In The Light of Renewal: The Lamb of Christ's Union - Introduction
The Lamb of Christ’s Union
By Sloane Ó Donnagán
Introduction
All journalists begin with dreams of finding and telling stories that are going to change the world. It’s practically a requirement of entering the field. My father had been central to the Irish Unification movement, which then lead him to The Oireachtas following that movement's ultimate success. Dreams of changing the world might just run in my blood. I’m not sure whether to consider it a privilege or a curse to have been so close to the success of these efforts to make the world a better place, as the Unification movement saw it. I think it gave me a realistic understanding of the work it takes, but an unrealistic estimate of how often it happens.
From the time I was around fourteen, to the time I went off to university, I was basically an assistant to my father. My mum and I were recruited into service of this cause by proximity. There was no money to pay for an assistant, but because of my father's public profile related to the cause, an assistant was necessary. My mum and I basically took turns in the role. During the day, she was answering calls, taking messages, running interference when necessary, keeping his calendar in order, trying to keep my father on schedule for appointments and so on. After school, and when my schoolwork was finished, it was my turn to take over. I was glad to be able to spend the time with him, and to feel useful in something both of my parents not only believed in so deeply, but that they shared with me. I was aware that it wasn’t the way most of my peers were growing up, and I often missed out on the activities of adolescence so many of them were taking part in, but it was exciting and I felt like I was taking part in something important. I don’t regret it, and I still think it was important. I’m proud of having dedicated my time and energy to it.
It was that experience that lead to studying journalism at university. I’d seen how important the news media was, up close. I’d seen the difference between journalism and being a stenographer for power. With a firmly entrenched belief in self governance for a United Ireland already in place, it was during my studies I developed an interest in the fall of democracy in the former United States. Over time, it was a topic I kept coming back to. I ended up writing a number of papers about it, and having a few pieces published in the student paper, which I’d joined early on. I looked at it as a cautionary tale, a list of failures, missteps and mistakes Ireland could learn from in the efforts to preserve our own democracy. Between the experience of being my father’s assistant during the Unification movement, and then what I’d learned in my study of the fall of the US, the chaos that lead to the establishment of Christ’s Union on the grave of one of the world’s longest running democracies, I decided that even as my father had become a Senator, the important work of journalism wasn’t going to be done covering national or international politics. Part of the early success of the Unification campaign had identified early on that there was a difference between journalists and outlets that covered press releases and media we created, and journalists and outlets who showed up where they were holding events. One of these was caught flat footed, seeming to feel that it had gained public support out of nowhere, the other hand witnessed how that support was built.
Niamh Flanagan had started The Republic in the first few years my father had become a figure in the Unification movement. She'd left The Guardian when it had become clear to her the UK was going to falter. She saw opportunity, as had the Unification movement, in the final cracks forming. She'd come from old money, but she was respected as a journalist and had covered Britain with a fair, but critical eye. To be honest, I think part of what drove her to come home to Dublin was watching how thoroughly the wealthy and powerful of England had cocked things up. There's a part of me that now thinks she'd decided to come home to Ireland to make sure the people in charge here didn't do the same. Even as she'd been educated at Oxford, the children of Ireland's wealthy had been among her peers, and I think she felt they needed watching. The Republic had been established with the mandate to take over where the British papers, very clearly as delusional as the British government had become, had lost their way. Between the inheritance she had to start The Republic, her reputation as a journalist, and her understanding of how to sell it, she'd collected some of best Irish journalists, before it had gone live.
The Republic had sent journalists to events my father was speaking at or done interviews with him often. Not only was it the rare example of a news outlet still privately owned by an individual, but even more rare, it was owned by a woman. Flanagan had become something of a role model while I was young, and still was when I went to uni. She started a number of different media ventures after the success of The Republic. Not all of those were successful, but the ones that managed to survive are well respected and she had a reputation for being smart, and tough. In my second year at university, The Republic had published an investigation into detailing that Barclays had used both unethical and illegal methods to fleece citizens of Ireland following the Unification vote. Barclay’s had set their impressive and extremely expensive legal machinery to work trying to destroy Flanagan and The Republic. Flanagan, in turn, assembled her own impressive legal team and set about waging a PR war against Barclays. Every complaint, impropriety, even basic annoyances were getting covered in her media outlets. Barclays had underestimated how many people deal with financial institutions because they have to, not because they particularly like them, and Flanagan had leveraged that at every chance. There was a two week period where she took every possible opportunity to get in front of a microphone, camera or journalist to call Barclays CEO an “impotent, lipless, morally bankrupt pig, who would burst into flames if the sun touched him.” Cartoons and augmented reality pieces of the man as a pig started popping up everywhere. Eventually, Barclays lost the suit they’d brought against Flanagan and The Republic, and with the evidence they’d reported, Barclays was forced to fork over one of the largest settlements in history of the Irish court system, including the legal costs The Republic had incurred.
I’d sought a position covering Dublin’s city desk at The Republic, not believing I had much of a chance. I assume my name was part of the reason I even got a chance, but it was my first job out of university, and I threw myself into it, believing it was the only way I’d keep it. It worked. For the next ten years, I learned and worked diligently, covering everything from city politics to costume contests for pets. If it was in Dublin, and I was assigned it as a story at some point, and I gave it my best, which turned out to be pretty good, if I may say so myself. It didn’t hurt that in the time working for my father, I’d developed a number of contacts who were willing to speak to me when they might not have been willing to speak to someone whose face and name they didn’t recognize as pleasant. My father’s been gone going on five years now. I’m proud of the work I’ve done for The Republic, even as he would have preferred I’d tried to get a position covering national politics. We differed in where we thought good journalism could be most impactful, but I think he was proud of me. He wasn’t always an effusive man, but I’ve been told on a few occasions he sent stories I'd written to colleagues.
It was good work, and I believe it was necessary, but in the time I’d been there, I hadn't come across that story. I’d become somewhat jaded, I think, and stopped believing one story could do anything so substantial as change how the public thought or could make any substantial difference in almost any way. I had come to look at being a journalist as being a kind of historian. I was recording the time I lived, as accurately as I could, so it would be there for the generations that followed. If nothing else, it would make it harder to tell the kinds of lies about the past that always empower authoritarians, a kind of inoculation against the delusional variety of nostalgia that had helped topple the United States.
That was before the story of The Lamb of Christ’s Union came to me. I know this story changed me. There is a part of me that wants to think it may be the kind of story that can help change the world. Another part of me, the part of me that spent years watching little change in Dublin, is too disillusioned to believe that. Even as I saw my father’s efforts to change his country, which had a impact on national and international politics, I spent ten years covering every variety of societal and governmental failure imaginable, and those stories can create a chorus that won’t be denied in their push for accountability, but I’ve come to understand why Unification seemed impossible in all those years before my father and so many others decided to convince the people of our nation it was.
It was Wednesday, February 5, 2076. I was at my desk finishing up the final changes my editor had asked for on a story about a threatened strike by an electrician's union. I had plans to meet a few old friends I hadn’t seen in a number of years, after work. I was putting on my coat and gathering my things, when a call came up at my desk.
Had it not been a Senator, I’d have let them leave a message, but when you’re a reporter and a Senator or their office calls you directly, it’s a good practice to pick up the phone. Either they have a story for you or there’s soon going to be a story about you, and both of these are good to know. Senator Donnelly had been among the earliest supporters of the Unification movement in the Oireachtas, as soon as it became clear it wasn’t just the same chatter and grumbling that had been going on for decades. I’d seen him occasionally at functions my father held or brought me to, but in a decade at The Republic, he nor any of his staff had contacted me.
He told me he had someone he wanted to introduce me to. Someone he thought would be a source for a story I’d want to hear, and hopefully want to tell. My interest was piqued, but there are complications when a senior senator wants to give you a story as a journalist. The first question is always, “Why?” Someone in Senator Donnelly’s position doesn’t just ring a random journalist up and hand them a story. In just about every case, they're calling someone they already have a relationship with and it’s serving their interests in one way or another. This lead to the next logical question, “Why me?” The amount of time I'd spend speaking to Senator Donnelly through the years, probably added up to thirty or forty minutes, and I’d avoided trading on my father’s time as a Senator. I wasn’t going to throw away the reputation I’d built to be a lapdog for anyone, even if my father had thought well of Donnelly. Those aren’t questions you ask directly though, because you’ll never get direct answers.
When I inquired about who this source was that it began to make more sense, and now, I think of that moment as the one that’s changed the trajectory of my life to a significant degree.
“And, who is this source Senator Donnelly?”
“The defector.”
I did my best not to let it show on my face, because I could see Donnelly was watching intently to see how I'd react, but elation is probably the best word for what I felt at that moment. There’d been a press conference a few months before about a defector from Christ’s Union. All that had been said was that he had been rescued at sea and for a few days his survival was in question. When his condition was stabilized, he awakened, and after being apprised of where he was and where he was found, he plead for political asylum saying that if he were returned to Christ’s Union, he would definitely be killed. We were told he was medically stable, but his health was not good, and he had been severely traumatized at the hands of the Christ Union government. When his health had improved, the Department of State would have a chance to debrief him more thoroughly, and he was ready, he was going talk to the press. He had apparently not agreed to speak to the press at the time this press conference was held, but Minister Coughlin of the State Department decided he was going to speak to the press, if he wanted asylum. Coughlin wanted a dancing monkey.
According to Senator Donnelly, it had taken them the last few months to convince him to talk to a journalist, and when he finally assented, he said he’d talk to me and only me.
I was dumbfounded. Every journalist in the free nations of the world would have wanted this interview, especially those covering international politics at The Republic. I told Donnelly it was going to be a hard sell to my editors, since I'd never covered national or international politics. He said he’d call them and see to it, if I wanted to do it. He went on to say he knew I probably could had my choice of assignments following both my father’s career and my performance at university, which made him assume I’d chosen to cover Dublin, and maybe whatever reason I’d done so was still applicable.
I was taken aback, because as far as I knew, Donnelly was not close enough with my father for them to have spoken about my choice not to cover national politics, as far as I had ever seen or heard. It takes a shrewd person to last in politics as long as Donnelly had, but it was still surprising and discomfiting to be so quickly and easily read by a stranger.
I told him this was different. It is nearly impossible to get accurate information about life in Christ’s Union. The former United States did not lose it’s ability to produce a continuous onslaught of media portraying itself simultaneously as victor and victim. As is well known though, it had long ago stopped letting foreign reporters roam free in within its borders and it is a nation that is aggressive in its pursuit of journalists or media from anywhere in the world not portraying it as it wants to be. I did want the interview, both because of the opportunity it presented to see what the fall of a democracy had become, selfishly for my career prospects, but also because of the opportunity to indulge an old obsession whose river of information had long ago run dry.
Donelly told me he’d personally contact the Niamh Flanagan, and our Editor in Chief, Sean Cahill, to explain to them they have the chance for this exclusive interview, but only if I were to do it.
I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask why it was Donnelly calling, not someone from The Department of State. He simply said my father had always been a good and honest man, he'd still owed my father a favor when he died and seeing that even if I was a journalist, I seemed to be possessed of those same traits. He’d pressed the Minister to allow him to contact me, as a senior member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense. “More simply and honestly put,” he’d said, “if I can prevent you from having to deal with those fools at State and all the demands I’m sure they’d have, I’ll feel I have paid my debt to your father. Not that it matters, but I think this defector also made a very good choice in asking for you. The Republic is one of the sources of news I read daily, so I am familiar with your work and you’re among the best choices to do this. I think we’ve concluded our business though, and I’ll make those calls to Niamh Flanagan and your editor immediately. We’d like to get this process started as quickly as possible.”
When the call with Donnelly ended, my head was spinning. I took off my coat, sat back down at my desk and called to tell my friends I wasn’t going to make it, a story had fallen into my lap. They understood, but were disappointed. I was too, but I also couldn’t stop the whirring wheel in my mind. The questions I wanted to ask, what this story was going to entail and so on. I thought it was going to take up weeks of my life, which I now know was naive. I was eating, breathing and sleeping this story for six months.
It took about an hour before I got a call from the Editor in Chief, Sean Cahill. He was surprised I was still in the offices and asked me to come up to a meeting with Niamh Flanagan. I’d gotten myself settled down by diving into as much of the last few years of news about Christ’s Union as I could read in an hour, but my head started spinning again, immediately. In the decade I’d been at The Republic, I’d never met Flanagan in person, and I was realizing at that moment, my admiration for her hadn’t soured much. I’d only ever met and spoken to our Editor in Chief on a handful of occasions. Kelly Coughlin has my editor on the city desk, and we'd worked closely since she had taken over the position three years before. Through the years, I'd gotten a five or ten messages from Cahill, congratulating me on stories, and twice from Flanagan, but this was different. Suddenly, I was going to be taking a meeting alone, with Cahill and Flanagan. I'd been a journalist long enough that facing powerful people hadn't rattled me in a while, so it was surprising to have that feeling seeping back in.
Twenty minutes later, I stood in Sean Cahill’s office, looking at him and Flanagan. It took about fifteen minutes of questioning for them to be satisfied I hadn’t in any way attempted to insinuate myself into this opportunity, after which they were satisfied this defector had indeed asked for me or at least someone in government had told him to ask for me.
Sean said to Flanagan, “Duffy’s going to lose him mind when he hears about this. He's been pressing every contact he has to get something that would give him a lead on this story. He might quit.”
She replied, “Duffy’s a good writer, and he’s a cunt. Good writers who aren’t cunts might be hard to come by, but not impossible. Good writers who are cunts are easy to find. He’ll get over it or he’ll quit. If he does, we'll find someone else. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’re not passing up this opportunity.” She turned to me, “Sloane, you’re smart. You know what this opportunity means for you and for The Republic, yes?”
I said, “I think so, yes.”
“All of this has to be on the level. I want everything recorded. I want four, five backups… of everything. Keep a few hidden as best you can too. I’m sure you know dissidents from Christ’s Union have a bad habit of experiencing accidents, right?”
“I do.”
"You're familiar with the suspicions about the case of that Australian journalist, I assume?"
I said, "Hudson Walker. I'm familiar with the story, yes."
She looked to Sean, “Do we need to hire some kind of private security for her?”
Cahill’s mouth dropped open. He hadn’t even thought of it. “It might not be a bad idea. It’s hard to say. Do you think they’d go after a journalist from another country like that? Walker had been in the country. Making a journalist disappear within their borders is different from violating the borders of another country, no?”
“Sloane, this guy is asking for you because you’ve done your homework about just how insane these people are. What do you say?”
“I’d be less worried about me than I am the source. They’re less likely to try to do something to me. This defector? If they think they can get him, they’ll try. Frakes is shrewd. They might try to intimidate me somehow, threaten me, but it would cause them new problems, internationally, coming after an Irish citizen on Irish soil, unless things have devolved there even further than they seem. The source? I think the incident in France makes it clear they'd go after him."
Flanagan said, “Aye. That’s my read too. I’m going to call Donnelly back. Since this defector is apparently a guest of the our government, they’re going to provide the security for the meeting, I'm sure. We'll just make sure they extend it to you too. If I were Christ’s Union, the first thing I’d do is try to follow you to him. We’ll agree to have whoever they’ll have running security pick you up wherever they designate and take you wherever they feel is secure. How does that sit with you?”
“That makes sense. Tell them I need to be able to check in with Sean every four hours though. If something does happen, I don’t want it to be three days of run around and some government PR wanker making up some shite that ends up in the news first.”
Fortunately, Senator Donnelly assured Niamh it would be taken care of. It was strange to be agreeing to be under government surveillance, as a journalist, but it seemed like the most sensible course of action, especially since I had no experience with a story of international significance that would cause the interest of an extremist foreign government to look my way.
Two days later, I sat down for the first time with Nicholas Benlow. Military Intelligence has given the codename, "Lamb." Military Intelligence isn't without their sense of irony, and it's how he came to be called, "The Lamb of Christ's Union." I found it insensitive and a touch morbid, but I learned quickly they cared very little for what I thought about anything. Their job was to protect Nicholas and myself, whether either of us appreciated how they did so or not. Over the period of three weeks, Nicholas told me his story. Not just the story of The Marblehead, but his story, the story of his life in Christ’s Union. Nick, as I came to call him, is not always an easy person to like. He is an easy person to understand though. What he described being put through, in the service of what Christ’s Union and it’s Party Leader, Johnathan Frakes, in the service of the petty desires for domination by men with even the smallest bit of power, and by sadists empowered for their willingness to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty in order to practice that sadism, has shaken me. I’m familiar with the history of my nation. I’m familiar with the history of The United States. Blood, suffering and terror are common parts of our histories. Christ’s Union was built on a romanticized idea of that history that never existed, but it exists and trades in the violence, persecution and subjugation that is all too real, and for that reason, Nicholas Benlow’s story is important.
I have verified some aspects of his story. I have not been able to verify all of it. This is why it was decided by myself, Sean Cahill and Niamh Flanagan, that this story wouldn’t be published in The Republic. They did not feel enough of the story could be corroborated to risk The Republic’s reputation. Those concerns are valid. I am not publishing this as an employee of The Republic, nor am I acting against the wishes of its publisher and Editor in Chief by doing so. I am publishing this story, in full, and will make available the recordings of my conversations with Nicholas Benlow, as well as transcripts, redacting only any information that could help identify his whereabouts. I have no doubt Nicholas believes this story. It’s also true that the government of Christ’s Union is secretive, devious, and dangerous in its desire to protect that secrecy. I feel the most responsible thing I can do is make this story public, be clear about what could be verified, hope others may be able to verify what I haven’t been able to, and let the public decide what they think or believe.
The day Senator Donnelly called me, I knew there was a possibility my life was going to change. I couldn’t have grasped how I would be changed though. There was a “me,” before Nicholas Benlow, and there is a “me” after Nicholas Benlow. They have all the same childhood memories, all the same experiences in adolescence and adulthood. Reading and understanding the terror and horror of history is one thing. It is something very different to look its consequences in the see yourself reflected back as you look its consequences in the eyes.