Dan Breen and the IRA

by Joe Ambrose

  ‘He came here for the purpose of finding a job,’ said Mike Flannery, ‘and the speakeasy was the only job that he could create for himself. He did well. His reputation helped it to be such a success in the neighbourhood.’

  Would-be customers went down a few steps off the street into a basement. They rang the bell, waited for one of the bouncers to peer out and were allowed inside if acceptable. The speakeasy itself was located, not in the basement, but in the servants’ quarters which extended through the lower regions of a sprawling, roomy, house. There was a long bar in one room, with tables and chairs scattered everywhere. The local Irish-American community were regular customers; their most prominent member, the profoundly corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker, was a frequent visitor.

  Mike Flannery maintained that ‘there was never any trouble with the authorities. The policemen would come in for a few drinks and usually not have to pay … that’s the way things were but I have to tell you that one time this young fellow came in and was given a drink; he put up the change right on the counter. “Take it,” he said, “I don’t want a free drink”.’

  Walking behind Luke Dillon’s coffin in 1930, Breen vowed to himself that he would not end up like the dead fenian, stranded in America, out of touch with events in Ireland. De Valera, planning his return to power, attended Dillon’s funeral and met with Breen. They discussed getting Breen into the dáil, under the Fianna Fáil banner, at the first possible opportunity.

  In August 1931, he got the news that his mother, Honora, had died in Limerick city. That same year he sponsored a tour of America by the 1930 Tipperary hurling team.

  Mike Flannery was active in organising the tour: ‘When Dan came here, he joined the Tipperarymen’s Association. It was one of the oldest organisations of its kind. The Tipperary hurling team had scored great success in Ireland in 1930; so they came here. They came to raise money. The money went to charitable causes associated with Sinn Féin. It provided funding in Ireland for those IRA men who could not find jobs. Breen favoured this idea as the Free State pension scheme only helped pro-Treaty people. He knew what it was like … When they say that Dan Breen sponsored the thing, they mean that he sponsored it for the Tipperarymen’s Association and that the association gave the profits to the IRA. Connie Neenan, Clann na Gael secretary, went along to look after those interests. He had Pete Landry with him as treasurer. I didn’t want the tour to go to California at all because of the expense involved; it would have taken up too much valuable time. Instead I felt that it would be more profitable if they played two games in Boston. That would get us more money because, in the first game, the Boston crowd nearly beat the Tipperarymen. I knew that the second game would be a real money-spinner. I was only interested in the money for the IRA and I ran the office in New York while Dan was off on the tour.’

  Every match was followed, later the same day, by a social occasion where additional fundraising could be done. Breen would speak at these gatherings, usually about his Tan War adventures, and eulogies such as Fr Columba Downey’s ode, would be recited with fervour:

  In the hardest fight

  ’Gainst tyrants might,

  Your place was the battle’s van –

  All respect to you

  Who were staunch and true,

  And who proudly lived ‘the man’.

  You kept in sight

  In the eclipsed light

  The cause of Rosaleen;

  When the sun shines high

  In proud freedom’s sky,

  She’ll remember Daniel Breen!

  By October, despite Mike Flannery’s misgivings, the hurlers were in San Francisco. A committee of prominent citizens, including Mayor Angelo Rossi, organised parades and parties. The Irish World, under the banner headline ‘San Francisco Extends Real Welcome to Irish Hurling Champions’ reported: ‘On Thursday morning the champions will be met at Sacramento by a delegation from the San Francisco reception committee; at Oakland, also, they will be met and entrained so as to reach San Francisco on scheduled time. On arrival at the Ferry Building, San Francisco, they will present the promoter, Dan Breen, with the key to the city. A parade will be formed, headed by a municipal band and decorated automobiles and will proceed to the Whitcomb Hotel. The principal streets will be decorated with the Irish Republican and American flags and with streamers bearing the inscription “Welcome, Tipperary Champion Hurlers”.’

  As the tour proceeded, legal papers from Fianna Fáil in Dublin arrived for Breen at the speakeasy. So long as Breen signed them and got them back to Ireland in time, Fianna Fáil was going to propose him for a seanad seat.

  The Irish Independent, on 6 November said: ‘“From America to Seanad? Mr Dan Breen’s Dramatic Dash”. The first declaration by a candidate for membership of the Oireachtas to be made in a foreign country is on its way across the Atlantic on behalf of Mr Dan Breen, the well known figure in the Anglo-Irish struggle. Mr Breen has been adopted by Fianna Fáil as one of its candidates in the forthcoming Seanad election. An Irish Independent reporter was informed yesterday that Mr Breen, who has been in America for some years, will sail from New York tomorrow. He hopes to be in Dublin by the end of next week. The documents are expected in Dublin in a few days. They consist of a sworn declaration made before a competent authority in New York that Mr Breen will take his seat in the Seanad if elected.’

  A senior Fianna Fáil figure let it be known that ‘we will place him at the top of the poll or very near it.’ Breen seemed to be back in political business but the signed papers arrived back in Dublin twenty-four hours too late. He had been in Montana with the hurling team when the papers arrived and he’d had to rush back to New York in order to complete them. He did not, in the end, sail for Ireland: ‘Dan never actually spoke for Fianna Fáil here,’ said Mike Flannery. ‘I disliked De Valera. He was too dogmatic and humourless. We would all be cracking up and he’d sit there like a statue. Breen did join his party, of course. I know he was very annoyed with De Valera for his pussy-footing over entering the dáil. “If you’re going in, you’re going in,” Dan said and he went in himself.

  ‘Breen was a man who read a tremendous lot, but the way I figured it, he was not able to assimilate it. He did not have the educational background. He’d toss out a thing without really thinking about it, like the church business. As his friend Father Noonan said “He never left the church - he only thought he did.”

  ‘Anyway, back to the election. Fianna Fáil sent out a request for Dan to stand in the election for them. I was thoroughly against Fianna Fáil – they had fallen down on the job as far as I was concerned – and I had control of all mail that was coming in, no matter who it came for. I had to open all mail and decide what had to be done about it. I opened this one which was a request for Dan to return home immediately in order to stand in the election. I took a match to it and watched it burn. Dan’s wife knew about this because Fianna Fáil got his address and things from her. She raised hell. But it was a dark secret and I never let anyone in on it. They’re all dead now and I can talk about the secret.’

  A week after the close of seanad nominations the Clonmel Nationalist reported that Dan’s health was not robust and that he wanted to return home for that reason. ‘I don’t know whether or not he had arthritis when he came to America,’ said Mike Flannery, ‘but he would massage both of his arms a great deal. He had an Irish masseur. He was in pain a great deal.’

  In 1932, he finally returned from America to be greeted by torchlight processions in Tipperary, where he stood in the general election for Fianna Fáil. He topped the poll and, when his party formed the next government, he started his thirty-three year stint as a backbench politician. His life of violence, insurgence, uncertainty and drifting came to a final end.

  He stayed on in the dáil until 1965, a truculent presence and a thorn in De Valera’s side. Dev wanted all of his deputies to sing from the same hymn sheet – the one he chose – but Breen was always, for good or evil, his own man. He supported the republicans in
the Spanish Civil War. He broke rank with his party to work with the socialist Republican Congress. He was alleged to have consorted with Nazi agents during the Second World War. His occasional contributions to dáil business were boisterous in the extreme. He opposed the Vietnam War at the end of his public life.

  For almost forty years the men and women who’d established the Irish state and who then fought a civil war about its nature, sat in Leinster House, glaring at one another in an atmosphere of acrimony and bad blood. Aiken, Mulcahy, De Valera and Breen all stayed trapped in Leinster House until they were old men. It was all over bar the shouting.

  Peadar O’Donnell, the socialist republican writer, had long been a close friend of Breen’s. O’Donnell’s wife was one of the women who’d nursed him back to good health after one of his Tan War scrapes. In 1934–35 O’Donnell was at the centre of the Republican Congress, an umbrella organisation which sought to unite republicans and socialists. O’Donnell persuaded Breen to lend his weight to the new movement.

  Republican Congress activists included members of Saor Éire* and former IRA left-wingers like George Gilmore* and Frank Ryan.* It sought the destruction of ranchers and the establishment of a worker’s republic. The Congress’ Athlone Manifesto, issued in April 1934, said: ‘We believe that a republic or a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots capitalism.’

  On 22 September 1935, Breen chaired a convention where republican and left-wing activists passed a resolution proclaiming the Congress’ ‘oneness with the people of north-east Ulster against whom conscription has been already threatened and appeal with special urgency to the workers of Belfast to take over their section of the front against imperialism, firm in the conviction that the well-being of the whole Irish working-class cannot be safe-guarded in an Ireland still held within the British empire and in the grip of imperial banking interests. There cannot be a free working-class within a subject Ireland.’

  The meeting gave rise to much speculation that a new political party was about to be formed. Such a party could, in 1935, have had a devastating effect on Fianna Fáil. The party was only getting into its stride and was anxious to be a broad church within which all manner of nationalists could coalesce. Breen was the most prominent Fianna Fáiler supporting the Congress, but there were indications that a number of the party’s councillors and local organisers were sympathetic.

  The Irish Press, De Valera’s paper, reported that ‘since the last convention moves have been made for the formation of an “Independent Republican Party”. A number of leading members of the IRA have expressed themselves in favour of the establishment of such an organisation. Some advocate a policy of entering the dáil and others stand for an abstention policy.’

  That was enough for De Valera – huge pressure was brought to bear on the likes of Breen. They disengaged from the Congress. George Gilmore wrote in The Irish Republican Congress: ‘The pressure brought to bear by the Fianna Fáil party leaders upon their too-republican branch officers forced them off the platform … and many of the trade union leaders, when left without that shelter, withdrew also.’

  In 1944, Breen, for all intents and purposes, threatened to shoot a fellow member of parliament – James Coburn – who’d accused him of having bought an evicted farm when its owner was dispossessed for not paying his rates. Coburn was one of the last relics of the once mighty Irish Parliamentary Party – wiped out by Sinn Féin back in 1919 – and had been elected to the dáil for the National League, the successor to the Parliamentary Party.

  ‘I want to tell Deputy Coburn that I did buy the farm,’ Breen said, during a somewhat confused defence of his own actions. ‘I have no interest in the farm and no interest in land; but in regard to anyone who stands for a no rent campaign or no rate campaign, in as far as in my power, I will see they are dispossessed and I will see that the land of this country is of the same value as the house in city or town. When men have obligations to meet, I will see that they meet them. I make no apology to anyone in this house or in the country for my action in buying that farm. I do not want that farm or any farm; I do not want any interest in land or ownership of land.’

  He went on to say that he would hold on to the farm, ‘until such time as they pay their rates. I am willing to lose money on it until they pay the rates … I am of the breed that wiped the landlords out of this country.’

  What Breen was trying to say about the farmer who refused to pay his rates seems ambiguous. He had a good reputation in Tipperary for settling acrimonious land and labour disputes. His lifelong rhetoric – some of which he had just shared with the dáil – implied that he was anti-landlord, anti-rancher, very much on the side of the peasant and the small farmer. It seems improbable that he really would have involved himself in grabbing land – for his own advantage – from which a farmer had been evicted.

  To cheers from the gallery he then called Coburn a coward, causing Coburn to challenge, ‘Meet me outside and I will tell you whether I am or not.’

  Breen was quite willing to meet his accuser outside: ‘I very rarely speak in this house, but when I am challenged I feel I have the right to defend myself. If any man challenges me inside or outside this house, I will defend myself to the best of my ability and with the weapons I decide on, not with the weapons they decide on. If I had taken the care of myself that Deputy Coburn took of himself, I would be able to deal with him as he wished. There was a weapon which John Colt made and which made all men equal and if Deputy Coburn wishes it, we can have it out at any time he chooses.’

  Daniel Morrissey, a fellow Tipperary TD, was so distressed by the turn that the discussion was taking that he intervened: ‘It is the most lamentable thing that has happened for years and no good purpose can be served by a continuance of what has gone on from the time this motion was moved. Things have been said here today, many of them in heat, that I am sure those who uttered them will afterwards be sorry for. There can be no good purpose in continuing this kind of discussion. It is something we should all put behind us and forget as quickly as we can, for the sake of the dignity of parliament and for the sake of the country.’

  One of Breen’s regular buddies in Leinster House was Liam Tobin, Michael Collins’ former intelligence guru. They occasionally encountered faces from their past. ‘I became friendly with a butcher in Moore Street named Walsh,’ said Breen. ‘I used to meet him racing and I often gave him a lift. About ten or fifteen years ago he came to see me in the dáil. He waited for me to come down and I shook hands with him. Liam Tobin was very excited and he signalled me. I said, “Wait, until I see my friend off.” Tobin said: “You are a right bastard! Do you know the fellow you are talking to, he’s the detective that was with the other fellow you shot that night in Drumcondra.” He never came back after that. Tobin sent word to him to the gate to say he was not to return … Another funny story about Tobin. This happened during the war, 1939–45. I had a car and I used to drive Tobin home … We were on the main Merrion Road and I just missed a fellow on a bicycle. He threw himself off it. Tobin said, “It was a pity you didn’t get him.” He said, “that’s Dinny Barrett, the assistant commissioner of the Tans.” It would have looked deliberate if I had hit him … He was an RIC man in Belfast … We used to go to mass at 5.30 a.m. in Clarendon Street to get him but he never came.’

  He didn’t confine his activities during the Second World War to almost running over old foes. One of his prized possessions was a portrait of Rommel, the German war hero, which he claimed he’d been given by a German diplomat.

  On 8 May 1942, David Grey, the American ambassador to Ireland, reported to President Roosevelt on the movements of German agent Henning Thomsen: ‘In Dublin, Thomsen, the secretary of the legation, has been entertaining, at the Gresham Hotel, Dan Breen, a former IRA gun man and present deputy for Galway [sic], known to be pro-German and suspected of being on the German payroll. He also gave a party in a private room for some members of the Italian legation and several pro-Axis Iri
shmen. They had a lot to drink and late in the evening they began to sing “Let us drink tonight. Next month may not be so happy”.’

  George Fleischmann, a German combatant who’d been interned in the Curragh during the war, was a friend of Breen’s. When hostilities ended in Europe, the Irish government let it be known that they were sending all German prisoners home. Fleischmann was one of the many internees who didn’t want to leave Ireland. Some of these men came from the eastern part of Germany and faced an uncertain future in a land now controlled by the Russians.

  Fleischmann was given parole prior to repatriation but did not report back to the Curragh. T. Ryle Dwyer, in Guests of the State, says that ‘Fleischmann was friendly with Dan Breen … If necessary he was prepared to hide Fleischmann at his home, but first he interceded with De Valera, who authorised Fleischmann to remain in Ireland on condition he kept his presence secret from anyone in Austria.

  Ernie Hogan spoke of Breen’s last years in the dáil: ‘I got to know Dan in the 1950s when he was getting on in years and I was a young man starting off in Fianna Fáil. I can’t pretend that we saw all that much of Dan down in south Tipp but he was a godsend to Fiann Fáil because you didn’t have to do a whole lot of campaigning to get the legendary Dan Breen elected. And the older he got, the more special he seemed. By the time I met Dan a lot of the heroes of the War of Independence were dead and buried but, despite awful health, he was very much alive. And larger than life. He was not what you would call a great constituency TD. He found a lot of that kind of thing very boring and why wouldn’t he? After the things he’d seen and done in his life. In those days, anyway, people didn’t necessarily expect a TD to be always holding clinics and arranging things for them. I think that quite a few people were glad to have the opportunity to vote for Dan, just because of what he did for the country. Frank Loughman had to act as Dan’s man on the ground in the county. Dan was keen on the GAA and you’d always see him at Croke Park for an All Ireland. He’d been supporting Tipp teams there since Bloody Sunday. Every meeting you had with him was a privilege. A total privilege.’