DAREDEVIL #205 (April 1984)
“The Gael”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Bob Budiansky

Gather round, children! An American is going to tell us about the IRA! This always goes well!

Daredevil #205 brings in Matt’s new love interest, Glorianna O’Breen. She’ll stick around as a regular until issue #233. But we first meet her as Debbie Nelson’s photographer niece from Ireland, on the run from “terrible danger” back home. Her father Fergus is a member of the IRA – “the anti-government rebels”, as she describes them – but he’s been falsely accused of betraying the organisation, and so he’s sent her to America to keep her safe from retribution.

Soon afterwards, Daredevil stops two IRA men from trying to bundle Glorianna into a van. But of course, the IRA couldn’t possibly be doing anything bad – it turns out that they’re actually trying to keep her safe from the Gael, an IRA hit man who “went bad”. We’ve already seen the Gael in the opening scene: he’s a man in a trenchcoat who kills one of his informants for the hell of it, has a shamrock motif on his gloves, and leaves a paper shamrock on his victim’s forehead as a calling card. You’d think it would blow away. Maybe he makes them with Post-it notes.

At any rate, the traitor plot is almost immediately dropped; Fergus has already been killed off panel, which presumably exonerates him in the IRA’s eyes. Instead, the story seems to be that Fergus discovered the Gael’s true identity, and that the Gael killed him to protect the secret. Fergus has chosen to share that secret with Glorianna – not by actually telling her, but by concealing it in her camera and giving cryptic hints about where to look. Since the Gael is actually family friend Paddy O’Hanlon, who knows precisely how to get in touch with Glorianna, it might have been a good idea to actually tell her to keep away from him. But then the plot couldn’t happen, so Fergus doesn’t do that.

In theory, then, the Gael’s primary motive in going after Glorianna is to stop her from exposing his identity. When he finally corners her – by the simple expedient of showing up at her door, because he’s a family friend – he gives us a speech about how he joined the IRA, but then came to realise that he enjoyed homicide more than he cared about patriotism. It’s made very clear that, although the Gael isn’t targetting the O’Breens completely at random, mostly he’s just a sadistic murderer, and he’s really looking forward to the sadistic murder bit.

Daredevil shows up, leading to a curious scene in which the Gael threatens to strangle Glorianna unless Daredevil handcuff his own hands behind his back. Daredevil does so, but of course he’s just playing along, and he handily defeats the Gael anyway as soon as he moves in for the kill.

The Gael himself is not especially problematic, despite O’Neil’s rose-tinted view of the IRA. He’s a psychopath who signed up for a patriotic cause simply because it was a pretext to kill people. It’s implicit in that concept that the IRA is the sort of organisation that might represent an attractive career opportunity for such a person. And the Gael somehow manages to come across as a sinister creep despite using a shamrock motif and calling himself “the Gael” – all of which might seem a bit on the nose for an Irish nationalist hitman, particularly one who doesn’t care about the nationalism. Conceivably the idea is meant to be that he’s mocking the patriotism of his more sincere compatriots, but it really plays more as Oirishness.

The Gael returns later in O’Neil’s run, in issues #216-217. In order to escape jail, he sticks his head in the prison laundry pressing machine, ensuring that he gets taken to a civilian hospital at the minor cost of mutilating his own face. Once there, he kills all his guards and makes a break for it. Obviously, this kicks him up a gear in the psycho stakes. He shows up later in the issue, back in his hat and trenchcoat but with a scarf covering most of his face, to kill an IRA cell for no particular reason – in Daredevil’s words, at this point “the man is a complete homicidal maniac”. In fact, not only does he kill the cell, he paralyses them with drugs so that he can torture them first. By this point, O’Neil is essentially repositioning the Gael as a slasher serial killer.

The Gael decides to go after “the Old Woman of Beare” – a woman in Victorian garb and a veil who hangs out in an Irish bar and, we’re told, “makes travel arrangements for the Irish Republican Army’s agents in America”. Daredevil shows up at the bar, only to find everyone dead apart from the Old Woman. She then turns out to be the Gael in drag, with the real Old Woman locked away in a cupboard. So Daredevil fights a facially scarred man dressed as an old lady, and naturally enough, he wins again.

It then turns out that the Old Woman of Beare was Glorianna . This is all rather bizarre, because O’Neil seems to be telling us both that Glorianna has only just arrived from Dublin and that the Old Woman of Beare is a fixture of the IRA’s New York operations. (A subplot establishes that Crossbow also knows about her.) But if Glorianna has been travelling back and forth to New York for years, then why did she need to ask Debbie for somewhere to stay in issue #205? If she was trying to get away from the IRA, why did she go to the one city in the world where she had established IRA contacts? And how does “meet me in a bar, I’ll be in Queen Victoria cosplay” qualify as an inconspicuous way of offering support services to terrorists?

But the plot problems aren’t the real difficulty with this story. When Daredevil asks Glorianna why she was helping terrorists, she responds by insisting that the IRA are not terrorists, but “good people fighting to free their home from oppression, any way they can”. She also insists that she was only involved in making travel arrangements. The Gael shows up later in the issue to have another go at killing her, but gets derailed by the A-plot, in which all of New York becomes temporarily blind. Naturally, he gets recaptured and send to jail. Finally, the Black Widow makes some calls and verifies that “Glorianna O’Breen is the soul of innocence”.

I mean. It’s fine to draw a distinction between the IRA, who have a cause, and the Gael, who is a slasher taking advantage of the opportunity that they provide. It’s fine too for Glorianna herself to reject the characteristion of the IRA as terrorists – as an IRA sympathiser, so she should. The problem comes when the story tries to assure us that helping terrorists to cross borders for fund raising purposes is “the soul of innocence”, and Daredevil seems to be okay with that.

It might be worth taking a step back here. In the early 17th century, James VI and I decided that it would be a really good idea to colonise Ulster with Scottish Protestants. This resulted in a permanent Protestant majority in the area which is now Northern Ireland, which endured for centuries. The Irish War of Independence ended with Northern Ireland voting to stay in the UK and being given home rule. But since Northern Irish politics divided along sectarian lines, the result was a permanent Unionist majority and anti-Catholic discrimination. The violent suppression of Catholic civil rights protests then led to the Troubles and the emergence of this version of the IRA.

The original IRA was the army which fought the Irish War of Independence in the 1920s. The IRA of the Troubles regarded itself as the successor of that group, and didn’t even regard the Irish government in Dublin as legitimate. Still, the fundamental difficulty with the demand for Irish unification was that the majority of the population of Northern Ireland didn’t want it, and however dubious the Plantation of Ulster might have been in 1610, the Protestants had been there for over 300 years by this point.

When O’Neil was writing the first Gael story, the IRA’s bombing campaign was mainly directed at targets in Northern Ireland and targets in England that had some sort of military connection (even if that meant things like parades in Hyde Park rather than military installations as such). The Gael debuted just as the IRA started to shift towards civilian targets. His first appearance is cover dated April 1984, but under the bizarre dating conventions of the time, that actually means that it came out in December 1983 – just as an IRA car bomb outside Harrods killed three civilians. The IRA claimed that it was a rogue operation. The second Gael story, published nearly a year later, came out not long after the Brighton hotel bombing, a failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher which killed five people and injured 30 more.

There is as problem, then, with having Matt accept that Glorianna assisting the IRA is consistent with her being “the soul of innocence”. O’Neil was not alone in this sort of thing; it was something of a commonplace in the 1980s to view Irish Americans as gullible terrorist funders, even if the actual contribution of Noraid to the IRA’s finances was probably overplayed. But by 1985, when the IRA planned a bombing campaign of English seaside resorts, it was getting rather harder to depict them romantically.

The Gael exists in that slightly odd limbo of having a codename and an extreme personality but not quite being an actual supervillain; in that respect, he’s another Daredevil villain cut from the mould of Batman’s rogue’s gallery. But for those of us old enough to remember their bombing campaign without actually encountering it on a day to day basis, having them show up in superhero comics is tonally weird on any view. Superhero comics exist in a fantasy world; the IRA were the reason why train stations didn’t have litter bins.

In theory, the Gael can exist independently of the IRA – the whole idea is that he’s gone rogue, after all. But there’s not a great deal of point in using him unless you want to say something about the IRA – without that back story and his Irish angle, he’s simply a serial killer. O’Neil does set him up very effectively in that role, as a torturer who’ll go to any lengths, even seemingly self-destructive ones. But the Irish angle was meant to provide him with an extra hook. And by the time O’Neil had finished with the Gael, perhaps writing about the IRA wasn’t looking as attractive to Americans as it once had.