Brian Keenan - A journey beyond imagination

Brian Keenan, author and former hostage, talks to Patricia Harty

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Brian Keenan on a recent trip to Lebanon.

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It’s early morning in the upscale café in the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. Not my usual hangout, but having spent two days immersed in Brian Keenan’s book An Evil Cradling, the story of his almost five years as a hostage in Beirut, it seems fitting, since it’s my treat, that we breakfast in nice surroundings.

Seated opposite me, barely touching his pancakes, Keenan, 58, speaks in a soft Belfast accent. He is in good spirits, but a little abashed at the reaction to a talk he gave at a conference the day before.

Many of the audience members had been moved to tears by his stories, and his vision of a united Ireland, which he said “must be a place of imagination, intellectual not political.” He received a standing ovation. 

Asked why he got such a reaction from the 700 plus audience, gathered for a Unite Ireland Conference hosted by Sinn Féin, Keenan explains: “When I was asked to do it I said yes instinctively. When I sat down to prepare for it I realized, holy God, how can you take five centuries of trouble, despair and a bloodbath and bring it to a place in fifteen minutes? And so I had to go back to my stories. I knew it had to be a very personal thing because we’re all engaged with this personally whatever our politics might be.” 

The stories that Keenan told – about the taunting of the only Catholic boy who lived on his street; about an old Protestant woman crying on learning of Bloody Sunday; about a Catholic barman breaking in a pair of shoes for Keenan’s father so he could walk more easily in a July 12th Orange Parade – were very effective in putting a human face on the Troubles. Pete Hamill, the American writer who moderated the conference, and talked about people like his own Belfast-born parents “being hurt out of Ireland,” was among those visibly moved by Keenan’s stories, which are now included with other stories in a newly released memoir of Keenan’s childhood,  I’ll Tell Me Ma.

Much has been made of the fact that Keenan was born into an Ulster Protestant family and brought up in a strict sectarianism culture. He explains why he escaped contamination.

“My dad was an Orangeman but he was a socialist in his own way, he had very strong views on it. He was the most unusual Irishman, I can tell you. Well, he was a Mason. My mother had a kind of Mother Earth thing going. She was always doing things for the neighbors. You know the way working class women do.” She also sent the minister “the hell away” from the door when he called to complain that the young Keenan was asking too many “awkward questions” at Sunday school. “I didn’t have all that church contamination. My father and mother whenever [questionable] things came up weren’t too taken aback, and neither was I, consequently.”

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