by Fergal Keane
Throughout this period Sir Arthur Vicars corresponded with a friend in Britain. ‘So far we have not suffered, but are about the only people in north Kerry whose house has not been raided,’ he had written at the outset of the Troubles, ‘one never knows what may happen. We have all our arms, etc., in a strong room. I have heard privately that they won’t raid us, but why I do not know, as I am a strong Unionist, and this they know. Last week they broke into a house 7 miles from here and stole blankets, boots, and clothes, etc. – how patriotic! – for the good of their cause!’3
The world around him was darkening and closing in. Big houses were being raided and some were burned. But this was not a campaign of religious cleansing in north Kerry. The local Protestant landowning community had not been targeted for sectarian attack by the IRA. The danger for individuals like Sir Arthur lay in being perceived as collaborators with the police and military. The level of animosity depended on individuals. Families with a history of benevolence towards their tenants or shrewd enough to cooperate with Sinn Féin could expect a safer passage. Arthur Vicars would be targeted because the temper of the times was paranoid, angry and vengeful; because he failed to see that hosting soldiers at Kilmorna invited dangerous suspicion; because he had refused to open his strong room; and because he was believed to be spying for the British.
When the house was first raided, in May the year before, Vicars told the IRA he did not have the keys to the strong room where any weapons might be kept. Nonetheless he sought to placate them by offering them money and producing two bottles of whiskey and some glasses, as if imagining the business might all be settled over a convivial drink. Both money and whiskey were refused. The IRA left but his refusal to cooperate was noted. Other landowners, including a former army officer, had taken a different approach, handing over weapons without protest. Denis Quille from Listowel later described Vicars as ‘an old anti-Sinn Féin type … giving information about our movements. We had information from a good source about him.’4
Arthur Vicars was targeted by the same man who had set up the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan. Patrick McElligott and his brother had prepared the intelligence report on the movements of the District Inspector. With Robert dead, Paddy now commanded the local battalion. The attack on Vicars was not sanctioned by local leaders. They were never asked, because, according to McElligott, there was no time. In a statement McElligott later gave to Irish army historians there is a sense of a man seeking to justify what happened. Vicars is described as a ‘large landowner’ (in fact he owned nothing) and is accused of asking the Kilmorna tenants about the movements of the Flying Column. McElligott links the killing to the shooting of Michael Galvin in the ambush a few days before. ‘Vicars was a spy and this house … was being taken over by the military’5 as a blockhouse to dominate the district. Most tellingly, he asserts that ‘our intention was to arrest Vicars and have him tried’.6 This meant tried and judged without lawyers or independent judges, but an important legal nicety in the eyes of the IRA. McElligott’s version is contradicted by his comrade James Costello, whose account feels closer to the actuality. He was to help ‘arrest Sir Arthur Vicars and have him shot as he had been sentenced to death for being a spy and assisting the enemy generally’.7
Another IRA man said that Vicars had seen him and a large party of guerrillas crossing the River Feale the previous week. Soon afterwards the Black and Tans and army were set on their trail. ‘We concluded that Sir Arthur Vicars had sent word to the Tans of our movements on the previous day after he had seen us.’8 In several statements Vicars is described as a former British Army officer, though he never served with the army. His class, background and position as resident of the ‘Big House’ may have led his attackers to assume otherwise and hardened their suspicions.
Vicars might have had a chance to escape. According to IRA volunteer James Costello, when he and other members of the attacking party arrived at Kilmorna on 14 April 1921, they were told by Vicars’s valet, Michael Murphy, that Sir Arthur was not at home. ‘I said to Murphy “We have a job to do and we are going to do it.”’ (The words are an almost exact echo of the language used by one of the assassins of Tobias O’Sullivan.) Another IRA man recalled that they approached Kilmorna but did not attack because the signal did not come from the battalion command in a nearby village. The IRA decided to leave and return the following morning. If this is true, then Murphy would surely have told Vicars, who may have believed it was another raid for arms. He stayed at Kilmorna. Murphy was an ex-soldier, a local man who had served in France with the Irish Guards from 1914–18 and who found work at Kilmorna when he came home to north Kerry. He was clearly fond of Vicars and decades later struggled to understand why Sir Arthur had been targeted.
The next morning the attacking party broke in through a window at the front of the house, and the smallest man in the company was hoisted up and opened the front door from inside. Murphy described men bustling through the house sprinkling petrol and paraffin on the ground floor. Soon rooms were set ablaze immediately. Murphy raced upstairs to Vicars’s room at the top of the house. ‘I warned him to get up. He got up and dressed at once.’9
From here accounts of what happened next diverge dramatically. According to McElligott, who ordered the killing, Vicars was ‘running from room to room, armed with a revolver … he rushed out through a side window … As he rushed out on to the lawn, he was shot dead by two of our men. He was not taken prisoner. There was no form of trial in the circumstance.’10 This account is a fiction, a story that made the shooting seem more like an act of war than cold-blooded killing. McElligott gave his account in 1955, thirty-four years after the killing of Vicars. He does not appear to have been present at the time but would certainly have spoken to his men afterwards. Yet his version is at variance, not only with Murphy’s account but with those of two IRA men who were present.
Murphy said he was following close behind his employer. ‘He had gone about 150 yards from the door when he ran into a second party of IRA who held him up and shot him dead on the spot. I followed him close on his heels. He was not questioned in any way.’11 A group went to the strong room and blew open the door but found ‘only a few dumbbells and a couple of dummy guns instead of revolvers, rifles or shotguns which they anticipated’.12
James Costello said that Vicars was found in an underground passage that led out of the house. ‘He refused to say anything except that he had no information. Eventually two of our men shot him dead on the lawn where he stood.’13 The obligatory sign was placed around his neck warning ‘Spies beware’. Petrol was splashed through the house and it was set ablaze. The household staff ran out onto the lawn and huddled together. Lady Vicars escaped the inferno by running out through the rear of the house. Michael Murphy remembered that ‘my life’s savings and personal belongings, including medals and discharge papers, were destroyed in the blaze which enveloped the house so quickly that everything within was burned to ashes’.14 When he was later interviewed by Irish army historians, Murphy brought with him his only memento, a photograph of Kilmorna – in case ‘it had any value for historical reasons’.
Later on the night of 14 April, Murphy was arrested by the Black and Tans. He was held for three weeks but failed to identify anybody who had taken part in the killing. He said he ‘knew nothing of the men’ involved. This may or may not be true. Once again the past freezes over. At the end of his statement to the army historians there is an unexpected declaration. ‘From the time of my discharge from the Irish Guards I was associated with the IRA, and had a brother who was an active member of that body.’15 It is hard to know what ‘associated’ means in this context, but Murphy stressing his Republican credentials to add force to his opinions on the Vicars shooting. He was angry over what had happened to the man he had served. ‘The news of the burning of the great house: and the shooting of Vicars was received with dismay throughout north Kerry. I do not believe he was a spy or got the benefit of a fair trial.’16
After the burni
ng, local people came ‘to gaze at the great black ruin. Their children played with the dismembered pieces of suits of armour they found lying on the terrace. Some wandered among the tiny headstones of Lady Vicars’s canine cemetery, but mostly they stood looking silently at the desolation before them.’17
II
In the eyes of the police the dead District Inspector would soon be avenged. Jack Sheehan, the scout who walked ahead of O’Sullivan as he strode to his death, was killed by the Tans near his parents’ home towards the end of May. An RIC man would leak the name of the constable responsible to the IRA, and the policeman named Farnlow was added to the death list. Meanwhile, two men, Jaco Lenihan and Eddie Carmody – both wrongly identified in the police line-ups at Tralee – were in prison waiting to walk to the gallows. The IRA hunt for informers went on unabated. The woman who testified against Lenihan, had already fled the country. But others were now under suspicion.
In early June, Con Brosnan was told about IRA plans to kill a man accused of informing in the aftermath of the O’Sullivan killing. James Kane, the fisheries inspector and former RIC man, lived on Listowel Square, across from the Church of Ireland church of St John’s. What caught the attention of the IRA was that Kane’s house was ‘quite adjacent to a house occupied by the Auxiliaries’.18 Kane originally came from County Leitrim in the west. His brother was the famous Chief Inspector John Kane of Scotland Yard who investigated the theft of the Irish crown jewels from Sir Arthur Vicars’s safe. The connections of act and place weaved and tangled. Kane and his family were long-time residents in Listowel and were popular on the square. They had known tragedy already. Father Gaughan, the Listowel historian, wrote that Kane’s ‘crippled son was robbed and thrown into the river from the parapet of the Big Bridge in 1919. It is generally accepted that the crime was not politically inspired – no member of the local IRA was involved. The person responsible, whose name was and is known to a number of local people, was never brought to justice because of the unsettled conditions of the time.’19 The casual cruelty of the killing speaks much about the ‘unsettled conditions’ of the revolutionary period.
From the upstairs windows of his house Kane might have gazed at the River Feale as it curved around Listowel racecourse and disappeared into the thick foliage of early summer. The river remained central to his life. He walked it every day and night, up past Gurtenard Wood where the trees come down to the banks, up through the high grasses to the salmon pools.
I know this river. I fished here with my father who was never more at peace than walking its banks. In James Kane’s time the fishing rights were still owned by the aristocracy. They had been since the reign of Henry IV, who granted ‘all the fishings and fishing places of the rivers of Cassan and Feale … from the sea to Listowel’20 to John Fitzmaurice, Baron of Kerry. Kane tracked poachers. When he vanished the police noted that he had numerous poaching cases due for prosecution.
According to Brian O’Grady, who left behind a haunting account of Kane’s killing, ‘we received a despatch from HQ in Dublin to have an ex-RIC man named Kane arrested and executed immediately’.21 Years later Denis Quille said that Kane was killed because papers captured from the British military during an ambush proved he had given ‘information about the District Inspector O’Sullivan … a list of many names’.22 These were the papers found on the body of the RIC commander Holmes who was killed back in January returning from investigating the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan. The IRA leader who led the ambush recalled:
The papers I got were illuminating. As a result of the shooting of Inspector Sullivan, a number of Kerry men were prisoners in Cork Barracks. General Holmes’ chief mission to Kerry was to collect the evidence that would condemn these men. He got it, but it never reached the official files, and the lives of those around whose necks might have [been] tied a noose were saved. Those who gave the information were unfortunately unable to repeat their story. They met the fate intended for the prisoners.23
The IRA knew that Kane walked the banks of the Feale ‘practically every evening’. For three or four evenings – O’Grady was not sure – a party of men waited for Kane but he did not appear. They got news that he was sick. This was reported to Dublin who did not let the matter rest. ‘A period of about two weeks elapsed and again the Order came,’ says O’Grady. The killers went back to waiting on the river bank.
Eventually Kane reappeared, alone and unarmed. ‘He was arrested by four members of the Listowel company,’ recalled IRA man Thomas Pellican. Kane was abducted on 13 June 1921. First he was taken across country to the house of a man named Broderick, near Knockanure. The execution would be carried out by Brian O’Grady, the three men who shot Tobias O’Sullivan – Con Brosnan, Jack Ahern and Dan O’Grady – and two other prominent IRA men, Dan Enright and Denis Quille. The names will come again in this story. Another war. Other executions. The connections of place and acquaintance that weave constantly on a small island. Brian O’Grady asked that a priest be sent for to hear Kane’s last confession and to ensure he made a will for his family. The killing squad ‘had to have a good sleep because of the fact that we had travelled long distances the two previous nights, most of which was cross country’.24
They rested for several hours. It was a beautiful summer’s evening when they set out in the direction of Knockanure to carry out the killing. O’Grady met the priest called to give the dead man the last rites. ‘He asked me for what reason was the prisoner being sentenced to death. I replied: “I don’t know, Father, the order has come from GHQ and that is all we know of the matter.” He then asked if the man’s life could be spared. I informed him that we had no option but to obey the order and, I added, “we would rather be surrounded by the enemy fighting for our lives than to have to give effect to the Order, but we had implicit confidence in our intelligence officers, that there was no mistake being made and that this was our consolation.”’25 O’Grady remembered the priest saying: ‘Very good, Brian, God bless ye,’ before he left. The man who was guarding Kane came to O’Grady and asked him to read the condemned man’s will. He could not do it himself as he was too well known to the prisoner and ‘under the circumstances it was right that a stranger should read it’.26 Every line of O’Grady’s testimony feels haunted though he describes the prisoner as ‘quite normal’ when they meet.
After O’Grady read the will, Kane asked if he was sure it would be delivered to his family. ‘I replied: Yes, I give you my word of honour it will be delivered.’ Kane had a last request of his killers. Would they kill him and leave him as near to his home town of Listowel as they could? ‘I told him we would do everything possible to comply with his request,’ O’Grady recalled.27
At midnight they all left and travelled towards the main road. A scout was sent ahead. Con Brosnan pointed out a shortcut through the fields. The imagery of the night sat with O’Grady long after the event: ‘It was a glorious night in early June – like one stolen from the tropics. The larks were singing all night and the northern sky was aglow with light from the Aurora Borealis.’ Again O’Grady uses the word ‘normal’ to describe the mood of James Kane. But how normal can he feel, marching across summer fields to his death? He told stories to the men nearest him. What were they about? Old times on the river perhaps, or people they knew in common? The singing of the larks, the low murmuring of men, the sound of men’s feet swishing across the dewy meadows. The glow from the Northern Lights disappeared. Darkness came again and they ‘knew the dawn was near’.
Kane was allowed to dictate a last letter to his children:
My dear children,
I am condemned to die. I had the priest, today, thank God.
I give you all my blessing and pray God may protect you all. Pray for me and get some masses said for me … Don’t go to much expense of funeral, and have no drink or public wake. I am told my body will be got near home. I got the greatest kindness from the men who were in charge of me.
Go-bye now, and God Bless you and God Bless Ireland. Pray for
me constantly, and give my love to all my friends and neighbours, and thank them for all their kindness to me,
Good-bye,
From loving father
James Kane
All my dear children
Bury me near my loving wife if possible.
Give my gold watch to Eddie, and watch in desk to Frank.28
They reached the road and Con Brosnan pointed to a cottage, a landmark on the main route into Listowel. They were alert now. Police and military patrols passed frequently along this route. The guerrillas all wore rubber-soled shoes and boots to avoid making noise. They checked the road for any sign of tracks left by a patrol. But it was clear. The light was coming up over the fields. Soon it was daylight. Brian O’Grady told the prisoner that they would go no further. He asked Kane if he would like to say a prayer. The man who was about to die said yes. O’Grady gave him his personal rosary. Then the killers and their victim knelt together by the roadside and said a decade of the rosary. Brian O’Grady, Con Brosnan and the others stood up, but Kane remained on his knees still praying, eking out the last minutes of life on that brilliant June morning.
O’Grady waited a few moments and then tapped Kane on the shoulder.
‘I asked him if he would like to be blindfolded and he said “Yes, it would be better.” I then asked the prisoner if he had anything to say before he was executed, and he said, “All I have to say is this, Ye are the finest young men I have ever met, and the only thing I am sorry for is that I am not dying for Ireland.”’29
This is Brian O’Grady’s remembrance. There was silence. Then the simultaneous drawing of revolvers from their holsters ‘with a speed that should be seen to believed’. Then the ‘sound of gunfire reverberated from the hills and valleys’. In O’Grady’s description the ‘prisoner swayed back against the ditch and slid gently to the ground’. The usual notice warning ‘Spies beware’ was fastened to his coat.