unwritten rule that if you're in another man's house after midnight on Christmas Eve, you'd better have a red suit and a big sack. The Guards had neither; indeed, a Guard I recognized from Seafield with no lips and no manners seemed hell-bent on proving he had no wits either: ranting lachrymosely and aggressively about how Christmas wasn't what it used to be, and of course it never had been, he had to be physically restrained from breaking to Sadie, Dave's angelic five-year-old, who was skipping about in a turquoise-and-lavender tutu with a magic wand, the news that Santa Claus didn't exist. Dave did the physical restraining himself, and he looked to me like he'd have enjoyed doing a lot more of it. The lipless Guard resumed after a brief pause with an ill-tempered, sanity- taxing tirade about how contemporary Christmas songs weren't fit to shine the shoes of the immortal classics of the genre, by titans such as Mud, Wizzard and Gary Glitter.
In the living room, the source of the inferior contemporary sounds, Dave's three boys, who were between ten and fourteen but looked like they'd been fed on beef three times a day since birth, were trying out their rucking and mauling techniques on a couple of Guards who wanted to show what good sports they were to three young female Gardai who had drunk themselves to the land where the only response to any event is to shriek with laughter. The shrieks only got louder when Dave's eldest lad tried a handoff that was more like a punch, causing a Guard's nose to flow and his temper to fly a long way from where the good sports play.
In the back room, a few older hands were putting on a different kind of show for their juniors, and after sinking the punch and finding some whiskey and hearing the Butler family being discussed, I felt emboldened enough to insinuate myself onto the edge of it.
'They're a blot, a fucking plague all over north Wicklow, and there's nothing you can fucking do with them,' a thickset ginger-haired comb-over said.
'Are they all one family?' a spotty young fella said.
Comb-over led the older hands in a burst of hollow laughter.
'You could say that,' he said. 'Put it this way: Old Man Butler wasn't fussy about where he dipped his wick. He didn't mind if you were his cousin. He didn't mind if you were his sister. He didn't mind if you were his
'He didn't mind that at all at all,' said a skinny cop with a hook nose and floppy gray hair in a side parting.
'Oh, he liked his daughters very much,' said Comb-over.
'He liked his granddaughters too,' added Hook Nose. The young Guards were appalled and delighted by what was obviously a practiced routine.
'He was an equal-opportunities shagger,' Comb-over said.
''Twas the granddaughters that did for him though,' said a crinkle-haired Galway man with a big mustache.
'What, his granddaughters killed him?' a round-faced young smiler said.
'In a manner of speaking,' said Comb-over, who smoked a pipe, and would have strung this one out until New Year's if he'd been let.
'One of the daughters caught him with the granddaughter,' Hook Nose said. 'Not in the act, but in the bedroom, very cozy. She reefed him out of it, sent him home with a flea in his ear. Then the young one, she's what, twelve, thirteen, doesn't she tell her ma her elder sister's been going in the bedroom with Granda for years now. The sister gets home, the ma gets it out of her, she hasn't been riding him, she's just been sucking him off, as if that wasn't as bad. And Ma goes fucking mental.'
'There was three Butler sisters in the Michael Davitt,' said Mustache.
'And Vinnie,' said Hook Nose.
'Well they were hardly gonna get Vinnie involved, sure wasn't Vinnie as bad as the old man?' said Comb- over.
'So the daughters took the old man down the seafront there in Bray, in and out of any pub or hotel he wasn't barred from, started at the harbor, ended up by the amusements, in full daylight this was, the wintertime, and they filled him full of drink and bullshit, bygones be bygones, nothing to forgive, sure nothing happened anyway. And the women were watching what they drank. And then they set off up the hill a little way and around the cliff path, work up a thirst for more, Da, they said, night falling fast. And when they got to the sheerest drop, little pick of a man at this stage, and two of the women twenty stone each, didn't they pick him up and fuck him down onto the railway tracks.'
'And what happened?' said Spotty.
'Into the station with them,' said Hook Nose. 'They told me Old Man Butler had committed suicide. I asked them why he'd done that, he didn't seem the type, and they said that he'd finally seen the error of his ways, and then they each produced a statement detailing what he had done to them over the years. And what he'd begun to do to their children.'
Hook Nose stopped talking, and drained his drink, and Comb-over passed him a bottle of Paddy.
'It didn't make pleasant fucking reading, I can tell you that for nothing,' he said.
'You took leave, didn't you?' Mustache said.
'Ah, I needed a holiday anyway.'
'But…how do you know they murdered him?' Smiler said.
'Because they were fucking boasting about it all over Bray that night. 'We killed our da, and we'll kill you if you fuck with us.' And Vinnie comes in three days later, the last to fucking know as usual, and he wants to press charges,' said Comb-over. 'They've told him they did it, they've told half of Wicklow they did it, and the other half know they did it anyway. So we prepare a file, and we send it to the DPP to see if they'll take it to trial, and he comes back with his decision: Not In A Million Years.'
'It'd be a grand 'oul story,' Hook Nose said, 'like in a film or something, only for the fact that the daughters are fucking savages too, and they've raised broods of savages: junkies and dealers and whores. Every night there's joyriding or robbing or fire-setting or some fucking shenanigans up there and it's always the Butlers.'
'What do you do though?' Smiler said. 'I mean, there's always gonna be families like that on a council estate, families that drag the rest down. And the only sanction you have is to evict them. And then what do you do with all the evicted families?'
'They used to go to England,' Mustache said. 'That's where Old Man Butler came back from. With three brothers, you know what they were called? Sean, John, and John Junior. And Old Man Butler was called Jack. Fuck's sake like. They all had the same fucking name. Making a show of us in front of the Brits, thick fucking Paddy can't even think to give his kids different names like.'
'Seed and breed, seed and breed,' Comb-over said.
'When the blood goes bad, it's a hard job to put it right,' Mustache said.
'It's the job of generations,' Hook Nose said.
'It's not our job lads,' Comb-over said.
'But seriously, what do you do?' Smiler had drunk himself earnest. 'I mean, if it's one or two families, and you get them out, what do you do with them then?'
'Is this a social ser vices or a waste management problem?' Comb-over said.
'Burn them,' said Hook Nose.
'Bury them,' said Mustache.
'Recycle them,' Spotty chirped, staying up late with the big boys.
They all looked at Smiler.
'I mean, it's just such a tragic set of circumstances,' he said, sticking nervously to his guns. 'There must be some way make an intervention, to break the cycle, to rehabilitate…some of them, at least,' he said. 'The children?'
Hook Nose and Mustache looked up at the ceiling and piously intoned the word
'In our day, son, a Guard was supposed to marry a nurse, not fucking turn into one.'
EVERYONE WAS TALKING about the Omega Man case, and everyone stopped talking about it whenever I got close. I decided it was better if I made good my escape. I was at the front door when Dave
