by Fergal Keane
The Brosnan family pub sits in the middle of the town, on a corner beside the road that runs down the gradually levelling land towards Listowel. Con’s son Gerry still lives here and his grandson is a farmer nearby. The flags of the Kerry football team and the Irish Republic hang from stands on the pub’s gable wall. The colonial name of Newtownsandes has been erased. Today the village is called Moyvane – from the Irish for the ‘middle plain’. In his deposition to the military historians, Con Brosnan still referred to it as Newtownsandes. He was born there in 1900 and went to the local national school and then to secondary in Listowel. His schooling ended when he was sixteen, the summer after the Easter Rising.
There was no one reason why Hannah and Mick and Con Brosnan took up arms against the British Empire. Youth was part of it, as was the extraordinary moment in world history when they came of age. They lived in one of those periods when history had slipped its bonds. The impossible became imaginable and then possible and they saw a chance of belonging to something larger than themselves. Events propelled them forward until they became agents of change themselves. It was part politics of the moment and in part the resurrection of long-buried sentiment ignited by the Easter Rising and the events that followed. By 1913 a branch of the Irish Volunteers had been set up in Listowel. The Volunteer movement was a broad coalition that included militant separatists as well as constitutional nationalists devoted to Home Rule. A nationalist private army on such a scale might never have existed but for a dramatic escalation in tensions in Ulster.
By 1910 the dream for which my great-grandfather Edmund Purtill had contributed his shillings seemed to be coming to fruition. The Irish Party held the balance of power in Westminster and Home Rule was the price of their support for the government.* The possibility of nationalist advancement provoked a furious reaction from northern unionists whose response was to threaten civil war. They were encouraged by the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law. His words are worth remembering, coming as they did from the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. In July 1912 he told a rally at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’. This was no rush of blood to the head. A year later, on 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, Bonar Law again threatened treason when he told Ulster Protestants: ‘Whatever steps you may feel compelled to take, whether they are constitutional, or whether in the long run they are unconstitutional, you have the whole Unionist Party, under my leadership, behind you.’3 The Tory leader knew he was adding fuel to the growing fire. Anti-Home Rule agitation had a bloody history. When the first Home Rule bill was introduced in 1886 around fifty people were killed in Belfast, hundreds injured and scores of homes burned. In addition, Bonar Law and the government were well aware that the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1912, were arming and drilling to fight Home Rule.
I doubt that my relatives in Ballydonoghue thought much about the north before then. It was far away on a long train journey or by miles of bad roads. But the rise of the Ulster Volunteers electrified separatists in the south. They watched the British state do nothing to stop the import of weapons by the UVF. If the Ulster Protestants could have a militia to fight Home Rule the Irish nationalists should have an equal right to defend it. The formation of the Irish Volunteers in late 1913 created a second private army on the island. That December, in Listowel, the first meeting of the Irish Volunteers heard Mr J. J. McKenna, a local merchant, urge the locals to follow the example set by the Unionist leader, Edward Carson: ‘He has been going around so far preaching what some called sedition,’ said McKenna. ‘At all events he had been preaching the rights of the people of the North to defend what he called their rights, but whether they were rights or whether they were wrongs, he was urging on them to defend them in the way that God intended.’4 Another speaker said the Irish Volunteers wanted ‘no informers … no cads or cadgers [but] true, manly men’.5 Afterwards men and boys queued to place their right hand on the barrel of a gun and swear allegiance.
From the outset the Irish Volunteers meant different things to different factions. The Home Rulers led by Parnell’s successor John Redmond wanted a force ready to defend the new devolved government when it came into being and hoped the drilling and marching would take some of the steam out of more militant nationalists. But the militants were ahead of him and gradually infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Republican Brotherhood – the IRB – sought complete independence rather than Home Rule within the empire.* Separatist ideas in culture and sport had been growing since the end of the previous century.
In the rural areas like north Kerry the appeal to ‘de-Anglicise Ireland’ provoked a strong response. Music, dancing and language lessons sponsored by the Gaelic League became popular.* My grandfather Bill Keane was a member of the Gaelic League in Listowel and passed on a love of the Irish language to his children. But he was by nature a moderate who disdained cultural exceptionalism. He taught students who went on to join the British Army and those who joined the IRA and he could understand the motivations of both. I believe it was this which kept him from being involved with the more militarily ‘advanced’ nationalists who were organising in and around Listowel. Those with memories of the Fenian rebellion of 1867 held discussion groups with younger men and women. The Gaelic League sponsored essay competitions in Irish, with the Listowel branch asking for entries on subjects such as ‘Tillage over Grazing’, an innocent enough-looking topic until you remember the bitterness of the small tenant farmers who saw their plots taken over by the big cattlemen in the decades after the Famine. Violence on the land still flared sporadically. In 1909, the Kerry Sentinel reported a ‘shooting affair of an extraordinary nature’ near Ballydonoghue, after a group of around twenty turf cutters were fired on by armed and masked men.6 The workers were ‘scattered … in all directions, some of them in their wild stampede falling into bog holes’.7
The general sense of unease would have affected young men like Mick Purtill and Con Brosnan. For both, sport was a likely route into a more militant nationalism. They were enthusiastic Gaelic footballers in a county where a good player was the hero of his locality. The Gaelic Athletic Association banned anyone who served the Crown from joining and was heavily infiltrated by separatists.* At least two prominent Listowel GAA figures were also leading members of the local Irish Volunteers. A Listowel delegate to the GAA County Board urged that rifle clubs should be affiliated to the organisation. He appears to have been listened to. ‘Kerry, true to its traditions, has made a good start,’ an article in the National Volunteer declared.8 The separatists reached into Listowel’s schools for recruits. At St Michael’s College, where Con Brosnan went to school, at least four boys were sworn into the ranks of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
By the spring of 1914 the crisis around Home Rule was threatening to escalate into armed conflict. In March, in response to reports that the military would be used to suppress a Unionist rebellion, officers at the Curragh camp outside Dublin declared they would refuse to enforce Home Rule, a stance supported by senior generals. The following month the UVF imported more than 20,000 rifles and ammunition without any government action to stop them and all, according to the Belfast Telegraph, ‘accomplished with celerity, yet without fuss or splutter, because it was done in pursuance of a well-formed plan, executed as perfectly as it had been preconceived’.9 The membership of the Listowel Volunteers rose dramatically in the aftermath. From a few dozen men and boys at the outset, the organisation now numbered around two hundred.
At the end of July 1914 nationalists landed weapons at Howth outside Dublin. British troops who had been called out to seize the weapons fired on a hostile crowd in Dublin, killing four people. The island was slipping towards civil war.
Across Europe the old bonds that guaranteed peace between empires were fraying, as alliances that had once maintained a balance of power confronted each other. Young men were rall
ying to the banner of national self-determination from Bohemia to Tralee Bay. From vastly different national standpoints writers such as Rupert Brooke and Patrick Pearse employed a language of redemptive blood sacrifice. In Ireland the exhumed animosities of generations – territorial, sectarian, social, cultural, economic – simmered until all was placed in abeyance by the opening shots of cataclysm in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Imperial armies mobilised. Home Rule was postponed and the UVF marched off to fight in Flanders.
The immediate threat of civil war between nationalist and loyalist armies abated. In north Kerry, as in the rest of the country, the war split the Irish Volunteers. Men from Listowel marched off to the front in the uniform of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, urged on by John Redmond, who declared that the ‘interests of Ireland – of the whole of Ireland – are at stake in this war … undertaken in the defence of the highest principles of religion and morality’.10 As Redmond framed it, the best means to secure Home Rule was to convince the Unionists that southern Catholics could be as loyal as they were. Militant nationalists were immediately scornful. Redmond reckoned on a swift Allied victory, not the butchery that, by 1916, had brought so much anguish to the homes of those who marched off to war at his urging. It would be his undoing and the death knell of the constitutional project.
Far more men from around Listowel and Ballydonoghue died fighting in Belgium, France, Gallipoli, Egypt, Jutland and Salonika than would die in the war against Britain that was to come. Out of the 147 north Kerry men killed in action in the Great War, six were neighbours of the Purtills in Ballydonoghue and sixty-three hailed from Listowel, including Edward Stack, who lived near the Keanes on Church Street and who died two months into the war, and the youngest of the north Kerry dead, Peter Flavin, just sixteen when he was killed in Belgium. The Revolution would sweep them all from public memory. The Listowel writer Cyril Kelly, whose grandfather was an RIC man based in the town, recalled family memories of the tensions of the period when Volunteers and Britannia competed for the loyalties of young men:
The time, 1914, when North Kerry was beginning to ferment, when unrest was growing restless, when indigenous forces of sedition were becoming insidious, like fairy thorn; resinous roots snaking into the surrounding hinterland, places with unpronounceable names, Currachatoosane, Knockanasaig, Gortagleanna, places where – according to intelligence reports – men were being inducted into the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
Hadn’t Ernest Blythe, a full time organiser of the Volunteers, brazenly visited Listowel, exhorting the local company to resist the Redmonites, resist the RIC, those shoneens who threatened that old-age pensions would be withdrawn from relatives of anyone parlaying with civil disobedience?11
II
For Ireland, for Ireland, for Ireland all,
Our ranks we band in might:
From her four seas we at Ireland’s call
In Ireland’s cause unite,
And march to the hosting of Gael and Gall,
To claim our Freedom’s right.
Thomas MacDonagh, ‘Marching Song of the Irish Volunteers’, 1913
An IRA man from close to where my grandmother lived recalled that when ‘John Redmond called on the Volunteers to defend the shores of Ireland there was a split in the company which soon after ceased to exist’.12 Militant nationalists had no interest in defending the shores of Ireland by fighting in France. But for two years nothing much happened on the home front. Patrick Pearse and his comrades were a minority within a minority of advanced nationalists, but were already planning an insurrection. Early in 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood began to secretly prepare, though the plans for armed action were kept secret from many senior figures in the Volunteers. A friend of Mick Purtill, who later fought alongside him in the IRA, recalled how the IRB came to his village ‘seeking men who would go into action at short notice in the event of a rebellion’.13 Drilling began again. But in the run-up to the Easter Rising no instructions came for the Ballylongford company to take part. Republican strategists kept their plans a closely guarded secret, which led to some of the subsequent chaos. To facilitate a national insurrection, a German ship would land arms in Tralee Bay. A train would disperse rifles to Volunteer units from Kerry through Limerick, Clare and to Galway. In Listowel, the rebels planned to seize the town and cut all communications. But the plans went wrong. The German arms ship was seized by the Royal Navy and scuttled. Sir Roger Casement landed at Banna Strand near Tralee, but was captured almost immediately. Irish Volunteers leaders who had been excluded from the rebel plan had recently learned of it and were now committed to stopping what they considered a suicidal folly. They issued a countermanding order to units across the country. In Munster a north Kerry man drove desperately across the counties to try and stop mobilisation. Michael O’Rahilly from Ballylongford was a key figure in the national organisation of the Volunteers but he was not a member of the IRB or the faction that had planned the rebellion. His mission to call off the rebellion was a failure but he felt honour bound to join the rebels in the GPO in Dublin, declaring the whole enterprise as ‘madness but … glorious madness’.* ‘The O’Rahilly’, as he was called, was one of three local men killed fighting at the GPO in Dublin in 1916.
In Dublin the Rising lasted for six days and cost the lives of 485 people, the majority of them civilians, before British shelling and overwhelming numbers forced the surrender of the rebels. The capture of the arms ship meant there would be no new weapons for the Volunteers in Kerry or neighbouring counties. In Listowel the mobilised Volunteers were sent home. The Irish Volunteers were damned from the pulpits and told to go home to their families. The Bishop of Kerry warned of the dangers of civil war. Nineteen Kerry prisoners were sent to England. Nobody rioted in response to this. But then the British made their first great mistake. Fifteen leaders of the Easter Rising were executed. The echo of the firing squads was heard across north Kerry. On 11 May 1916, with executions still under way in Dublin, the prominent Home Rule MP, John Dillon, rose to his feet to excoriate the government of Herbert Asquith. It is one of the most prescient and powerful speeches in Irish history: ‘We are held up to odium as traitors by those men who made this rebellion, and our lives have been in danger a hundred times during the last thirty years because we have endeavoured to reconcile the two things, and now you are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood.’14
The following day the British executed the leader of the socialist Irish Citizen Army, James Connolly, who was so badly wounded he faced his firing squad strapped into a chair, and Seán Mac Diarmada, who had long argued for a blood sacrifice to revive Irish separatism.
A year after the Rising came a significant indication of the political upheaval that had been unleashed. Across the Shannon in County Clare, Éamon de Valera of Sinn Féin won a landslide victory in a by-election caused by the death in Flanders of Captain Willie Redmond MP, the brother of John Redmond, leader of the nationalist MPs at Westminster. De Valera, who had campaigned on the slogans ‘A Vote for Ireland a Nation, a Vote Against Conscription, a Vote Against Partition, a Vote for Ireland’s Language’, and ‘for Ireland’s Ideals and Civilization’, had only escaped execution after the Rising because his court-martial came at a time of growing public and international criticism. The constitutionalists had held the seat for over thirty years. To celebrate de Valera’s victory, Republicans marched in Ballybunion, a few miles from the Purtills’ homestead. A stone thrown through the RIC barracks window there was met with a volley of fire. More stones were thrown and the ensuing police volleys killed a local member of the Volunteers. Sinn Féin sent a prominent lawyer from Dublin to investigate but the policeman involved in the fatal shooting escaped justice. ‘This Ballybunion episode was the first manifestation of real savagery by the police,’ concluded Charles Wyse-Power, ‘and there is no doubt that it was the East Clare election that brought this out in them.’15
Hannah and Mick Purtill felt their world changing. In those days, said my father, Hannah �
�couldn’t be bested. When her mind was set it was set.’ She may have been influenced by her childhood neighbour May Ahern who became an active Republican in 1917 and first drew attention to herself by stealing the bicycles of two RIC men attending a Gaelic football match in Ballydonoghue. In the beginning, before the first fighting between Republicans and the state, the teenagers organised ‘dances, raffles and plays for funds’.16 But the founders of Cumann na mBan believed women were meant for tougher work than making tea and sandwiches for the men. In her memoir of the period, the veteran activist Mary Colum wrote how the women ‘would collect money or arms, we would learn ambulance work, learn how to make haversacks and bandoliers … we would practise the use of the rifle, we would make speeches, we would do everything that came in our way – for we are not the auxiliaries or the handmaidens or the camp followers of the Volunteers – we are their allies.’17
