All for one and one for all

All for one and one for all is the motto Jonathan Devlin recalls as the defining rule of his boyhood bond with Cathal Mills and Shane. Borrowed from The Three Musketeers, it begins as a promise that the three boys will protect one another when they feel they have nobody else; in retrospect, it also reveals how their loyalty could close their imagined world around themselves and leave another person’s wishes out of account.

Origin of the Motto

When the boys were ten, they made a blood-brothers pact. Shane was afraid to cut himself, but Cathal Mills persuaded him; the remembered ritual gave physical form to a bond Jonathan describes as closer than that of most brothers. After they watched The Three Musketeers on television, Cathal chose its motto for the group. He insisted that they had to have each other’s backs because nobody else was on their side, and Jonathan later acknowledges that Cathal was right about the importance of their mutual support.

A Bond Made Necessary by Circumstance

Jonathan places the pact against the boys’ unhappy family backgrounds and the limited prospects they faced after leaving school in the early 1980s. Shane had never known his father; Cathal Mills’s father, in Jonathan’s account, was unreliable; and Jonathan’s parents were both alcoholics. There were few jobs, and the boys had neither the means nor the academic points to go to college. With little to do or anticipate, they had one another. Jonathan stresses that this background is not an excuse for what followed, but it helps explain why the promise of loyalty carried such force—and why the group’s solidarity could become dangerous when it was treated as the only bond that mattered.

The Motto Turned Against Its Promise

The limits of the pact became clearer after Shane discovered that Jonathan was involved with Sandra Scully, for whom Shane also had strong feelings. He experienced the relationship as a betrayal, and the three friends argued repeatedly over the following weeks. Cathal Mills then proposed that all three should be with the same girl, presenting this as a stronger seal on their friendship, an echo of their childhood blood-brothers ritual. Shane supported the idea. Jonathan recalls having doubts, but says Cathal kept pressing it; the group’s loyalty thus became the rationale for a plan centered on Sandra without first asking what she wanted.

Retrospective Meaning

Looking back, Jonathan admits that they should have asked Sandra’s opinion. He describes the three boys as living in a world of their own, where other people did not seem fully real to them. His account distinguishes explanation from exoneration: he says there was no excuse for what they did, though their adolescent isolation helps explain the logic they used. The motto therefore carries a double meaning. It recalls the security of a friendship forged amid neglect and bleak prospects, but also the danger of making loyalty absolute. What once promised that each boy would stand by the others later helped them mistake their shared desire for a sufficient reason to disregard someone outside the pact.