by Fergal Keane
The Revolution challenged authority in many forms. The Catholic Church would find that while Volunteers adhered to its rites, they could easily ignore condemnations and later, during the Civil War, the threat of excommunication. For parents who had lived a lifetime in the United Kingdom, the period from 1912 onwards was a challenge to certainty and authority. It has been the same in every revolution and civil conflict I have ever reported. It is not truth but ‘parental control’ that is the first casualty of war. According to the great memoirist of the period, Ernie O’Malley, young women like my grandmother had a chance to revolutionise their place in society. ‘The girls too developed and broke away from strict parental discipline,’ he wrote. ‘This to my mind was the greatest innovation.’18
By the time the Volunteers were ready to launch a guerrilla war, Hannah was working for the prosperous Listowel draper Ned Moran and already moving away from the farm life of her parents and grandparents. Con Brosnan joined the Irish Volunteers in 1917. He recalled that there were only about twenty men in the Volunteer company in Newtownsandes at the start. ‘We had no arms at that time but we drilled and paraded all that year.’19 Relations with the police deteriorated drastically across that year. In October 1917 hundreds rioted in Listowel following a confrontation with the police during the annual Listowel horse races. There had been Volunteer drilling in Ballybunion on the previous day, and the arrest of an army deserter in Listowel added to the atmosphere of tension. Prominent Sinn Féiners faced off with the police on street corners. It began with the exchange of curses and descended into a furious assault at William Street. Surrounded, the RIC faced a continuous volley of stones. District Inspector M. J. Molloy described how his men became trapped in the centre of town. ‘The police were hit – scarcely any men escaped and most men were struck several times,’ he said. ‘Constable Delaney was wounded on the forehead by a stone and was knocked down and kicked by the mob … our only chance of escaping defeat and probably being murdered was to charge into the Lower William Street mob and take possession of the small square.’20
A second detachment of RIC was surrounded at the railway station and barricaded themselves into the waiting room there. Those in William Street fired repeated volleys above the heads of the rioters but they would not disperse. Several were wounded. The parish priest intervened along with some local merchants and tried to persuade the police to retreat to the barracks. ‘I refused to comply to that,’ D.I. Molley reported.21 But the scale of the fury shocked him. ‘I have very long service in the police (27 years) and I have witnessed very many riots, but I must say that I have never seen any disturbance nearly as great as the one I am describing.’22 The crowds could not reach the British rulers at Dublin Castle or the government in Westminster, so they turned their fury on the green uniformed representatives of the state on the streets of their town.
Opinion had already well hardened when the British committed a colossal blunder. Ignoring the warning signal of de Valera’s election, and the growing evidence of public sympathy for Irish separatism, a compulsory military service bill was passed by the House of Commons in April 1918. With this the Cabinet proposed to force the men of Ireland into the charnel house of the Western Front. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland warned that ‘between mismanagement and mischief-making this country has already been deplorably upset, and it would be a fatal mistake, surpassing the worst blunders of the past four years … to enforce conscription’.23 The bishops ordered a solemn novena. The Home Rulers railed in Parliament and eventually boycotted it. The trade unions organised Ireland’s first general strike. And the IRB got to work recruiting and preparing for revolution. Membership of the Irish Volunteers alone jumped to more than 150 in Con Brosnan’s village. The same was true in Ballylongford, where it was said that ‘all the men in the locality joined the Volunteers’.24
The British stepped back from enforcing conscription. But the damage was done. In the 1918 general election, held just a month after the Armistice, the separatists of Sinn Féin won a decisive victory, destroying the Home Rule politics that had dominated nationalism since the time of Parnell, and resurrecting the ideal of complete independence in the form of a republic.
Guerrilla war came in Ireland not because the people demanded it, but because they were ready for it. The executions, the plan to introduce conscription, melded with older resentments to create a growing mood of national alienation. The Leader of the Opposition, Lord Asquith, encapsulated the situation during a Lords debate. Resentment of the government had grown ‘greatly during the last few years’ Asquith declared:
partly due no doubt to the war; partly due to disgust; partly to anger at the state of affairs which arose in the North of Ireland, anger at their own arms being stopped when they thought that the arms of that other portion of Ireland had been allowed to go in; anger at the vacillation and changes which took place over Conscription and over Home Rule; treating of Home Rule as ‘a broken treaty’. There the thing is. How is it to be met by the British Government? These incidents have been attributed to the British Government; the vacillations and changes have also been attributed to the British Government. I am not blaming particularly the present Government over this matter; it is unfortunately the fact that, owing to our Party system, we never have any continuity of Government in Ireland. There is vacillation first to one policy and then to another; and even during the career of one Government there is vacillation because the Government of Ireland is carried on by a small coterie of men in Dublin Castle, and the policy they carry out largely depends on who is the most dominant person and how long he is in office.25
If the British were constantly indecisive on Ireland they faced an emerging enemy with clear goals and increasingly sophisticated organisation and intelligence-gathering. Sinn Féin refused to attend Westminster and instead set up its own parliament in Dublin, Dáil Eireann, to which the Irish Volunteers swore allegiance, increasingly becoming known as the Irish Republican Army. The Dáil set about forming a parallel administration with its own ministries and bureaucracy, with the shadow state’s writ enforced by the IRA. The constitutional road to devolved government mapped out by Parnell and then John Redmond had vanished.
A teenage recruit to the IRA, Seamus O’Connor, was powerfully impressed by the changed attitude of the people in north Kerry as Republican prisoners were gradually released after the Rising: ‘The Ireland they left was a puzzled Ireland, incapable of understanding the glory of what had happened; the Ireland they came back to, received them with welcoming processions and blazing bonfires throughout the country.’26 A Listowel soldier, home on leave from the British Army, described how the ‘IRA came to me and informed me that if I rejoined the army it would mean instant death, so through fear I never did.’ He deserted and never received ‘a penny gratuity or anything else’.27
Arms were being stockpiled around the district. They were mostly shotguns and a couple of rifles, including one that its owner had used in the South African War while fighting for the Boers. In November 1917, the Irish Volunteers in Ballylongford had been visited by their local organiser to discuss obtaining arms. A Catholic priest went to Manchester with £75 raised locally and purchased and smuggled back rifles. Visits were made to farmhouses and twenty-five weapons, mostly shotguns, were seized. The organiser was a Gaelic teacher named Liam Scully. His name will recur and become a crucial element in the unfolding violence. He was originally from south Kerry but moved to Ballylongford to run the Gaelic League in the north of the county. By the time the first shots were fired in the revolutionary war he was already a trusted Volunteer leader.
The Republicans were under close police surveillance. Local leaders were rounded up under the Defence of the Realm Act. The Listowel bookshop owner, Danny Flavin, a great friend of my grandfather, was arrested for possession of seditious literature and jailed for three months.
Danny was there when the Volunteers staged their first big confrontation with the state in May 1918. Some locals, including
several Volunteers, wanted to plant crops on land belonging to Lord Listowel. The case was complex. The lord had rented the land to two Catholic tenants, who used the ground for grazing. Armed only with hurleys, several Volunteer units from the district and at least two brass bands marched through Listowel to the lord’s field. The two cattlemen had wisely relinquished their rights to the land in the weeks before the march. But Lord Listowel’s agent was less inclined to give way. Soldiers with machine guns backed up the considerable police contingent. ‘A strong force of military was present,’ one IRA man testified, ‘but they did not interfere when informed the tenants had agreed to forgo their claim to the land.’28 The British officer in charge reportedly told the land agent that soldiers had no right to interfere in a matter that belonged in the courts. The gates were smashed open and the Volunteers marched with bands, plough horses and hundreds of excited locals. There was no choice in the matter. The law belonged to the men willing to use their muscle and who were beginning to gain popular legitimacy. At a public meeting afterwards a Sinn Fein campaigner praised the Volunteers ‘who had done a noble day’s work for the people of Listowel by assuring them of a plentiful supply of food, none of which would ever find its way into the corn stores of England’.29 Danny Flavin and several others ended up serving a month in jail for the land invasion, but the sentence would only have enhanced their reputation as defenders of the people.
Later in the conflict local agrarian grievances could become militarised. A dispute between two creameries resulted in boycott and bombing. The privately owned creamery in Ballymacelligott was targeted by supporters of a new cooperative. Anybody trying to buy milk from the private creamery faced attack. A horse was shot, milk churns were emptied into the ditches, an old man had his whiskers cut off and forced down his throat. Class rivalries and the old unresolved tensions over land boiled to the surface. Just across the Limerick border in Abbeyfeale, a feud erupted when a creamery manager sacked some labourers and gave their jobs to farmers’ sons. ‘It was common practice for one or other of the two parties to come out at night and fire a few shots through the windows of their opponents’ houses,’ IRA man James Collins recalled.30 When the farmers formed their own ‘vigilance committee’ and began patrols with the police, the IRA stepped in and disarmed them. ‘By 1st June, every farmer in the area, including those attached to the vigilance committee, had joined the IRA.’31
Mick Purtill and Con Brosnan belonged to a class of people whose lives had improved since the Land War. They were not rich but they came from families who had a stake in the land. In the conditions of war against the government they forged a common patriotic cause with the sons of farm labourers. But the tension between farmers and labourers, between those hungry for land and those who already had a stake, would re-emerge when the British left.
There were a few returned soldiers with experience of the Western Front who joined the IRA. They directed the training but local leaders were chosen by their comrades, and had to earn their trust. Paddy Kennelly from Ballybunion was wounded at the Battle of Messines in 1917 and his life was saved by a fellow north Kerry man who saw him bleeding in no man’s land. Within a year of his return from the Western Front, Kennelly would be preparing men to fight Britain. Officers were often elected because they were popular with their comrades. It was a long way from Dublin and the war would be defined by local initiative. Collins might send orders but the daily conduct of the war was left to the men on the ground. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century there were some militant nationalists who saw the impossibility of meeting the British in fixed battles. The Rising had been a political success but an expensive military failure of a kind that could not be repeated. The rebel leader Fintan Lalor had advocated guerrilla war in the 1840s, urging militants to adopt the tactics which would attack their enemies discipline.* ‘You cannot organise, or train, or discipline your own force to any point of efficiency,’ said Lalor. ‘You must therefore disorganise, and untrain, and undiscipline that of the enemy, and not alone must you unsoldier, you must unofficer it also; nullify its tactique and strategy, as well as its discipline; decompose the science and system of war, and resolve them into their first elements. You must make the hostile army a mob, as your own will be.’32
Con Brosnan and Hannah and Mick Purtill stood on the verge of actions that would change their lives in ways for which they were utterly unprepared. But local involvement in acts of revolutionary violence was gradual. The first ambushes were small. There was no one cataclysmic event. In April 1918, the IRA raided the police barracks at Gortatlea, about twenty miles south of Listowel. This was the first armed engagement of the war in Ireland and was meant to deliver a haul of rifles. It was a disaster. An IRA man was shot through the head. Another was wounded and died a day later. Men who had never experienced fighting saw how ‘in less than a minute the barrack room floor was covered with blood’.33 When an IRA volunteer asked the leader of the raid if he should shoot the prisoners, he was told that men with their hands up could not be killed. The survivors fled without weapons. In 1919 as the IRA began to stage more ambushes fewer than twenty soldiers and policemen were killed. But the rules would change as the IRA became more ruthless and efficient.
III
Policemen would be ambushed on patrol, but also hit walking to and from home. In the first half of 1920 forty-four soldiers and police were killed in Ireland. The numbers jumped to 334 in the following six months. In the same period the IRA losses went from thirty-two for the first six months of 1920, to 228 up to the end of December.
In every village and town eyes watched and recorded the movements of the police. Times were noted, and patrol numbers assessed. Women like my grandmother carried the information to the IRA. In Listowel one of Hannah’s comrades, a forty-year-old mother of four, spied and smuggled guns from within the RIC barracks where she worked as a clerical assistant. ‘She got out about six revolvers,’ remembered a neighbour of the Keanes on Church Street.34 Hannah’s childhood friend and comrade, May Ahern, later revealed the extent of the danger they risked. Some of the women were told to ingratiate themselves with the Black and Tans. ‘They used to tell me to be very friendly with the Tans,’ May remembered, ‘and I knew a couple of them and I once got a copy of the “Hue and Cry” [the list of wanted men] … I had one who told me that if they were ever raiding about the place he would fire a shot and let me know.’35
On another occasion May was sent to collect luggage which had been packed with revolvers and ammunition and placed on a train to north Kerry from Dublin. The bag had been waiting for collection at Kilmorna station. On the way she passed roadside crosses erected to the memory of comrades recently shot by Crown forces. ‘I could guess what her thoughts were when she landed at the station,’ recalled one of the IRA men involved in the operation. As luck had it, the mail train that day was held up and the station was filled with police. May was told by the IRA to leave at once. But she waited, steeled herself and went to recover the luggage. ‘Just imagine,’ said the IRA commander, Thomas Collins, ‘walking through a platform filled with Tans holding on to two bags filled with guns, ammunition and Mills bombs.’36
The IRA and the police both depended on local intelligence. Informers were hunted down mercilessly. Often the evidence for either side only needed to be anecdotal. Later in the war an eighty-year-old ‘tinker called Old Tom O’Sullivan’ was seen talking regularly to the Black and Tans. It was enough for him to be killed. His body was then used to lure the police into a bog near Rathmore on the border with Cork in 1921. They were ambushed when they tried to reach it and eight were killed.
Bodies began to appear on country roads with the words ‘Spies Beware’ hung on cards around their necks. Informers had been the bane of every Irish rebellion before this. Michael Collins now sent orders to target the British spy network in the countryside, most notably the officers and men of the RIC, both serving and former constables, who might still keep links to the force. ‘Without her spies England was hel
pless,’ he said. ‘Without their police throughout the country, how could they find the men they wanted?’ The north Kerry IRA man Seamus O’Connor recalled how ‘for the first time in Irish history the spy had no place. Drastic punishment was so certain and so imminent that it was as much as a man’s life was worth to utter a discordant note, let alone give information to the enemy.’37
The reference to ‘discordant’ notes also applied within the north Kerry IRA. An IRA man who helped kill a local ex-serviceman known to be friendly with the police spoke of him being ‘tried, found guilty and sentenced to death’.38 But where was the evidence? How did the prisoner plead? Was anybody allowed to speak for him or defend his case? We are not told, but his death was probably decided before he was ever arrested. A guerrilla army had neither the time nor resources, nor very often the desire, to mount trials that would satisfy the most elementary standards of justice. There were numerous such cases across the country. The IRA volunteer who described the execution was one of six men involved. Another of the group had been regarded beforehand as a suspect ‘as he had on several occasions discussed IRA matters in the presence of strangers and generally talked too much about IRA activities’.39 For this reason he was made to take part so that ‘having carried out the execution himself he would have to remain silent about it’.40
The government responded to the violence by banning Sinn Féin, the IRA, Cumann na mBan and the Gaelic League. Like tens of thousands of other Irish people, my grandmother and her brother and their friends now belonged to proscribed organisations. The move only deepened their resentment of the British.
Hannah smuggled weapons and messages, brought food and clothes to men hiding in dugouts and observed the movements of the police and military. The guns she hid were meant for killing: smuggled messages could be the first step in a chain that ended with a man’s brains spilt on a rural road. I picture this teenager with her long raven hair tucked under a scarf, a solid young countrywoman of medium height, her gabardine belted against the hard weather, crossing the winter fields, climbing over ditches, and up narrow tracks on the move to or from where the fighters hid out, or at work in the town smiling at the police and the military so they wouldn’t suspect she was part of a machine devoted to their destruction. Hannah lived the lie of loyalty because that was what the war demanded. I remember once she remarked that the British Army – the regular army – were polite, a ‘better class of men’, who didn’t swear or get drunk in public. It was no great trouble to be civil to such men. But later when the reinforcements, the Black and Tans and the Auxies, arrived, she would struggle to contain her temper. By now she knew that her work had one purpose: to inflict as much damage on the British until they gave up and left Ireland.