Chilling In The Name Of

The Cold, Cold Ground takes us back to 1981, the Hunger Strikes and the months of rioting that followed Bobby Sands’ death.

“I suppose 1981 is the time that was most significant for me as a child,” says McKinty. “All my memories of that time are incredibly intense and vivid, so I decided it was a time period I wanted to do.”
One would think it would be difficult to capture ‘80s Northern Ireland from the rather different environs of Melbourne, where the author now lives, but McKinty says not.
“It really wasn’t. It was tremendous fun. All the memories just came flooding back. My problem wasn’t coming up with stuff to say, but deciding what not to say. It was just extraordinary what happened in just a few months.
“From Bobby Sands’ funeral when half a million people were on the streets, to rioting every night and bombs going off. My problem was editing because I had so much stuff. I had tons of material, newspapers and books. I was even able to do some interviews with policemen and some IRA men when I was back home.”
McKinty’s hero is Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, living a somewhat precarious existence in Protestant Carrickfergus.
“I thought it would be much more interesting to take a Catholic boy and put him in a Protestant town and have him as one of the very few Catholics in the RUC. It made it more interesting for me as a writer, and hopefully for the reader as well, because you have all these lines and loyalties and ideas of selfhood that are crossing.”
Duffy is a man seeking the right path for himself – and in a way for Ireland. Before joining the RUC, McKinty writes that Sean had volunteered for the IRA.
“Right after Bloody Sunday in Derry, he wanted to join something, he wanted to help out, but he’s confused. He goes to join the IRA. They tell him to finish his degree first. He is a joiner and by a circuitous route he ends up in the police. I think that is an interesting dynamic. His psyche is that of someone who wants to help, but he doesn’t know what the correct method is. Even though he is in the police, he is still not sure it was the right thing to do. I loved having a conflicted character. It was so much fun to play with.”
One of the strengths of The Cold, Cold Ground is explaining that much of the violence is and was not necessarily political in nature.
“That’s the big dirty secret,” says McKinty. “I lived in America for many years and it’s one of the things you could never explain to people – that it’s drug dealers fighting for territory or rival sectarian gangs wanting to control the protection rackets. Then, of course, at the higher level, these people who are supposed enemies – the Protestant paramilitaries and the Catholic paramilitaries – are actually meeting up in neutral locations to divide up turf. That happened all the time. That story has never played well in America where the INLA are seen as romantic rebels and the Protestant paramilitaries are seen as reactionary thugs. People like the clichés.”
When a body is found on waste ground, Duffy assumes this is yet one more victim of paramilitary violence until the evidence suggests that he may be dealing with Northern Ireland’s first serial killer, one who is targeting gay men. During the course of his investigation, the young, attractive and heterosexual Duffy has a homosexual encounter in a public bathroom.
“I thought that was important. In 1981 in Northern Ireland, homosexuality was illegal. You could actually get five years in prison for a homosexual act. I felt it was important for Sean to take a step into that world. One of the motifs under the story is that throughout 1981 when all this other stuff was happening, there was this case rumbling through the European Court of Human Rights trying to get Northern Ireland’s laws regarding homosexuality repealed. In about September or October the judgment came through and Northern Ireland had to change its laws.”
Was McKinty trying to challenge all sorts of prejudices, whether they were to do with religion or sexual orientation?
“I really was. The only thing I couldn’t do was a racial dimension because in Carrickfergus, where Sean lives, there were no racial minorities at all. During the Troubles, they would have been burned out of their houses. There were no immigrants, and gays and lesbians became the scapegoats of everything that was wrong with society. I remember Ian Paisley electioneering, saying that gays and lesbians should be killed – stoned to death I think is what Paisley said. Those attitudes were by no means uncommon.”
As McKinty notes in the book, when Northern Ireland’s laws against homosexuality were repealed, both the Catholic and Protestant churches condemned the ruling.
“To me that was an hilarious irony. They finally found something to agree on. The irony of that struck me at the time, even though I was just a kid. What brought them together at last was a common prejudice.”

The Cold Cold Ground is out now.