Mo and I were planning our wedding when, on Thursday 8 March 1973, the windows of her London office were blown in. The IRA had bombed the Old Bailey. Our honeymoon was already booked for the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. Wanting isolation amongst nature we had rented a middle terrace country cottage on Ventry Strand. Come June, we escaped the strains of London and took our very first flight, arriving in Cork.
Our honeymoon cottage was set amongst the dry stone walls where Ryan’s Daughter had been filmed a couple of years before. Dingle, a twice-weekly bus ride away, had a long history of hospitality and most of the shops were licensed to sell alcohol. The language spoken in the bar in Ventry when we were there was Gaelic and as the Oscar-winning film had a republican theme, I asked the barman if there was still IRA activity in the area.
“Do you know who your neighbour is?” the barman asked quietly.
“No”, I replied.
“Seán Mac Stíofáin.”
I looked suitably ignorant.
“The chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. He’s just come off hunger strike and he’s recuperating in the cottage next to yours.”
I spent the first night of our honeymoon being sick into a bucket, not with fear you understand, but ‘because I ate the crab’. Sitting with Mo amongst the dunes the next day watching Mac Stíofáin and his family negotiate a walk across the incoming waters on the strand, we were suddenly distracted by Gannets fishing behind them, plunging from 100 m deep into the surf. Exhausted by city life, we decided to move out of London when we got back.