Cultural memory – Frank McNally on remembering and forgetting the murder of Noel Lemass

Driving up the Dublin Mountains on Monday for a forthcoming feature, I noticed in passing an impressive monument in the bog off to the left.

“What’s that?” I wondered aloud, thinking I should know. Maybe I’d stopped here before to find out, then forgot again. But my travelling companion didn’t recognise it either, so we pulled in for a closer look.

As I’ve since realised, we thereby unwittingly recreated a small scene from literature, thanks to Samuel Beckett’s 1946 novel Mercier and Camier. Although written in French, with unspecified setting, that book also follows its protagonists up the thinly disguised Dublin Mountains one day where they too notice a memorial.

What is that cross? said Camier.

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Planted in the bog, not far from the road, but too far for the inscription to be visible, a plain cross stood.

I once knew, said Mercier, but no longer.

I once knew too, said Camier, I’m almost sure.

The novel’s narrator then fills us – and them – in, with a mixture of specifics and deliberate vagueness:

It was the grave of a nationalist, brought here in the night by the enemy and executed, or perhaps only the corpse brought here, to be dumped. He was buried long after, with a minimum of formality. His name was Masse, perhaps Massey. No great store was set by him now, in patriotic circles. It was true he had done little for the cause. But he still had his monument. All that, and no doubt much more, Mercier and perhaps Camier had once known, and all forgotten.

As Beckett had surely not forgotten, the man’s real name was Lemass: Noel Lemass (1897–1923), an anti-Treaty IRA captain who did quite a bit for the cause in his short time – including being wounded in the GPO during Easter Week – before he was kidnapped and murdered in very brutal circumstances just after the official end of the Civil War.

By another strange coincidence, also since revealed to me, it was exactly 100 years on Monday since the opening of his inquest, extensively reported by The Irish Times.

The coroner heard that on July 3rd, 1923, Lemass had been having lunch with a former colleague from Dublin Corporation, discussing a possible return to work, when he was kidnapped by armed men in Exchequer Street, near where the Fallon & Byrne food shop now stands.

He was taken forcibly across the city to the new Free State’s Criminal Investigations Department, at the corner of Fenian Street and Westland Row, and from there disappeared.

When his decomposed body was found in the mountains on October 13th, it had broken bones, missing fingers, and evidence “that the teeth were torn from the jaws”.

Nobody was ever convicted of the crime but the most likely suspect – Free State Army intelligence officer James Murray – was subsequently jailed for another extrajudicial murder and then died from TB aged only 30.

He is alleged to have boasted of killing Lemass and first dumping the remains in the river Liffey at Poulaphouca.

Hence the contrast between Beckett’s wilful vagueness about the monument (he even describes it as a grave, which it’s not – Lemass is buried in Glasnevin) and his careful qualification on the question of how the body ended up there.

As part of the search, the Lemass family had succeeded in getting part of the river Liffey near Blessington dragged, which may have forced the killer or killers to move the remains.

This is one of the details noted in a fine 2005 essay – “Cultural Memory in ‘Mercier’ and ‘Camier’: The Fate of Noel Lemass”, by Seán Kennedy, published in the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui.

Kennedy contrasted Beckett’s reputation for lack of geographic and historical specificity – or as another critic put it, for setting his work “anywhere and nowhere” – with the inclusion in Mercier and Camier of a clear reference to Lemass’s death.

He suggested Beckett, who grew to adulthood in 1920s Dublin, was making a point about both the brutality and selective amnesia of the ruling Cumann na nGaedheal party.

In a darkly satirical note, Mercier and Camier themselves go on to murder a Civic Guard, and in their conscience-free discussion of the event afterwards, make a pointed reference to “law and order”.

On the other hand, some of Cumann na nGaedheal’s former enemies chose to forget past brutality too, with more benign results.

After the discovery of the body, as The Irish Times also reported 100 years ago this week, “Mr John Lemass, a younger brother of the deceased man, was released from prison on parole”. Better known as Seán, he went on to be Ireland’s greatest Taoiseach, whose economic reforms set the country on the path to belated success.

He had made peace with the winners of the Civil War and, to the end, maintained public silence on what had happened his brother. “Terrible things were done on both sides,” he said in 1969, two years before he died; “I’d prefer not to talk about it.”