‘Although, in my opinion, he richly deserved such a fate, I determined to save his life for the sake of his poor wretch of a wife and young family,’ Neligan explained. ‘I, therefore, sought him out and told him I’d heard two fellows in a public house saying they’d shoot him next day.’
Coffey was terrified. ‘He had no stomach for the business after that,’ Neligan said. ‘He never came out of the castle (where he lived with his wife and family) again until the Truce … Hordes of officials holed up there and spent their evenings walking about, some wearing steel waistcoats.’
The first of the hunger strikers to die was Michael Fitzgerald on 17 October, but his death was hardly noticed against the backdrop of MacSwiney’s continuing struggle. The lord mayor died eight days later on 25 October, after seventy-four days on hunger strike. Joseph Murphy died some hours later, and Arthur Griffith ordered that the other hunger strikes be called off.
MacSwiney attracted most attention because he was not only an elected member of the Westminster parliament, even though he had never actually taken his seat, but was also the lord mayor of the island’s third largest city. After his death Sinn Féin sought to make as much capital as possible out of the funeral. If they had had their way the body would have been brought to Dublin and then brought down through the country, but the British military delivered it straight to Cork, where there was a massive funeral.
MacSwiney was buried in Cork on Sunday, 31 October 1920. Speaking in New York at the polo grounds that day, de Valera said that MacSwiney ‘and his comrades gave up their lives for their country. The English have killed them … Tomorrow a boy, Kevin Barry, they will hang, and he alike, will only regret that he has but one life to give. Oh God!’ De Valera then quoted Yeats:
They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever.
CHAPTER 13
‘LIKE A TOWN WITH THE PLAGUE’
The execution of Kevin Barry, an eighteen-year-old university student, was the first official British execution of a rebel in Ireland since 1916. He was sentenced to death on 21 October and hanged eleven days later. Collins did consider some rescue plans but Barry’s mother was opposed as she thought his sentence would be commuted because of his age.
There was intense public pressure to reprieve Barry, but there was little support for the idea at Dublin Castle, because ‘the three soldiers he and his party killed were all under 19,’ noted Mark Sturgis, who felt this made a nonsense of the arguments about Barry’s age. ‘I think the Shinns would gain more sympathy as “sportsmen” if they were a little more logical about this,’ Sturgis wrote. ‘They seem to see nothing absurd in making their proudest boast that they are a rebel army attacking a tyrant and yet using every sort of plea for mercy whenever one of their brave soldiers is up against it.’
Churchill was finally getting his way, but he could hardly have conceived of a timing that would cause greater offence to the Irish people than by desecrating ‘All Saints’ Day’, a Catholic holy day, with the hanging of a teenage college student. They thereby played right into the hands of Michael Collins. ‘Rather a pity no one noticed it is All Saints’ day,’ Mark Sturgis wrote in his diary. Barry would immediately go into the pantheon of Irish heroes as a martyr and a virtual saint. He was immortalised in song:
Another martyr for old Ireland,
Another murder for the crown,
Whose brutal laws may kill the Irish,
But won’t keep their spirit down.
Lads like Barry are no cowards
From the foe they will not fly,
Lads like Barry will free Ireland,
For her sake they’ll live and die.
IRA headquarters decided on a general attack on British forces on the eve of Barry’s execution as a kind of a reprisal. Orders were sent out to this effect to the officer commanding each brigade. Tadgh Kennedy brought the order to the Kerry No. 1 brigade as he was just returning to Tralee after five months in Dublin.
‘I conveyed the order to Paddy Cahill,’ Kennedy explained. ‘A cancelling order was sent out at the last minute but none reached Kerry.’
Four RIC men had been killed in Kerry by rebels since the Easter Rebellion, but within twenty-four hours of Barry’s execution no less than sixteen policemen and a radio naval officer had been shot, seven fatally, another two were kidnapped, beaten savagely, and then released. One of those never recovered from the ordeal and committed suicide shortly afterwards.
Hugh Martin of the Daily News argued that what occurred next in Tralee was symptomatic of what was happening throughout Ireland. The IRA struck and the crown police lashed out in retaliation against the people as a whole. This had the impact of solidifying local support for the IRA.
On the night of 31 October Constable William Madden, aged thirty, from Newcastlewest, was shot dead in Abbeydorney and a colleague, Constable Robert Gorbey, aged twenty-three, was mortally wounded. He died later in the week. Constable George Morgan, also aged twenty-three, a native of Mayo, was killed in nearby Ballyduff and Constable Thomas Reidy, aged forty-two, from Clare, was shot through the head and two other colleagues were wounded. Black and Tans arrived in Ballyduff a few hours later and proceeded to torch the creamery and some of the principal business houses.
John Houlihan was taken out of his home near the village and shot by the Black and Tans. The military arrived at the house around 4.30 a.m. As the teenager’s horrified parents looked on the Tans dragged him from the house across the road, where one stabbed him with a bayonet in the side, shot him three times, and then another finished him off with a blow of a rifle butt to the head.
Two Black and Tans, Constables Herbert Evans, aged twenty-six, from Belfast, and Albert Caseley, aged twenty-four, from London – were killed at Hillville, near Killorglin, that night. Officially they were on patrol, but they had actually just seen two girls home when they were attacked. Two more Black and Tans were wounded in an ambush in Green Street, Dingle.
Killorglin had been relatively quiet over the years, but the Black and Tans went on the rampage in the town that night. They burned down the Sinn Féin hall and an adjoining garage, as well as the Temperance Association hall and the residence of a well-known Sinn Féiner who was in Cork with his family for the MacSwiney funeral. Throughout the night shots were discharged intermittently until about 5.30 a.m. The homes of other known Sinn Féiners were knocked up, but none of the ‘wanted’ men were found, though Denis M. O’Sullivan was taken from his house in the square and shot four times. He never recovered fully and died the following year.
Meanwhile Tralee was in turmoil. On Sunday evening, Constable Daniel McCarthy of the RIC and Bert Woodward, a naval radio operator, were shot and wounded, while Constable Patrick Waters, aged twenty-three (a four-year veteran from Loughanbeg, near Spiddal, County Galway), and Constable Ernest Bright, a Londoner in his early thirties – were seized by the IRA, taken outside the town and killed. Their bodies were never found. It was variously rumoured that they were thrown live into a furnace at the Gas Works, or that they were shot and their bodies disposed of in the furnace or buried near the lock gates at the end of the local canal outside the town or in the family crypt of the lock keeper.
Assuming that their two colleagues had been kidnapped and were possibly still being held by the IRA, the Black and Tans un leashed a veritable reign of terror in Tralee over the next nine days. The events made front-page news in both Canada and the United States, prompted a series of parliamentary questions at Westminster, and became the subject of some controversy and editorials in the British daily press. News from Tralee was actually reported on the front page of the New York Times on three separate days during the siege and on the front page of the Montreal Gazette on four different days.
Monday, 1 November, was All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation, with the result that all the churches were busy. The Black and Tans drove up and
down the streets in lorries, discharging their rifles. ‘Volley after volley resounded to the terror of the people,’ recalled one witness. Shots were fired as people emerged from twelve o’clock mass at St John’s parish church and there was a panic as people stampeded back in.
A group of foreign journalists from the Associated Press of the United States, Le Journal (Paris), the London Times, Daily News, Manchester Guardian, and London Evening News visited Tralee after MacSwiney’s funeral and heard of the burning of the local county hall the previous night. Although the local council owned the hall itself, Paddy Cahill, the IRA brigadier in north Kerry, was renting it as a cinema.
The Tans told a group of journalists which happened to include Hugh Martin of the Daily News (London) that they were looking for him because of what he had been reporting. The threat to Martin, which made front page news in the New York Times, was denounced as a threat to the freedom of the press in an editorial in The Times of London: ‘A n issue of importance to all independent newspapers and to the public is raised by the account published yesterday in the Daily News of the threatening attitude of the constabulary at Tralee towards a special correspondent and confirmed in all essentials by the special correspondent of the Evening News who accompanied him and heard the threats.’
A French journalist who was with the group visiting Tralee depicted a frightening situation. ‘I do not remember, even during the war, having seen a people so profoundly terrified as those of this little town, Tralee,’ M. de Marsillac, the London correspondent of Le Journal reported. ‘The violence of the reprisals undertaken by representatives of authority, so to speak, everywhere, has made everybody beside himself, even before facts justified such a state of mind.’
Shopkeepers were warned by the police to close down for the funerals of their companions, who deserved as much respect as the lord mayor of Cork. All schools were closed and remained closed for over a week. The security forces stalked the deserted streets firing shots into the air, or shooting blindly into windows as they drove up and down the street. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, Tommy Wall, aged twenty-four, an ex-soldier who had fought in France during the First World War and returned to join the IRA, was standing at the corner of Blackpool Lane and The Mall when some Tans told him to put up his hands. One of the men hit him in the face with a rifle butt and told him to get out of the place. As he left they shot and fatally wounded him, claiming that he was shot trying to escape.
‘Except for soldiers, the town was as deserted and doleful as if the Angel of Death had passed through it,’ de Marsillac continued. ‘Not a living soul in the streets. All the shops shut and the bolts hastily fastened. All work was suspended, even the local newspapers.’
In the early hours of Thursday morning the Black and Tans began firebombing the occupied business premises of Sinn Féin sympathisers. ‘Scenes of the wildest panic ensued,’ The Cork Examiner reported. ‘The screams of the women and children were heard from the neighbourhood of the burning buildings, mingled with the ring of rifle fire and the explosion of bombs.’ The accounts of what was happening were still fairly sketchy on the Thursday when T. P. O’Connor, the nationalist member of parliament from Liverpool, asked in the House of Commons about the deaths of John Houlihan, John Conway, Tommy Wall and Simon O’Connor.
‘I have received a report to the effect that John Houlihan was shot by masked men at Ballyduff at 6 a.m. on Monday the 1st, and that Thomas Wall was fatally wounded in Tralee from gunshot wounds,’ Sir Hamar Greenwood, the chief secretary for Ireland, replied. ‘Courts of inquiry will be held in these cases. In the case of Conway a court of inquiry found that he died from natural causes. I have not yet received a copy of the proceedings of this court, but I am informed by the police authorities that the deceased was found dead near his home on the 1st instant, and the body bore no traces of gunshot or other wounds.’
The London Times had already reported that its correspondent had seen the body laid out with an obvious bullet wound in the temple. ‘The vital fact in the tragedy is that while the chief secretary is repeating his stereotyped assurances that things are getting better, it is patent to the readers of newspapers the world over that they are getting daily worse,’ the Daily News commented. ‘At the moment the supreme need is to withdraw the troops. If the police cannot remain unprotected, let them go too. Ireland could not be worse off without them than with them. There is every reason to believe her state would be incomparably better.’
On the same day that John Conway was killed in Tralee, Ellen Quinn, a pregnant housewife, was shot dead in Galway while sitting on her wall by a Black and Tan firing indiscriminately from a passing lorry. There was no doubt about the responsibility even in Dublin Castle. ‘I wish these lorry loads of police could be restrained from this idiotic blazing about as they are driving along – it can do no conceivable good and yesterday’s case of a woman in Galway shortly expecting a child, shot in the stomach and now dead is beastly.’
By Friday, 5 November, separate stories from Tralee were front-page news in both the Montreal Gazette and the New York Times. By then the British army commander was being depicted as protecting the people from the police but saying that he really did not have the authority to act, because the police terrorising the town were the legal authority.
Saturday, market day, was normally the busiest day of the week in Tralee, but people were not allowed into town. The correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal contacted his newspaper by telegraph. ‘Police persist in taking measures to cut off the necessities of life from the people,’ he reported. ‘Black and Tans take up positions outside bakeries and provision stores where they suspect food could be secured, and at the bayonet’s point send famishing women and children from the doors. Outside one baker’s establishment a Black and Tan, brandishing a revolver, told women and children to clear off, adding “You wanted to starve us, but we will starve you”.’
By now, people had not been able to do any shopping for a week and there was real deprivation, especially in the poorer areas. The breadwinners had been unable to work and the poorer people could not afford to buy food, even if it had been available. The story on the front page of that day’s Montreal Gazette was headlined: ‘TRALEE IS PARALYZED: Town Near Starvation, Condition is Desperate.’
‘The town of Tralee, Ireland is fast approaching starvation in consequence of recent police order forbidding the carrying on of business – until two missing policemen are returned by the townspeople,’ the report began. ‘Trade is paralyzed, the banks, and bakeries even being closed, and the condition of the people is becoming desperate. An addition military order forbids the holding of fairs and markets or assemblies of any kind within a three mile limit.’
That same day in London T. P. O’Connor asked another series of questions in the House of Commons about what was happening in Tralee. He asked about the police closing of all businesses in Tralee, whether the poor were in serious distress, and whether the trade of the town was being destroyed.
‘The business premises in Tralee were closed for some days following a number of assassinations of police on Sunday last, but not by order of the police.’ Greenwood replied. ‘I understand shops are now open and business is resuming its normal course.’ He said he had already telegraphed Tralee and was waiting for a reply to his question, ‘on whose authority were they closed?’
‘Is the world expected to believe that women and children went without food for days in the hope that the chief secretary would be blamed for reducing them to starvation?’ the Freeman’s Journal asked. ‘That is the only interpretation of Sir Hamar Greenwood’s so-called explanation. It gives the measure of the present Parliament that this issue of grotesque fabrications was apparently accepted by the majority, not indeed as the truth, but as a plausible substitute for the truth. Any lie, however clumsy, will serve if the object is to stifle inquiry into the Irish Terror.’
On Monday the bakeries, butcher shops and local factories were permitted to open in Tralee, but all other busin
ess were not. The New York World reported that an attempt to open others shops in Tralee on Tuesday, 9 November, ‘was met by demonstrations by the police, who appeared on the streets shouting and discharging firearms and terrorising those who had attempted to defy the order and open their business places.’
‘No coherent account of conditions in Tralee is possible,’ the New York World correspondent explained. ‘Communication is difficult, investigation dangerous, and the reports from the place are so remarkable as to be almost unbelievable. It has been suggested officially that the police are not responsible for the order, but local accounts leave no doubt that the police are enforcing it, perhaps unofficially but none the less effectively. Wholesale starvation apparently is enforced with bayonets and occasionally with bullets, as events have shown. The people cannot understand how this can be done by forces of the crown without crown authority … A Black and Tan rule has been set up in Tralee. Many of the 10,000 inhabitants have fled, but those unable to find refuge elsewhere are the victims of this awful procedure.’
It was not until around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, 9 November, that the Black and Tans announced that businesses could re-open the following day. That same evening Lloyd George declared during a highly publicised address at the annual lord mayor’s dinner at the Guildhall that the security forces ‘had murder by the throat’ in Ireland.
While the British had been building up their intelligence service, the intelligence department under Collins and Tobin had been collecting the addresses of the undercover British agents living in private houses around the city. Instead of taking them out one by one, it was decided to hit as many of them as possible at the one time, as they were coming much too close to the IRA leadership for comfort.
Having been introduced by Willie Beaumont and Dave Neligan to some of the British intelligence people, Cullen, Saurin and Thornton began to frequent Kidds Buffet in Grafton Street, where the British intelligence officers and auxiliary intelligence officers met frequently. ‘We were introduced in the ordinary way as touts,’ Thornton explained. They eventually became great friends with men like Lieutenant Bennett, Captain Peter Ames and a number of other prominent secret service officers. One day, one of these officers turned suddenly to Tom Cullen and said, ‘Surely you fellows know these men – Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton, these are Collins’ three officers and if you can get these fellows we would locate Collins himself.’
The Squad Page 16