by Fergal Keane
The Fuller interview shook from my memory another of my father’s stories.
‘Watch the ceiling,’ he’d say. ‘Watch and you will see him.’ A man in green uniform would appear and float through the darkness, if I would only wait.
‘He is an English soldier and he was killed on the street outside. Wait and he will come.’
The soldier never came. Another of my father’s yarns.
But years later I find out that Eamonn was telling a version of a truth.
A man had been killed on our street, shot dead close to the Keane family home. He was killed by an IRA unit that included a family friend with whom my grandmother and her brother had soldiered. The war had been sweeping across the hills and fields around my grandparents’ town of Listowel for nearly two years when District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old married man, an Irish Catholic from County Galway, was shot dead. He was the son of a small farmer, the same stock as my grandmother Hannah’s people, and he left a widow and three young children behind. Yet his name was never mentioned. There is no monument to his memory, even though at the time of the killing he was the most powerful man in the locality and it was one of the most talked about events in the area’s recent history.
There are many other uncommemorated deaths and events in the journey that forms this book. It is the story of why my own people were willing to kill, and of how people and nations live with the blood that follows deeds – a story that, in one country or another, I have been trying to tell for the last thirty years but not, until now, in my own place. It has been a journey in search of unwilling ghosts. My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick left no diaries, letters or tape-recorded interviews. What I have are the few confidences shared with their family, some personal files from the military archives, the accounts of comrades in arms, the official histories and contemporary press reports, and my own memories of those rebels of my blood and of the place that made them.
I have tried to avoid yielding to my own collection of biases; however, a story of family such as this cannot be free of the writer’s personal shading. When writing of the Civil War I am acutely conscious that I come from a family that took the pro-Treaty side and, later, became stalwarts of the political organization founded by Michael Collins and his comrades. But I have tried to describe the vicious cycle of violence in north Kerry as it happened at the time and as it was experienced by the people of my past, doing so, as much as possible, without the benefit of hindsight, and without acquiescing to the justifications offered by either side. This book does not set out to be an academic history of the period, or a forensic account of every military encounter or killing in north Kerry. Others have done this with great skill. This is a memoir written about everyday Irish people who found themselves caught up on both sides in the great national drama that followed the rebellion of 1916. It is not a narrative which all historians of the period are sure to agree with, or indeed which other members of my family will necessarily endorse: every one of them will see the past through their own experiences and memories. The one bias to which I will readily admit is a loathing of war and of all who celebrate the killing of their fellow men and women. The good soldier shows humility in the remembrance of horror.
I have reached an age where I find myself constantly looking back in the direction of my forebears, seeking to understand myself, and my preoccupations, through the stories of their lives. It is only with the coming of peace on the island of Ireland that I have felt able to interrogate my family past with the sense of perspective that the dead deserve. It felt too close while blood was being daily spilled in the north. ‘We return to the lives of those who have gone before us,’ wrote the novelist Colum McCann. ‘Until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.’16 Home is where all my journeys of war begin and end.
* On 30 January 1972, soldiers from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, killing thirteen unarmed people. On 2 February angry crowds marched on the British embassy in Dublin and set it alight. In the events that became known as ‘Bloody Friday’ the IRA carried out multiple bombings in central Belfast on 21 July 1972. The attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured more than one hundred.
1
The Night Sweats with Terror
‘It is not,’ he urged, ‘by weak inaction that great empires are held together; there must be the struggle of brave men in arms; might is right with those who are at the summit of power.’
Tacitus, The Annals, AD 109
‘The freedom of Ireland depends in the long run not upon the play of politics, nor international dealings, but upon the will of the Irish people to be free.’
An t-Óglach, Dublin, 29 October 1918
I
It was a January morning of low grey skies. On Dublin’s Sackville Street crowds stood in fidgeting silence – street boys, daily paper hawkers, beggars and pickpockets, the old women from the Moore Street market, all gawking at the solemn faces marching up the left flank of the broad thoroughfare. With the cortège out of sight, they turned and went back to that other life of small trades and smaller change. They would have known that this policeman’s death was bigger than the usual run. Half the police and army top brass in Ireland seemed to be there: first came the bands with their sombre music, bands from the Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Immediately behind them came General Tudor, the most senior British security official in Ireland, along with a phalanx of senior police and military officers. The coffin lay on a gun carriage and was flanked by Auxiliaries marching with rifles reversed. A newspaper reported that some Auxies had taken the hats off men who failed to bare their heads in respect as the cortège passed.
He had been killed down the country, in Kerry, but he came from County Galway in the west. His RIC comrades followed in slow procession beside and behind. The constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary were marching out of history and towards oblivion behind a coffin draped in the Union flag: colours that would vanish from these streets in less than two years. But the marching men could not foresee the end of empire in Ireland. The British imperium stretched from the Pitcairn Islands across the Pacific and the Bay of Bengal, across the Hindu Kush to Delhi, across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Palestine, through the Strait of Gibraltar until it reached this embattled western frontier, these streets of Dublin, capital of Britain’s first colony. The funeral marchers knew of the unravelling in the wider world. Some would have had brothers and cousins still fighting the small wars of peace that erupted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Great War was over. But the Bolsheviks were fighting to save their revolution. Churchill had dispatched an expeditionary force to Russia to bolster anti-Communist ‘White’ forces, in the vicious civil war. As a child I remember seeing a photograph of a soldier, Sergeant Jamesie Harris of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, crouching in the snow. He was the father of my mother’s best friend, Breda, and went to ‘fight back the Red menace and collect the shillin’ a day’.1 The Great War irrevocably changed Breda’s father. The man in the picture has a wanderlust, perpetually seeking a camaraderie impossible to find in the tenements of Charlemont Street where as many as nine people lived in a single room. More practically the Dublin of escalating guerrilla war was a risky place for an ex-serviceman, unless he was going to offer his services to the Republicans. As long as Jamesie Harris’s fellow soldiers were being shot at and grenaded by the IRA, marching across the snows of Russia seemed much the better option.
At the Paris peace talks in 1919 the Irish delegation had been ignored, as had Vietnam, represented by Ho Chi Minh, and T. E. Lawrence with the Arabian commission, who quickly discovered the worth of promises made during war. The treaties of Versailles and Sèvres merely rearranged imperialism. Out with the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans and in with the Italians, the Japanese and, greatest and youngest of the looming giants, the United States, a behemoth that oscillated between isolationism and the logic of
its expansive energy. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was being devoured by Britain, France and Greece until Turkish nationalism, in the form of Kemal Atatürk, halted their advance. Great armies clashed on the plains of Asia Minor and in the coastal cities of the Aegean. Smoke swirled over the port of Smyrna in 1922 while thousands of Greeks and other Christian minorities were butchered by the Turks.
Versailles did not deliver freedom to the small nation of Ireland. But the future IRA leader Michael Collins surely never expected it would. With his ingrained pragmatism he would have understood the crude realities of power in the post-war world. But they did not daunt him and the other leaders of the Republican movement. In Ireland by January 1921, thousands of regular troops were supporting sixteen thousand regular police and paramilitary forces in the war against the IRA.
Until these past twelve months in Ireland the British had managed to suppress colonial revolt. In the late nineteenth century, countless tribes went down before the machine guns and cannon of imperial armies: Zulus, Xhosa, Ashanti, Matabele, Shona, the Mahdi and his Dervishes at Omdurman. The Boers gave them a fright but ultimately succumbed. The Great War expanded the machinery of terror available to the industrial powers. The Iraqi tribes were crushed with air power and Maxim guns, their villages burned while high explosive shredded and carbonised those bearing arms and those who did not.
In India the viceroy was in the midst of plans to welcome the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, on a visit during which nationalist agitation was expected. Mahatma Gandhi asked angrily: ‘Do the British think we are children? Do they think that parades for the prince will make us forget atrocities in the Punjab or the perpetual delay in granting us Home Rule?’2 In the House of Lords, Lord Sydenham was worried about the rising militancy of religiously inspired warriors, young men who had forgotten the thrashing handed out to their fathers when they rebelled in 1897 on the North-West Frontier. ‘It is always the young tribesmen who are easily accessible to the Mullahs, and they can at any time be led either to attack their neighbours or make raids into British India.’3 Across Africa, nationalist movements were organising and challenging white rule: the African National Congress was formed in 1912, four years before the Easter Rising.
The new nationalists in Africa, Asia and the Middle East were ruthlessly suppressed. In Ireland alone, from 1920 onwards, the anti-colonial struggle was escalating towards a decisive showdown. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, worried that ‘if we have lost Ireland we have lost the Empire’.4 The funeral of District Inspector O’Sullivan was the latest way station in the decline of British power in Ireland.
The funeral procession passed the ruins of Dublin’s General Post Office. How distant the Easter week of 1916 must have seemed now to the marching policemen and soldiers. The war of symbolic martyrdom was over. The poets and dreamers were dead. New leaders imbued with ruthless purpose had emerged to challenge the empire. Michael Collins and his ‘Squad’ of assassins tracked down police constables, spies and informers. There would be no more heroic failures. This was to be a revolution of steel not poetry. In north Kerry, my grandmother and her brother joined with farmers’ children from across Ireland. They fought alongside the hard men of the inner cities and idealistic college students from the middle classes. They were part of a rebel army which would never offer itself up to such easy destruction as had the men and women of 1916. The GPO veteran Collins wrote that the new force would not be ‘like the standing armies of even the small independent countries of Europe [but] riflemen scouts … capable of acting as a self-contained unit’.5 The concept of the IRA Flying Column was born.
Collins was helping to develop a new form of warfare: assassination and ambush, fast-moving squads of guerrillas – the so-called Flying Columns – would move across the countryside, being sustained by the people. The Boers had tried this with some success, moving across the expanses of the South African veld, before the British burned their farms, rounded up their women and children and stuck them in concentration camps. Such a repressive policy could not be so easily implemented in Ireland, just a few hours’ sailing from mainland Britain, and with a watchful press and parliamentary oversight. His approach would pre-date Mao Zedong’s seminal On Guerrilla Warfare by seventeen years. It would be studied closely by Ho Chi Minh later, as he prepared to liberate Vietnam from French rule, and by many other insurgents, from Algeria to the Far East. But Collins’s ambitions for the fall of empire in Ireland did not appear imminently realisable at the start of the conflict.
The British government tried to meet terror with terror. It was brutal enough to push the Irish people deeper into the embrace of the guerrillas. Addressing the Oxford Union, W. B. Yeats condemned ‘the horrible things done to ordinary law-abiding people by these maddened men’.6 He was referring to the paramilitary police who had been recruited to augment the exhausted police. Over ten thousand served in Ireland. Many were veterans of the trenches of France and Flanders.
In Dublin, Nelson still stood on his pillar gazing south across the Liffey; behind him in the Phoenix Park the Chief Secretary for Ireland was still firmly ensconced in the Vice-Regal Lodge. The manager of the Shelbourne Hotel had closed his doors, in deference to the reduced custom occasioned by war, but he could see better days ahead, a return to the normal order, and he ensured that the ‘grande old dame’ of St Stephen’s Green was regularly patrolled by the last remaining porter, upon whom ‘devolved the ghostly duty of an inspection tour in the unnatural day-and-night darkness, in the silence piled up floor upon floor’.7 The past offered some reassurance. There had not been a nationwide rebellion in Ireland for more than a century when the failure of the rising of 1798 led directly to the Act of Union that hobbled Ireland to Britain in 1801.* The most recent outbreak had been a small and failed uprising in 1867, staged by the Fenians, a secret society dedicated to the expulsion of the British Crown from Ireland and to the establishment of an independent republic. In the 1880s the Fenians launched a bombing campaign in Britain, the first major terrorist attacks of the modern age, striking at the London transport system, police stations and prisons, and the dining room of the House of Commons. They even staged an abortive invasion of British Canada.* Their rebellion, in Ireland, had amounted to a handful of skirmishes. But the ideas and organisational structures of Fenianism survived. The movement’s short spasm of violence would also allow leaders such as Patrick Pearse to claim an unbroken tradition of armed resistance through the centuries of British rule.
The official name of the Fenian movement was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and it would recover from defeat in 1867 to shape the political thinking of a new generation of Irish separatists in the early twentieth century. Michael Collins was an IRB man and steeped in its traditions of secrecy; they would serve him well in the guerrilla war that erupted in 1919.
It was Collins more than anybody else who forged the war machine that had killed District Inspector O’Sullivan. He would have been in Dublin, on the late January day of the policeman’s burial; his spies would likely have been mingling among the mourners and reported on its progress and on what they overheard. At the top of O’Connell Street, a crowd of onlookers gathered near the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell, his arm pointing into the past, towards Home Rule and peaceful change and all that had been devoured in the age of revolution. The crowd had their backs turned to the monument and its chiselled words: ‘No Man has a right to fix the Boundary to the march of a nation.’ But the nation was marching after coffins. The days of Parnell, the Home Rulers and great parliamentary speeches were over. This new era was crowded with killing.
That same month, a few miles away in Drumcondra the police captured five IRA men after a failed ambush. An informer betrayed their position. After courts martial the five were hanged, among them a nineteen-year-old student from University College Dublin. The reaction from the IRA was to wait a little. Then, eight weeks later, the informer was found, abducted and shot. Blood begat blood. Andrew Moyn
ihan, a married farmer in Ballymacelligott, twenty miles south of Listowel in County Kerry, was found with incriminating documents by the police. He was shot while trying to escape. There was a problem with this explanation. A fleeing man would surely have his back to his pursuers. But Moynihan was shot in the chest and the face.8 His killer was a Black and Tan, and veteran of the war in France. There was a perfunctory investigation but no charges were pressed. At London’s Mansion House, Prime Minister Lloyd George had confidently declared: ‘by the steps we have taken [in Ireland], we have murder by the throat’.9
But in the counties of Ireland murder spat back. It roamed Dublin, tracking secret agents and killing them where they slept, smashed into sleeping tenements, coiled in ambush on remote bog roads, ran up the stairs of redbrick Georgian houses in tree-lined suburbs, leaped in flames through the roofs of Anglo-Irish mansions, and always vanished into the sullen, unrevealing faces of the crowd. And murder also wore the uniforms of the British military, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries, regular policemen, and secret agents who dispensed with the law. Yeats captured the mood of the time:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror …10
The police and army filed into Glasnevin cemetery to lay their dead comrade to rest. District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan was an Irish Catholic and a supporter of Home Rule within the British Empire, the path pursued by the majority of Irish nationalists until the upheaval produced by the rebellion of 1916. O’Sullivan would be buried in the same vast graveyard as nationalist heroes like Parnell, Daniel O’Connell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The following year, Michael Collins, the leader of the war that claimed the policeman’s life, would be buried here too, shot dead by his former comrades in arms. It was here, six years previously, that Patrick Pearse had delivered the graveside oration for his Fenian friend, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse’s pledge that ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ would become the rallying cry for the Revolution to come.