The ghost of 'Danny Boy'

The ghost of ‘Danny Boy’

He was the only soldier that I remember feeling sorry for. Captain Nairac died in May 1977 but, like the ghost of Banquo in the story of Macbeth, he keeps reappearing to remind us of the terror of our collective past. It was only in disappearance and death that we knew his real name. To the people of Crossmaglen, he was known simply as ‘Danny Boy’. He had sung the Derry Air in one of the pubs in the village and he became known afterwards by its common title. He was no common soldier however.

Nairac was uncommon in his behaviour as a soldier, on the dangerous terrain of South Armagh, during the most violent period of the Troubles. The reason I felt sorry on hearing of his abduction and probable death was that he was the only British soldier who had struck up some kind of relationship with the people of the locality that was not based on mutual contempt. He smiled a lot and he was engaging in a charming, gentlemanly kind of way. He went out of his way to be noticed and to notice.

Every three months or so when the army regiments changed, Nairac would appear on patrol wearing the beret of the incoming regiment. He was a regular who had been patrolling the area in uniform for about a year before his death. Jokes might be made about new hats on old heads when he appeared with the distinctive beret of the several regiments that passed through the region. He wore his hair significantly longer than a regular soldier. He was a fine looking man with glossy, wavy black hair and the women of the area often openly admired his physique and bearing.

The last time I saw him was a few nights before he was abducted. I was working in our family bar when he came in with a colleague who was obviously a senior post-holder in the local regiment. There was a small crowd around the bar and lounge as it was early evening. It was the pattern of the military, at that period, to enter the village pubs occasionally, ask some people their personal details, observe who was present and then leave reasonably quickly. Nairac entered and asked those who were gathered around the television set in the lounge if they had heard the shooting that he claimed had just taken place on The Square. Nobody had heard anything and reluctantly told him so. He playfully observed that nobody ever heard or saw anything of significance in Crossmaglen. ‘You’re some boys! – You never hear or say anything around here!’

He told his small audience that he and his colleague had just been shot at. The story that he told was of how they had been discussing tactics together and had just decided to visit two other pubs separately. As they parted, a shower of bullets hit the wall between them. He described it as a near-miss for both of them. This led to a further, farcical conversation between Nairac and his potential audience. ‘What colour were the bullets?’ one man wanted to know. ‘Were they green white and orange?’ ‘Are you sure you weren’t hit? Did you check yourself for holes?’ Such was the largely good-natured tone of the teasing.

One relatively young man hit a jarring note just as Nairac was about to leave. The young man had an alcohol-abuse problem and he was in an uncharacteristically narky mood. ‘What you want is good slap in the jaw,’ he said to Nairac. If he had known of Nairac’s prowess in the boxing ring, while a student at Oxford, he might have thought twice about his suggestion. To my amazement, Nairac responded to his aggressor by sitting down next to him and adopting a counselling tone. It was not the usual military response. He spoke and listened to him for about forty minutes, disarming him with words rather than weapons. Behind the bar, my father was getting nervous. A British soldier entering your premises and not leaving for almost an hour could look mighty suspicious.

That was the last we saw of the man we later came to know as ‘Captain’ Nairac. It was already assumed that he was some kind of special operative in the British Army and it was rumoured that he had been involved in some of the more dramatic killings that had taken place in the North around that time. Only later did we learn of his background and personal history. His mysterious role in the underground, intelligence war that was being waged in Northern Ireland at the time is still the subject of speculation. His name is linked to some of the most notorious, unsolved atrocities of the period. He remains a complex character in a dirty, violent, war-world. He is still the only soldier among the North’s ‘disappeared’. Military Intelligence people are reluctant to talk of him and Republican sources are unwilling to divulge the truth about his final hours or resting place. The story reflects well on neither group.

Some see Nairac as a Walter Mitty character; an ineffectual dreamer whose fantasy life led him to an early death. Others see him as a brave but maverick, go-it-alone undercover soldier, taking on the conquest of South Armagh single-handedly. Still others see him as a reckless, out-of-control killer who stopped keeping the rules of his own organisation and paid the price for his foolishness. He may have been overly-influenced by a colleague who was his superior for a time. Julian ‘Tony’ Ball, who died a few years afterwards, is described by former colleagues as ‘nasty’, even ‘psychotic’. The pair were split up, by military orders, in 1975. Whatever the truth, his story is a mystifying and compelling drama of a middle-class English Catholic boy who excelled at Ampleforth Abbey Benedictine College and later at Oxford; only to become bogged down in the quagmire of evil that dogged Northern Ireland at that time. The past still haunts us, like Banquo’s ghost, demanding that decency be done and that the truth must out.