Saint Helen

SYNOPSIS

LOGLINE
An engineer tells of the Ireland of the 1980s through the intertwined stories of a teacher who gets fired for getting pregnant and insisting on keeping her baby, and the small-town shipyard that’s blackmailed by a dissident republican organisation after it has cruelly murdered a contractor to intimidate the shipyard management.

This is a thriller that ends in tragedy but which displays humor and other emotions, not to mention great writing, along the way.

HOW THE NOVEL OPENS
The opening scene shows HELEN, a convent teacher who used to be a nun, having a fraught meeting with her Mother Superior because concerned citizens have reported that they believe her to be pregnant, although unmarried. It is made clear that this is a major offence as far as the convent, and the town, is concerned. Helen denies the charge.

The book then goes back in time to show that ANTON, the engineer, works in a local shipyard where he is helping to build the accommodation platform for an offshore gas rig, to be situated in the newly discovered gas field off the Old Head of Kinsale, Co. Cork. This project, the first of its kind in Ireland, is regarded by the government, and by everyone else in the know, as representing the financial salvation of the country, which is suffering a deep recession.

Anton gets to know Helen early on.

He frequents a local pub, operated by NED ROCKET. He’s a complex character who knows everything about everyone who goes into his pub. He’s married but separated, with one teenage daughter. He’s also a member of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Rocket divulges to his contacts in Sinn Féin that he’s discovered that an electrical contractor, a friend of Anton’s who also drinks in his pub, is carrying out work for the police in Northern Ireland. The IRA is informed and warns the contractor to stop doing this work.

Readers are introduced to MONSIGNOR PETER MURPHY, and shown that he is a strict Catholic disciplinarian, but one who has a drink problem, and his bishop, DAMIEN O'GRADY, a cynical careerist who is busy climbing up through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This involves him taking part in the decision making that will result in the cover-up by the Catholic Church of the child sex abuse that was rampant in those years.

HOW THE PLOTS UNFOLD
Helen gets to know Rocket, the pub owner, through her activities in raising funds for a local hospice. They are immediately attracted to one another.

Anton explains to a politically naïve Scottish engineer that in the 1970s and early 1980s the Provisional IRA was heavily involved in bank robberies and in the kidnapping of business people in order to gather money to pay for its subversive activities in Northern Ireland.

The PIRA army council decides to target the gas field developers as a source of funds. The members examine ways in which they can achieve this. A plan is formulated to cause a strike at the shipyard, which will only be lifted if a large sum of money is paid over by the developers of the gas rig, a large and wealthy American oil company. The IRA will intimidate the workers to bring them out on strike, and then use the same tactics to get them back to work when the oil company has paid up.

Helen realizes she is pregnant. Two of her students, fourteen-year-old girls, come to understand this when they see her coming through a doorway, and report it to their parents. The parents get the backing of the Monsignor, who involves the bishop, to bring the matter to the attention of the nuns who run the convent. All concerned are judgmental and harsh; they wish to see Helen fired immediately.

The oil company refuses to pay any ransom to bring the strike to an end. The IRA decides to kidnap the electrical contractor, who has continued to travel north for his work, and to execute him. They will use this action to demonstrate to the oil company that they mean business. Anton sees the body of his friend, shot though the head and dumped in a ditch on the border, on the television news.

HOW THE NOVEL ENDS
Helen is informed that she will lose her job as a result of becoming pregnant, and because she has moved in with the father, Ned Rocket, a married man. He cannot get a divorce as this is illegal in the Ireland of the 1980s. The case becomes public. There is uproar on the part of the embryonic but growing liberal classes in Ireland. This is resisted by conservative, Catholic Ireland. In the middle of all this the Reverend Mother tells Helen that it can be arranged for her to go to England, have the baby, get it adopted, and then come back to her teaching job as if nothing had happened. Helen refuses, and is fired.

The oil company arranges for its French subcontractors, who were up to then building the production platform and the legs for the whole rig, to come to New Ross, load the accommodation platform onto its ocean-going barge, which has also been built in New Ross, and tow it to France to be completed. This operation is carried out with the highest security, which is provided by the Irish army, and with military precision.

Having the gas platform towed to France for completion in this manner is deeply embarrassing for the town of New Ross, and for the country as a whole. People become aware of Rocket’s involvement and start to boycott his pub. Helen is shunned in the street because of her relationship with Rocket by some who had previously supported her in her difficulties with the nuns.

Helen dies in childbirth. Rocket’s pub is raided by the authorities for unpaid taxes, and has to close down. The upshot of all of this is that he is a broken man. He contemplates suicide, and it is only the thought of his daughter that keeps him alive. At the end he breaks with Sinn Féin and the IRA, and takes a job as a barman with another, sympathetic, bar owner.

ENDS