by Fergal Keane
The forces of the Crown stood to attention. Behind them was a group of around a hundred or more mourners. As the Pathé news cameras roll a young boy, a street urchin possibly, suddenly darts forward to pluck something from the ground, just behind the Auxiliaries. What has he found? A dropped coin perhaps. Nobody pays him any attention. And he vanishes out of shot.
Tobias O’Sullivan is buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church. At the grave a woman stands in a mourning veil with two small boys dressed in black coats and caps. These are Bernard and John, the dead policeman’s sons. The woman is Mary, his widow, known to her family and friends as May, and she and some others are briefly seen looking away from the grave. That is because Tobias O’Sullivan’s daughter, his youngest child, Sara, aged two, is crying, hidden behind the row of larger figures at the grave’s edge, and being taken care of by another family member. The two boys look as if they are in a trance. The gravediggers, two young men in shirtsleeves, stare at the boys. They are in fact young policemen, because the gravediggers are on strike. The film is from the era before sound. But we can imagine the graveside murmur. The stifled cries as earth is piled upon earth. A newspaper reported on ‘pathetic scenes at the graveside, the widow and her two young sons weeping pitifully as the police buglers played the Last Post’.11 Tobias O’Sullivan is buried as an Irish policeman under the British Empire and as such is destined to be officially ‘unremembered’ in a newly independent Irish state. The only memorials for men like O’Sullivan will exist in quiet homes – a photograph or keepsake on the mantelpiece beside a votive candle; the bloodstained tunic he was wearing when he was shot, kept in a private place until his widow has died and eventually it vanishes. These Irishmen who killed and were killed by other Irishmen in the War of Independence are not commemorated or publicly mourned.
An old IRA man who fought in north Kerry remarked wistfully of the War of Independence: ‘We didn’t handle them properly for their brothers were in the IRA. In August 1920, the RIC were beating up the [Black and] Tans … we should have been able to pull the RIC our way if we had worked it properly.’12 The RIC was disbanded after independence. But the wounds of death were not forgotten. Not by those who loved the dead. Or by those who killed them. Tobias O’Sullivan was shot on Church Street in Listowel, near the house where my father grew up. He died at the hands of my grandmother’s comrades in the IRA. Hannah never spoke to me of his death or indeed of her comrades who died at the hands of the police and army. But decades after the killing, the shade of District Inspector O’Sullivan lingered in the hidden memories of Church Street. The dead have a way of coming back, if they ever went away at all.
II
The day I donned my first uniform was one of the happiest in my life, and I felt that Dublin belonged to me as I swaggered down Grafton Street with my black cane stick, gloves neatly under my shoulder strap and my whistle chain across my breast.13
Constable Jeremiah Mee
Tobias O’Sullivan stood at around six feet and was sturdy with wavy dark hair and a thick moustache. A photograph of him in the last year of his life shows him gazing at the camera with a dogged expression. He came from the same Catholic faith and the same rural poverty as his assassins. But he had chosen to defend the existing order and for this his compatriots were ready to kill him.
His family traced their roots to the Gaelic lordship of O’Sullivan Beare, who had fought the English until he was forced into exile in 1603 and was murdered fifteen years later, apparently by an English spy, as he left mass in Madrid. The family believed their ancestors had retreated north-west with O’Sullivan Beare after the battle of Kinsale in County Cork in 1602, when the forces of Elizabeth I defeated a combined Irish and Spanish force, presaging the death of the Gaelic order and the triumph of colonial power. According to family lore, the O’Sullivans fought on and were present at Aughrim in County Galway when their leader Donal Cam O’Sullivan defeated a larger English-led army in January 1603. These were the stories of resilience and hardiness that were told to the young Tobias O’Sullivan. He grew up in this Irish-speaking district believing he had inherited the blood of warriors.
Tobias was one of nine children born in Cornamona, County Galway, of a small farmer whose wife, Tobias’s mother, died in childbirth when the boy was just four years old. They lived on twenty-six acres but Tobias’s father had known great hardship: he was seven years old when the potato crop failed and the Famine followed. Tobias would have heard stories of the catastrophe.
‘The very dogs which had lost their masters or were driven from their homes became roving denizens of this district,’ reported an English land surveyor at the time; they ‘lived on the unburied or partially buried corpses of their late owners and others, and there was no help for it, as all were prostrate alike, the territory so extensive, and the people so secluded and unknown’.14
In fact Tobias’s own grandfather, Patrick O’Sullivan, died of cholera during the Famine. He was tending livestock on the Durrus peninsula and, knowing he was dying, sent word back not to fetch him. The O’Sullivans buried him on Inchagoill, a scarred island on Lough Corrib. At the height of the Famine the area also saw a concerted effort to convert Catholics to Protestantism, with considerable sectarian animosity between elements of the two churches. The evictions that accompanied the Famine, and escalated in its aftermath, deepened the alienation. As late as November 1875, ten families were forced off the land near Oughterard, eighteen miles from the O’Sullivans; among them was an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack on hearing that he was to be made homeless. When the RIC were called in to enforce the eviction one officer had hot coals poured down his back. Thirty men and women were injured by a subsequent police bayonet charge. By 1880 meetings of the Land League in the area were drawing crowds of more than five thousand people to the slogan ‘land for the landless people, land for the children of men’.* An English traveller wrote that ‘the law was ignored and agrarian crime respected and unpunished’. How can ‘this almost universally disaffected tone be changed into one of content and loyalty?’ he asked.15
The young Tobias would have been aware of the complicated history of the police in the area. The Irish Constabulary were obliged to enforce the law of the land. They took part in evictions. They infiltrated and informed on secret anti-government societies. But Tobias was one among many thousands of Irishmen who signed up to the ranks of the police. Many hundreds of thousands of others joined the Irish regiments of the British Army. Without them, the writ of Britannia, from Ireland to the empire’s most far-flung borders, would have been hard to maintain. It was a choice made by members of my mother’s family too, as we will see. The O’Sullivan family had strong police links. Tobias’s older brother Bernard spent eight years in the RIC and became an inspector of police in Jamaica. Another brother rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army. Two of his cousins would become RIC sergeants in Limerick.
Tobias O’Sullivan and his wife, Mary, known to her family as May (Desiree Flynn)
Tobias O’Sullivan was an achiever. In the national exams for sergeant in 1910 he came second in Ireland. Growing up, he would have heard stories of the bravery of a local man, John Purcell, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Neighbours’ sons were far more likely to have joined the British Army than a militant nationalist organisation. Besides, the ranks of the Crown forces offered rare escape from rural poverty. The Connaught Rangers regiment recruited heavily from the young men of the region, and throughout the nineteenth century fought in wars across the British Empire.
Why did young men join the police? At home the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary offered upward mobility. There was strong competition for positions. Tobias O’Sullivan joined the police with his two brothers and a cousin. My maternal great-grandfather made the same choice with his three brothers. For many young men in rural Ireland the RIC constable was accepted as a pillar of authority and respectability. Even after the
upheavals of the Land War the commanding position of the police sergeant in village and town seemed immutable. ‘They all went to him for everything,’ one officer remarked, ‘he was the chief advisor and all.’16 The police constable’s salary was equivalent to that of the bank clerk, the civil servant and the schoolteacher, but the prospects of advancement were better. And while the young schoolteacher and bank clerk would be confined within the narrow space of a classroom or behind a counter, the police constable could get out in the open air, meeting people from town and country. RIC constables had to read and write, and their literacy gave them an additional measure of respectability. There were also other advantages such as the fact that uniforms and boots were supplied free, and married men received a lodging allowance. They were also an armed police force, although in the years before the Revolution they rarely carried their weapons on patrol.
When O’Sullivan joined at the turn of the century the make-up of the force represented the sectarian reality in Ireland: eighty per cent of the constables were Catholic, but Catholics only made up ten per cent of the district and county inspectors. The leadership was dominated by Protestants; the strong Catholic middle class was still excluded from the upper echelons of the state security apparatus. A university education could not break this glass ceiling. No such restrictions existed in the colonies, however. A bright Catholic boy like Michael O’ Dwyer, for instance, one of fourteen children of a farmer in County Tipperary, could rise to become Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in which role he imposed martial law and defended his subordinate’s role in the massacre of between 400 and 1,000 Sikh civilians at Amritsar. (O’Dwyer lost his job and ultimately his life. A Sikh tracked him down and killed him in London twenty-one years later.)
As the twentieth century opened, most Irishmen thought their position within the empire was settled. There was certainly enough consent from the governed for Her Majesty’s police to enforce the law largely unhindered. During Queen Victoria’s three-week visit to Ireland in April 1900 she had delighted in the ‘endless streets full of enthusiastic people’ in Dublin and the great fireworks display that lit the skies over the city.17 Later she entertained 52,000 children to a ‘Patriotic Children’s Treat’ in Phoenix Park.
Irish separatists demonstrated. W. B. Yeats denounced the royal visit and called attention to the plight of the Boers fighting ‘an empire that has robbed [them] of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers’. A year earlier, when the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain visited Trinity College Dublin, pro-Boer demonstrations turned into full-scale rioting. With a prescience that was generally lacking in Dublin Castle, Under Secretary for Ireland David Harrel warned that the Boer struggle created ‘this idea amongst the younger men of getting the possession of arms’.18 A cultural revolution was under way, encouraged by Yeats and Lady Gregory who wrote of Irish themes in English, and by Irish language activists seeking to overturn English influence in the cultural sphere. The future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, the son of a Protestant clergyman, deplored the ‘constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas’.19
But in those days a rural policeman like Tobias O’Sullivan was more likely to be preoccupied with disputes over rights of way and grazing, petty theft, illegal poitin distilling and prosecuting the owners of unlicensed livestock than with the dangers posed by nationalist agitators. By 1907 he was stationed in County Sligo where his name appears in court reports, a constable prosecuting groups of men involved in agitation against dairy farms. They were men of no property who sought fields in which to plant crops; they drove the cattle onto the roads, a symbol of wealth that lay perennially beyond their reach. My maternal great-grandfather, Patrick Hassett, was a thirty-year veteran of the police force by the time Tobias O’Sullivan joined up. A tall, sturdy figure with a piercing gaze, I know Patrick was physically brave. A newspaper report from 1895 refers to him as a man of ‘rare coolness and self-possession’ and describes how he killed a rabid dog with the stock of his rifle in order to save the life of a young boy.20
Yet the politics of the age seeped through. Two court cases from Patrick’s service speak of an Ireland more unsettled than the British understood. One afternoon in Cork city, towards the close of the nineteenth century, he, his brother and a fellow constable hailed a horse-drawn cab. They asked to be taken to a police barracks on the western fringe of the city. The driver was the worse for drink and, for reasons unknown, resentful of the police. As soon as they had climbed on board he drove the horse at a furious pace, causing a collision with another cart, carrying lumber. My great-grandfather and his comrades were thrown into the road. His brother John suffered a broken collarbone. But when Patrick Hassett made to arrest the driver a crowd gathered and began to jostle the police. My great-grandfather drew his sword. Then the chanting began: ‘Boycott the police!’ Constable Hassett emerged unscathed with his prisoner, but the newspapers would later describe how the case had caused ‘some stir in the city … when it was reported that a serious conflict took place between the police and the people’.21
Three years later in rural Waterford, Patrick was dispatched to arrest a land campaigner and local Home Rule councillor who had shot at a wealthy Catholic farmer. Patrick succeeded in disarming the assailant who told him: ‘God is on my side … I had every right to do it.’22 The fight was about land and the big farmer’s purchase of ground rented by the poorer man. Land and who lost it, who stole it, who worked it, who gained from it, was the marrow of my ancestors’ lives. As I travelled further I would discover in north Kerry, in the fields of my grandmother’s people, how nothing was more political than the ground beneath their feet.
My great-grandfather was lucky to have retired from the RIC by the time a choice had to be made about what kind of country he was willing to fight for. In his last years, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, there was a growing campaign to isolate policemen and their families from the communities in which they lived. The boycott chant he heard in Cork now echoed across rural communities. In 1897 the Gaelic Athletic Association, which attracted hundreds of thousands of young men to the sports of hurling and Gaelic football, banned police and soldiers from membership. Retired policemen faced discrimination in jobs controlled by nationalist town and county councils. When the War of Independence escalated the boycott extended to undertakers who were warned not to transport the bodies of dead policemen back to their home districts.
After the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, many policemen became conflicted about their role. The outbreak of guerrilla war in 1919 put the RIC directly in the firing line of the IRA. The first victims of the IRA were Irish policemen: eighteen were killed before the end of the year. By the middle of the following year more than fifty were resigning every week to avoid the violence. Policemen and their families were directly boycotted. Hundreds of remote police barracks were closed because they could not be defended. Scores of others were burned down.
Tobias O’Sullivan was the sergeant in charge of Athea barracks in County Limerick when it was closed in early 1920 and the police redeployed to more easily defended locations. The village was about eight miles from Listowel where he would be posted the following year. But first he was sent to the County Limerick town of Kilmallock which had a strong barracks in the heart of the town. Twenty years into his police career, O’Sullivan was determined not to be intimidated by the IRA. His resolve hardened in the face of the escalating campaign which branded men like him as traitors. An IRA poster in Cork in March 1920 was explicit in its threat: ‘Whereas the spies and traitors known as the Royal Irish Constabulary are holding this country for the enemy … we do hereby proclaim said spies and traitors, and do hereby solemnly warn prospective recruits that they join the RIC at their own peril. All nations are agreed as to the fate of traitors. It is the sanction of God and man.’23 Some police cooperated with the IRA. The flow of information from inside police barracks, and from the British administration’s
headquarters at Dublin Castle, was instrumental in the IRA’s successful targeting of spies and informers. Others looked the other way when confronted with information about IRA operations.
Yet the majority remained loyal. This was partly to do with tradition and discipline, and also the power of the status quo. Every previous rebellion in Irish history had been suppressed and life had always returned to a version of normal. To men like Tobias O’Sullivan the gunmen presented a vision of chaos, threatening the destruction of the more ordered world that had emerged from the anguish of the great Famine and the struggle for land. Late nineteenth-century British governments had been reformist. In the words of Irish chief secretary Gerald Balfour, they set about ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’. Still Home Rule within the empire was now promised, a perilous pledge given the obduracy of Ulster Unionists, but a distinct probability in some form in the early years of the twentieth century.
An Ireland run by the armed separatists would probably have horrified O’Sullivan. The British Empire had been shaken by the Great War but in 1920 nothing indicated that it was on the cusp of irreversible decline. Tobias O’Sullivan must have felt he was on the right side of history. His wife May went with him, into the heart of a war she knew could claim her husband’s life at any moment. When they married Ireland was already restive. But nobody then anticipated that revolution was looming. Tobias and May met at the Pattern Fair of Leenane, an ancient saint’s festival, held on the last weekend of September between his district near Oughterard and her home in the townland of Aghagower in County Mayo. Nearly twelve years older, he was handsome and would have radiated calm authority. Many years later the policeman’s granddaughter Desiree wonders aloud to me if he was reckless, knowing the dangers he faced. Of her grandmother she says: ‘She must have lived in terror.’24
