by Fergal Keane
In later life, as a journalist, he revealed the horror of the anti-Semitic pogrom at Kishinev in the tsarist empire in 1903. He arrived in Kishinev ‘a striking figure with a black beard, armless sleeve, and trilby hat’, and set about interviewing the survivors and witnesses.27 His journalism seethed with righteous indignation but was always supported by a meticulous attention to the facts. Davitt came across a house where a young girl had been raped and murdered: ‘The entire place littered with fragments of the furniture, glass, feathers, a scene of the most complete wreckage possible. It was in the inner room (in carpenters shed) where … the young girl of 12 was outraged and literally torn asunder … the shrieks of the girl were heard by the terrified crowd in the shed for a short while and then all was silent.’28 His reporting created an international outcry.
He also went to South Africa as a correspondent during the Boer War, where he felt conflicting emotions as he encountered British prisoners of war: ‘[I felt] a personal sympathy towards them as prisoners; a political feeling that the enemy of Ireland and of nationality was humiliated before me and that I stood in one of the few places in the world in which the power of England was weak, helpless and despised.’29
In Ireland, Davitt had started the Land League campaign with the alluring slogan: ‘The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’. Huge meetings were held across the country during the late nineteenth century in support of what became known as ‘the Three Fs’: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. Predictably the agitation brought a return of violent customs in the north Kerry countryside. The targets were not only the old Protestant landlord class. Rural Ireland now had a large body of Catholic bigger, or ‘strong’, farmers, who became targets of the League.
At the height of the land agitation, in the crucial years 1879–85, the colonial government was forced to install a permanent military garrison in Listowel. A bad landlord, a greedy big farmer, might expect retribution in the form of boycott, or a visit from ‘Captain Moonlight’ or the Moonlighters – agrarian raiders who hocked cattle and burned hay barns. Catholics who rented land from others who were evicted or who paid rent in defiance of a boycott were frequent targets. The French writer Paschal Grousset met a man in north Kerry in 1887 whose ears had been mutilated and whose cattle had had their tails docked. The man’s crime was to have accepted work on a boycotted farm. ‘Let a farmer, small or great, decline to enter the organisation,’ wrote Grousset:
or check it by paying rent to the landlord without the reduction agreed to by the tenantry … or commit any other serious offence against the law of the land war, he is boycotted. That is to say he will no longer be able to sell his goods, to buy the necessities of life; to have his horses shod, corn milled, or even exchange a word with a living soul within a radius of fifteen to twenty miles of his house. His servants are tampered with and induced to leave him, his tradespeople shut their doors in his face, his neighbours compelled to cut him … people come and play football in his oat fields, his potatoes are rooted out: his fish or cattle poisoned; his game destroyed.’30
And if he refused to accede to the threats? Grousett put it starkly: ‘Then his business is settled. Someday or other, he will receive a bullet in his arm, if not in his head.’31
Another man, who had shaken the hand of a hated landlord, was forced to wear a black glove on that hand. A seventy-two-year-old writ-server had his left ear sliced off. The land agent S. M. Hussey was forced out of the area after his home was destroyed by dynamite in 1884. There were sixteen people in the house at the time. Miraculously no one was hurt. ‘To show how matters stood,’ he wrote, ‘one of my daughters reminds me that I gave her a very neat revolver as a present, and whenever she came back from school she always slept with it under her pillow.’32 Hussey aroused particular loathing because of a rent rise intended to pay for a £100,000 mansion for one of his landlord clients, and the burning down of several evicted tenants’ houses. The land agent for Lord Listowel, Paul Sweetnam, evicted the O’Connell family at Finuge for non-payment of rent, as a contemporary report described.* ‘When Mr O’Connell came on the scene the eviction was almost completed … He had no place to shelter himself or his family. He came into town and asked the agent for a night’s lodging in the home from which he was evicted. The agent refused.’33
The bigger Catholic farmers watched the violence with alarm. The attackers were nearly always the ‘men of no property’, the rural underclass made up of the sons of small farmers or farm labourers. The land campaigners promised them a stake in the soil they worked. Land would be redistributed. By the beginning of 1880 worsening agricultural prices and poor weather reduced many of the peasantry in the area to destitution. The horror of famine loomed once more. A letter from the organisers of hunger relief in Ballybunion, about five miles from the Purtills, described how the ‘surging crowds of deserving and naked poor who throng the streets every day seeking relief show unmistakably that dire distress prevails in the locality and that unless immediate relief be given and held on for some time there can be no alternative but the blackest Famine … the state of our poor is hourly verging on absolute destitution and the condition of the poor children attending our schools deplorable’.34
Once more a network of secret groups sprang up across the countryside to mete out the people’s justice. Informers were despised. A parallel system of justice with its own courts was set up to adjudicate on land disputes. Ominously, in parts of north Kerry the Royal Irish Constabulary were increasingly identified as the landlord’s enforcers. ‘They have thrown the whole thing on the police,’ a report noted, ‘who for the past six months have acted more in the capacity of herds[men] than policemen and the result is the men are becoming completely worn out, disgusted in their duty and demoralised.’35
The hour of the night raiders was back.
The Moonlighters roamed the country in disguise. They raided to exact retribution and to arm themselves with seized guns. The Catholic farmer John Curtin, a senior local figure in the Land League, was murdered in l885 in south Kerry. One of the attackers was shot during the raid and Curtin’s daughters gave evidence that led to the conviction of some of the Moonlighters. As a consequence, the family was damned. They were booed and jeered when they drove on the local roads. All their servants left. An old man who had herded their cattle for thirty years was too afraid to remain. When they went to mass ‘a derisive cheer was raised by six or eight shameless girls … believing that the police won’t interfere with them’.36 The parish priest ‘never uttered a word in condemnation’. They were again assailed outside the church. The priest, Father Patrick O’Connor, explained that on a previous raid Curtin had surrendered a gun and ‘that if he had given up a gun they would not have hurt a hair on his head’.37 The following week the daughters were accompanied by twenty-five policemen and a representative of the Land League. But the presence of the man from the League made no difference. Stones were thrown. When he tried to address the crowd he was shouted down and afterwards said he owed his life to the police. A group of women ripped out the Curtin family pew and destroyed it in the church grounds. Curtin’s widow could neither sell nor leave. The sale was boycotted. Any prospective buyer was threatened with death. ‘I cannot live here in peace but they won’t let me go,’ she wrote. But the mother of one of the convicted men showed no compassion. ‘As long as I am alive and my children and their children live, we will try to root the Curtins out of the land.’38 The words have an obliterative violence, as if she were speaking of the destruction of weeds. The Nationalist MP John O’Connor sounded a note of hopelessness when he remarked that if the Curtin family was to be protected from the annoyances, to which he regretted they had been subjected, ‘it would have to be by other means than public denunciations of outrages’.39 Not for the last time in Irish history, political condemnations would mean nothing. After eighteen months of hostility the Curtins sold their farm for half of its value and left the area. Nobody, not the police, not the gentry, not the government,
could change the minds of their neighbours.
Near to Ballydonoghue, sixty-year-old John Foran was murdered in 1888 for renting the farm of an evicted man. The teenage Bertha Creagh, whose father acted as solicitor for several landlords, saw his killers planning their attack as she went for a walk. ‘I remarked on their evident seriousness to my brother,’ she wrote. Foran was a successful farmer and had gone to Tralee to hire extra help. When on his way home with his labourers and fourteen-year-old son, an assassin appeared out of the woods at a bend in the road and ‘fired from a six-chambered revolver, and lodged bullets in succession in Fohran’s [sic] body … the terrified boy, having waited to lay his dying father on the grass at the roadside, drove on to Listowel’.40 The murdered man was a survivor of the Famine and a contemporary account describes him as ‘being brave even to rashness – that the people of his district had a wholesome dread of himself and his shillelagh’.41 He had also endured four years of harassment – with police protection that had only recently been withdrawn at the time of the murder.
The investigation followed a familiar pattern. There were arrests and court hearings but nobody was convicted. The witnesses kept to the law of silence. In the time of my grandparents, the IRA would draw on those old traditions of silence and communal solidarity.
The Land League was denounced and Parnell and Davitt accused of fomenting violence. The League leaders knew how rural Ireland worked. Violence was not a surprise to them. Davitt condemned the murders but stressed the responsibility of history. ‘The condition and treatment of the poorer tenantry of Ireland have not been, and could not be, humanly speaking, free from the crime which injustice begets everywhere,’ he declared. ‘For that violence which has taken the form of retaliatory chastisement for acknowledged merciless wrong, I make no apology on the part of the victims of Irish landlordism. For me to do so would be to indict Nature for having implanted within us the instinct of self-defence.’42
With tough anti-coercion laws, and a gradual resolution of the land issues, violence abated. The Land War wound down. Parnell led a new campaign for Home Rule before he was destroyed by scandal. Davitt went off to become a journalist and then took a seat in the House of Commons. He dreamed of nationalising the land of Ireland but misunderstood entirely the character of rural Ireland. Only the land a man held for himself offered any security. By 1914, seventy-five per cent of Irish tenants were in a position to buy the land which they rented. They were assisted by British government loans. Labourers were helped by the building of cottages, each on an acre of land. The Purtills bought their own land. In time the sons of the family would move out and buy their own farms. When my cousin Vincent Purtill sold his 400-acre farm and retired he felt agitated. Without the land who was he and where was he? Eventually the stress got the best of him. He went and bought a small farm of twenty-four acres. ‘I need only walk out the door and I am walking on my land. I do it every day,’ he said.
By the early years of the twentieth century, Listowel seemed at peace. Violence was present but contained. It flared occasionally and just as quickly fell away. Tenant farmers used the law to challenge landlords. One case from the Ballydonoghue area in March 1895 shows how dramatically rural life had changed. George Sandes, a descendant of Cromwellian planters, was one of the most powerful landowners in the area. The town of Newtownsandes, about five miles from the Purtills, was named after his family. During the Land War, Sandes was such an unpopular figure that locals attempted to rename the town after one of the Land League leaders. He was a resident magistrate during those years
But in the new rural world forged by Parnell and Davitt, Sandes was no longer free to evict at will. When a farmer went to court to challenge his eviction Sandes lost and was ordered to pay damages.
Constitutional politics were again on the march and Home Rule was promised. My great-grandfather, Edmund Purtill, was listed as donating 1 shilling and sixpence to the cause of the Irish Party at Westminster. Enclosing a cheque for £32 from the parish, the Very Reverend John Molyneaux assured the party treasurer in London that there was not ‘in any parish in the South of Ireland a people more willing and anxious to generously support any movement which has for its object the interests of religion, and the happiness and prosperity of the people’.43 It may have been that Edmund Purtill harboured more radical sympathies and was donating money out of a desire to please the parish priest. But it is more likely that he believed Home Rule within the British Empire was the surest guarantee of stability. The Purtills were still poor but they had a stake in the land. At that point in history, directly on the turn of the century, the majority of Irish Catholics took the same view. The area returned Home Rule MPs at successive elections. The Catholic hierarchy and most of the priests preached cooperation with the government. Nothing in the immediate circumstances of my grandmother’s childhood would have made her or her brothers likely converts to revolution. But there was a desire for change brewing in Ballydonoghue and across Ireland and Europe. The times were about to be disturbed by restless nationalisms that would usher in the end of the age of empire, from the Danube to the River Feale, and make rebels of my forebears.
* The local historian John D. Pierse has published figures showing a fall of 481 in the number of residents in the district in the years 1841–1851 – nearly 22 per cent of the population.
* The writer Catherine E. Foley, an expert on Irish dancing tradition, unearthed the death certificate of ‘Muirin’ in her research on the effects of the Famine on the music and dance culture of the rural poor. She describes him as being fifty-five at the time of his death. ‘Step dancing was seen as a skill to be mastered,’ she writes, ‘a skill that showed individuals had control and mastery over their minds and bodies.’ See Catherine E. Foley, Cultural Memory, Step Dancing, Representation and Performance: An Examination of Tearmann and The Great Famine, in Traditiones (Llubljana 2015).
* Sweetnam came from a Protestant farming background in west Cork. He was an unpopular figure with many in the locality because of his work instigating prosecutions for non-payment of rent for Lord Listowel, and newspapers recorded instances where men who tried to intimidate him ended up in court. In 1899, long after the Land War ended, he appeared in court seeking to evict a Mary Brennan from a caretaker’s house on Lord Listowel’s lands. He would also appear dramatically in the story of District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan.
4
Revolution
Soldiers are we whose lives are pledged to Ireland …
Peadar Kearney, The Soldier’s Song, 1907
I
To approach a man near his home where his wife and young children are waiting for him, to fire enough bullets into his head and chest to make sure he is dead, and to do this when you have never killed before, and to live with this for fifty years and more and never speak of it: how does a man, a man like you, live with this? Others in Ireland will tell war stories. They will boast of their exploits. Not you. There will be annual parades to attend. You will become part of the national myth of origin that cries out for heroic deeds. But you are remembered as a modest, decent man.
Con Brosnan: hero of the good clean fight against the evil of the Black and Tans. But you know how it really was. It is all there in memory, whenever war comes back: his face down in the space between the cart and the footpath, the blood thickening in the gutter, the children crying. You were brave in the Revolution and a man of peace when it was needed after the Civil War. You were well loved by your own people. For you the act of killing was no lightly taken enterprise. It stays locked inside you for nearly thirty years until the men from the Bureau of Military History came calling.* What you told them was true: you were following orders that came all the way from headquarters in Dublin. But what was the story you told yourself down the years? You were good friends with my uncle Mick Purtill and his sister Hannah. You lived in a neighbouring village, shared the hardship of the Tan war with them, fought on the same side in the Civil War, and after that war you once threaten
ed to shoot a man who had cursed the name of Mick Purtill. ‘The Purtills and Brosnans were fierce close’ was how your son put it.1
A neighbour of yours, the poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice, told me that every day you went to church to pray for the souls of the men you killed. The District Inspector will not be the only killing in which you play a part. It reminded me of something a friend of mine, a Special Forces soldier, a man who killed at close quarters, told me once. He would never let his son join the army, he said. ‘I would never want him to see the things I keep locked up in my head.’
Cornelius – ‘Con’ – Brosnan and Mick Purtill were members of the Irish Volunteers. My grandmother would join the women’s wing, Cumann na mBan, which had been founded in 1914. I believe Hannah was nineteen when she joined; Con Brosnan was the same age when he joined up in 1917.
Con Brosnan, revolutionary and footballing legend (Brosnan Family)
Like the Purtills, Con had grown up on a scrap of land, the son of a small farmer who also ran a small public house in Newtownsandes, now called Moyvane – the ‘small, sleepy straggle of a village about seven miles from Listowel in north Kerry, and off the main road’.2 To get there from Ballydonoghue I drove the long, straight small roads across the plain. I saw the smallness of the killing zone and how the flat terrain with its sparse woodland offered no decisive advantage to guerrillas. I imagine how I would read this land as a war correspondent; the habit is ingrained in me now, a perverse filter through which topography is measured for the cover it provides and the menace it conceals.
There are no steep mountains, plunging valleys; there are no acres of trees or dense scrubland that come up to the roadside for mile after mile. I think of the long drives I have made through ambush zones around the world, my mouth dry and stomach knotted knowing the killers could be as close as the high grass brushing the side of the car. Once in Rwanda I saw them, armed with AK 47s, standing in the middle of the road, surprised by us as we came around the corner of a jungle track. There was a split second when they might have turned on us but they ran into the bush, the element of surprise lost. We turned around and went back, survivors by the grace of chance. So often in armed convoys in guerrilla territory I have strained to see who might be hiding in the passing treelines, or to hear the first shot that would signal an ambush; I have spent fruitless hours calculating whether it was safest to travel in the front, middle or end of a convoy. With enough ambushers and a mine in the road the chances of escape are pretty small, as good friends of mine have found out in Africa, the Balkans and Iraq. Here in north Kerry there was a lot of hiding in plain sight for the men of the IRA. It was in the homes of the people that they found their hiding places, and in barns and dugouts meticulously camouflaged under turf and ricks of hay.
