by Joe Ambrose
‘It was laid down as an order,’ said Robinson, ‘That if only two RIC should accompany the cart they were to be challenged but if there were six of them they were to be met with a volley as the cart reached the gate.’
Paddy O’Dwyer was the lookout whose job it was to warn the group when the gelignite and its guardians were leaving Tipperary: ‘For five or six days I cycled to Tipperary each morning and returned each evening with nothing to report. At night-time we went to the vacant house on Hogan’s farm to sleep … A week-end intervened and on the Saturday morning I cycled home to Hollyford for a change of clothing and cycled back to Solohead on the Sunday night.’
‘After a week’s wait the whole affair ended suddenly and in a tense atmosphere,’ said Tadgh Crowe. ‘My recollection is that the two RIC men armed with carbines were walking behind the horse and cart when it came into the ambush position. There were several shouts of “Hands up!” I myself shouted that command at least two or three times. I saw one of the policemen move up to the cart and crouch down beside it. From the position he took up and the manner in which he was handling his carbine, I was satisfied that he was going to offer resistance.’
‘The hot-headed tension of Breen made it even more vitally important that Treacy should be collected and cool in order to be able to deal with any emergency,’ said Robinson. ‘One could depend on cool riflemen. Small arms in the hands of men in their first fight, no matter how cool these men may be, are almost useless at a range of more than two yards.’
Paddy O’Dwyer said he was with Robinson ‘on the extreme left-hand side of the position, about twenty-three or thirty yards away from what I will call the main party of six and the arrangements were that Robinson and I were to get out on to the road when we heard the others call on the men with the cart and the escort to stop and put up their hands, the idea being that if they did not halt, Robinson and I would be in a position to stop the horse and cart.’
‘Seán Treacy and Dan Breen at the last exciting moment started to insist that they should be allowed to rush out,’ said Robinson. ‘Breen seemed to have lost control of himself, declaring with grinding teeth and a very high-pitched excited voice that he’d go out and face them.’ Robinson later claimed that, right there and then, he made a mental note that Breen ‘should never be put in charge of a fight’.
Séamus Robinson felt that, ‘The RIC seemed to be at first amused at the sight of Dan Breen’s burly figure with nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief; but with a sweeping glance they saw his revolver and O’Dwyer and me … they could see only three of us.’
‘Hearing Dan Breen and Seán Treacy shouting, “Halt, put up your hands!” Robinson and I immediately started to get out on to the road,’ said O’Dwyer, ‘and almost simultaneously either one or two shots rang out. I distinctly remember seeing one of the RIC men bringing his carbine to the aiming position and working the bolt and the impression I got was that he was aiming at either Robinson or myself. Then a volley rang out and that constable fell dead on the roadside. I am not certain whether it was that volley or the previous shot, or shots, which killed his companion.’
‘I fired three shots at him,’ admitted Tadgh Crowe. ‘One was ineffective and the other two got him in the arm and back. About the same time, either one or two shots were fired from the gate where Seán Treacy was positioned and the other constable fell, shot through the temple.’
‘The driver of the cart and the county council ganger were, naturally, very frightened,’ said Paddy O’Dwyer. ‘Dan Breen spoke to them and told them that nothing was going to happen to them. One of these men, Godfrey, knew both Breen and Treacy well and I imagine that Flynn must have known them too. On Breen’s instructions, Tadgh Crowe and I collected the two carbines belonging to the dead constables. Breen, Treacy and Hogan then drove away the horse and cart with the gelignite.’
‘I took the belts with the pouches of ammunition and handcuffs off the dead policemen,’ said Tadgh Crowe. ‘Treacy, Breen and Hogan drove away on the horse and cart with the gelignite and Paddy O’Dwyer and I took the RIC men’s carbines and hid them together with the belts, pouches of ammunition and handcuffs in a ditch about half a mile from the scene of the ambush. O’Dwyer and I then parted, he to go back home to Hollyford and I went to Doherty’s of Seskin.’
‘Seán Treacy had made all the arrangements for disposing of the gelignite,’ remembered Robinson. ‘Dan Breen and Seán Hogan mounted the cart, Breen, standing up with the reins, whipped the horse and away they went clattering on the rough road. I had thought that Dan Breen, who had worked on the railway, would have known the danger of jolting gelignite that was frozen … the weather was very cold. Hogan told me afterwards that he tried to caution Dan but either he couldn’t hear him or he put no “seem” to it.’
According to Breen: ‘Séamus Robinson did not know of the police being shot that day until he was nearly at home in Ballagh. He was at a point about 300 yards from where the shooting took place and, though he heard the shots I suppose, he did not see the effect of them. It was Robinson himself who told me afterwards that himself and McCormack, one of the other men who were engaged with us, had nearly arrived at Ballagh on their way home when McCormack told him that the two police were dead and that this was the first he heard of anyone being killed.’
In his ‘Statement to the Bureau of Military History’, a sealed account of events left behind for future generations, Breen went out of his way to repeatedly claim that he and Treacy set out to kill RIC men at Soloheadbeg: ‘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. Treacy had stated to me that the only way of starting a war was to kill someone and we wanted to start a war, so we intended to kill some of the police whom we looked upon as the foremost and most important branch of the enemy forces which were holding our country in subjection. The moral aspect of such a decision has been talked about since and we have been branded as murderers, both by the enemy and even by some of our own people, but I want it to be understood that the pros and cons were thoroughly weighed up in discussions between Treacy and myself and, to put it in a nutshell, we felt that we were merely continuing the active war for the establishment of the Irish Republic that had begun on Easter Monday, 1916. We felt there was grave danger that the Volunteer organisation would disintegrate and was disintegrating into a purely political body … and we wished to get it back to its original purpose … We also decided that we would not leave the country as had been the usual practice, but that, having carried out this act of war, we would continue to live in the country in defiance of the British authorities … The only regret we had, following the ambush, was that there were only two policemen in it instead of the six we expected, because we felt that six dead policemen would have impressed the country more than a mere two.’
In My Fight for Irish Freedom, which appeared while many of those involved in the ambush were still alive and while Breen was an active politician, he chose his words more prudently: ‘We would have preferred to avoid bloodshed but they were inflexible.’
Witnesses later claimed to have seen a cart being driven furiously by two masked men with a third in the back. As Breen put it in My Fight for Irish Freedom, their ‘career of real excitement’ had just begun.
6 – Soloheadbeg: Reactions and Consequences
Rewards of £1,000 for the capture of Breen and the others were quickly offered. Wanted posters featuring photographs of Breen were displayed outside RIC barracks all over the country and descriptions of Breen, Hogan, Robinson and Treacy were printed in the RIC’s Hue and Cry.
Joost Augusteijn says that the RIC were so spooked by the killings that they suddenly perceived threats and enemies all over the place. ‘Everywhere it is pervaded with young men who show hostility to any form of control,’ the south Tipperary RIC county inspector reported in January. ‘Imbued with Sinn Féin propaganda and possessed of arms and ammunition,
they are a danger to the community.’ In April 1919, the RIC reported that seventy per cent of the people were ‘in sympathy with the attackers’.
Paddy O’Dwyer boasted: ‘Whilst I was purchasing a newspaper in a shop in Hollyford the following day [22 January], two RIC men came to the door and stood there. One of them appeared to be taking a keen interest in me and was looking me up and down. Opening the newspaper, I read aloud, with assumed amusement, the story which it carried of the shooting of the constables at Soloheadbeg on the previous day. The policemen remained at the door listening and as I wanted to give them the impression that I was in no way perturbed by their presence, I then read out the leading article, which, in no uncertain terms, condemned the shooting. Any suspicions which the RIC men may have entertained of my connection with the affair were apparently allayed, for when a friend called me I left the shop without being in any way molested by them.’
Lord French, the lord lieutenant who enjoyed almost dictatorial powers at the height of the Tan War, famously said that the mere commission of the Soloheadbeg crime had dealt a severe blow to the Sinn Féin organisation.
An tÓglach, the organ of the Volunteers, edited by Piaras Béaslaí – a close confidante of Michael Collins who’d been intimately involved in drafting the constitution of the first dáil – weighed in behind the attackers. On 31 January, the paper stated that Volunteers were justified in ‘treating the armed forces of the enemy – whether soldiers or policemen – exactly as a national army would treat the members of an invading army.’
Richard Mulcahy, chief-of-staff at GHQ when the attack took place, later confided to his son that, ‘bloodshed should have been unnecessary in the light of the type of episode it was.’ Mulcahy, a stickler for detail, order, and discipline, conceivably saw the unauthorised fight as a direct challenge to – or sign of contempt for – his personal military authority. He reckoned that Dr Kinnane, the archbishop of Cashel, who ‘many years after told me that he had regarded Soloheadbeg as part of official policy … withdrew his mind from such things and concentrated entirely on the religious and the moral aspect of his responsibilities and work. When, later, a monument was being erected at Soloheadbeg to mark the episode, he intimated to those concerned that he did not wish any priest in his diocese to be associated with it and that as far as the parish priest was concerned, into whose parish the president, Seán T. O’Kelly, was going for the occasion of the unveiling, he was to receive the president with all due courtesy, but not to be associated with the official proceeding.’
Mulcahy’s tart disapproval was voiced privately to his son in the early 1970s, towards the end of his life. When writing ‘Chief of Staff – 1919’ shortly beforehand for the 1969 Capuchin Annual, he was rather more circumspect, saying that Soloheadbeg fell, ‘naturally into the general position of local initiative in reaction against aggression.’ In the same essay he, more acrimoniously, claimed that, ‘no cure for the malaise in the army command in south Tipperary could be found in military manuals or in any order that could be issued from the general headquarters staff.’
Mulcahy wasn’t always so cautious. Three years before Soloheadbeg, while incarcerated in Frongoch Camp after the 1916 Rising, he made a speech to his fellow internees: ‘To bring a revolution to a satisfactory conclusion we need bloodthirsty men, ferocious men who care nothing for death or slaughter or blood-letting. Revolution is not child’s work. Nor is it the business of saint or scholar. In matters of revolution, any man, woman, or child who is not for you is against you. Shoot them and be damned to them!’
Mulcahy ended his political days as a Fine Gael opponent of Dan Breen in the Tipperary South constituency and some rancour concerning that situation – Mulcahy never once got more votes than Breen – may have coloured his attitude retrospectively.
Tom Garvin, in Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, cites a Tipperary IRA leader who said that the real effect of the war sparked off by the Soloheadbeg ambush had been the intimidation of informers and of civilians generally, rather than the breaking of British power: ‘The RIC were at sea when they pimped and pried yet could not gather scraps of news through their ordinary sources in pubs and fairs, or by talking to men who had met men who came in from the country; or by talking to pub owners. The once prolific sources of talk-supply were drying up. In Tipperary due to Solohead the people were warned – afraid of talking – and so they kept their minds to themselves and their neighbours. As a result the south Tipperary people did not talk much.’
Jerome Davin, a stalwart of the Third Tipperary Brigade recalled: ‘One morning a party of military visited Rosegreen. This was unusual at the time [early 1919], so with a Volunteer I went to the village to see what they had been doing. I found that they had put up a large notice in the village offering a reward for information which would lead to the arrest and conviction of the persons concerned in the shooting of the two RIC men at Soloheadbeg. From a good friend and solid Irishman, the late Ned O’Neill, I got a sheet of notepaper, on which I wrote in block letters the following words: “Take notice that anyone caught giving information as to the shooting of the peelers at Soloheadbeg will meet with the same fate. Signed, Veritas.” I then tore down the poster which the British soldiers had put up and replaced it by my own notice. I mention this incident specifically because it was later, on two occasions, the subject of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons.’
At the inquest into the deaths of the two Soloheadbeg constables, county council worker Patrick Quinn gave some confused evidence as to what he had seen and then he collapsed in a fit. He was removed from the room. After a brief second spell in the witness box he had to be sent to hospital, suffering from a complete nervous breakdown.
The coroner said that Constable McDonnell had been in Tipperary for thirty years and a more quiet or inoffensive man he had never met. The inquest heard that McDonnell had been shot in the left side of the head and that, from the track of the bullet, he must have been in a crouching position and been fired on from behind.
As for the Big Four, as Robinson, Treacy, Hogan and Breen were now known, they took to the hills. ‘We were to be outlaw raparees,’ Breen said, ‘with a price on our heads.’ They moved fast and they moved often. They were only welcome in certain homes and districts; they could only trust certain families. A safe house was only safe for a day or two. Breen said that former friends shunned them, preferring the drawing-room to the battlefield.
Hogan, Treacy and Breen moved around together from the day of Soloheadbeg on, but Robinson returned home to Kilshenane, only later hooking up with the others. ‘I went to Kilshenane to fix up contacts,’ he explained, ‘and to find out what the reactions were.’ According to both Eamon O’Duibhir and Breen, Robinson went back to Kilshenane with the intention of resuming his bucolic life as a farm worker. O’Duibhir said that he ‘tackled the work again but, after Soloheadbeg, he was no longer able to come to Kilshenane except on the quiet.’ Breen said, ‘Robinson was separated from us then, as he apparently had intended to carry on with his work at Ballagh with Eamon O’Dwyer.’
There is some dispute as to how long it took him to rejoin his comrades and there are signs that he had no idea where they had gone. Paddy O’Dwyer recalled that, a few days after Soloheadbeg, Robinson visited him at his Hollyford home: ‘Séamus was anxious to get in touch with Treacy, Breen and Hogan.’ O’Dwyer couldn’t help Robinson because he had no idea of their whereabouts.
Breen claimed that it was some weeks afterwards, when someone told Robinson that he was about to be arrested in connection with Soloheadbeg, that he went on the run and joined the other three. ‘In fact,’ Breen maintained, ‘I think it was about six weeks afterwards.’ This would seem to be a wildly incorrect recollection.
Robinson had certainly joined them by the time Treacy called a meeting of brigade officers at Donnelly’s of Nodstown, near Cashel, on 23 February. At that gathering, Robinson drafted the proclamation which ordered all British military and police forces to leave s
outh Tipperary under penalty of death. It said that all upholders of the ‘foreign government’ found in the county after that date would be held to have forfeited their lives. GHQ refused to ratify the proclamation, pointing out that the Third Tipperary Brigade was effectively making policy on the hoof and on behalf of the entire revolutionary movement. Breen, in My Fight for Irish Freedom, said that, ‘We could not understand their reluctance, seeing that ours was the only logical position.’
The proclamation – despite the Dublin objections – was distributed throughout the brigade area. Robinson said that it was intended to put things on a war footing.
Maurice Crowe said that: ‘After Soloheadbeg I again came in contact with Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and Seán Hogan near Galbally. We proceeded from there to Lackelly and Doon, where we again met the brigade commanding officer, Séamus Robinson, and from there we went to Croughmorka. I was then sent back to get the RIC men’s rifles which were hidden near the scene of the Soloheadbeg ambush. I did this in company with Tadgh Crowe of Solohead and brought these arms to my home in Glenbane. They were in the custody of my brother, Edmund, until they were handed over some months later to Dinny Lacey of the Fourth Battalion.’
His mission completed, Crowe commenced the difficult task of linking up, once more, with the hard travelling Soloheadbeg co-conspirators: ‘When we got to Doherty’s, they had gone on to Kennedy’s of Glengroe, at the foot of the Keeper Hill. We proceeded there but, when we got to Kennedy’s at 3 a.m., they had gone to Hewitt’s of Ballinahinch. We stayed at Kennedy’s until the following evening and at last located the others at Hewitt’s where we stayed until the next evening and proceeded mostly on foot to Castleconnell where we met Seán Connolly … We went from there that night to the Falls of Doonass to a watchman’s hut at the Turbines. Here we stayed a couple of days until a message came as a result of which Robinson and Treacy went to Dublin and Breen and Hogan to east Limerick.’