Although the answer to this question was obvious and terrible, it was not until much later that I was able to see it. What I knew, in the first instance, was that the death of Admiral Somerville had historic consequences: together with the fatal shooting, on 26 April 1936, of a suspected informer, John Egan, in County Waterford, it led to the final collapse of the relations between the IRA and Fianna Fáil. On 18 June 1936, the IRA was declared an unlawful association by the government, and has remained unlawful in Ireland ever since.
Uncle Brendan did not elaborate on his pronouncement that the Colt .45 unearthed at Ardkitt was the weapon used to shoot Admiral Somerville. He said that he was going to do a little bit of research into the matter. I didn’t press him. Streams of confidential information run underneath all families, but the very integrity of republican families depends on secrecy. Leaks are avoided by restricting the movement of sensitive information to approved channels and, just as importantly, by the cultivation (conscious or unconscious), by those not in the know, of a measured incuriosity about certain things that others might be up to. This complicity perhaps comes naturally in large, claustrophobic families, where not everybody can or wants to know everybody else’s business, and where mutual, unintrusive loyalty is an essential familial glue. ‘You’ve to stick together for better or worse,’ my grandfather would say to his sons. The reservoir of O’Neill republican confidences was Brendan. He was the son whom my grandfather trusted, and to whom he vouchsafed knowledge of certain matters so that Brendan might bear witness to them and, it could be inferred, keep them in memory until they might safely emerge at the lit surface of history. But when is this kind of disclosure timely? This was a matter for Brendan’s judgement and, in relation to the circumstances surrounding the death of Admiral Somerville, quite a responsibility. Sometimes, I discovered, O’Neill sensitivities are anomalous, so that even though an event might be a matter of public record it remains subject to our internal hush; thus we have secrets that elsewhere have become non-secrets and we treat as out-of-bounds territory trampled by the rest of the world. The discrepancy is understandable: why should the family’s boundaries of discretion, staked out in times of extreme jeopardy, follow the shifting contours of a public discourse that embodied the political values which for so long brought us danger and hardship? But in relation to Admiral Somerville, we had not been overtaken by public knowledge. The public had no idea about the Colt .45 or who had pulled its trigger.
When I asked her about it, my grandmother could not to tell me whether the story about the gun was true or not. ‘We were never told anything,’ she said. She did, however, remember the ‘hullabaloo’ that the Somerville shooting caused; and she also knew – from what source, I didn’t know – that the car used by the assassins had been finally abandoned at Rathduff, a small village north of Cork city, close by the house of her father’s sister.
Not long after the Ardkitt trip, another thing surfaced. Breaking a silence he’d kept for a quarter of a century, my uncle Billy Pollock said that when he became engaged to my aunt Ann O’Neill a fellow remarked to him, ‘Do you know you’re marrying the daughter of the man who shot Admiral Somerville?’
My grandfather’s childhood was a wartime childhood. From around 1918 until the truce in July 1921, he lived through the Anglo-Irish War and – after nearly a year’s imperfect peace – through the Civil War. County Cork, sometimes referred to as the Cork Republic, was a centre of fierce resistance to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, which provided for the partition of Ireland into an independent Irish Free State (comprising 26 counties) and a province of the United Kingdom (comprising six Ulster counties) to be called Northern Ireland. But the rebels’ resistance did not last long. Free State troops arrived in Cork in August 1922 and, notwithstanding the death of General Michael Collins and instances of extreme violence, took physical control of the county with relative ease. By May 1923, the fighting was as good as over and the great majority of the IRA was in captivity.
During these conflicts, Cork was by far the most violent county in Ireland. From 1917 to 1923, the IRA in Cork killed 195 and seriously wounded 113 people, and blew up 211 bridges and 301 buildings. The British army killed 93 and wounded 155, the Royal Irish Constabulary killed 108 and wounded 145, and the Free State army killed 70 and wounded 175. The combined forces of the Crown destroyed 237 buildings. The total number of serious casualties came to around 1,600, which is to say around one victim per 240 persons – a much higher rate than that suffered in Northern Ireland since the troubles there began in 1969.
The Anglo-Irish War was much bloodier and more terrifying than the Civil War. The IRA’s guerrilla campaign was ruthless and unpredictable and calculated to cow not only the Crown forces but also their perceived civilian supporters – most notably, Protestant families, whose Big Houses were burned down in reprisals against British actions. Faced with an effective and intangible enemy, the British imposed martial law and terrorized the local population by official and unofficial reprisals, death squads, and the raiding and destruction of homes. A good part of the centre of Cork city was burned down as a reprisal for the Kilmichael ambush. I learned something of the scope and deadliness of the violence by leafing through the newspapers of the time. On 16 February 1921, for example, the Cork Examiner ran the following headlines: CORK TRAIN AMBUSH – SIX PASSENGERS DEAD, TWO ATTACKERS KILLED, MILITARY WOUNDED · MOURNEABBEY CONFLICT – CIVILIANS DEAD AND CAPTURED · SHOT DEAD IN CORK FIELD – ANOTHER LABELLED BODY FOUND · REPORTED SKIRMISH NEAR CORK.
The day before, 15 February 1921, the Examiner carried the following story:
BANDON DOUBLE TRAGEDY– TWO YOUNG MEN SHOT DEAD
Bandon, Monday – Another appalling tragedy is reported today from Breaghna, Desertserges, which is in the neighbourhood of the place where Thomas Bradfield, of Knockacoole House, was found shot about a fortnight ago.
It appears that the two sons, James and Timothy, of a highly respectable farmer named James Coffey, were taken from their beds about two o’clock this morning by masked and armed men and immediately afterwards shots were heard, their dead bodies being found subsequently in a neighbouring field. They were aged 19 and 22 years, and were quiet and inoffensive. Much sympathy is felt for their bereaved parents and relatives.
The question of who killed the Coffey brothers (who, it later emerged, were in fact aged 22 and 25) was raised in the House of Commons on 22 February 1921, but the British government had no information then, or at any subsequent time, as to the identity of the killers. The O’Neills simply said it was the Black and Tans. We had a view on the matter because the Coffeys, who lived very close to Ardkitt, were Jim O’Neill’s first cousins, and, a fact not mentioned by the newspapers, IRA volunteers. Their deaths, not forgotten, were part of the family’s history of itself.
My grandfather was eleven years of age and living in Kilbrittain with his O’Driscoll aunt and uncle when his cousins died. It required a conscious effort on my part to think of him at that age, and all that came to my mind was the cinematic image of a boy in shorts tramping alone across a field in Graunriagh. I could not picture his face or guess what his thoughts were. I knew that he was growing up without his mother and father, that two of his cousins had met death in the most nightmarish circumstances, that at night he heard gunfire and roaring British armoured cars and shouting enemy soldiers; that his name, James O’Neill, appeared on the list of occupants tacked to the front door of Graunriagh by order of the British; that the Kilbrittain company of the IRA was one of the most active in the country; that in a year his uncle would die, and that he would leave school at fourteen and be once more uprooted, and that he never knew life to be easy or certain. These frightening, internecine circumstances were utterly removed from my experience of growing up, and I hesitated to draw too many conclusions from them; but I thought they were a clue to why, by the time he was a man, my grandfather had developed a character and outlook calculated, first and foremost, to withstand and reduce the world.
Jim O’Neill threw himself into paramilitary life with characteristic determination. With his single-mindedness, physical strength and easy way with machinery, he was a very competent and respected volunteer and known for being a strict disciplinarian. By the mid-’thirties, he was an IRA company OC and TO (training officer). Training took him away for weekends to special camps, and he would often come home from work in the evenings only to set off immediately for a drilling session in West Cork, where his knowledge of the country complemented his expertise with a Lewis machine-gun. When the civil war in Spain started in July 1936, Jim O’Neill toyed with the idea of fighting against the fascists. But the IRA forbade its members from travelling to Spain (a prohibition of limited effect: around 400 Irishmen, mostly ex-IRA, fought in the International Brigades, 42 dying in action), because volunteers were required for active service in Ireland. Only months after the killing of Admiral Somerville, the first anti-British military campaign since 1921 was to be launched.
The first step was to be a raid on Gough Barracks, in County Armagh, by 26 men from the Cork active service unit. Among the select few was Jim O’Neill.
The Corkmen packed their bags and went to confession and bought train tickets for Dundalk. However, when the women’s republican group Cumann na mBan – which was not supposed to know anything about the raid – requested to participate in the raid, it became apparent that the attack was an open secret. The Armagh raid was cancelled. My grandfather always regretted this lost opportunity, just as he always regretted not having fought for the Spanish Republic – even though its cause was doomed and nothing he could have done would have affected the outcome of that war.
The Armagh raid was the idea of Tom Barry, the new IRA Chief of Staff. His right-hand man was my great-uncle, Tadhg Lynch, the IRA adjutant-general. I knew from family talk that Tadhg was an IRA man but I only learned what a prominent national figure he’d been from reading historical literature. I read, for example, that in May 1937, he marched alongside his friend Frank Ryan, recently returned from the Spanish Civil War, at the head of the anti-Coronation march in Dublin. There was a huge brawl with the police, but the marchers made it to the Smith O’Brien monument in O’Connell Street, where Tadhg, ‘his coat and shirt a mess of blood, but voice, mind and body vibrant with the passion of a great work well done’ (An Phoblacht), chaired the meeting. Fighting broke out again and Tadhg was knocked out. Waking up next to Tom Barry in hospital, my great-uncle got out of bed and mobilized the Dublin unit for another march the next day. A New York Times headline read: ‘Dublin Republicans Battle Police in Anti-British Rallies’. Tadhg no doubt appreciated the effect of such media coverage: that year he edited a new series of An Phoblacht, the newspaper that still remains an important IRA mouthpiece.
My grandmother said that Tadhg was an analytical man, into strategy: he wouldn’t be a fellow to go out and do the shooting. Her brother Jack, she implied, was different. Jack was a man of action.
Everybody loved Jack Lynch. They loved his cheerful, straightforward take on the world, they loved his devilment and courage. It was Jack who was always on the run, always getting into scrapes and, most of the time, getting out of them – shooting his way out of a tight spot in Drimoleague from the back of a roaring motorcycle, clambering on to the roof of MacCurtain Hall in Cork as the Special Branch poured into the building. It was Jack, abroad in West Cork, who one night was warned by a ghost not to go to a place surrounded by waiting security forces. It was Jack who holed up in a dugout at Ardkitt and took breakfasts from his great admirer, Peter O’Neill, Jack who was happy-go-lucky. When, during active service in England, his false identity became known to the doctor who removed his appendix, the doctor, a man called Keyes, turned out to be a Dunmanway Protestant and for some reason gave him the wink. Jack was across in England for two or three years, Grandma said, working undercover as a navvy. In 1940, when the police tried to arrest Jack and his friend Denis Griffin in Dunmanway at the rear of O’Driscoll’s pub, Denis Griffin was caught, losing a finger to a bullet; but Jack escaped. ‘Jack was quick,’ Grandma said.
These colourful anecdotes did not reveal the wider significance of great-uncle Jack and, in particular, his activities in England. Jack Lynch was appointed the IRA’s commanding officer for Great Britain in 1937. He was based mainly in Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham, and his pseudonym was Buckley. On 12 January 1939, the IRA formally served Lord Halifax with a demand for the British military evacuation of Ireland within four days. The demand was not met, and on 16 January 1939 the IRA responded by blowing up electrical lines and power stations. In February, time-bombs were set off at Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square underground stations, seriously injuring two people; at the end of March, two major explosions struck Hammersmith Bridge, bombs blew up in Birmingham, Liverpool and Coventry, and seven further explosions hit London. In May, fifteen people were treated as a consequence of tear-gas attacks in Liverpool, four explosions shook Coventry, four magnesium bombs were set off in a Birmingham cinema, and London cinemas were damaged. In June, the postal system was attacked: letter bombs were posted, and twenty pillar boxes, a mail van in Birmingham and a sorting office in London were blown up; three banks in central London were smashed by huge explosions, and Madame Tussaud’s was damaged by a balloon bomb. By 24 July 1939, there had been 127 incidents, one fatality, and serious injuries to 55 people. Two days later, bombs went off at Victoria Station and King’s Cross Station, where a man was killed. A day after that, in Liverpool, a bridge was blown up and a post office reduced to rubble. Then, on 25 August 1939, a bomb intended for the destruction of a power station detonated in the middle of a busy Coventry street. Five people were killed. Two members of the Coventry unit of the IRA, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were arrested and hanged.
On 2 September 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, a state of emergency was declared in Éire (as the Free State was now called). Worried that the IRA’s activities compromised the neutrality of the State, de Valera acted decisively against militant republicans. IRA men were selectively arrested in the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940. In a countrywide haul in June 1940 and in continuing arrests thereafter, practically all known republicans were locked up.
Jack Lynch, who returned to Ireland in 1939 to take command of the Cork IRA, managed to avoid capture until 1942. Jim O’Neill was not so lucky. On 2 January 1940, six months before the general round-up, a Special Branch detective arresting Tomás MacCurtain Junior was mortally injured, and in retaliation Cork’s senior IRA men were immediately seized. At three or four in the morning, armed detectives knocked on the door at Friars Road. Jim O’Neill, who had played snooker earlier that night at the fire brigade, was in his bed and in a state of undress. As he fumbled to put on his new Christmas shirt, one of the detectives told him to hurry up. ‘You’ll wait as long as it takes,’ my grandmother snapped. ‘We didn’t send for ye.’
James O’Neill, who refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, was found guilty of membership of an unlawful association and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He was taken to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. During his spell there the Supreme Court declared that the Emergency Powers (Amendment) Bill, which empowered the state to intern Irish citizens without trial, did not contravene the Constitution. The Bill was duly signed by President Douglas Hyde. My grandfather was re-arrested on his release from Mountjoy and take
n to the internment camp at the Curragh, in County Kildare. My grandmother was notified by telegram that her husband would remain interned until further notice.
Nine months later, in December 1940, Jim O’Neill was released on parole for a few weeks to receive dental treatment. He was delighted to be home. His teeth were fixed, he visited old friends, and he took his three young sons on outings to West Cork. A fourth son, Padraig, was conceived.
My uncle Jim recalled this interlude with peculiar vividness. He was playing on the street with his kid brother, Brendan, when a black car came down Friars Road. Jim had only ever seen cars stop on the street when a family took delivery of a baby from the hospital, so when the black car halted outside the O’Neill house, he pointed and said to Brendan, ‘Look, we’re getting the baby.’
It was the Special Branch, in a Black Maria. In an instant, armed soldiers were running through the garden and taking positions on rooftops. A jeep screeched to a stop and more soldiers sprang out, holding rifles. The house was surrounded and then occupied. The soldiers waited. My grandfather, returning from an errand to buy cigarettes and records for his fellow internees, was seized before he could set his foot through the door.
A search of the premises was carried out. Under the saddle of a doorway, they found a dismantled machine-gun and rounds of ammunition that (without my grandparents’ knowledge) had been secreted there by Jack Lynch and an IRA carpenter.
The following day, my grandmother went with her three children to see Jim at the Bridewell in Cornmarket Street. They were told that dinner was being served to the prisoners and that they should return in an hour. The young family went outside to wait. Cornmarket Street is adjacent to the North Channel of the river Lee. Young Jim noticed that there was a lot of activity in the Channel, with boats in the water and a crowd gathered round. For some reason a man was in the river, repeatedly diving and resurfacing in the pea-coloured water. A little while later, the O’Neills returned to the Bridewell. As they sat in the waiting-room, the body of a drowned boy was brought in, wrapped in a blanket. My grandmother put her hands over her sons’ eyes.
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