by Joe Ambrose
Dan Breen
and the
IRA
Joe Ambrose
MERCIER PRESS
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© Joe Ambrose, 2006
Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 847 7
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 864 4
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To the Norrises - Michael, Mai, Nora, Josie, Jimmy and Pat.
Introduction
Dan Breen runs like a ragged thread through the history of Ireland in the twentieth century. He helped kick-start the country’s War of Independence in 1919; he played a major role in that war and a more uneasy part in the ensuing Civil War. He remains, to this day, one of the most famous and contentious IRA leaders of his generation. He once said, ‘The secret of my success is the word republican’.
The Irish may owe him a certain debt of gratitude but the Irish are cranky by nature; they sometimes like to take pot shots at iconic characters like Breen.
The Irish are also a post-colonial people, incessantly told what to do and think by international opinion makers working in publishing, broadcasting and the arts. A colourful and curious array of nay-sayers, soothsayers and academics – not to mention pseudo-scholars fighting their own private Wars on Terror – devote entire Amazon rain forests of paper to debunking some simple facts of narrative history concerning Ireland’s War of Independence. They’ve taken to their task with gusto and occasional aplomb, undermining complex mythologies which have grown up around the likes of Breen, Michael Collins and Tom Barry. Trying to dismantle the reputations of these rural lads of humble origin, they have sought to create post-modern mythologies of their own from which 1916–23 guerrilla leaders emerge as political deviants from some imaginary, civilised, democratic norm, frantically in league with nebulous forces of evil, indifferent to mandate or morality.
The simple storyline and sequence of events to be found in the memoirs, statements, interviews and correspondence of those participating in the 1916–23 IRA campaign, is closer to the truth. Those leaders of what is called the ‘Old IRA’ emerge from their own testimonies as heroic figures. They undoubtedly saw themselves that way. They thought they were ‘a grand collection of men’. What did the rest of the people in their country make of them? The answer to that question is as simple as the storyline and does not need the interpolation of researchers or commentators. Those who supported the notion that Ireland would only get independence from England through armed struggle thought them terribly heroic. Those who thought ‘freedom’ could be achieved by purely democratic means – and those who favoured union with Britain – often thought of them as thugs with blood on their hands. One’s assessment of the Tan War leaders has everything to do with one’s own political prejudices and nothing to do with the history of that combat.
Dan Breen, more than most others, is regularly filed away under ‘Thug with Blood on His Hands’. This is largely because of the ongoing controversy surrounding his first major guerrilla outing as part of the gang behind the Soloheadbeg RIC killings, but it is partially because of the forthright manner in which he defended that gory exploit for the rest of his life. Mary Anne Allis – the aunt of his comrade, Seán Treacy – called him ‘Breen the Murderer’ until the day she died. Having witnessed Breen’s behaviour during the Soloheadbeg clash, Séamus Robinson made a mental note that he was a man who ‘should never be put in charge of a fight’. A close relative of my own, who was forever seeing Dan Breen around our family’s farmyard when she was growing up, said, ‘There was something dirty about that Dan Breen’.
Rumour had it that he was illiterate and couldn’t have written his own book. In fact he wrote vigorously and read voraciously. Enemies suggested he was some kind of crypto-fascist, sympathetic to Hitler and opposed to the redistribution of wealth. However, he lent his weight to the left-leaning Republican Congress and, in league with socialist republican Peadar O’Donnell, was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Blame and plaudits were heaped upon Breen all through his life; he accepted the blame and soaked up the plaudits. He said the RIC men he helped kill at Soloheadbeg were, ‘a pack of deserters, spies and hirelings’ and, ‘I would like to make this point clear and state here without any equivocation that we took this action deliberately having thought the matter over and talked it over between us’.
Though he was certainly a radical extremist throughout the War of Independence – and this is his overriding reputation – the Dan Breen who lived on into the era of Kennedy and the Vietnam War was a conciliator and a moderate. Trusted by both sides before and during the Civil War, he did everything in his power to avoid that conflict. One of his initiatives led to a temporary pact between Michael Collins and De Valera which, for a while, looked like it was going to avoid that grim quarrel. He was the first republican politician to take his seat (and the oath of allegiance) in the Free State parliament.
Soloheadbeg remains a political and historical hot potato. It also remains a substantial turning point in the history of modern Ireland. It forced the hand of nascent Dublin-centred urban power elites within Sinn Féin, the IRB and the IRA. Breen’s other colourful involvements – like the fights at Knocklong and Ashtown Road – are less controversial manifestations of an unquenchable generational spirit.
My paternal grandfather – who was also in the IRA but who took the opposing side in the Civil War – used to say that Breen’s memoir, My Fight For Irish Freedom, was the book in which the word ‘I’ was used the most often in the English language. That the book is full of self-aggrandisement, bombast and bias is beyond question. That it sometimes plays hard and fast with the facts is likely. Séamus Robinson – who was unduly prejudiced against Breen – called it ‘The Great Tipperary Hoax’.
My Fight for Irish Freedom made Dan Breen one of the permanent heroes of the revolution. Well paced, unremitting, a Boy’s Own story, it stands alongside Speeches from the Dock and Jail Journal as a bible of Irish nationalism. Compared with the literary – but bookish – guerrilla writings of Che Guevara or Ernie O’Malley it might seem thin gruel but it was written as propaganda. It is hugely successful, Homeric, propaganda.
Dan Breen certainly didn’t win his war single-handed and the ego-driven style of his ghost-written book is not replicated in his ‘Statement to the Bureau of Military History’ in Dublin. The Breen who emerges from that recollection was very political, very realistic and impressively harsh. That Dan Breen painted a picture of a collective Tipperary leadership which was determined, all on their own if needs be, to remove Ireland from the British empire.
In February 1919, the Third Tipperary Brigade of the IRA – the sons of small farmers and labourers – issued a proclamation instructing the British to quit south Tipperary under pain of death. The decree was greeted with derision by the British and with disapproval by the Dublin republican establishment. Exactly three years later, the last British soldiers left south Tipperary. What happened in between is a significant story – at that moment in time Britain seemed as invincible as the
United States seems today. The efforts of disenfranchised people wielding a hodgepodge of muskets, mud bombs and captured weapons seemed as hopeless in 1919 as similar efforts by Vietnamese peasants seemed in the 1960s or as the Palestinian resistance seems now.
A number of punctilious historians have chronicled the untamed activities of the Third Tipperary Brigade. Desmond Ryan wrote a hagiographical study of Seán Treacy and the Third Brigade which had the merits and demerits of being both written and published while the majority of the participants were still alive. An tAithair Colmcille Conway wrote a typically forthright and partisan history of the brigade from 1916 right through to the end of the Civil War which had enthusiasm and unique access to brigade members about it. In more recent years Joost Augusteijn has deconstructed the story of south Tipperary IRA Volunteers with efficiency and academic rigour. Augusteijn sups from the same revisionist trough which feeds an undeniable intellectual blackguardism but he does know what he is talking about.
The real story of Dan Breen and the IRA – told here for the first time in the words of those who participated in it – is considerably more moving and more interesting than the myth. This book seeks to recalibrate the story of Dan Breen, the Big Four (Breen, Treacy, Robinson and Seán Hogan) and the Third Tipperary Brigade so that the other players come into the spotlight. Breen operated in the middle of a group of noteworthy individuals who felt it was ‘the decree of history’ that they would stand or fall together. This is their story too.
The myth of the Big Four doesn’t bear close examination. Séamus Robinson – whose many polemics, rants and recollections have been seized upon by sloppy revisionists anxious to prove what a bad lot the Tipperary IRA were – was a decidedly hesitant combatant, disliked by Michael Collins and distrusted by many members of the Third Tipperary Brigade. His 1950s written attacks on Breen, informed by retrospective bitterness and jealousy which bordered on the irrational, are worth noting but are unreliable. Seán Hogan, younger than the others, led the Second South Tipperary Flying Column but was regarded by his comrades as being unfit for leadership. His capture by the RIC – which led to the Knocklong rescue – was just one of many incidents wherein his careless, brainless or irresponsible behaviour put himself and his companions in danger. Breen and Treacy were what they seemed to be – gutsy, spirited militants willing to risk everything for what they saw as a high ideal. Other Tipperary activists – such as Eamon O’Duibhir, Maurice Crowe or Dinny Lacey – were probably more deserving of the fame which was heaped upon Robinson and Hogan. Nevertheless, the legend of the Big Four acted as a stirring call to arms during 1919 when the outcome of the War of Independence was far from clear.
When I was tramping with my mother through the roads and boreens of Tipperary in 1981, speaking to Dan Breen’s contemporaries and working on a small book about him, Ireland was in many ways identical to the country he fought in and for. That has all changed now. The events of ninety years ago seem terribly remote. Few Irish people now know what a haggard* is or what real hunger feels like. ‘Oró ’Sé do Bheatha ’Bhaile’, the song which the Third Tipperary Brigade sang as they marched through the Galtee Mountains, is today best known as a track on a Sinead O’Connor album. Many of the principles and aspirations which those people fought for seem neither here nor there. This makes the job of explaining what happened, whom it happened to and why it happened at all, crucial.
Joe Ambrose
www.joeambrose.net
1 – Seán Treacy and Dan Breen
In Tipp, landlords’ estates had been broken up and there were many small holdings. The men were more independent; the houses neater and better built than in other counties I had visited. The men were tall and quiet; they had a great deal of purpose and were dependable.
Ernie O’Malley, The Singing Flame
Dan Breen was born in the village of Donohill, Tipperary, probably on 11 August 1894, to Daniel Breen, a labourer, and Honora Breen, née Moore, a midwife from a district close to Doon in Co. Limerick. Daniel Breen died of blood poisoning at the age of sixty, when Dan was a small child.
Breen had a clear memory of his father’s coffin being brought into the room in which he was waked. The women keened so much that they were sent down to the kitchen. In My Fight for Irish Freedom, Breen spoke warmly of a father he scarcely knew: ‘I remember one sunny day when he took me up by the hand and led me through the fields. When I got tired he lifted me on to his shoulders and brought me home pick-a-back.’
In his subsequent statement to the Bureau of Military History he was more dismissive. He said his father’s people had been fenians but the impression gained was, ‘that he belonged to a type of fenian who’s more talk than anything else … I had heard it said of the people that he resembled that they were great fellows for talking and drinking and doing very little else after that but, on the other hand, I suppose there was little they could do in their day.’
Breen’s family was a large one; his siblings were Laurence, Mary, John, Winifred, Catherine, Patrick and Laurence Junior, who was known as Lar. The older Laurence died when Dan was four years old.
‘We were not blessed with a lot or worldly goods,’ remembered Breen. ‘My mother was a midwife and so when my father died she had to work very hard to support us. The family was generally a young family [at the time of Daniel’s death], I being about six and there was another brother after me who was only in his cradle but, nevertheless, we lived happily there. My mother was a hard worker and thrifty and contrived to make ends meet.’
Honora Breen spent some of her widow’s pittance purchasing popular paperback books containing the rebel writings of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and the other icons of Irish nationalism. Breen reckoned that the women were the most impressive people in the south-west Tipperary society from which he came. He said it was the women who promoted fenian ideals: ‘The men of my father’s generation had apparently drifted into a system of what we would call public house debate as their only contribution to the national movement of the time, but it is the women who kept alive the traditions of the past and handed those things on to my generation.’
‘Dan regularly spoke about his mother,’ said Clonmel Fianna Fáil activist Ernie Hogan. ‘The other men and women who were active at that time talked about her too, saying that she was formidable. She entirely egged Dan on in his political activities. By general agreement, she was more “extreme” than Dan – she was one of those great old fenian ladies. Little learning perhaps but a great spirit. The Tan War cost her dearly and she ended up nearly destitute.’
Life in Tipperary towards the end of the nineteenth century was tough. Brutalising rural poverty was never far away, in the midst of the ascendancy architecture of the big towns and big houses. Between 1891 and 1911 Tipperary lost fourteen per cent of its population. The towns didn’t decline as dramatically as the countryside – and some even prospered. Tipperary town, the nearest sizeable settlement to Donohill, had three creameries. One of these, owned by Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Company, employed 300 people, including a large percentage of women.
‘We were not too well off in those days,’ Breen told Jim Maher in 1967, ‘and our neighbours were only barely above the poverty line too. We mostly ate potatoes and milk. Sometimes we had salted pork for our dinner, but we hardly ever ate fresh meat. We also ate much cabbage and turnips.’
Tom Garvin in Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, points out that society had just recently emerged from agrarian feudalism and was ‘only partly affected by urban culture, denied political power by the colonial establishment, without any self-assured intelligentsia other than the priests and the young men whom the priests had educated.’
Watching what was happening to neighbouring small farmers and noting the poor prices they got for their produce, Breen developed a lifelong interest in the politics of land and property. Childhood political memories included the brutal eviction of a nearby cousin who died homeless on the side of the road.
‘I was a socialist in outlook
,’ he told Jim Maher, ‘I was never a communist; I never believed in communism but I was a strong socialist. I did not see any possibility of a socialist state, because I knew that the establishment would step in and crush it. I never understood why any man with a family, denied work, should let himself and his family go hungry. I always felt that it was the duty of a man to provide for his family and if he couldn’t get enough food by honest means, he should take it.’
The great political debate of his childhood concerned the Boer War (1899–1902), a key conflict which saw the emergence of jingoism, Winston Churchill and concentration camps. People around Donohill were pro-Boer and Breen overheard their daily discussions concerning the war’s progress.
Like most boys of his social class, Breen enjoyed a good primary education at the hands of teachers who, in addition to the British curriculum, taught the Irish language and the story of Ireland seen through the prisms of ancient mythology or more recent history. Fenians and other separatists took their place in a colourful pantheon alongside Cúchullain,* Oisín* and the Fianna.* The children heard a great deal about the Famine (1845), with England’s assumed role in it brought up at every opportunity.
The schoolboy Breen could never understand ‘why a million people were allowed to starve to death in Ireland in the Great Famine in an agricultural country, when Irish wheat and other foodstuffs were allowed out of the country. I wanted to take the people of Ireland out of serfdom. I did not want to enrich them but I wanted them to have a better way of life. I wanted to take the people out of the slums and bad living conditions and give them decent lives – lives as good as they would get anywhere else in the world.’
Most of the nationalist-minded primary teachers – later to play an important role in the emergence of the IRA – were members of the Tipperary-founded Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and of its companion organisation, the Gaelic League – a reasonably altruistic organisation dedicated to the revival of the Irish language.