Documents on the A minor altercation at Heathrow with a young security man on the departures gate — he speaks little English, and turns out to be a recent arrival from Poland. [ Previous Radical’s Diary ] March 28, 2008 (Friday) Windsor (England) — Cork (Irish Republic) — Inchigeela AT eight 8 a.m. to Heathrow in the Pigmobile (as Jessica calls the little Renault van).

A minor altercation at Heathrow with a young security man on the departures gate — he speaks little English, and turns out to be a recent arrival from Poland. Ah yes, this is still Mr Sanctimonious Blair’s England in a way. I was forgetting. The next surprise is to be charged by the airline for one piece of baggage. We used to be allowed two pieces free; now it is none. The Aer Lingus girl looks cunning — “It was introduced two years ago,” she says in a matter-of-fact way.

That must have been during 2006, my Year that Never Was: I was locked in Cell 19, oblivious to the march of time or events outside my prison, like the arrival of those 900,000 Polish “migrants” in London. At midday, a very bumpy landing at Cork airport, in southern Ireland. The brothers O’Brien meet me — that detail won’t give too much away to their authorities, I guess.

We have lunch in Cork, then drive out along country highways during the afternoon to Creedons Hotel in the main street at Inchigeela. In the main square of Macroom on the way, just by the fort — it reminds me of the wooden toy fort I had as a child — stands a monument to I.R.A. men executed by us, the British. Most of them seem to have been called Leary.

We drive on deeper into the historic heart of the original I.R.A country, near the crossroads where the Republicans ambushed a British army patrol in 1920 and killed twenty soldiers. A photo on the wall inside Creedons portrays the Republican desperadoes after the action: now they would be called “terrorists,” or “freedom fighters”, or “insurgents” depending on where one stands. They are grinning like schoolboys in a school photo. Civil war, the cruellest kind of conflict known to man.

We visit the ruins of the local church in Inchigeela as the daylight fades and a fine drizzle begins. It has been a burial ground for these last six hundred years; the building itself has its roof off, and its walls are crumbling away, the nave overgrown with plants and weeds. My host says that the local council levied taxes on all abandoned buildings unless their roofs were removed, a bit like our mediaeval window-tax in England.

Seems crazy to me — in England all religious buildings are tax-exempt. The graveyard has one tomb separated from the rest, near the gate erected in honour of a World War One Irish soldier, Michael Leary VC. It contains the remains of one British soldier, Cecil Guthrie, and the slab bears the tell-tale date of death, November 1920. They say he was one of the hated Black & Tans.

His body was found buried in a bog four years later, identified by his widow, and laid to rest in this ancient churchyard, apparently the only British soldier buried on Republican soil (the others were brought