It so happened that a film touching on the Easter Rising, Michael Collins, directed by Neil Jordan, was being made in and around Dublin at that time – September 1995. The film was causing great excitement, and not simply because of the presence in Ireland of its stars, Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts. The eponymous hero himself had captured the imagination of the public. Newspaper stories, magazine features and TV programmes about Collins and his times were hungrily absorbed, and the media somewhat bizarrely reported the substance of the movie’s eighty-year-old plot as if it were breaking news. The nation was developing a new appetite for its history. The paramilitary cease-fires of August and September 1994 had just passed their first anniversaries, and it seemed that the events of the Anglo-Irish War and even the Civil War could at last be consumed without distress. When the call went out for unpaid extras to appear in crowd scenes in Michael Collins – notably for the Bloody Sunday scene in which British troops fired into the crowd at a Croke Park football match, killing twelve – large numbers of people from all over the country presented themselves in suitably old-fashioned attire, eager to take part and take fresh narrative possession of the national past. This light-hearted new enthusiasm for history had another consequence: it facilitated the appearance, in 1997, of The IRA in the Twilight Years, 1923–1948, a book that decisively disturbed the long stillness surrounding the Curragh internments. Published by a former Curragh internee named Uinseann MacEoin, the book contained the reminiscences of more than thirty men about their internment days, and, taken together with information I gathered from Curragh veterans I met in Cork and Dublin, enabled me to piece together something of my grandfather’s experiences in Tintown, as the internment camp was called by the internees.
I walked from the cemetery at Arbour Hill to a decrepit hospital in north Dublin. In the wasteland behind this ruin had been built the most spectacular set for Michael Collins, a simulacrum of the O’Connell Street area as it appeared shortly after Easter Sunday, 1916. The set was open to the public, and I joined the sightseers strolling in the dusk on pseudo-cobblestoned streets that were sprinkled with sawdust. We looked at tramlines, a shop selling boaters, a hotel with a hammam, and, of course, a burned-out General Post Office. It was an agreeable way to spend a quarter of an hour. On my way out, a speaker crackled into life and began to broadcast a speech spoken by Liam Neeson in a West Cork accent. It was Michael Collins addressing a street-crowd, but the sounds of his passionate words travelled indistinctly in the unseasonally warm breeze and very few of the people leaving the cardboard Dublin of old paused to listen to what was being said.
Jim O’Neill, who arrived at the Curragh from Mountjoy Prison in March 1940, was among the very first prisoners to be taken to Tintown. He was initially detained in the Glasshouse, a purpose-built cell-block that held fifty-two men and was later used as a punishment centre. In around April, Jim was moved to a settlement of seven wooden huts. He lodged there while a much larger encampment of twenty-four timber huts was completed. In August 1940, when 171 new internees arrived from Cork Gaol, the new camp came into operation. Each hut was divided into two sections that separately contained thirty prisoners, one bucket latrine and a pot-bellied stove. The men slept on beds constructed from the trestles, boards and mattress with which they were issued on arrival. Not all of the huts were residential. Two were cookhouses and others were in use as an infirmary, a chapel, a laundry, and a library, where stool-pigeons would pass on information. Smaller huts served as wash-houses and latrines. Just south of the huts were playing fields with goal-posts for hurling and Gaelic football. The perimeter of the camp was lit up at night and guarded by strips of barbed wire and a wide deep trench. Observation posts looked down on the camp, and prison guards could be heard calling all through the night: ‘Number 1 reporting, all is well.’ ‘Number 2 reporting, all is well.’ The camp held a shifting population of anywhere between 300 to 500 republican prisoners at any one time. In the five years that the internment camp operated, not one managed to escape. An internee was, however, free to leave if he ‘signed out’ – i.e., undertook to desist from republican activism. Jim O’Neill never signed out. He stuck it out until about November 1944, when, following his father’s death the month before, he was granted parole. Most internees were offered and accepted extended parole at around this time. A hardcore of about seventy men, who were regarded as a continuing military threat, remained in Kildare until mid-1945.
Like everybody else, Jim passed his internment in a buttonless Free State army shirt, string-laced boots that forced their wearers to shuffle, and a grey, misshapen Martin Henry suit that was inadequate in the winter and uncomfortable in the summer heat. Not that overheating was a common occurrence. The encampment was situated on a bare, wind-blown, exposed place that always felt chilly, even in summer. The cold may have contributed to the constant hunger from which the prisoners suffered, even though they received the same rations as their guards: a quarter loaf with a lump of butter and an egg for breakfast; for lunch, stew; for dinner, a quarter loaf with a lump of cheese. Food was served in the cookhouse, and since all men had to be inside their huts during hours of darkness, in winter the meals were consumed between 9 a.m. and 4.30 p.m., leaving the men unfed for interminable nights. They went to great lengths to get extra food, plucking wild sorrel from under the barbed wire fence and, in the case of one man, trapping a bird and eating it stuffed and roasted. Once a week the prisoners took a much-needed lukewarm shower. In the smoky, reeking, unsanitary huts, lice was endemic and illnesses, unpleasant rashes and infections were easily communicated. Medical attention was patchy, and the camp doctor was called Dr Doolittle. The shithouse was called Gerry Boland’s, after the Minister of Justice. It was daily hardship rather than mistreatment that was the most trying – although misbehaviour would result in a spell in the Glasshouse, where the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement and fed bread and water. Jim O’Neill and his friend John Varian spent time in the Glasshouse for reasons that were no longer clear.
The prisoners – who had no radio – had a variety of contacts with the outside world. Each hut received one newspaper. Priests came in for Mass on Sundays and confessions on Saturdays. Attendance at Mass was very high, partly because anyone who stayed behind in a hut might be suspected of being an informer. According to my grandmother, the Quaker Society was very good to the men, and brought them gramophone records and other useful items. (If ever Grandma were to change religion, she said, she’d become a Quaker.) Only closed visits were permitted – i.e., visits during which the parties were separated by a wire mesh and not allowed to touch – and the majority of the men refused these. When open visits were finally introduced in around July 1943, Grandma was not able to see her husband. It was a long way to the Curragh, and what with the children, no bus service and money very tight, the journey was simply impracticable. Instead she wrote to Jim every day, posting her letters once a week. Internees were allowed to send one letter a week. Jim wrote to Eileen one week and to his mother the next. The letters Eileen received were censored, and whole sentences would be crossed out.
My grandmother’s situation in Cork was very difficult. She had the boys (four boys with Padraig’s birth in August 1941) to look after, rent to pay and, aside from welfare payments of a few pounds a week, no regular income. For the first six months, Jim’s work colleagues at the Cork Corporation took a collection for her, and a little money came in from the Republican Prisoners’ Dependants Fund. Grandma struggled along with the help of the family. Sometimes she received money (and a bottle of cod liver oil) from Tadhg after his early release from the Curragh and cash-in-hand from Jack (when he was still on the run). Eileen’s parents and her sister Kay Coletta helped out with groceries, and Jim’s parents sent potatoes and parcels of eggs from Ardkitt. Her sister Mae, in Dublin, and her aunt and uncle in Dunmanway, the Kingstons, were also very good to her: they took in young Jim after he had broken his leg and looked after him until her husband’s return from the Curragh. Although Ei
leen earned extra money by knitting, hunger was not always avoidable; my uncle Brendan remembered a time when the family had five Oxo cubes for three days.
The demands of poverty did not deter Eileen O’Neill from political activity, and Friars Road was used as a safe house for Jack Lynch and others. They would stop for a day or two at a time, staying indoors and sleeping on the ground floor for easy access to the sash windows that gave on to the garden. Grandma also kept a printing press and copies of the republican War News, which carried details of arrests, internments and other matters of interest to republicans that received no coverage in the heavily censored official press. On one occasion Grandma’s place was surrounded by Free State soldiers and she threw the press and the pamphlets over the hedge to her neighbour (the horrified and distinctly non-republican but nevertheless co-operative), Mrs Neenan. The soldiers charged in and trampled over the clothes hanging on the line but found nothing. ‘At Turner’s Cross we were raided morning, noon, and night,’ Grandma said. ‘I should have charged for all the entertainment I gave them!’
Even after Grandma left Friars Road, Turner’s Cross (rent 12s. 6d.) for the corporation house at Mount Nebo Avenue (rent 3s. 6d.), money was still hard to come by. Republican bazaars would raise money by selling brooches and rings and handbags made by Curragh internees. Rings (often Claddagh rings and snake rings) would be shaped out of spoon heads or coins, which in those days contained a significant element of silver: small rings were made from one-shilling pieces and larger ones from two-shilling pieces. ‘Jim made a lovely wedding ring for an American girl, Eileen O’Reilly,’ Grandma said, ‘and engraved her name on it. They gave Jim old-fashioned clippers,’ Grandma said, ‘and he made a box for them and acted as the camp barber.’
In addition to passing the time with crafts activities, internees had the opportunity to study sociology, economics, history, German and Irish (notable Gaelic scholars were interned at the Curragh). My grandfather did not appear to have taken classes or to have gone down other roads that promised a broadening of intellectual horizons. He did not, for example, join one of the numerous Irish-speaking huts, where any utterance of English was strictly forbidden. He joined a Cork hut, Hut C1, commanded by his brother-in-law Tadhg Lynch. It was a fateful decision, because Tadhg, and Hut C1, came to be at the centre of the most bitter division of the camp.
In early December 1940, a handful of senior IRA officers, including Larry Grogan and Peader O’Flaherty, arrived at the Curragh and took over the camp leadership. Not long afterwards, the internees’ butter ration was cut from one half ounce to one quarter ounce a day. Even though the ration of the camp guards had been reduced by the same quantity, it was decided to stage a protest by burning down huts. Jim O’Neill and Tadhg Lynch suggested to O’Flaherty (who urged the arson with the cry, ‘We’ll show them are we men or are we mice!’) that only huts that were unoccupied and had no escape tunnels beneath them be burned; but in the event, on 14 December 1940, seven huts, some occupied and containing the belongings of the men, were burned to the ground, and an extensive network of tunnels was exposed. The camp authorities responded with predictable aggression. They herded the men into the remaining huts – including a concrete-floored hut known as the Icebox – and locked them in, with no beds or extra clothes or fuel for stoves, for two freezing days and nights. The older men, in particular, found the ordeal very hard. On Monday 16 December 1940, the men were finally allowed out. As they were queuing for a meal at the cookhouse, the guards for some reason shot dead an internee, Barney Casey, as he stood in line. When the internees returned to their huts, the guards continued to their offensive, striking the men, shouting, rattling batons and leaving lights on throughout the night; this practice continued indefinitely, as did the evening roll-call of prisoners in their huts, when even a slight movement of the head led to trouble. Henceforth the internees slept on their palliasses on the floor, since their burnt bedboards were not replaced for two years. Grogan and fifty-one other ringleaders of the fire were taken to the Glasshouse and kept in solitary confinement for ten weeks as they awaited trial for arson. In Grogan’s absence, a man called Liam Leddy was made camp leader.
A great change came over the camp after the fire. Morale worsened and discipline broke down: marching to the cookhouse in military fashion came to an end, as did the closing of ranks around men who signed out. Most significantly, a split appeared between Hut C1 and the new camp leadership. In January 1941, Liam Leddy issued the order that huts should refuse the reduced ration of turf (peat) for their potbellied stoves. Tadhg Lynch, who failed to see the point of such a protest in freezing weather, disobeyed the instruction. As a consequence, Leddy ordered that Tadhg be ostracized for ‘co-operating with the State’; but the rest of Tadhg’s hut, around twenty men (including Jim O’Neill and Paddy Lynch), stood by their OC and disobeyed Leddy’s instruction to leave the hut. They, in turn, were ostracized; which is to say, nobody spoke to them, played Gaelic games with them, responded to their overtures or otherwise acknowledged their presence.
Hut C1 never got out of Coventry. However, others soon fell out with Leddy’s group, and new men arriving at the Curragh often preferred the less rigid, more diverse regime that operated on the dissident side. Some of these were communists, others were men, often regional commanders from the North, who were used to doing things their way and did not relish the idea of surrendering their power or rank (the camp rule was that all men fell back to being ordinary volunteers). In time, the unofficial faction came to outnumber the orthodox group. Tadhg Lynch, meanwhile, was able to avoid much of this unpleasantness. He applied for and obtained extended parole within weeks of the turf incident and was never re-interned. I never understood how or why my great-uncle was able to get out in this way; but it seemed that his release may have been sanctioned by the IRA command, because in 1941 Tadhg and his brother Jack apparently participated in the court-martial proceedings against Stephen Hayes, the IRA Chief of Staff suspected of treason.
Some observers felt that the split between Lynch and Leddy reflected their respective loyalties to Tom Barry and Seán Russell. Seán Russell had been elected leader of the IRA in April 1938. Barry strongly opposed Russell’s election and (on the grounds that there were plenty of targets in British-occupied Ireland) Russell’s plan for the bombing campaign in England. Less clear is what stance, if any, Barry took in relation to Russell’s dealings with Nazi Germany. These began in October 1936, when, during a visit to the United States as the IRA Quartermaster-General, Russell wrote to the German ambassador in Washington regretting the refusal by the ‘puppet Irish Free State government’ of landing rights to German aeroplanes, ‘a right apparently conceded without question to England, the traditional enemy of the Irish race’. This diplomatic overture was followed up in February 1939 when Russell, now IRA Chief of Staff, sent an agent to Berlin to receive instruction in the procurement of small arms and hand grenades and to try to secure the provision of German military supplies. When the Second World War broke out, Seán Russell was on the run from the authorities in the United States, who had served him with a deportation order. He finally escaped that country by accepting a German invitation to travel via Genoa to Berlin, where he arrived in May 1940. Russell took bomb-making classes with the Abwehr and sought out German assistance for the IRA. In August 1940, he set off to Ireland by U-boat. He never made it. On 14 August 1940, the leader of the IRA died from perforated ulcers and was buried at sea wrapped in the flag of the Third Reich.
On board the submarine with Russell when he died was Tadhg Lynch’s old comrade from the 1937 anti-Coronation march, Frank Ryan. Ryan had had an extraordinary few years. In the late summer of 1938, he was captured by fascist forces in Spain. For nine unimaginable months he was one of a group of eighteen prisoners of whom nine were shot dead each morning and replaced by nine others. In July 1940, after representations from the Irish and German governments, the frail and deafened anti-fascist was released to Nazis and driven to Berlin, where he joyful
ly met up with Russell and accompanied him on the fateful U-boat journey to Ireland. After Russell’s death, Frank Ryan returned to Germany, where he died in a sanatorium in 1944 and was buried in a grave bearing his German cover-name, Francis Richards.
The circumstances of Ryan and Russell’s deaths had, of course, a symbolic resonance. They stood for the ease with which political extremists can lose their way and, in the case of Seán Russell, the fallibility of the tenets of Irish republicanism as a general guide to political conduct. Directed by the imperative of breaking the connection with England, it didn’t occur to Seán Russell – a devout man with no personal vices – that England’s misfortune, in the context of war with Nazi Germany, might have a significance other than Ireland’s opportunity. Once removed from the backwaters of Ireland and Irish America, Russell and the organization he led were in every sense out of their depth.
It so happened that there was, in the dissident faction at the Curragh, a group of internees who took a wider view of international affairs. The Connolly group was led by Neil Gould, a communist who had lived in the Soviet Union, and its members absorbed and discussed left-wing literature and closely followed developments on the Eastern Front. Following their ideas through to their logical conclusion, some even argued that the right course of action would be to help the Soviets to defeat the Nazis by signing out and joining the British army. Even for the relatively flexible IRA camp leadership on the dissident side, this went too far. Gould was refused permission to teach Russian and, eventually, removed from the Curragh. The Connolly group had a strong Cork element, and Hut C1 was pro-Soviet, and Jim O’Neill was a socialist; nonetheless, it was doubtful that my grandfather came significantly under Gould’s influence. Described by one veteran as a man with a strict sense of discipline and little interest in political development, Jim would most probably have approved of the decision to remove Gould and quash any talk of IRA men joining the British army. Certainly, he never discussed Neil Gould with his wife or even his son Brendan.
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