Dan Breen and the IRA

by Joe Ambrose

  In the dáil, as a new generation of politicians began to take over, he seemed all the more symbolic and celebrated. Young bloods, recently elected, made it their business to meet the famous but ailing Dan Breen. One new Fianna Fáil deputy asked him what the secret of his success was. ‘The secret of my success,’ he answered, ‘is the word republican.’

  He stood for re-election, for the last time, in 1961. He didn’t do quite as well as he had in the past but he got in. The Tipperary poll topper on this occasion was a fresh young Labour Party candidate by the name of Seán Treacy.

  ‘On my first day in the dáil in 1961,’ Treacy remembers. ‘I got a message that Dan Breen wanted to see me. He was sick in the Mater Hospital and he sent me this note written in his spidery handwriting, asking if I’d come to see him. To me he was this renowned figure for whom I had so much respect so I was thrilled to get his summons. As soon as I could – it was my first day in the house and there were a number of things I had to do – I made my way to the Mater. They were used to having him there – he’d been visiting them with his wounds since the days of the Fernside incident. He had his own room and his own nurse, this woman who was clearly very fond of him and who was used to handling him. He took a bit of handling. When I went in to see him he was intrigued by my name. This was what interested him. I think that he was fascinated that a young man by the name of Seán Treacy had been elected by the people of south Tipperary, all those years later. And he was right to take note of it. My parents were both republicans and I was named after the great hero of the Third Tipperary Brigade. So we talked. He was very poorly. He’d wanted to see me because he needed somebody on the opposition benches who would pair with him during his absence in hospital. This meant that he didn’t have to enter the dáil for votes, but could be paired off against me. And he really was in no condition to be traipsing off to Leinster House. I was honoured to do this favour for a fellow Tipperary man and for the great Dan Breen.’

  Peadar O’Donnell remained close to Breen: ‘In 1962, I wrote to Dan Breen … I said, “Dan, with all this talk about the Americans in Vietnam there should be an Irish voice in the chorus. The only two people in the country who can be called on are yourself and myself.” Very modestly we called ourselves the Irish Voice on Vietnam. I went to Dan with a copy of the protest letter we were to hand in to the American embassy. I commenced to read it. He stopped me abruptly. “What are you doing?” says he. “Sure any bloody letter you sign I’ll sign”.’

  18 – Séamus Robinson’s Fight for Irish Freedom

  Once in power, Fiana Fáil achieved a seemingly permanent political supremacy. De Valera set about, by constitutional and resourceful means, dismantling the Free State and the culture which surrounded it.

  The Fianna Fáil cultural agenda facilitated the rise of a new type of establishment intellectual, one who had either been ‘out’ during the Tan War, or who was generally deemed to be sympathetic to the ‘cause’. Gradually the country was covered with commemorative plaques and statuary celebrating 1916–21 raids and affrays which had involved future members of Fianna Fáil. Former warriors not suited for high office or cultural distinction were fixed up with sinecures in the civil service, local government and the many ‘bords’ set up to promote fisheries, horse and greyhound racing, tourism and other aspects of national industry. This can’t be simply construed as a form of hopeless corruption. Those who fought during the Tan War were frequently the able go-ahead people in their communities, active in every aspect of civic and cultural life. They were also, very often, people who had passionately optimistic visions of what an independent Ireland might become and were now free to play some part in attempting to bring such visions to fruition.

  Séamus Robinson slipped comfortably into this new establishment. Like most of the Ulstermen who’d fought in the southern war he, inexplicably, did little to aid the nationalist population stranded within the Northern Ireland or to bring about the end of partition. Instead he settled into life in Dublin’s leafy Rathgar suburb; a bitter, comfortable and angry bureaucrat of the revolution.

  One neighbour recalled: ‘There he lived on Highfield Road in a big redbricked house, complete with an immense garden, that he didn’t know what to do with, on a street still almost entirely full of Rathgar protestant families. He was a pious civil servant, anxious to fit in and to be respectable.’

  Robinson had been a founder member of Fianna Fáil and he became one of the party’s first Seanad members. He remained a senator until De Valera abolished that chamber in 1936. When Fianna Fáil introduced the Military Service Pensions Act of 1934, aimed at providing pensions for IRA veterans, Robinson worked on processing applications. In order to qualify for the allowance, claimants had to provide proof – in the form of a legal statement or a reference from a senior officer – of their involvement.

  ‘Robinson was in charge of the IRA pensions,’ one man said, ‘with responsibility for giving out the little bit of pocket money that was on offer. And I believe he was a right pain in the arse to deal with and made life miserable for lads who were trying to collect their money.’

  During the decades when his fellow party member was operating a speakeasy in New York (allegedly locking horns with Al Capone), being greeted with torchlit processions and brass bands, topping the poll in general elections, purportedly meeting James Joyce (and Albert Einstein) and becoming a national icon, Robinson harboured serious resentment towards Breen. The main source of his sense of grievance was My Fight for Irish Freedom, required reading in early Fianna Fáil Ireland. Robinson felt that his role had been played down, that Breen was taking credit for having started the War of Independence and for leading the IRA in south Tipperary.

  This sense of affront was largely in Robinson’s imagination. Breen’s book stuck to the line that the Big Four were a band of brothers who took on a mighty empire and won. There are many friendly references to Robinson and, given what Breen really thought of him, he got off lightly. He also garnered favourable mentions in Ernie O’Malley’s influential and literary (if not quite so widely read) On Another Man’s Wound.

  He may have invested his hatred in the book because, in reality, he was still seething from the way the Tipperary IRA had treated him. He had been used as a puppet by Treacy and Breen. The forthright farmers and country boys of Tipperary had become tired of his dithering or bureaucratic ways. In the profoundly regional and provincial Ireland of that era, he was expecting a lot if he expected all Munster people to welcome his Belfast accent and his Belfast attitudes.

  In 1947, he got his chance to set the record straight and to get some revenge. The only problem was, so did everybody else. The Bureau of Military History saw Séamus Robinson explain his role in the fight for Irish freedom and his comrades debunk his claims.

  The De Valera administration, encouraged by the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, established the Bureau of Military History, whose remit was to collect – either orally or in written form – the memories of the revolutionary generation while they were still of an age when they could clearly recall what had happened. The idea, at the time, was that these testimonies would remain sealed until a reasonable period – perhaps twenty-five years – had passed. Most of the collected ‘statements’ (as these testimonies are known) didn’t see the light of day until the twenty-first century.

  Diarmaid Ferriter thinks that ‘Fianna Fáil was determined to play a role in how the revolutionary period was remembered, but it was also understood that the project would have no credibility if it was mistrusted or boycotted by Fine Gael … The instructions given to interviewers were clear. They were urged to steer witnesses away from obvious fantasy or exaggeration, but under no circumstances to induce testimony. If the testimony was being given orally, “copious notes” were to be taken and the notes converted into a coherent statement to be submitted to the witness for approval; where there was evidence of unreliability through “failing memory” or “self-glorification”, a report to that effect was to be
appended.’

  All manner of establishment intellectuals were suggested for the job of running the bureau including Seán O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor and Frank Gallagher but the job eventually went to a solicitor called Michael McDunphy. The full-time members of the bureau were Florrie O’Donoghue, John McCoy and Séamus Robinson.

  De Valera was correctly cautious about this initiative. One of the leading lights behind it was UCD’s Professor R. Dudley Edwards, a man who harboured contempt and dislike for De Valera and everything he stood for.

  Robinson’s role was to look after Fianna Fáil’s interests. In the course of doing so he had ample opportunity to assure his own place in history. Others, like Breen and Jerome Davin, were equally anxious to set the record, vis-à-vis Robinson, straight.

  His statements insisted, again and again, upon his role as senior officer in the Third Tipperary Brigade. The principal object of his ire was Breen, with references to his rival’s weight, ugliness, unreliability and incompatibility. Sometimes he was portrayed as a near comic book villain, bug eyed and with grinding teeth.

  Appended to the rear of one of his statements was a file of letters, hatchet jobs on Breen, which had clearly circulated throughout the milieu that Robinson, De Valera and Breen traversed on an almost daily basis. The only purpose behind this campaign can have been to embarrass Breen to the greatest extent possible

  The result was a time bomb from another era, recently exploded, that was designed to wipe out Breen’s reputation and the credibility of his book.

  The majority of this correspondence is made up of rejected ‘Letters to the Editor’ signed by Mrs Kathleen Kincaid, Robinson’s sister-in-law. Robinson clearly looked over Mrs Kincaid’s shoulder as she wrote but, being a government employee, he couldn’t lend his name to such abusive epistles. The fact that they were sent to editors at the Irish Press group, newspapers controlled by the De Valera family, ensured that they’d never appear, but that the whole of Dublin would hear about their contents. By appending them to his own Bureau statement, Robinson came close to breaking the rules of the body he worked for; Mrs Kincaid’s letters were overflowing with obvious fantasy, exaggeration and (assuming Robinson had a hand in their composition) self-glorification.

  In one letter she claims that: ‘Dan Breen was never in charge of an organised fight during the whole of the Tan War. Ask anyone who is a first-hand authority.’ My Fight for Irish Freedom was ‘an insult to intelligence and the Irish Republican Army alike.’ Either Breen or Michael Collins were denigrated as a ‘paper-manufactured “hayro”.’ ‘Whose duties,’ she enquires, ‘as quartermaster kept him in Dublin almost permanently?’

  Mrs Kincaid wrote to the editor of the Sunday Press, having received one of her many rejection slips: ‘Your refusal to print my letter surprised me. I phoned my brother-in-law Séamus Robinson. He, too, was surprised – at my being surprised. He murmured something about, “Truth is a noose when it comes to trying to get any Tipperary man to expose the Great Tipperary Hoax. No Tipperary man can be expected to espouse my fight for Irish freedom,” he said. “But didn’t Dan Breen write that?” I asked. “No, it was Mrs Séamus O’Doherty who wrote My Fight for Irish Freedom and the Sunday Press is anxious to expose it – for sale”.’

  Some letters suggest that Robinson deserved the credit for initiating Soloheadbeg and for starting the Tan War. ‘There are men and women in Dublin today,’ Mrs Kincaid argued, ‘who remember discussing with Séamus Robinson months before he went to Tipperary, ways and means of re-starting the fight along the lines that he started at Soloheadbeg …’

  Her most extravagant claim somewhat undermines the consensus regarding Seán Treacy’s innovative mind and charismatic leadership in Tipperary: ‘Séamus Robinson was recognised by all during all those years between 1918 and 1923 as the authority, the beginning, the driving force and the brain behind Soloheadbeg and all that.’

  Séamus Robinson came out from behind Mrs Kincaid and wrote a poignant but haughty letter to the Soloheadbeg Memorial Committee in January 1950 which revealed his attitude towards the way things had turned out for him.

  He had been invited to attend the unveiling of the Soloheadbeg Memorial. ‘For reasons that seem good to me,’ he responded, ‘I must decline the invitation. As a member of the “Bureau of Military History 1913–21” I have to be careful that my presence and silence at a function such as the unveiling of the memorial at Soloheadbeg Cross (where I was the officer in command), where speeches and addresses will be made and delivered, will not be interpreted as lending even the appearance of any shade of official authority by me, either personally as the brigade officer commanding at the time, or as a member of the Bureau of Military History, to statements that may be made in connection with the function.’ He felt he could not lend, ‘my imprimatur to proceedings’.

  He explained that My Fight for Irish Freedom ‘had no authority from the GHQ of the republican army at the time or of the officer commanding the brigade or division’ and that, ‘on the whole, I prefer Buck Rodgers’.

  Having persuaded Mrs Kincaid to sing his praises and to wash as much dirty linen in public as the clothesline would hold, he explained to the Soloheadbeg Memorial people that ‘I have never yet tried to sound my own horn, nor have I ever yet attempted to wash dirty linen in public – I have never even complained in public – because I had hoped (forlornly?) that some generous-minded Tipperary man would some day try to redeem what other Tipperary men have done (or left undone) to a stranger who went amongst them out of love for Ireland to do a certain job for Ireland and Tipperary and who did it.’

  Movingly, neurotically and obsessively, he thought that ‘had I served my country in any other part of Ireland as I have served her in south Tipperary, I would not have been damned with faint praise and worse, for the last thirty years.’

  19 – A Lion in Winter

  As Breen’s health declined, his fondness for letter-writing increased. These tended to be handwritten and hard to read. He held his pen in a claw because his hand bones had long before been shattered by bullets.

  In 1960, a schoolteacher who’d met Breen when he was a young child, brought a group of schoolboys to visit the dáil. Breen eagerly came down to meet the children and to show them around.

  That night the teacher wrote to Breen, thanking him for his gesture towards the boys and inviting him to visit his home. A reply came quickly: ‘There is no need for you to thank me for meeting yourself and the boys yesterday. As a matter of fact I love to meet young people and talk to them. I had hoped when I reached fifty years of age to retire from public life and devote all my time to going through our country, giving lectures and talks to our young folk. I feel it is more than ever needed today. I am now too old – I am sixty-six – and I am still in the same position, only worse than when I hit the fifty mark.

  ‘I feel a great lot could be done to save our people from the evil influence of Yankee and English ways of life if our youth got a proper grinding in the things that matter. I feel that the things I want done will never be done, as our educational system is so set that a pass in an exam is more important than truth, honour, citizenship. I won’t worry you more. I may upset you and I don’t wish in any way to do that. I was pleased to meet you and the lovely boys. I never visit anyone, I live within myself. So you will excuse me. Dan Breen.’

  When Brian Inglis wrote his 1962 memoir, West Briton, about growing up a protestant in Ireland, he was surprised to get a laudatory letter from Breen: ‘Your grandmother would not like it – in fact she may now turn in her grave at you reading it. I only want to congratulate you on your book West Briton. You surely got to grips with the real position. It’s sad for Ireland to lose men like you – you are needed back here to build up an Ireland not rich but with a culture.’

  Inglis, aware that Breen had spoken about the need for the Republic to achieve reconciliation with northern protestants, recalled, ‘The handwriting was at times barely legible; he had been ill for some time, he expla
ined and found it hard to write, “so excuse my effort”. I wrote back to tell him that I could think of no letter which had given me more pleasure.’

  By 1965, Seán Lemass had replaced De Valera as taoiseach and Fianna Fáil was about to undergo a sea change. The War of Independence generation of politicians, taking their lead from De Valera, were gradually retiring. New bloods like Charlie Haughey, Donagh O’Malley and Jack Lynch were taking over. In 1965, Lemass wanted some of the old timers to make way for younger men.

  Breen was on his list of deputies fit for retirement but, when efforts were made to track him down, Breen was nowhere to be found. He seemed to have gone on the run again. He eventually surfaced in a nursing home in Clonmel. Brendan Long, an able reporter from the local Nationalist newspaper, was summoned for a valedictory interview.

  He told Long that he did not mind resigning, but wished to announce it to the Nationalist and to the people of Tipperary. ‘Maybe I wasn’t a hell of a good representative for Tipperary,’ he admitted, ‘because I always tried to think of the whole country.’

  He was ready to retire from public life: ‘The Ireland of today is not the Ireland I grew up in. The ball is at the feet of the young fellows … I went seventy last August and I am glad to see the youth taking over. If they would only stop squabbling and get down to work, they could make a great country out of it.’

  He returned to a favourite theme, the past slave mentality of the Irish: ‘The greatest kick I ever got was trying to get that slave-mindedness out of our people, trying to elevate them from the craven attitudes in which I saw them. When I was young the people were slaves to everyone and they were sat upon by everybody from the time they started. If they didn’t have a cap to lift, they’d have to lift a handful of their hair. I detested that. I could never accept it – not even when I was a little boy. I could not and would not conform to this tyranny.’