by Fergal Keane
The police in Ireland are themselves the victims of a condition of terrorism which is only equalled by the condition of terrorism that they themselves endeavour to impose. They are, for the most part, quite young men who have gone through the experience, at once toughening and demoralizing, of fighting through a long and savage war. They are splendid soldiers and abominably bad policemen. They are unsuitably and inadequately officered, quite insufficiently trained for their special duties, and expected to keep sober in nerve-racking circumstances in a country where drink is far more plentiful and potent than in England.12
Two days later an IRA ambush at Ballyduff, about five miles from the Purtill homestead, led to the death of a Black and Tan and the wounding of several others. In retaliation the Tans descended on the village and stormed the house of James Houlihan, an IRA volunteer who had taken part in the ambush. He had decided not to stay at home but his younger brother John was not so fortunate, as James later described:
After surrounding the house, the Tans broke in the doors and windows, searched the house, and found my brother, John, in bed upstairs. They seized him, not giving him time to dress, pulled him downstairs and out the side of the road, placed him against a ditch and riddled him with bullets. As he was dying, he moaned, after which one of the Tans approached and drove a bayonet through his body. They had previously dragged my mother out onto the roadside to witness the shooting … Having shot my brother the Tans proceeded to the village where they looted several shops and set fire to a number of buildings.13
One of the mutinous Listowel constables, Michael Kelly, later told the American commission of inquiry that ‘in command of the party that night was District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan who was in charge of the RIC and Black and Tans stationed at Listowel’.14 But he was not present himself and his dating of the incident is out by almost a month: Kelly said that the killing of John Houlihan had taken place ‘around 5 October’ when in fact it was on 1 November. Tobias O’Sullivan might have been there, but apart from Kelly’s statement there is no other documented reference to his presence. His brother James’s account of the reprisal refers to ‘eight lorry loads of Tans’ and does not place the District Inspector at the scene, although he does mention the later fate of Tobias O’Sullivan.15
On the same day as the Houlihan killing two more police were abducted after they had been accused of ‘interfering with the congregation leaving church after devotions’ in Ballylongford.16 It appears the two had attempted to search people leaving evening prayers. Ballylongford already had a bad name with the Crown forces. At the very start of the Troubles the army was humiliated there when the IRA frustrated its attempts to stop a Gaelic League concert. There had been attacks on the police and raids for arms.
The two men, Constable William Muir, a Black and Tan, and James Coughlan, from the regular RIC, were unarmed, as were the IRA men who overpowered them. Among the IRA group was Ballylongford local Brian O’Grady, who would become a comrade in arms of Con Brosnan and Mick Purtill through the years that followed. Con Brosnan also took part in the operation with a unit from his home village of Newtownsandes. Coughlan was brought to a house in the village where he suffered savage beatings and feared he was going to be executed. Muir was taken to a townland outside Ballylongford. It was a small stretch of country but, search as they might, the police could not find their men. It was only when the Tans threatened reprisals against the local population in Ballylongford that the IRA released the prisoners – Muir within twenty-four hours and Coughlan after three days. Coughlan was apparently so badly beaten, after having been dragged blindfolded for miles across country, that a local doctor said he had ‘never seen a man in such a condition. He was black and blue from head to foot’.17 But it was William Muir who suffered the greatest trauma. He committed suicide about five weeks after being released. The army court of inquiry heard that Muir ‘was, on his return, in a nervous and shaky condition, he became silent and would only speak when spoken to’.18 He cut his throat with a razor in Ballylongford RIC barracks on 27 December 1920. Was the dead man an already traumatised ex-soldier, driven to the brink by his abduction, or broken by physical or psychological torture at the hands of the IRA? Nobody told.* But the abductions added to the picture of Ballylongford as bandit country and the brutality meted out to Muir and Coughlan would have enraged the police. The word from RIC headquarters in Listowel was that a crackdown was imminent. A spy warned of shooting and burning to come.
II
The first mention of Tobias O’Sullivan in local IRA accounts describes him leading a raid on Ballylongford at the end of November 1920, soon after his arrival in Listowel. That night, 22 November, there was a hard frost on the ground and a full moon, the kind of weather where sound travels far and moving targets are easier to spot. The only witness accounts come from surviving IRA members, but they are consistent. One man remembered how ‘several lorries of RIC and Tans arrived and began a house-to-house search in Ballylongford, adjourning from time to time to visit public houses which they looted, eventually becoming almost mad from drink. In the streets they assaulted everyone they met and fired several thousand rounds of ammunition.’19 Houses were burned, a creamery, sawmills and shops. The local IRA was caught without weapons to defend the village as they had been dumped outside the village a week earlier to avoid searches.
While one IRA party went to recover weapons several men hid behind a wall about quarter of a mile from Ballylongford. Footsteps approached, which they took to be those of other IRA men. One of them, Eddie Carmody, called out: ‘They are the lads.’ But stepping into the road he saw a party of Black and Tans. ‘He turned and ran,’ recalled a comrade, ‘[but] the Tans opened fire, shooting him in the back. He managed to throw himself across a low wall in front of the doctor’s house. The Tans immediately raided the doctor’s house but found nothing there. As they were leaving they found Carmody behind the wall, pulled him out on the road and shot him dead on the spot.’20
Brian O’Grady was also present in Ballylongford and had to jump into the bitterly cold waters of a tidal river to swim to safety. ‘I was fired on by a party of Tans from the behind the creamery,’ he remembered. ‘During all this, the people, especially the women, were terrified. They went through a terrible ordeal.’21
The terror in Kerry was overshadowed by an extraordinary spasm of violence in Dublin. On the day after the Ballylongford raid, the IRA launched dawn missions against men Michael Collins had identified as British intelligence agents living outside military barracks. Fourteen were shot dead and another died of his wounds.22 Two civilians were also killed. Later that day, in reprisal, the police opened fire on spectators at a Gaelic football match in Dublin. Fourteen people, including women and children, were killed in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The IRA killers were led by the so-called ‘Squad’, a group of assassins who worked directly for Collins and offered him their total loyalty. They established a reputation for ruthlessness which set the example for many IRA gunmen around the country. Several of the Squad would later achieve notoriety under very different conditions in north Kerry.
What happened in Ballylongford would have been enough to make District Inspector O’Sullivan a priority target. But threatening talk had been mounting from the moment he arrived in north Kerry. To the IRA he was the O’Sullivan who killed Liam Scully at Kilmallock; O’Sullivan sent in by the Castle to take control after the mutiny. There was another possible reason for his becoming a priority target in the eyes of the IRA leadership in Dublin.
The death of Liam Scully was only one legacy of Kilmallock. But Scully was gone; nothing could be done but to avenge him in due course. There were the living IRA men to worry about. The man who led the raid on Kilmallock barracks, Seán Forde, was alive but had been arrested in Cork. Just before Christmas 1920, two weeks after the burning of Cork city centre by the Auxies, Forde was caught by the Tans. By now he was one of the IRA’s most senior and aggressive operatives in Munster and his face was probably kn
own to police in the Kilmallock area. He had been in Cork to collect weapons and ammunition. But the Tans stopped him on the street and found bullets in his pocket. He tried to make a run for it but was on unfamiliar ground. Another party of Tans cornered him in an alleyway and beat and tortured him. He was asked about Seán Forde. ‘They questioned me. I gave all sorts of names – the usual thing … I told them I had heard about him but that I heard his health had broken down and that he had gone to America. He [the policeman] said, “It must have been very recently. He was in some ambush – I think it was Glenacurrane – only a week ago.”’23
The prisoner was charged with attempted murder and possession of ammunition. The attempted murder charge would be difficult to sustain. Forde represented himself at the court martial and argued that he prevented a Tan from murdering him. The two fought hand to hand, with the Tan firing the only shots, before the fight was broken up and Forde arrested. In his cell in Cork he was sure he would escape murder charges as long as nobody could positively identify him as the leader of the raid on Kilmallock barracks, plus several other attacks in County Limerick. To the arresting Tans he was just another IRA man. Forde was sent on remand to prison on Spike Island, a military base in the middle of Cork harbour.
But HQ in Dublin feared that Forde might be identified. According to his own account, captured British dispatches revealed that ‘a man answering the description of Seán Forde was a prisoner in Spike Island and that DI Sullivan of Listowel, who was made a DI after his defence of Kilmallock barracks and transferred to Listowel would be able to identify him’.24 There were concerns over other prisoners as well. There was a precedent. RIC men from Limerick had been brought to Dublin to identify a prominent Republican, not in custody, the previous September. They misidentified and a police death squad executed the wrong man. Forde later testified that an order was sent from one of the most senior IRA commanders in Dublin for Tobias O’Sullivan to be killed. The decision to set a plan in motion was taken at an IRA battalion council meeting in December 1920.
It was a potentially suicidal mission: to attack the most senior police officer in Listowel, in daylight, near a barracks crowded with RIC, Tans, army and Auxiliaries. There was also the strong likelihood of reprisals as the brutal days of late October and early November had shown in north Kerry. The IRA knew precisely what could be wrought upon the civilian population by such an audacious attack. After an RIC District Inspector was shot in County Clare in September 1920 there had been counter-attacks on several local towns. Twenty-six buildings were razed and four people killed.
Yet the IRA also knew that as well as alienating the public, reprisals were creating growing unease in Britain itself. In October 1920, the same month that O’Sullivan was leading the police raid on Ballylongford, Sir Oswald Mosley asked Prime Minister Lloyd George whether the ‘promiscuous reprisals’25 in Ireland enjoyed government support. He also called for a sworn public inquiry. A few days later Mosley stressed that he supported the army’s work in Ireland. Indeed, he had a close relative serving there. His implied targets were the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. ‘Famous regiments, that for generations past have performed most magnificent services to this country, are to-day labouring under certain imputations – imputations which I have every reason to believe are unjust,’ Mosley charged. ‘They are shouldering the guilt of others. It is only fair to the troops actually engaged in Ireland that the matter should be sifted and that we should know who are guilty of the outrages.’26 Mosley went further, adding the incendiary claim that reprisals were worse than German behaviour in Belgium at the start of the First World War and more reminiscent of ‘the pogrom of the more barbarous Slav’.27 The latter reference is tainted with historic irony. Mosley would later become leader of the British fascists, who tried to terrorise the streets of London’s Jewish East End.
III
Volunteers were sought for Tobias O’Sullivan’s assassination. The call was heard by all the men of the north Kerry IRA, including my great-uncle Mick Purtill and his friend Con Brosnan. There was no rush to respond. As Brosnan later drily recalled: ‘Some time elapsed before anyone volunteered.’
It was a month, according to another witness, before anybody came forward. Eventually Con Brosnan and three other men from his parish – Dan O’Grady, Jack Sheehan and First Lieutenant Jack Ahern – volunteered to shoot the District Inspector. Con had never killed before. His comrades likewise. His family was devout and respectable. Nor did he have any real experience of the heat of battle. He would be woefully unprepared if the police and army arrived on the scene. His teachers and priests had taught that killing was a mortal sin. At school he learned that Irishmen had fought for their King across the empire. The curriculum was still set by civil servants trained and paid by Dublin Castle. Except that Con also learned, at meetings of the IRB, in the ranks of the Volunteers, that Irishmen had fought the English for centuries. His consciousness had been shaped by inherited narratives of oppression, famine and dispossession; of the Fenian rising and the Land War; and by the immediate circumstances of that Christmas of 1920, when men he knew had already been killed and tortured by the Black and Tans. The great national cause had become local and personal. Brosnan was told by the IRA battalion commander that O’Sullivan had killed Liam Scully at Kilmallock. Con Brosnan’s son, Gerry, was in no doubt that the killing of Scully had made O’Sullivan a target. ‘He was after shooting a Kerryman … the Moyvane men decided they would do it.’28
Closer still was the death of Eddie Carmody near Ballylongford in November. In Con Brosnan’s telling, and that of his fellow assassins, the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan was a settling of several scores. Jack Ahern, a twenty-two-year-old farmer’s son, remembers that the shooting of Eddie Carmody ‘put new life into the company here and the men … were very anxious to avenge his death’.29 Motives abounded and the moral restrictions that prevented ordinary men from killing had been swept away in the terrible atmosphere of late 1921 when the pitch of attack and fierce reprisal had permeated life across north Kerry. Men had crossed over to where violence was normalised, a crowded, claustrophobic hellish island. The orders had come from above, the motivation from within. Now it was left to the assassins to make their plan.
Hats off to Brosnan, our midfield wonder
He’s par excellence in feet and hands
Oh where’s the Gael can pull down the number
Of Kerry’s idol from Newtownsandes.
(Kerry ballad, 1924)30
When I was growing up Con Brosnan was a legendary name in Kerry, not for anything related to the wars but for his Gaelic footballing prowess, the most important talent a man could possess in any part of the county. It was said by my father that Con Brosnan helped to heal the wounds of the Civil War through bringing men from opposing factions onto the same team. Brosnan captained Kerry and won six All-Ireland medals. He was a welcome figure in my uncle John B’s public house on William Street and in the home of his old comrade Mick Purtill. They shared the experience of a war about which the town did not usually speak. Along with everybody else in the area they observed the rituals of 1916 remembrance at Easter, but beyond that their memories of war remained private.
There is an expression in Ireland that says somebody looks ‘shook’. It is both literal and highly evocative. A man is shaken, made frail and older-looking by the travails of life. As Con Brosnan aged there came dark periods when the smile receded and melancholy took hold. Nobody knew it in the Listowel of my childhood, but Con Brosnan did tell some of his story of the war to the interviewers from the Bureau of Military History. Like all of the other veterans who participated he knew that his words would only be read by the public long after he was dead. Distance might help the Irish people better understand the terrible things that had happened.
The first attempt on the life of Tobias O’Sullivan was made in late December 1920 under cover of darkness. Con Brosnan and Dan O’Grady joined several others and prepared to ambush the District Inspector on his way hom
e at teatime. But a scout came and told them O’Sullivan had ‘ceased to go home to his tea and [is] probably having it in the barracks’.31 The plan was deferred.
Then towards the turn of the year something happened in Listowel which deepened hostility towards the police.
John Lawlor was a seventeen-year-old trainee priest home on holidays from the seminary in Dublin. The local parish priest, Father Dennis O’Connor, had known him for two years as a ‘quiet and law abiding youth’.32 The records give different dates. On the afternoon of 31 December, or 1 January, John Lawlor was walking in Listowel when he was stopped by a Tan patrol. He had troublesome family connections. Lawlor’s father was the parish clerk and a prominent Sinn Féin supporter. His age also made him a likely candidate for police harassment. The civilian witnesses who later testified to the army court of inquiry all told a similar story: Lawlor was stopped by the Tans, surrounded and then beaten with the butt of a rifle.
The police surrounded him. I saw him struck on the head with the butt end of a rifle. He fell, afterwards he got up and ran away …
I saw a policeman strike him in the face with his hand and another hit him on the back of the head with the butt end of his rifle. He fell – A policeman told us to move on and we saw no more …
He put his hands up and the next thing I saw him falling down. I did not actually see the blow struck as I was too far away …
He said: ‘Oh! My head, Oh! My back.’ He was bleeding from the mouth.33
Five witnesses testified to the beating of John Lawlor. The parish priest said he had found him on Market Street ‘and he told me he was sore all over his body, especially his head because of a beating’.34 The next Father O’Connor saw of the youth was when he was called to give him the last rites that evening. ‘I found him drowsy and not inclined to speak much.’ A local doctor, Timothy Buckley, testified that he found a cut with bruising on the right side of Lawlor’s head and cuts inside the mouth. He agreed with the army doctor that Lawlor died from a brain haemorrhage caused by ‘an external injury to the right side of the head’.35