by Fergal Keane
IRA action could bring fierce reprisals against civilians. This deepened the alienation of the public from the government, a truth that would in time prove as enduring in the Mekong Delta and the Casbah of Algiers as in the hills of north Kerry. In Listowel tensions grew quickly between the Tans and some of the regular police. In 1921, Constable John McNamara told an American inquiry into conditions in Ireland that he had heard Black and Tans boast of killing and torturing prisoners. ‘It is their practice to break into public houses and saloons and confiscate the liquor there,’ he explained. ‘They use the vilest imaginable language on all occasions and no man who respects himself would be associated with them. It is their practice to steal food, fowl and other farm animals at night on raids which they conducted dressed in civilian clothes and with blackened faces. None of the officials in charge of the barracks reprimand them for these raids.’7
The IRA offensive against the police drove Dublin Castle to redeploy its forces. On 16 May 1920 the RIC in Listowel were told that most of their number were to be sent to remote posts. The army was to move into the barracks. Constable Jeremiah Mee, who was the proudest of men when he first marched down Grafton Street in his police uniform, gathered his comrades for an emergency meeting. Mee left behind a detailed testimony. His address to his comrades, if taken at face value, was strikingly clear-sighted:
I pointed out that in a war one of two things must happen. We had either to win or lose. I assumed that we would win the war with the assistance of the British military. When we had defeated our own people, the British military would return to their own country and we would remain with our own people whom we had, with the assistance of the British Government, crushed and defeated. That would be the best side of our case. If we lost the war, the position would be still worse.8
Mee and his men decided to refuse transfer and any cooperation with the British military. On 17 May, he presented an ultimatum to the District Inspector. It contained an incendiary paragraph: ‘When we joined the police force, we joined with characters second to none, and we refuse to cooperate or work in any capacity with the British military, men of low moral character who frequented bad houses, kept the company of prostitutes and generally were unsuitable and undesirable characters.’9 This last reference was more likely aimed at the Black and Tans and was hyperbolic; there was as much likelihood of finding a brothel in Listowel as snow in the Congo. In fact, Mee had earlier commended the army commander in Listowel as ‘a tall handsome British military officer who kept his men under good control’.10 Captain John Bidwell Watson of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment was a veteran of the Great War, most of which he spent in a prisoner of war camp in East Africa after being captured at the battle of Tanga in November 1914. In custody he learned the value of patience. It would prove critical in the months ahead.
On the nineteenth, two days after the initial police revolt, the top brass of the RIC descended on Listowel. They were led by Lieutenant General Henry Tudor, veteran of the Boer War, veteran of the Great War, a friend of Winston Churchill from India days and now the effective chief of police in Ireland. But Tudor said nothing. His mere presence was meant to awe the rural constables. It was given to Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Brice Ferguson Smyth to address the men. He was another old India hand and much-decorated veteran of the Western Front whose left arm was paralysed by wounds. As Mee remembered it, both Tudor and Smyth were wearing full-dress uniform with the attendant complement of medals. They were accompanied by around fifty military and police escorts. ‘This display of force was no doubt intended to terrorise our little garrison,’ said Mee. ‘And I will admit that I never felt less cheerful.’11
However, the officers had not come to chide them. Smyth, the divisional commissioner, appears to have misunderstood the mood completely. Rather than threaten sanctions, or reverse the transfer decision, Mee claimed Smyth offered the men unfettered licence to kill. By Mee’s account his orders were draconian:
Police and military will patrol the country roads at least five nights a week. They are not to confine themselves to the main roads but take across country, lie in ambush, take cover behind fences, near the roads, and, when civilians are seen approaching, shout ‘hands up’. Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot, and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but this cannot be helped and you are bound to get the right persons sometimes. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.12
This appeared to contradict a general order Smyth would issue the following month, on 17 June – to specifically shoot IRA members who failed to surrender when ordered. In the same order he warned against reprisals saying, ‘I will deal severely with any officer or man concerned in them.’13
Mee’s reported account was explosive and easy to accept for a population suffering under the terror of the Tans. Later Mee claimed Smyth’s words had been written down within an hour of his hearing them, and that he had fellow constables read and sign the document to affirm its veracity. In Mee’s description there was uproar after the Smyth speech. He called Smyth a murderer and surrendered his belt and gun. Tudor attempted to calm things down and promised to scrap the transfers. The Listowel barracks had become a nest of subversives, with the British beginning to wonder if their Irish comrades would turn their guns on them.
After a few weeks Mee and three other constables deserted with their weapons. The story of ‘the Listowel mutiny’ was picked up by the press and nationalist propagandists and soon spread abroad. Mee’s comrades backed him up and some gave evidence to an American commission of inquiry the following year. In the House of Commons, the Nationalist MP Joseph Devlin pressed for a debate: ‘Is not the House entitled to have this matter discussed in view of the intense passion that the statements have aroused in the country and the possibility of serious and immediate bloodshed in consequence?’14
On 14 July 1920, Colonel Smyth was questioned by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, during which he repudiated Mee’s version as a ‘distorting and wholly misleading account of what took place’.15 Smyth opened a libel suit against a newspaper that published Mee’s account. In his description of what happened he does no more than stress government policy on reprisals and repeat the order about shooting armed men, or men thought to be armed, who refused to surrender. He also advocated the commandeering of houses and turning the inhabitants onto the streets if an RIC barracks was burned. The houses of Sinn Féiners were preferable but not imperative. Smyth covered himself carefully against allegations of a general shoot-to-kill order, but he knew police were already operating well beyond the bounds of legality and were steadily alienating the civilian population.
The controversy ensured that Smyth became a marked man. The following July he was in Cork city when IRA men burst into the Cork and County Club, where he had been playing billiards, and shot him dead. Smyth’s body was taken back to the north of Ireland where he was born. After his funeral there were reprisals: the homes of Catholics were attacked in the town of Banbridge and Catholic workers driven from their jobs in a three-day-long rampage. The killing of Gerald Smyth begat another tragedy for his family. His brother Osbert came to Ireland from a military posting in Egypt to seek vengeance on the IRA and was killed by them in Dublin, less than three months after his brother.
The war kept growing, feeding ravenously on rage and fear, killing an innocent man here, destroying a family there; it dispatched death with whispers and nods, on scraps of paper with scribbled addresses in city suburbs, provincial towns, remote farmsteads; it was a war of enemies real and guessed at, a war of a kind that will recur often in the century ahead as the old world of empires is convulsed by men and women who understand the power of propaganda and popular mobilisation. In this war the brutality of your enemy becomes a weapon to be turned ag
ainst them. The Auxies tortured and killed, often with impunity but rarely without exposure, as they carried out some of the most notorious reprisals. In December 1920 my maternal grandmother witnessed a red glow over her home city of Cork. She was ten years old and her family was politically uninvolved. The war did not reach their genteel suburb.
On the night of 11 December, in retaliation for an ambush just outside Cork which killed one Auxiliary and wounded several others, the Auxiliaries, assisted by Black and Tans and soldiers, burned part of the city’s commercial district, the city hall and library, and prevented the fire brigade from responding. Civilians were beaten and robbed. Businesses were looted. Several people were shot. My grandmother remembered being petrified. Her father was in the city, where he worked as a book-keeper for a firm of biscuit-makers. He had not come home for tea and so she waited up all night with her mother and sister listening to the sounds of shooting echoing from the valley below. The following morning a key turned in the lock. Her father was home and unharmed having gone to the pub after work and, seeing the disturbance, retreated to the house of a friend nearer the city centre.
From the outset there had been reprisals, officially disavowed but privately supported by the government. Reprisal raids were sometimes ordered and led by senior officers. They most frequently happened when men wanted to avenge attacks on comrades. The County Inspector for Limerick, John M. Regan, wrote after the war that the ‘police quickest to avenge the death of a comrade were Irishmen and men of an excellent type. Black and Tans, having drink taken, might fire out of lorries indiscriminately, loot public houses, or terrorise a village but the Irishman would avenge his comrade when absolutely stone cold sober and on the right person. It required a great deal of courage to do so as if detected he ran a serious risk of being hanged.’16 The last sentence is disingenuous. Regan knew that the state took a more than lenient view of such reprisals committed by police. It was complicit in them. The Auxiliaries were already in the habit of tying men to the front of vehicles as human shields while travelling through dangerous territory. Security force death squads were becoming an established phenomenon.
The case of the Black and Tan Thomas Huckerby illustrated the complicity of the RIC command in covering up such crimes. Huckerby was the son of Methodist missionaries, born in the Caribbean and of mixed race, a former RAF cadet and then sailor in the Royal Naval Reserve. He arrived in Ireland in July 1920 at the age of nineteen and was posted to the west Limerick/north Kerry borderlands. A few weeks after arrival he and another constable were held up by the IRA and stripped of their uniforms and made to walk back to barracks through the village of Shanagolden. That night the Tans raided the village and burned the creamery. Killings began soon after. A local pensioner, John Hynes, was shot dead. Nobody was charged, but Huckerby was suspected by locals. He was moved about fifteen miles to the larger town of Abbeyfeale, directly on the Kerry border. By now he was on the IRA’s target list. In September the IRA ambushed a patrol and killed two constables, believing Huckerby was present. He was in fact off duty that night.
Two days later Huckerby shot two innocent men claiming they looked suspicious and had tried to run away from him. He was transferred again, this time to Limerick city. Clearly feeling that his time was running out, he left Ireland at the end of the year without facing any charges over the killings.
Occasionally the violence of the police paramilitaries provoked a military intervention. A week after the attempt on Huckerby’s life, a joint force of Tans and Auxies descended on Abbeyfeale and seized the eighteen-year-old brother of a local IRA leader. He was tied to a bush and beaten while being interrogated in full view of the people passing through the town square. Within the next hour a frantic drama was played out as the parish priest pleaded with the District Inspector of the RIC to intervene. The senior police officer was apparently so intimidated by the Tans that he called for military reinforcements. The victim’s brother, local IRA leader James Collins, gave a detailed account of what happened next:
When the military arrived, the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans protested at their interference. They held on to Michael and would not hand him over. An argument then developed between the two parties and was becoming serious when the Tans and Auxiliaries released him and tied him by the legs to their lorry. Preceded by the military, the Auxiliaries dragged him through the town towards Newcastlewest. When they reached Barna, about six miles away, the military halted and again remonstrated with the Auxiliaries and Tans. By this time, he was unconscious. His head and body were battered and bruised. At last, they untied him and threw him into a dyke and left him for dead.17
It is an extraordinary testimony, revealing not just the scale of the brutality meted out to civilians, but the tension which could erupt between different forces of the Crown. Reprisals became official government policy in January 1921. In the government’s Weekly Summary, Sir Nevil Macready, the general officer commanding, wrote that because ‘the machinery of law [has] broken down, they feel there is no certain means of redress and punishment, and it is only human that they should act on their own initiative’.18 Shops and garages were razed to the ground in many parts of the country. In another foreshadowing of the punishments of later colonial wars, the family homes of some of those suspected of attacks were demolished. Shots were fired at groups of young men in the streets. Prisoners were given savage beatings. Any civilian captured with a weapon could expect to die.
The official line was that Republican violence was being caused by a minority. But in Listowel there was enough of a quiet majority behind the rebels to keep the war going. Con Brosnan and Mick Purtill were honing their skills as guerrilla fighters, and my grandmother Hannah was becoming bolder in her gun-running and spying. The state pledged to restore order but from the first burnings and killings it had lost its moral authority. There would be no going back to the Ireland of the Viceroy and the Loyal Children’s picnics.
6
The Abode of Wolves
Here once the pride of princely Desmond flushed;
His courtiers knelt, his mailed squadrons rushed.
Aubrey de Vere1
I
It was the place where his life turned. Tobias O’Sullivan came to Kilmallock in County Limerick in his late thirties. He arrived as a diligent but ordinary police officer. He would leave as a decorated and swiftly promoted hero – and as a marked man at the highest levels of the IRA.
It is possible that had he been sent to Dublin Castle or Belfast, or to a small station in the midlands, somewhere that did not offer the same challenge or opportunity, he might never have become such an important target. But I believe that would be to misread the man. His character was of a kind made for war. He would have found the front line. Such men find the action because it is where they test themselves. I have known men like the District Inspector. Under fire they are the last ones standing between survival and the chaos of defeat. It is what happens under his command in Kilmallock that sparks in me this recognition. Ireland would not be willingly handed over to the IRA by a man like Tobias O’Sullivan.
After the siege of Kilmallock, Tobias O’Sullivan centre (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
He was transferred to Kilmallock from Athea as the guerrillas were stepping up their attacks on remote posts. He arrived with his wife, May, his sons Bernard, aged six, and John, aged four, and the one-and-a-half-year-old baby Sara.
Throughout 1919 the atmosphere had been changing in rural towns and villages. Police and their families had become vulnerable. Backs were turned and conversations stopped when policemen’s wives entered shops. In dormant areas, the IRA sent outsiders as organisers to escalate the conflict. One of them, Liam Scully, former schoolteacher, had been sent from north Kerry where he trained men like Mick Purtill and Con Brosnan. Scully was popular with the men back in Ballylongford, where he was a captain with the IRA, and he came to Kilmallock with a reputation as a man of action.
In the 1920s, Kilmallock was a small mar
ket town set in the rich pastureland of south Limerick. It had retained a strategic significance from the time of the Elizabethan conquests, commanding the main road between the east and west of Munster, creating a blockade against the perpetual fear of invaders from the Atlantic coast. Back then order was imposed with customary savagery. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, coloniser, half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh and decapitator of the peasantry, could boast that the conquered territories were ‘so quiet that I have but to send my horseboy for any man and he will come’.2
In 1573 the Irish rebel Sir James Fitzmaurice and his army torched Kilmallock, creating ‘a black thick and gloomy shroud of smoke about it, after they had torn down its houses of stone and wood’, so that in the description of one chronicler the town ‘became the receptacle and abode of wolves’.3 Fitzmaurice was the first to define, for reasons of conviction and convenience, a national identity that melded ‘Faith and Fatherland’, or what James Joyce would centuries later call ‘Christ and Caesar hand in glove.’4 A tenacious and resourceful commander, Fitzmaurice ran the English ragged, much as the IRA Flying Columns would some four hundred years later. One contemporary chronicle described him as a ‘brave and gallant gentleman, witty, learned, circumspect … not much given to the pleasures of Bacchus or Venus’.5 This view would change as Fitzmaurice stayed at large, his liberty a taunt to the English administration. He was eventually captured and offered a pardon if he submitted to the authority of the Crown. Fitzmaurice would have felt he had little option but to submit. The alternative was a gory traitor’s death on the scaffold, designed to impose maximum humiliation on the defeated lord. He had a halter placed around his neck and was led like a farm animal before Sir John Perrot, the president’s sword pressed against his chest. In front of the assembled nobility of Munster, Fitzmaurice recited the words written for him by the English, but spoken in both Gaelic and English: ‘This earth of Kilmallock, which town I have most traitorously sacked and burnt, I kiss, and on the same lie prostrate, overfraught with sorrow upon the present view of my most mischievous past.’6