Troubles of ‘Widow McShane’

Five years ago, Treasa McShane moved here from America to marry a former militant who proposed in a letter written from his jail cell. They dreamed of a quiet family life in his hometown; maybe a couple of kids.

“It was supposed to be a love story. He called it our ‘happy ever after’ story,” she says.

Now, she threads past new-scorched hulks of a post office and the pub where her husband had his last drink. She turns on to Little James Street, where young trees are planted along the sidewalk and where Dermot McShane was crushed to death by a British army armored personnel carrier during a riot in July.

Driving by, the woman who neighbors now call “the Widow McShane” is pleased to see a purple remembrance ribbon fluttering from one tree. “And look, someone besides me has left fresh flowers.”

Across tragic decades, the death of young men claimed by sectarian strife has been an oft-told tale. This is the story of how Northern Ireland’s violent and magnetic past ambushed one American.

“History didn’t just catch up with us. It overwhelmed us without warning,” she says.

Treasa McShane, nee De Chabert, moved to Londonderry for love. Now she grieves here in anger, a new activist, determined to balance the scales: The world must know that the British army killed her husband, she says. Treasa McShane is American witness, and victim, of historic hatreds that still convulse everyday lives despite painful strides toward peace in Northern Ireland.

The port city of 72,000 that is her home has prospered and modernized in the years since “the Troubles” ignited here in 1969 when Roman Catholics rioted against a Protestant march. Thus began decades of religious apartheid and sapping violence between Catholic nationalists who consider themselves second-class citizens and demand union with the Irish Republic, and majority Protestants who are loyal to Britain.

Here, the majority is Catholic. A blue-collar city known among Catholics as Derry has welcomed thousands of new jobs in recent years, many of them through American investment. There are American textile, plastics and computer plants, an automobile parts factory where Dermot McShane worked; even a new mall.

“One night we went for a walk and he said, ‘As a boy I could never have imagined that Derry could look so good and thriving,’ ” Treasa McShane recalled one recent afternoon.

Despite the progress, the Troubles, eased by a now-tattered 1994 cease-fire, linger. Divided on such issues as the surrender of terrorist weapons, the two sides have been unable to negotiate a peace settlement despite fierce pressure from Britain, Ireland and the United States. This summer, the sectarian violence flared anew as Catholics rebelled against Protestant marches through their neighborhoods in the cities and towns of the divided province. On July 13, the 35-year-old McShane became the first fatality in street protests since Protestant and Catholic terrorists independently declared their cease-fires.

“Dermot was born to the Troubles, he lived through the Troubles and, ultimately, he was killed by the Troubles. When I heard he was dead, I just got the feeling that it was supposed to happen this way,” his wife said.

Treasa McShane, 47, who was raised in northern New Jersey, became a player in the Northern Irish drama because of a spur-of-the-moment visit to London in 1988, where she met a tall, engaging young man from Northern Ireland in a pub. McShane told her he was working as a furniture deliverer. What he didn’t say was that he had been living as a fugitive for a decade in England.

“The next spring I got a letter from jail; he explained that he had left England and returned home when he learned his mother was dying. The police arrested him as soon as the boat docked and he never got to see her,” she said at her home here. “There was something about his letters. . . . I wrote to a man I barely knew and we got to know each other. That was our courtship.”

Dermot McShane, she discovered, had been recruited by a radical left-wing splinter of the Irish Republican Army when he was around 15. In December 1977 when he was 17, McShane and two other teenage militants conspired to hijack a car at gunpoint for use in a robbery. The driver of the car turned out to be an undercover British army corporal. He shot and killed Colm McNutt, 18, after McNutt threatened him with a pistol, according to court records.

McShane and Patrick Heslin Phelan were arrested. Phelan went to jail for four years and emigrated to America. McShane jumped bail and fled. He had a tattoo of hearts and flowers engraved on his left forearm. “In Memory of Volunteer Colm McNutt,” the inscription read.

“For some reason, Dermot was not there the night his friend Colm died; he couldn’t make it. He was so distraught in the aftermath that he tried to commit suicide. That’s something I’ve only just learned,” Treasa McShane said.

The Troubles were there all the time, she recognizes now, but they seemed far away as love bloomed.

“I came over for the first time in the summer of ’90 when they gave him a few days’ parole,” she recalled. “In October, he wrote me a letter from his cell . . . ‘Imagine that I am down on my knees . . . Will you marry me?’ We were married in the City Hall here on St. Valentine’s Day in 1991; he was released that June.”

With her furniture and piano shipped from New York, the newlyweds and her teenage son, Chris, from a first marriage eventually settled into a small, three-bedroom house owned by the city.

“I said we should live in Derry. He had mixed feelings but was happy to be back near his family. I guess he felt the slate had been wiped clean and that all his bad deeds had been forgiven. He said that part of the design of fate was to get caught when he did,” she said.

Treasa McShane got to know the city, and she started working as an aromatherapist. Dermot McShane found a job, took his family to Mass, enjoyed cooking the traditional big Sunday lunch. He did odd jobs around the house and tended a backyard garden that won a prize. He went to school and got a license to drive heavy trucks.

In a society long accustomed to a heavy police and military presence and the constant threat of violence, life in Northern Ireland danced to its own rhythm, Treasa McShane quickly learned: checkpoints, army patrols, once a small bomb in the city center. “When the soldiers came down our neighborhood on patrol and I’d get nervous, he’d say, ‘This is just normal everyday life.’ ”

In their new lives, the closest the McShane family came to politics was their television set, Treasa McShane says.

“He’d written to me from jail that he was finished with politics. We both wanted a united Ireland, but he was never involved in anything political. Not long after we moved in, four houses in the neighborhood were raided by police--really trashed--but they never bothered us.”

He had a new wife, a new house, a job and he was back home, but something gnawed at Dermot McShane.

He was happy to be home, but it brought back a lot of memories. I thought he could separate himself from his past and forge his own life, but everything fell apart.”

McShane stayed away from politics, but he began to drink heavily, his wife says, frequenting friends who spent much of their time in bars. Dermot McShane was a son of the Troubles and the scars ran deep. One Sunday in 1972 when he was 12, his wife would learn, trouble was brewing in Derry and his parents ordered him to stay home. But he disobeyed and was there when British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed Catholics in a civil rights march. Then McShane rushed home to pretend he hadn’t left the house on a day that passed into Londonderry history as Bloody Sunday.

“Dermot was tortured. There was this self-destructive thing about him. And once when I asked him what made him do such negative things he said it might be easier for me to understand if I had seen somebody’s head blown apart in front of my eyes when I was 12,” Treasa McShane said.

Earlier this year, McShane learned that “Hessie” Phelan, a boyhood friend and the third member of the fatal 1977 conspiracy, had died of a gunshot in New York, a reported suicide.

“Dermot was very depressed before, but that news finished him off,” his wife said. He drank more and more, became destructive. “It was like pulling me down. The only way not to be pulled down was to pull out.”

She kicked him out. He promised to clean up his act and wanted to return home, Treasa McShane says, but Dermot McShane was still living at his father’s house in July when old violence returned to new Derry.

Again, as in 1969, it was a Protestant march through Catholic territory that stirred the violence. Again, the army had to be called. Around 2,000 rioters burned, looted and hurled more than 1,000 gasoline bombs. Police and soldiers fired more than 1,000 plastic bullets, by official count; many more, Nationalists say.

Dermot McShane, “Tonto” to his friends, was drinking in Jackie Mullin’s pub, now a charred ruin, when violence erupted. Around 1:30 a.m. on July 13, McShane was filmed behind a large piece of plywood. Rioters throwing gasoline bombs and passersby trying to get home were both sheltering behind it, witnesses say.

A British Army Saxon armored vehicle edged forward. In the tumult, McShane went down in front of it.

“When we realized someone was lying there I rushed out with two RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] officers and we carried him away. One of the policemen detected a slight pulse and started giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” said Martin Finucane, who heads a human rights group here. Finucane went to call an ambulance. A second officer aiding McShane was stabbed in the face with a broken bottle. The 27-year-old officer required 19 stitches. McShane died of multiple injuries.

“He might have been nosy, but he was not there as a protester,” his wife says. A spokesman for the Royal Ulster Constabulary said there would be no comment on McShane’s death until an investigation is completed.

Who was Derry’s latest sacrifice to the Troubles? The guerrilla group to which McShane once belonged said he was no longer affiliated.

“He had past connections, but nothing recent as far as anybody knows. He was just an ordinary fella,” said Eamonn MacDermott, a reporter at the local newspaper Derry Journal, which reported extensively on his death.

John McCourt, who heads a community reconciliation service, saw McShane as one of those people who had matured away from youthful commitments but still were marked by them. “There is a weight borne by people in their 30s and 40s, particularly among those who had earlier involvement in the Troubles,” McCourt said. “They had seen the cost and paid part of it themselves, and didn’t want to see it for their children.”

His wife recites McShane’s poignant epitaph: “Dermot had lost so many friends in the violence, it was almost as if he felt guilty he survived. So I’m not surprised he has been killed this way; in a strange sort of way Dermot died exactly as he would have wanted to--as part of the Troubles,” she said with a glance at his freshly dusted picture on the mantelpiece in their living room. Dermot McShane died a stone’s throw from where his friend Colm McNutt was killed in 1977.

In the aftermath, Treasa McShane is a marked woman.

“Now I’m caught up in the Troubles, too, and I’m staying here. I want to let the whole world know how the British government is behaving here. Armored personnel carriers to guard against petrol bombs?”

In Northern Ireland, there is a special bond in grief spawned of the Troubles.

“People are very sympathetic. I’ve had visits from relatives of [1972] Bloody Sunday victims. ‘We didn’t get justice,’ they said, ‘but because you are American, people may listen to you. When you get justice for your husband, we’ll consider it a victory for our families as well,”’ said the Widow McShane.

London bureau chief William D. Montalbano is currently on assignment in Ankara, Turkey.