him. Only twenty-one, he was.


Between the midday sun in the Punjab and seasickness on the way back we were in poor shape. Even worse when we were in the punishment cells in Dartmouth. But we still had a bit of fight in us. Hunger strike. Yes, that’s what we decided. Like MacSwiney. We’d have kept on to the bitter end. But they tied us down. Put a clamp in our mouths and poured gruel down our throats. I’ve never had pain like it. Some of it comes back up, see, burns your throat. Then into your lungs. Like acid. And the tube. Tears you on its way down the throat. Sometimes it goes into the lungs too. Some of the lads, they say the scarring in the lungs is so bad you’d think they had TB. None of us were ever the same after it.  


And for what? Most of us are back in England wherever there’s work. Those of us that are fit to do it. Look at me. Who’d take me on, eh? Tramped round the roads and rails of Ireland begging, you might say, for a few hours work, enough for a bed and a packet of smokes. And now I’m on my way too, back to England to see if I can’t get something with this war coming up. Yes. England couldn’t break me but my own country did. That’s nice for ye.


And let me tell ye, those that have sons. If this man Hitler does what he says he’ll do in Czechoslovakia, the King will come calling again for your young men, free State or no. but don’t make the same mistake I made all those years ago. And if they do go, let them stay there, for there’ll be nothing here worth coming back to.




NARRATOR:


They watch him go. No one there gives him much chance in England. And indeed Ireland never sees him again. Maybe things will work out. Maybe, years from now, someone from Australia will post a message inquiring about their grandfather, John Gleeson, ex-Connaught Rangers. But during his own lifetime, a few scraps of news, then silence.


Not unlike the story of Dan Hogan. A clerk in Clones railway station, he worked closely with Eoin O Duffy, who was given command of the IRA’s second northern division. The station and nearby Hibernian Hotel became a hub for planning operation in the northern part of the country. The brother of Michael shot in Croke Park, perhaps it is no coincidence that the months following Bloody Sunday were the most violent in Co. Monaghan.


Hogan became the first man to hoist the tricolour in Dublin Castle, and by 1927 he was Commander-in-Chief of the defence forces. However, in 1929 he resigned or was dismissed, and shortly afterwards, moved to new York. By the late 1930s he had no known address, and in 1941 his last pension cheque was cashed. After that date his fate or whereabouts have never been clearly established.


Hugh Scollan watches John Gleeson go. He’s seen many like him, and will again. And he has other things on his mind. 1938 was, as has been said, the year of Munich – and of land disputes here and elsewhere. 


The upstairs meeting room in the Foresters is being used by the land Commission to distribute land. As a prominent public figure, Hugh is often called upon to do the impossible and favour the claims of both candidates. The Land Commissioners will move on, but the enemies Hugh Scollan makes will remain. Once again, he goes to sleep with the revolver close at hand. 




KAVANAGH -EPIC


I have lived in important places, times
when great events were decided: who owned
that half rood of rock, a no man's land
surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
and old Mc Cabe, stripped to the waist, seen
step the plot defying blue-cast steel -
'Here is the march along these iron stones.'
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
was most important? I inclined
to lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
a local row. Gods make their own importance.




[zzTHE BLUE OF THE NIGHT INTRO AND FADE]
From 0:03 and fade out at 0:42


NARRATOR:




And just as, even in the broad day, the stars continue their course across the heavens, their light millions of years old, so too, as Ann Marie explores the dark of the cellar,
The town, past and present goes about its business. Like flowers in a garden, the streets and buildings; as some die, so other come to life. A solitary, lonely train makes it way morning and evening on a doomed track while on a still summer morning the hum of a motorway not too far distant can be heard. The old roads are streams now, feeding into the great river than makes its way toward Dublin; over the years more go than come back. Scaffolds and painters’ vans along the main street track the progress of new money and the decline of the old.




And over it all, or should we say, under, the town is its own story, some of it told, most hidden, like the old streams that watered the land then all around was wood and pasture, now drained and piped underground. It flows still, beneath both hotels, the churches, the small railway terraces. If you stand halfway up the hill to the new school and listen after a particularly cloudburst you can hear, under a culvert cover, the gurgle of these water become a roar. It’s brief, it last little longer than a minute, but while it does, it’s as if the old town, thought dead and hidden is coming back to life, threatening to burst into the daylight. Like an old war in times of peace which can only be kept at bay by remembering. 


Or houses, named for those who lived there during the childhood of people now old in turn.  




​HOUSES
 
One by one the houses
like lights, are flickering off and on.
A life goes out, another takes possession.
That list of names that rolled off your tongue
those years ago - Toye, Cartwright, Galvin -
where have their faces gone?
Like fields, their boundaries pulled down,
those ditches we used jump, filled in.
 
And you, somewhere behind us,
your moon not yet risen;
the stars you recalled from memory
years ago, are simply stars again,
the patterns you helped us see,
merged with the past, that dust, infinity.
 
Old maps I've read suggest
we played pitch and toss above a river.
I followed its unseen trickle and twist
along the bottom of abandoned gardens,
reaching a point where nothing seemed solid.
It runs still, I'm sure,
not as a dream or ghost, but like an animal
at night - or an eel, drawn
by something pagan, some unfathomed navigation




NARRATOR:


And what of these houses now? Some are empty, their owners both out working. Down a driveway, a ball rolls, out onto the road. A child chases after it. Will he catch it before it rolls across the road? No. but he stops, looks, walks across and back.




In one living-room, a young woman shows her partner her first ante-natal scan. As they embrace, a neighbour is lining out his medication for the day. From open windows comes the music of languages, sounds unimaginable to the man and women who lined the square the day the tricolour was rained for the first time. In a small flat on the first floor of the Cotswold Arms the last Mrs. Mc Coy sits on the armchair she was given as a wedding present. On the table beside her are two photographs – her late husband and the Queen.


On the hill, twenty yards and forty years apart, lie the late Anne Scollan, née Malone, and the body of her first love, Captain Frank Barratt of the Free State Army. And who knows, perhaps, even now, something hovers between them, like a kind of unearthed electricity, or the plans they made in that time when everything seemed possible, when long summer day merged with the blue of the night. 




[zz BLUE OF THE NIGHT AND FADE OUT]
Fade in from 3:00 and play until the end




[SOLO TIN WHISTLE MUSIC. MINOR KEY]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thjwTiQRZ0
Play from beginning and fade out at 0:32


NARRATOR:


Hugh Scollan and Frank Barratt had been friends from childhood. They were different personalities, Hugh practical and full of energy, Frank, more of a daydreamer, who spent hours drawing in the margins of his school copybooks. 


Frank Barratt, in fact, was a gifted draughtsman and had set his sights on a career as an architect. But as a student he’d joined the IRA, and when the Treaty was signed he’d risen to be a captain in the Free State army. Hugh was known to have anti-treaty leanings, but this hadn’t affected their friendship. Nor had the fact that both men had their eye on Ann Malone. When she and Frank had become engaged, Hugh had promised them the Foresters for their reception free of charge, as a wedding gift.




Although Hugh was known to favour the anti-Treaty side, he was discreet about it. Both he and his father tried to be a moderation influence as relationship deteriorated between the two sides. But Tom’s influence was waning. He intervened to help his old trading rival, Terence Gray, who had fallen foul of the irregulars, but to no avail. Gray’s fortunes had taken a turn for the worse over the years, and he was reduced to leasing a house and farming a medium sized plot of land. Like many such cases during these years, the campaign of harassment conducted against him was probably motivated by a personal resentment by someone on the anti-treaty side.


He later described what happened in his claim against the State for compensation:




TERENCE GRAY:


I gave up the land as it was useless to do business under such conditions. I have had to watch cattle all night with a loaded gun. Some fowl were battered to pieces with stick and left there. My two dogs were killed, one with a bullet meant for me. The owner of the house asked me as a favour
To leave before the house was levelled, and I felt I had no choice but to do so.  


When I asked why I had been driven out I was told I was and always had been a British spy. My friend councillor Tom Scollan spoke up on my behalf but he was ignored.




NARRATOR:


Hugh too, tried to help those he could from both sides. He believed he could maintain the hotel as a neutral space, where former friends could meet informally and have a quiet drink without politics intruding. As the weeks went by, it became clear that this would not happen. Hugh closed the hotel on the day of Michael Collins’s funeral, and there were no reprisals from the irregulars. But shortly after that, things began to deteriorate.


A number of posters began to appear.




DUBLIN ACCENT


To all whom it concerns
Any person employed in the free State Forces in uniform or mufti found loitering in the vicinity of the Cotswold Arms Hotel or any of the adjoining streets on or after Sunday, October 29th, 1922, will be shot on sight. This warning applies to the murder gang, also known as the military intelligence and so-called CID.


Also any person giving information or helping the same. This includes management and staff od said hotel, shopkeepers, mechanics, etc.


Signed – Irish Republican Defence Committee.  


Warning – any person found disfiguring or destroying this notice shall be drastically dealt with.




NARRATOR:


As in every town in Ireland, it has been common practice to put up political posters. In many cases dozens of them would spring up overnight. But this poster had doubly-sinister overtones. Just weeks earlier, three young men had been shot dead while posting a similar notice in Drumcondra. It was known that Free State officers and civil servants were staying in the Cotswold Arms. This, coupled with the forcing out of Terence Gray, had created an air of increasing tension, which would soon reach boiling point.


On the early morning of the third of November, Hugh Scollan and Frank Barratt were alone in the long bar, enjoying a quiet drink and making plans for the upcoming wedding reception. Frank was off duty but armed with his service revolver. Suddenly there was a loud knocking at the front door. This wasn’t that unusual – the hotel was known to keep late hours. When Hugh opened it, a young man, not much more than a boy, rushed in, through the bar, and up the stairs. He was followed almost immediately by two Free State soldiers. The youth had been caught putting up posters, and, fearing the worst, had made a break for it.


Hugh, anxious to defuse the situation went to the foot of the stairs to talk to the boy. He called up. The youth came out of Hugh’s bedroom, brandishing Hugh’s revolver. His had was shaking wildly. He threatened to shoot, and this brought Frank and the soldiers out to the hallway. There was a tense stand-off, during which Hugh, as he thought, had calmed things down to the extent that it was safe to approach the boy. This was a fatal mistake. As the climbed the third stair, he was  deafened by the roar of a shot. For a moment he stood, stunned, half-expecting his legs to give way under him. But the boy, terrified and shaking, had missed. Instead the shot had hit Frank in the forehead, killing him instantly. 


In spite of his shock, Hugh managed to prevent the other two soldiers from either shooting or beating to death the boy, who had crumpled, weeping to the landing floor. He was taken away, and like many others from that time, seemed to vanish into a strange mixture of fact, rumour and eventually history. No one today remembers his name; few remember that of Frank Barratt.


Grief-stricken Ann Malone emigrated to Canada. Hugh Scollan did what most people did during the Civil War; he kept his head down, said as little as possible, and attempted plan for some kind of future when all around seemed to be falling apart. His father never got over what he saw as his humiliation over the Terence Gray affair. His health declined rapidly and he died in early 1923. His business empire, such as it was, shared the fortunes of the post- Civil-War economy. Of all his children, Hugh was the only one who managed to keep his business intact. Everyone marked the change in Hugh’s personality. He became old beyond his years. Although always polite and personable, he appeared increasing focused on money and expanding the hotel. 


In the late 1920s he heard from the Malones that Anne had found it difficult to settle in Canada. He wrote to her with the offer of her fare home and a job in the hotel. She accepted. Eighteen months later, they were married. 


The reception was held in the Cotswold Arms.


Hugh had managed to disarm the youth that night. He kept the gun but made sure it could never be used. Although it was kept under the bar and later at his bedside during the 1930s, this was purely as deterrent. It would never be fired again.




[MUSIC…]       
All your Troubles from beginning and fade at 0:36
             
        
NARRATOR:


This then, is the gun Ann Marie now cradles in her hand.
Like her mother and grandmother before her, she is expecting a child at an age they would have considered late in life. Unlike them, she already knows it will be a boy. She considers the gun. A gift for her unborn son. A memory of his great grandfather, the revolutionary hero. She knows she’ll never come back, and feels in her bones her son will never want to. 


She goes to put the revolver in her bag, but something stops her. Is it the weight of history, some deep psychic instinct that tells her in an instant, without words, of that slow-spreading, rust-coloured stain on a ceiling almost at the point of collapse? 


Or maybe it’s a glimpse, there under a worn fox-fur coat, of something she missed first time around. A tan, leather case. She picks it up, opens it. It’s an old Kodak camera. Maybe in London you can still get a film for it, but not here. She’s about to put it back when she notices the glass bead on the back and realizes there’s a film still there. Undeveloped photos. Perhaps of her mother as a young girl. She dusts the small glass bubble. Twenty-two.  Two pictures left. This makes up her mind. She takes it.


She leaves, not looking back on the Harp Hotel, once the Foresters, once the Commercial. Still as much a mystery as it was before she walked through the creaking door. And what do they think of her, those ghosts, watching her go? Where will they go when the roof is taken off and they must make their way, looking for landmarks in a town which no longer exists?


Ann Marie drives off. She’ll drop the keys at the solicitors, then wash the smell of the old keys from her hands. But first, she drives to the edge of the town. To a place which was a mile outside its limits when Tom Scollan bought it. Unlike the Commercial, this house’s name has remained unchanged since Victorian times. A prosperous house, a place of leisure, the farm extending to the rear, hidden from the road. 


Despite changes over the years, it’s still instantly recognizable from the sepia-tinted postcard, the one her mother took with her to London.


Ann Marie gets out. From an open window, a child is practising piano scales. Others are playing out of sight.
A happy place. She moves the film on. The button moves surprisingly easily. The shutter clicks. One more. She moves back, this time, to get the name of the house, set into the wall almost two centuries ago. 


The photos will turn out almost perfectly. Her grandparents. Her mother, not quite a teenager. A carnival. A parade, tricolours and accordions. And one taken inside, dim, at the long bar, an old man in a mackintosh coat – who is he? And the two she took – in the last, the blurred figure of a girl chasing after a ball. And in the foreground, clear, the wall and the name she wanted – Greenbank.




Greenbank
[MUSIC…GREENBANK from beginning, complete song]