This piece is based on 'World War Z' by Max Brooks.
Its an oral history of the war as told by the former Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland.
[I meet Paul McKenna in a pub in the north inner city of Dublin. Although a committed tee-totaller, McKenna said this place had sentimental value and was a favoured haunt of his father. We find a deserted booth in the lounge. The few people here don't seem to recognize either of us.]
Ireland held its parliamentary elections three months prior to the Great Panic. There were rumours at this time of course, but nobody really took it seriously in this country. We've had previous 'pandemics' – Swine flu, bird flu, you name it – and the Irish people have a tendency to shrug these things off, not to worry about them until they get sick… At which point, they adopt a fatalistic approach, and assume that they're going to die. Anyway, the point is that these rumours of a great plague or a new outbreak of rabies were not an issue in the election. We had just got over the worst economic crisis and depression in our history, our public finances were once again in order, and the people were weary of what seemed to have been a lifetime of austerity. My party fought a strong campaign but still came second. As leader of the smaller party in the coalition government, I was made Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister).
I wouldn't expect most people outside of Ireland to be familiar with the dynamics and intricacies of Irish politics, so I'll just give a very quick summary and leave it at that. My party, Sinn Fein is a socialist and Republican organization. We were the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Troubles. We desired, and still desire, a 32 county republic.
[EDITORS NOTE: In recognition of the extraordinary co-operation of the catholic and protestant communities in Northern Ireland during the war, the United Kingdom has announced that it would allow Northern Ireland to unify with the southern Republic, pending the result of a referendum – which, as we go to print, has not yet occurred]
We had never before been in government, but I had moved my party firmly into the mainstream center left, and we picked up many votes from centrist voters with our policies on education and healthcare. This had caused problems among our rank and file, many of whom would be considered 'Marxist' in the traditional sense, which I will refer to later in this account.
The panic struck Ireland particularly badly. Of all the countries in the world, only Iceland was worse affected. Think about it. We had something like 7,000 full time soldiers. This in a country of four and a half million people. The vast majority of our police were unarmed. Very few people in this country owned guns. Nearly all of our buildings are low rise. The lapse of time between the breakout of infection in the city of the Cork and the time in which the city was completely over-run or lost to the Irish government was less than six hours. The infection then spread north throughout the country like an uncontrollable tsunami.
It all happened so quickly. The government was summoned in the early hours of the morning, only minutes after the first case of infection was identified in Cork. Unable to fully grasp what was happening or how to handle it, and unable to understand how the few hundred soldiers and reservists who had been placed on active duty were so easily defeated, we were understandably confounded. We hastily, and quite messily instituted the South African plan.
*Shrugs head forcefully*
You implemented it in the middle of Dublin City?
Yes, and to this day I will never understand what possessed us. An Irish solution to an Irish problem! At the time, it seemed like such a great idea. Our green zone would be Phoenix Park – the biggest urban park in Europe by any standard, and its slap bang in the middle of the city. We already had the HQ for our police here, along with the Presidency, our central army weapons depot, and pretty much every tank the Irish army had - it became apparent how useless these things would be during the war. About two hours into the Cork infection, we learnt of individual cases in the Dublin suburbs and in Donegal, so we knew we had to act quickly. Phoenix Park is completely walled, so we ordered the strengthening of these walls with concrete and whatever else we could get our hands on as quickly as possible. As the mass panic gripped Dublin, it seemed that many thousands of people had the same idea and they made for the park, possibly fueled by rumours that the government had basically given up on the rest of the country and were preparing this area for its last stand. We instituted a stop and search programme, but there were so many of them. We couldn't let them all in. So we created an outer wall and an inner wall. The outer wall had no real wall at all of course, just a line of sandbags along some arbitrary streets in the north inner city, immediately surrounding the park. We assembled as many technicians, engineers, agricultural experts, and anyone of value we could find. Meanwhile, the mood outside the gate was getting uglier by the minute. Families were banging their car horns, people were climbing the walls in greater numbers and with ever greater audacity. The few hundred soldiers we had available didn't know what do… should they fire at people climbing over? Were they infected?
Our police were even more clueless about what to do. It became apparent that we could nothing to swell this human tide. Our security forces are simply too few to withstand this kind of pressure, and the idea of shooting at them as they did in places like Russia or Ukraine was simply unthinkable.
It turns out that this short sightedness nearly cost us our lives.
It didn't take long for the city of Dublin to be completely over-run by the infection. It is hard to ascertain an accurate number, but the survivors were a statistical aberration. We heard sporadic gun fire for days afterwards from the park. Some districts of the city managed to organize themselves somewhat with improvised weaponry, yard tools and such, but few of them were able to hold out for long.
Predictably, some people started to turn soon after getting in to the park. I was in the relative safety of Aras an Uachterain (seat of the Presidency) along with the rest of the government and the elite scientific and military personnel in the nation. This was a walled enclosure within a walled enclosure. There was probably 400 of us, all told. From there, I had could hear sporadic gunfire, and the pathetic, animalistic cries of thousands as the unspeakable and inexplicable madness of reanimated corpses began to tear in to them. Thousands of people were clambering at our gates, but none of them were allowed in. We had to leave them to their fate. This time, as people began to try to climb over, our soldiers did shoot and did kill those unfortunate souls. Some of the refugees attempted to break down the walls with lorries, but mercifully the machines were not able to build up much steam because of the congestion and the blast barriers we had set up earlier in the day. A few makeshift petrol bombs flew over as well.
Shortly after giving the order to shoot anybody attempting to get in to the Presidential grounds, the Taoiseach took his own life in front of the rest of the government. To this day I don't know where he even got that revolver, but the panic, as you can imagine, was intense.
You were made Prime Minister?
Indeed. Parliamentary majorities didn't seem to matter much in this new reality. I was the deputy, and then all of a sudden I was the leader. I was the leader of an undead nation. Not exactly why I got in to politics in the first place.
We had professors of microbiology, theology, physics, chemistry, immunology, and any number of experts congregated in the one relatively small place, along with the President and most government ministers. My wife and family were there as well, though most of the others did not have this sort of luck. They all lived with the near certain knowledge that their loved ones were almost certainly dead.
It took a few days for us to settle in to our new lodgings, and we got some of our experts to work on creating a national communication system. The first radio frequency we got a hold of was from a group of twenty people trapped in the top floor of an office building in the financial district of the city. Somehow they managed to get their hands on a ham radio – we later learnt that one of the bankers had a major interest in this archaic hobby, and he went on to become a major figure in our war effort. We dispatched one of our three helicopters to the roof of that building and organized an evacuation. There was no infection in the refugees, and they were then brought over to the Presidential building.
We had thousands of tents and emergency shelters in Phoenix park but since it had now been over-run by the undead, we had no access to them. There was a lot of debate at this point whether we should even be taking in more people – would be able to fit them in the building? Would there be enough food and water to go round? I over-ruled these concerns and set about organizing a national rescue effort. Over the next few months, we evacuated about two thousand Dubliners from various locations around the city, and brought them to the seat of the Presidency. We set about growing our own food, but rations were tight, and we had to make do with what we had. Fresh meat was not going to be in our diet again for a very long time.
Ireland has many restored castles and walled towns. We were getting reports all over the country of small groups of survivors fortifying themselves in old castles – Trim, in Meath, in the city of Limerick, in ancient ringforts – many of which had been restored in the years leading up to the great panic, for reasons completely unrelated to a zombie war! Our islands off our western coast also become sanctuaries of a sort. Achill Island off the coast of Mayo instituted a quarantine programme. The bridge connecting the island to the mainland was clogged full of people trying to get across, and in time the local authorities were able to accept most of the survivors before they were forced to explode the bridge.
There were some shining example of light and brotherhood throughout this mess. The city council of Derry, which had been effectively abandoned by the UK government, had concentrated all of its resources in to the old walled section of the city – and then, dramatically, shut its gates. The thousands of survivors concentrated here would later go on to help clear much of Ulster of the infection. Catholics and Protestants formed the 'Foyle Militia', many of them armed with weapons last used during the Troubles, this time fighting together as comrades against an existential threat.
Thankfully, the first winter came with a great cold front from the arctic, and froze over most of the country, making the zombie a more manageable if no less dangerous threat. We managed to clear out Phoenix park in that time, and secured the outer walls, allowing us some breathing room and more importantly, space to grow crops. For the first time during the outbreak, we had hope that we might be able to salvage something from this. A detachment of soldiers retook our main air force base on the other side of the city, and this gave us access to a huge quantity of fuel, as well as our helicopters. Naturally, we stripped apart the few jets that we had, recognizing their inherent uselessness in this conflict.
This fleet of helicopters – fifty or so in total – spent most of the next couple of years in the air, landing supplies to survivors groups, mapping out the islands of humanity in a sea of dead. We were able to establish a rough estimate of survivor numbers and were they were based. The peatlands in the middle of the country proved fertile soil for many survivors, and our soldiers made contact with these groups and helped them erect fortifications. The sparsely populated west of the country fared ok as well, many getting to grips with the outbreak at an early stage. The old manor houses of the long gone aristocracy bore the twin advantage of relative remoteness and large, walled enclosures, which were perfect for raising livestock and growing crops. Most of these places were secured in the first couple of months of the infection, often by enterprising locals in tandem with the few thousand soldiers left remaining in the country.
Many of these new communities became deeply distrustful of the government in Phoenix Park. We mishandled everything, they said. Some even declared 'independence', whatever that was supposed to mean. Some of them were disaffected members of my own party, and held me in particular in contempt for my supposed cowardice and complicity in the execution of refugees in the city of Dublin.
I did what needed to be done, and have no problems getting to sleep at night.
[The former Taoiseach leaves the building and starts walking down the street towards his home. Dublin, once a vibrant city with a raucous nightlife, is all but deserted, the melancholy permeating everything like a sponge.]