by Fergal Keane
In Kilmallock the outline of the Irish struggle with the English could be traced in the ruins of the ancient moss-bewigged walls, in the roofless and abandoned Dominican priory, sacked by Cromwell’s forces in 1648, and in the contours of deforested lands ploughed into fields of grain and barley, the pastures dotted with the grazing cattle of the planters. In the colonists’ telling, the wilderness had been transformed by English organisation and discipline. It was to be seen in their promotion of laws and businesses, in the markets and the spires of new Protestant churches; more poignantly it could be heard in the music of itinerant harpists who once played for Gaelic chieftains and now blended the English and continental forms with the native music. They earned their coins and keep in the Ascendancy mansions where, in less than a generation, a rugged soldier from Worcestershire could become lord and master of vast lands, his Catholic tenants kept firmly in hand with the threat of eviction and consequent destitution.
By the nineteenth century the colonists’ mark was also to be seen in the town’s broad main street with its abundant life of commerce, the regular market days, the creameries and coach-building factories, the thriving public houses, and the omnipresent patrols of ‘Peelers’, the Irish Constabulary in their dark green uniforms who kept order from a sturdy police barracks.
Political violence occasionally simmered. Three decades before Tobias O’Sullivan arrived, the Kilmallock barracks was attacked by the Fenians. About twenty men advanced in a military formation more suited to the massed ranks of the recently ended American Civil War, in which several leading Fenian commanders had served. A handful were armed with guns but the majority clutched only pikes to face volleys of fire from the well-prepared police defenders. The Fenians were routed with ease. After the attack, the police received an unexpected honour from Queen Victoria who, according to the Unionist Irish Times, ‘had been graciously pleased to command that the force should thereafter be called the “Royal” Irish Constabulary and that they should be entitled to have the harp and crown as badges of that force’.7
But the core tenet of Fenianism – the belief that Britain could only be driven from Ireland by force – retained a powerful hold among a small circle of revolutionaries in the area.
By the time Tobias O’Sullivan arrived in Kilmallock in May 1920 he found a troubled town and mounting IRA violence in the surrounding countryside. It was still prosperous with numerous grocers, public houses, a pig market and four hotels. The finest of the hotels was Clerys, ‘near the railway station, at which best horses and cars attend all trains’.8 Clerys was located opposite the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
The previous month, the IRA had hit the RIC garrison at Ballylanders, about ten miles away. Very lights – illumination flares fired from pistols – filled the night sky in bright coloured streaks, a desperate call for assistance from the occupants. But the IRA had blocked all approach roads to the town to delay reinforcements. Heavy iron weights were used to smash the barracks’ slate roof and petrol was poured in, followed by bombs. Faced with being burned alive the seven-strong police garrison at Ballylanders surrendered.
The man leading the attack was one of the most formidable IRA figures of his day. Seán Forde was hard-headed and clinical in his decision making.* He had fought in the Easter Rising and shared a cell with one of the leaders, Seán McDermott, the night before he was executed. When Prime Minister Herbert Asquith visited IRA prisoners in Dublin after the Rising, Forde was among those who refused to stand up when he entered their quarters. Asquith was unperturbed and listened patiently to a lecture from Forde about the men’s demand for prisoner-of-war status. ‘I said if we were prisoners of war our leaders – our officers – would not have been executed.’9 Forde was exceptionally brave in the field, single-handedly attacking a lorryload of troops at close quarters. ‘I remember myself emptying an automatic pistol into one of the lorries,’ he said, ‘and throwing a little haversack full of bombs into it as well. From what I could see stooping over, all the military in it were bleeding and hanging out of the lorry in various attitudes.’10 Yet when his men captured soldiers in another ambush the wounded were well treated and a Church of Ireland minister was found to console the most seriously hurt.
Forde had been sent to the Kilmallock area by Michael Collins with instructions to ‘get those Limerick men into the fight’.11 Like Collins, Forde understood that realism was the essence of guerrilla warfare. No fights were to be picked unless there was a chance of winning. Martyrdom by hunger strike or on the gallows had value in creating public outrage. But with the new revolutionaries it was a tactic not a creed. Since Forde’s arrival the local units were better coordinated and more aggressive. After Ballylanders the highly motivated guerrillas wanted a bigger target, and eyed the RIC barracks in Kilmallock. ‘We had done so well at Ballylanders,’ Forde recalled, ‘that we said at some of the meetings: “Why not attack the big one and do it properly!”’12
Kilmallock was better defended. Set back from the main street, the barracks was sandbagged, steel-shuttered and surrounded by barbed wire. Local Volunteers noted that it was overlooked by Clery’s hotel and had a number of neighbouring houses and small shops which could be taken over without much difficulty. Breaching the roof was possible but Forde would need help from IRA men in the region. The word went out for men, guns and ammunition across Limerick and Cork, Clare and Tipperary. Units began to converge on safe houses around Kilmallock.
At the RIC barracks there was always a general expectation of attack, but no specific warning of the inferno that was about to be unleashed by the IRA. The newly arrived Sergeant O’Sullivan had suffered a serious failure of his local intelligence network.
II
There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out and through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall.
Homer, Iliad
The men infiltrated the town in ones and twos. It was the last Friday of May and Kilmallock was thronged with farmers and towns-people. The guns were hidden in a dump on the western approaches to the town, the explosives and paraffin placed on the eastern side. One man posing as a commercial traveller was sent to book rooms on the top floor of Clery’s. If the manager guessed what was being prepared, he had the wit to say nothing. Two volunteers were sent to take over Mr Carroll’s shop next to the barracks. They bought a bottle of whiskey from the terrified owner. ‘The poor man got a great fright at first but after a little talk became calm,’13 one IRA man recalled. By nightfall there were thirty gunmen in place for the direct attack on the base. Around forty others were deployed to cut off any attempt by the police to break out into surrounding laneways. Beyond the town, other contingents barricaded roads, severed telephone and telegraph wires and tore up railway tracks.
By midnight Kilmallock was totally cut off. The local bank manager, Cyril Andrews, who lived above the premises adjacent to the barracks, was woken by ‘armed men who appeared mysteriously in my bedroom’. They allowed him, his wife and children to dress before escorting them to a local hotel. ‘I asked them not to unduly alarm my wife … [they] were all the time most courteous to my wife and myself.’14 Like many bank managers at the time, Andrews was a Protestant and might have feared that the IRA would see him as a loyalist spy.
By now the men in the barracks were aware that an attack was imminent. They had heard men clambering onto nearby roofs. But with no communications, Sergeant Tobias O’Sullivan and the six men under his command had few options. They could have tried to leave but would almost certainly have been mown down on the street without cover. They could have surrendered and hoped for mercy, or they could choose to fight it out and hope to survive until the army in Limerick was alerted, about an hour away. Given the humane treatment afforded the Ballylanders garrison, surrender might have looked a better option. But O’Sullivan was constitutionally unsuited to surre
nder. He would stand and fight.
On the roof of the house nearest the barracks Seán Forde edged forward with a flash lamp. The men in their attacking positions waited for his signal. Complete fire discipline was maintained. One of the attackers remembered that ‘suddenly from the roof top three flashes of light winked out into the night and were instantly answered by the roar of thirty rifles’.15 As at Ballylanders, lumps of cast iron weighing fifty, sixty, pounds were then hurled onto the roof of the barracks. Each crashed through the slates. ‘Into this opening our leader, from the roof, hurled bottle after bottle of petrol.’16 Mills bombs, homemade grenades and rifle fire were directed at the breach to ignite the fuel. When nothing happened, more bombs and paraffin were poured in. A horse-drawn petrol pump was brought up and more fuel funnelled in through the roof. The fire was soon blazing. IRA men would remember a street hazed in red, the remorseless crack of rifle shots and their own hoarse voices singing the revolutionary anthem ‘The Soldier’s Song’.
We’ll sing a song, a soldier’s song,
With cheering rousing chorus,
As round our blazing fires we throng,
The starry heavens o’er us;
And as we wait the morning’s light,
Here in the silence of the night,
We’ll chant a soldier’s song.
After two hours of fighting a ‘cease fire’ order was given. Seán Forde called out for the police to surrender. ‘No surrender’ came the reply, accompanied by sustained rifle and grenade fire. The grenades brought bricks and dust crashing around the attackers. One IRA account published in the 1950s claims that O’Sullivan asked about surrender during a lull in the fighting but was refused and ‘continued a most valiant defence’.17 As the main barracks became an inferno, O’Sullivan and his men retreated to an outbuilding. ‘They fought the fight of heroes,’ one IRA account recalled, ‘and although we were engaged in a life and death struggle with them, we readily acknowledged the magnificent stand they made in the face of an utterly hopeless situation.’18 This was some acknowledgement from an organisation which officially regarded the men of the Royal Irish Constabulary as traitors. Another volunteer remembered his personal admiration for those ‘who grimly refused to surrender even when the building which they held was consumed and in ruins around them’.19 There was an echo of the rebels in the blazing GPO in 1916, but separated by a vast chasm in loyalties.
On occasion, in the heat of furious battle, the IRA attackers began to falter under the fierce response from the police. A fire broke out in their rooftop room and was answered with a bucket of water thrown by Seán Forde. The water turned out to be paraffin. Men screamed and cursed. Frantic smothering with wet sacks brought the fire under control. One parched attacker was offered a bottle of water to drink. This too was paraffin. He threatened to kill the man involved.
For five hours the police held out. Two wounded constables who failed to escape to the outhouse were burned to death. But O’Sullivan still refused to give in. He may have hoped that reinforcements would inevitably arrive, particularly as the morning approached. Towards dawn, Liam Scully, the IRA captain from Kerry, stepped into the street in the belief that all the police had withdrawn or were dead. A marksman caught him instantly, the bullet entering his head just below his ear, killing him immediately. The reverberations from his death would be felt back in north Kerry.
With dawn rising and ammunition low the IRA retreated. Kilmallock had held out against a large, well-coordinated IRA attack led by one of its best commanders. The defiant police sergeant O’Sullivan and his surviving men advanced into the street with bayonets drawn. They were spotted by a party of the IRA covering the retreat. A shot rang out and one of the policemen doubled over, struck in the stomach. The attackers vanished.
The stricken Scully was retrieved from the firing line and taken to the bank-cum-dressing station where he was given the last rites. It was thought too risky to take his body home to Kerry, so the next day he was taken to Templeglantine in County Limerick, a few miles from the Kerry border. His brother Bertie was with an IRA unit nearby and remembered being called to a safe house. ‘It was bright moonlight but the house was lit up. I hid near the house, expecting a raid, but Chris was watching out for me and called me. I went in. Seán Forde, Paddy Kenneally and another chap were inside. When they told me Liam had been killed the night before in the Kilmallock barracks attack I don’t think it surprised me.’20 Bertie Scully knew the times, and he knew his brother. Forde told him that the death was to be kept secret, probably to keep the Crown forces guessing. It was futile, though, and word reached north Kerry quickly.
Bertie was taken to a farmhouse and followed the others into a kitchen where he saw his brother’s body on the table. It was the first time he had seen a dead man. Some volunteers were making a coffin. Bertie was given a tricolour and the contents of his brother’s wallet, including a bloodstained map which his brother had used to plan the Kilmallock attack. ‘I think it was T. Crowley of East Limerick who afterwards said that “only for him the Barracks would never have been destroyed”.’ This gave me to understand that he had a good deal to do with the planning.’21 The men had come to the point where death was accepted as part of their days and nights. If they were killed, the burial would most likely be in secret. The rituals of Catholic burial in this part of the country – the wake, the neighbours coming, the crowds at the removal and mass – were forsaken in the interests of safety. Still, for Liam Scully around fifty IRA men converged on Templeglantine cemetery, where he was buried hours after the May evening light went down over the Mullaghareirk mountains. At midnight, after prayers led by three priests, his coffin was lowered into the grave and a volley fired into the air.
Afterwards Bertie Scully took it into his head to go and see the place where his brother had been killed. He made his way across county to Kilmallock, a distance of about twenty-five miles – probably off the main roads, cutting through fields and fording streams to avoid detection. When he reached Kilmallock the local IRA took him to a dugout where he met one of his brother’s old comrades. ‘I offered to stay with the East Limerick Flying Column but he laughed and said, “We don’t want the second one of ye to get killed here”.’22 The man with the friendly advice was killed soon afterwards himself.
The Unionist Belfast Telegraph reported the barracks attack in detail, with predictably rapturous praise for the police and a denunciation of the ‘devilish work’ of the IRA, and describing how a thousand spent cartridges had been found in one house alone, how a rosary had been found next to the burned body of a policeman, and how Sergeant O’Sullivan had survived only because a pocket book above his breast stopped a bullet from entering his heart. A photograph of the surviving police contingent shows Tobias O’Sullivan standing in the centre, his exhausted men on either side. It is tempting to read in a man’s expression the effect of traumatic experience. But Sergeant O’Sullivan does not look harrowed in the photograph. Exhausted certainly. But his is the face of a dogged man, one to be feared in battle, a man who had decided he would not take a step backwards in fighting for the Ireland in which he believed.
There are a few lines in one account of the attack which indicate how the IRA came to view the sergeant at Kilmallock. They are significant because they come from one of the most thoughtful of IRA veterans, speaking years afterwards to the military historians. By the time he was interviewed, Seán Moylan was Minister of Education in Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government. His memories of Kilmallock and Tobias O’Sullivan were still vivid. ‘His experiences of that fierce night in May seemed to develop in him a mania for vengeance,’ said Moylan. ‘Shortly afterwards he appeared in Kilmallock with a group of police and soldiers, burned a number of houses and ill-treated a number of townspeople. It was reported to me that he passed between Cork and Limerick with a military party on a number of occasions and many times I lay on that road awaiting him and his party.’23
There is no other recorded claim of this alleged i
ncident or of Tobias O’Sullivan abusing civilians in Kilmallock. But in the files of the Bureau of Military History I found evidence of another plot to kill him before he left County Limerick. In the wake of the Kilmallock attack, O’Sullivan published a list of fourteen names wanted for complicity in the operation. One of those, Nicholas O’Dwyer, remarked that ‘the RIC Sergeant Sullivan [sic] was more responsible than anyone else for the formation of the East Limerick Column which I believe the prototype of all the Flying Columns. When he published the list of fourteen names … we had no option but to band ourselves together on the run, and take enough ammunition for self-defence from the people who had it – the British Forces.’24 The quest for vengeance led O’Dwyer and Seán Forde to plan the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan but by the time they had made their plan he ‘had been moved on’.25
In the House of Commons Lloyd George praised the defence of Kilmallock barracks. The surviving constables were awarded the Police Medal for bravery and Tobias O’Sullivan was promoted to the rank of District Inspector. The defence enhanced his reputation as a fearless leader of men. Where better to send him afterwards than a place where morale had collapsed so much that the RIC had mutinied. In the autumn of 1920 District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan set out for Listowel determined to face the IRA.