by Fergal Keane
* David Neligan had been a spy for Michael Collins inside the police in Dublin Castle. A native of west Limerick, he would have known the geography of north Kerry and some of the IRA personnel. The IRA commander Ernie O’Malley, who chronicled the period in several acclaimed books, believed there was no conclusive evidence linking Neligan to killings.
13
A New Ireland
And as he travels back he thinks of history, sees something old, tarnished and achingly human rising out of the chaos of the present …
Niall Jordan, The Past, 19801
I
The end was preceded by horror and delusion. Although pursued across mountains, the IRA commander General Lynch believed that mountain artillery, imported from Germany or America, could change the course of the war for them. ‘You realise that even one piece of artillery would do this. One such piece could be moved round amongst our strong forces and this would completely demoralise the enemy and end the war,’2 he announced to his exhausted staff. How the miracle weapons would reach Ireland or be transported into the mountains of the south, past the Free State army, was never clear. Even de Valera, who had been looking for a ceasefire since July, enabled this blind faith, telling a supporter in early February 1923 that ‘one big effort from our friends everywhere and I think we would finally smash the Free State’.3 Having spent the Civil War sidelined by the militarists, the master politician was reasserting himself, sounding tough but knowing privately that victory was no longer possible. Dev could feel the end coming. By late February even the redoubtable Humphrey Murphy was warning that the ‘steamrollering of the South would soon finish us’.4
The fear of execution by the Free State, legal and summary, was pervasive. On 14 March 1923, Listowel man Dan Enright was shot by firing squad in County Donegal. He had gone north with a team of Cork and Kerry guerrilla veterans to help the struggling IRA forces along the border. Enright was an old comrade of Con Brosnan and Mick Purtill. He was with Brosnan the night they killed James Kane, an executioner who now faced his own violent death. On the eve of his execution Enright wrote that the ‘sentence of death is just after being passed upon me, but I am taking it like a soldier should’.5 The following morning Dan Enright and three others, including another Listowel man, Timothy O’Sullivan, were taken into nearby woods by National Army troops and shot. For a few years now, men had been walked into woods, down lanes, across bogs, a gun pressed to their backs, maybe a blindfold to help propel them unseeing into the forever darkness, men walking to the end of their lives. Seamus O’Connor, on the run in north Kerry, remembered of the Free State army: ‘there was no yardstick now by which their actions could be measured: they had started to kill indiscriminately’.6
IRA ambushes were swiftly followed by Free State counter-attacks. By late spring the Free State confidently predicted the impending collapse of the IRA campaign. Mick Purtill had another narrow escape. A bullet went through the shoulder pads of his tunic. Survival rather than resistance became the focus of hard-pressed IRA fugitives. Liam Lynch was killed in the first week of April 1923, shot by a sniper as he scrambled his way across a mountainside in County Tipperary. At Lynch’s urging, his comrades left the dying leader to be captured by Free State troops. Frank Aiken, who succeeded Lynch as IRA chief of staff, wrote to Lynch’s brother that the fight had taken place ‘on a mountain as bare as a billiard table’:
Sean Hyde had him by the hand helping him along when he was hit … To leave him was the hardest thing any of us ever had to do. I was last leaving, having been carrying his feet. I was afraid to even say ‘Good-bye Liam’ least it would dishearten him … Liam’s death was a great blow to our chances of success, coming at the time it did. But they … [the press] … are quite wrong if they think they have heard the last of the IRA & the Irish Republic.7
But the last hopeless dreams of Republican victory had died with Lynch. ‘Events of the last few days point to the beginning of the end so far as the irregular campaign is concerned,’ an army report said. ‘The general feeling of the people seems to be that the Irregular Organisation … is doomed.’8 IRA commander Frank Aiken, later to become a celebrated foreign minister under de Valera, ordered the Irregulars to dump their weapons.
The Civil War allowed all kinds of grudges to float free to the surface. Men took the opportunity to thieve from neighbours or avenge old slights. Much harm was done in the name of the Republic and the Free State. The lawlessness touched Ballydonoghue. It can be traced in the financial compensation claims lodged by the victims. Johanna Sheahan of Moybella was told to clear out the tenants on her farm before her house was burned down. She had offended some group of armed men but the claim for compensation does not indicate who they are. Margaret Brown, who ran a shop at Lisselton Cross, was robbed on several occasions. ‘Tobacco and provisions taken … by armed men on various dates.’9 IRA man Seamus O’Connor entered a shop near Knocknagoshel and found two armed men in the process of stealing all they could carry. A terrifying stand-off followed with one of the men pressing his cocked revolver into O’Connor’s stomach. It ended when the thieves backed down, faced with the levelled weapons of O’Connor’s comrades; the robbers might have killed O’Connor but they would never have left the shop alive.
The home of the steward for Eyre Massey Stack, a local landlord, was attacked. The steward, Daniel Sweeney, was also a farmer and the claim records that a ‘dwelling house, gates and land [were] damaged at Ballyconry on various dates in 1922’.10 Over in Con Brosnan’s home parish of Newtownsandes the local priest submitted a claim for the destruction of the national school at Knockanure, which was burned down in January 1923. This is close to where the Tans executed three men and badly wounded Con Dee. Why would the IRA – if it was them – burn down the school? Was it revenge for the church damning them from the pulpit, or was it the action of louts taking advantage of the febrile times?
In the same parish in April, Keating’s Creamery was bombed and a train carrying cream was destroyed. This was the kind of thing the Tans had done to inflict misery on local communities. The Minister for Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, declared that the Free State had to vindicate law and order ‘as against anarchy’.11 But O’Higgins would not live to become an old warrior looking back on the terrible battles of his youth. Four years after the war’s end, at the age of thirty-five, he was shot dead by the IRA as he walked to mass in Dublin. One of Kevin O’Higgins’s killers said that they had spotted him by chance and were ‘taken over and incensed with hatred … with the memory of the executions’.12 The story loops back to Listowel. O’Higgins’s bodyguard on the day he was assassinated was Brian O’Grady, comrade of Con Brosnan and Mick Purtill, and the man who left the haunting account of the killing of the alleged informer James Kane.
The war of the brothers lasted barely a year, beginning with the occupation of Dublin’s Four Courts building and ending soon after Lynch’s death in the mountains. Historians have not yet agreed on a reliable figure for Civil War fatalities, with the best estimates ranging from between 1,000 and 2,000 combined deaths by the ceasefire of 24 May 1923. The years of war, from the first ambushes in 1919 to the agony of Ballyseedy and the final executions, had deeply destabilised society. Around Listowel attempts were being made to restore a normal order. A week after the ceasefire, policemen were on the beat, seizing a boat and poachers’ nets on the River Feale; in this new state the police carried no guns and, because they were not regarded as political, they could walk without fear of ambush. By the end of August the local council was threatening to send the Army in to collect rates, such had been the collapse in revenue collection in recent years; a homeless man named Brown broke into the Listowel Workhouse with his wife and family and took over the male tramp’s ward; a landowner from Limerick was claiming compensation for the loss of forty-five acres near Ballybunion where landless people had taken up squatters’ rights. This was near the Purtills at Ballydonoghue and would have reinforced their determination to see a stable order return after t
he wartime chaos. A judge hearing compensation claims for war losses in the town remarked caustically that ‘the Kerry people were not going to lose much from the war, judging by the claims they are putting in’.13 He was a tough mark. His judgements were five hundred per cent below the amounts sought.
Paddy O’Daly was the malign master of all he surveyed. In a notorious incident he and two other officers assaulted the daughters of a Kenmare doctor, dragging them out in their night clothes, flogging them and rubbing oil in their hair. He again escaped censure.
The great survivor of the Revolution was de Valera. He escaped execution in 1916 because of the late timing of his court-martial and survived the Tan war by virtue of a growing political status that would have made killing him a catastrophic option for the British. The Civil War destroyed some of his best friends and greatest rivals. By the time it ended the majority of Republicans opposed to the Free State were ready to take the political road, leaving an IRA hard core that would struggle on until a Dev government rounded on them, at one point importing the English hangman Albert Pierrepoint to execute the IRA chief of staff. De Valera had broken away from Sinn Féin in 1926 and formed his own party, Fianna Fáil (the Soldiers of Destiny). The following year he led his elected comrades into the Dáil after swallowing his objections to the oath of allegiance. Five years later, in March 1932, he formed the first Fianna Fáil-led government and would remain in power for sixteen years, dominating Irish life in a manner nobody has ever, or is ever likely, to rival. One of his first acts was to abolish the oath of allegiance. There was little London could do or was minded to do.
Within two years of coming to power, and with the IRA firmly in Dev’s sights, the Special Branch were harassing Republicans in Listowel, raiding meeting rooms and ripping up floorboards. Men who had followed Dev in the Tan war and the Civil War watched him set out to dismantle the IRA without a backward glance.
My grandmother’s comrades in the Blueblouses, the women’s wing of the Blueshirts (Vincent Carmody)
Hannah Purtill stayed loyal to the memory of Michael Collins, and when some of his former comrades formed a movement known as the Army Comrades Association in 1932 she joined up. The ACA adopted a uniform of blue shirts and black berets and were quickly known as the Blueshirts. Con Brosnan joined too. The context is important. The Blueshirts were different things to different people. There were those, especially in the leadership, who admired Hitler’s Blackshirts and Mussolini’s Brownshirts. They saw Franco’s Spanish nationalists as saviours of Christianity in the face of a godless communist onslaught and sent a brigade to fight in Spain against the Republicans. There were fascists among the Blueshirts but my grandmother was not one of them.
Around Listowel, and certainly for Hannah, the Blueshirts were primarily the defenders of Collins’s political legacy, and the physical response of his followers to Republican intimidation. They had formed a new political party, Fine Gael – the party of the Gael – but with de Valera’s Fianna Fáil in government and escalating harassment from the rump of the IRA, they looked to the Blueshirts to protect political meetings and crack the skulls of their more militant opponents. The low-level violence that spluttered from 1934 through the following year was a coda to the Civil War. A former IRA guerrilla and Free State soldier, Paddy Joe McElligott, led the Listowel Blueshirts. In the War of Independence he planned the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan, helped shoot the fisheries inspector James Keane, and grieved a brother killed by the British. A party of Blueshirts from Listowel, including ten women, was shot at on their way to a Fine Gael meeting in Ballybunion, close to the Purtill farm. The IRA raided the homes of Fine Gael supporters and a parish priest told his congregants that ‘the spirit of bitterness and hatred which springs up from political differences in Ireland [is] diabolical and inspired by hell itself’.14
On the night in May that the Blueshirt leader, General Eoin O’Duffy, came to town Hannah had a fateful choice to make.* There were six hundred policemen backed up by soldiers in armoured cars and a general expectation of serious trouble. Several hundred Republicans had already massed in the square, boiling for a fight. My grandmother had been warned by Republican acquaintances that if she marched down to welcome O’Duffy, she would have the ‘blue shirt torn off of her back’.15 It was a threat to humiliate her in front of the entire street. Hannah ignored the threat and went. A contemporary account described how O’Duffy ‘passed through a guard of honour of about a hundred blue-shirted young men and women’ and mounted an ass and cart, the workers at the local timber factory having refused to give wood for a stage.16
The Blueshirt leader, General Eoin O’Duffy, speaking in Listowel (Vincent Carmody)
There is a photograph of O’Duffy standing on the a cart outside the Protestant church of St John’s. He is stocky and bald and the Blueshirt uniform gives him the look of an Irish Mussolini. Republicans remembered that O’Duffy was one of the leaders of the military campaign against them here in the Civil War, a comrade of Paddy O’Daly and the other outsiders who had tortured and executed their comrades. The blood could not have been any badder. The general announced that armed Republicans had already tried to attack the Blueshirts but a large party had ‘been driven off by a man over sixty years of age armed only with a sweeping brush, with which he injured many of the Republicans besides capturing one of their rifles’.17 It sounded like a tall tale. But I am sure my grandmother loved it. After the speech four hundred young men armed with sticks attempted to attack O’Duffy’s supporters and ‘repeated baton charges were necessary before order was restored’.18
De Valera saw the danger of private armies swarming the countryside. First he banned the Blueshirts, who duly disappeared back to their farms and businesses. The IRA was next up for proscription and was not so obliging. During ensuing decades it split, surged, shrank and split again. It has claimed the right to kill its enemies in the name of the Republic to this day.
The hatred festered in north Kerry for years afterwards.
Mick Purtill was attacked by Republicans while cycling home from a football match. ‘He was very badly beaten,’ my cousin Liam recalled. Revenge was not long coming. ‘I know for a fact that two or three of them paid the price. He was a fearless man.’19 On another occasion Con Brosnan cycled out to visit Mick at the farm. On the way he stopped to chat to a neighbour and Con asked about the man and his family. ‘We are fine but there is a man down there, Mick Purtill, if we could only get rid of him,’ the man said. To ‘get rid of’ meant a bullet in the head. Con replied: ‘If I had my revolver, it isn’t Mick we would be getting rid of but you.’20
Years later Mick Purtill’s wife, my great-aunt Madge, was out canvassing for votes in the county council elections when she was verbally abused by a woman who pointed to a hole in her living room wall and shouted: ‘That’s the shot he [Mick] fired to kill my father.’21 The man had not been killed but the anger had endured.
The man Mick and Hannah had worshipped faded out in the larger public memory. Michael Collins became, among his followers, the object of an idealised counter-factualism that endures to this day. ‘What if he had lived? What kind of Ireland would we have had?’ … ‘Would he have united the nation? Yes. Of course, yes.’ … ‘If only. If only.’ To Hannah he became in death the lost leader who might have saved us from the suffocating rule of lesser men. This was dreaming of a man that never was. A man who died too young, and in such a fractured country, to be able to show what kind of a peacetime leader he would have made. The story of Collins and de Valera was reduced to a contest of virility, an argument about ‘who would you want with you in a fight’, which only the tall handsome Mick, the laughing boy, whistling bravely from beyond the grave, could ever win.
De Valera lived to enjoy the worship of his supporters and to mould modern Ireland in the image of his dreams. I don’t think Hannah ever forgave him.
Éamon de Valera – the leader who more than any other shaped the Ireland in which I grew up (Library of Congress, Prints & P
hotographs Division)
What’s the news, what’s the news?
De Valera’s pawned his shoes
To buy ammunition for his men.
They were eating currant buns
When they heard the Free State guns
And all the dirty cowards ran away.
(Street Ballad, Civil War period)
I learned the ballad in my grandmother’s kitchen. I grew up with the mantra of Dev the crooked, Dev the true killer of Collins. I came to believe that he was responsible for all the ills of the nation. Economic stagnation, mass emigration, censorship, the power-hungry bishops, the way we were forced to learn Irish at school, the absence of sex or even pictures of sex … all this and much more was the fault of that ‘long miserable hoor’, as my father called him. A family anecdote illustrates the depth of the loathing. A relative of Dev’s was courting my auntie Peg. She had met him in Dublin where she was training to be an air hostess for Aer Lingus, the new national airline. My grandmother was an hospitable woman and would not have held the young man’s lineage against him. Others in the house felt differently. When the young suitor was brought home to Church Street he was shown into the kitchen for the obligatory tea and small talk. In the middle of the pleasantries the door opened and in walked my eccentric uncle Danny, occasional cattle dealer and denizen of the high attic, bearing his chamber pot. Danny stood to attention, held out the pot and then marched outside to dispose of the contents. The love affair ended soon afterwards.
Dev was no monster. Nor was he solely responsible for the gloomy state of the nation in which my grandparents raised their children. There is no evidence, apart from youthful anti-clericalism, to suggest that had Collins lived they would have grown up in a paradise of full employment and liberal social mores. The nineteenth-century struggles of faith and land had bequeathed a legacy of conservatism in rural Ireland which moulded the world view of Dev and Collins. The greatest of all myths was that the Irish were a nation of natural rebels. Far from it. The conservatism of the mid- to late nineteenth century came out of the long sacrifices and struggles of centuries. The Irish yearned for a stable order. Social and economic radicalism was confined to small pockets in the countryside and a slightly larger space in the cities.