by Fergal Keane
My great-uncle Mick Purtill in his Free State army uniform (Purtill Family)
Her brother Mick fought in the countryside. He lived off the land, depending on the welcome of country people, hiding in dugouts and hay barns. The privations of life on the run ensured that this was a young man’s war. After an icy winter downpour, men might lie hidden under bushes for hours while the police and military searched the fields around them, or shiver in earthen dugouts, unable to light a fire for fear of giving away their positions. Most dugouts held no more than four men. The more comfortable had a corrugated iron roof with a hole for ventilation, camouflaged with sods of turf. Exhaustion overcame discomfort. ‘To fall asleep and remain so was always the least of our troubles, no matter where we were,’ remembered Seamus O’Connor; ‘no sooner did we lay down than we fell asleep and remained so until morning.’41 The men preferred to sleep in hay sheds because they were ‘warm and comfortable … apart from an occasional attack of hay insects which seemed to frequent some hay barns’.42 But they became too dangerous as searchers began to prod them with bayonets or to fire bullets into the stacks at random.
Searching the military archives I find the first record of my uncle Mick Purtill in action. On 13 March 1920 he and Con Brosnan and another boyhood friend, Con Dee, were sent to take part in an attack on Ballybunion RIC station. There were around sixty men and they met in a field outside the town. Later on they would be careful never to gather in such a big group near a town centre. Most were carrying shotguns or pistols. There were only four rifles. But there was a homemade mine which was to be used to blast an entrance to the barracks. A commander went through the ranks and divided the men up into five sections and sent them off to surround the barracks. Listen for the blast of a whistle, they were told. ‘That is when you fire. Not before. Two blasts means ceasefire. Three blasts means retire.’
Con Brosnan was sent to block roads around the town and forestall the arrival of Crown reinforcements. Mick Purtill and Con Dee went with one of the sections attacking the barracks. The novice gunmen were given an early example of how the war would affect civilians. A family living next to the barracks was ‘moved to safety’ so that the homemade mine could be used to blow down the wall between their living room and the barracks.43 How long had they been living there? How did they react? There is no further mention of them in the official account. In the end the bomb failed to explode, but the signal to fire was given anyway. Soon the IRA could see Very lights being blasted into the sky from the direction of Ballydonoghue police post. But they stayed where they were, shooting at the barracks until their ammunition was exhausted. It was the action of men with more courage and luck than military sense. They escaped before reinforcements could arrive. Con Dee remembered how ‘these barracks were but eight miles from my home [and] I had to be on the run from that time on’.44
Up to now the RIC in Listowel town had not been attacked. One constable recalled how they ‘did the usual routine police work and carried arms only at night. There was no interference with the people who went about their business and did not show any active animosity towards the police. There were no military in the town and no necessity for them.’45 Yet the men read the morning newspapers. They listened to the accounts coming in of killing elsewhere in the country. It was a matter of time before blood was spilled.
It would happen near Ballydonoghue, about a ten-minute walk from the Purtill homestead. On 3 May 1920, an RIC sergeant and two constables were cycling back from court in Listowel. Several IRA volunteers from Ballydonoghue were lying in wait behind the ditches on either side of the road. Mick Purtill is not named as being among the attackers but the men were all close comrades of his and it is highly likely he was present. Jack Ahern, the brother of Hannah’s childhood friend, May, was there and May herself acted as a lookout.
Sergeant Francis J. McKenna, a thirty-nine-year-old married man with three children, was making a journey he and his constables had made many times before. They were three Irishmen passing the time of the day in the spring weather, trusting still that the people of the area had no reason to want to kill them.* They came along the road, past a steep tree-lined bank, walking for the last time as country policemen, sure of their ground. According to one IRA man, the police were called on to surrender but ‘refused and attempted to draw their revolvers’.46 There were no witnesses to prove this one way or the other. The Ballydonoghue men opened fire at close range. McKenna was hit in the face by a shotgun blast, a hideous wound that obliterated his features and caused massive damage to the brain. He died at the scene. The two constables were wounded but survived; one of them managed to inflict a light wound on an attacker. May Ahern remembered that ‘going back I met my brother and I took a revolver and handcuffs from him’.47 These belonged to the dead sergeant.
There had been no killing on these rural roads of north Kerry since the Land War. But blood would now follow blood. The shooting of Sergeant McKenna brought searches and threats. A local priest, Father Curtayne, known to be an active Sinn Féiner, received a threatening letter telling him: ‘Prepare for your death, Black hand gang’.48 The letter was from the police who suspected the priest was in league with the killers.
Hannah Purtill was working in Listowel as a draper’s assistant. Besides providing a useful income the job gave her cover for moving between the town and country. Every day she cycled the four miles from her home in Ballydonoghue to work. The policemen on the roadblocks got used to her comings and goings, morning and evening.
One day she was walking around a corner in Listowel when she bumped into a studious-looking older man who smiled warmly and apologised. He had dark hair and eyes ‘full of devilment’ and she was lost to him in that moment – or so she told her daughters decades later. Bill Keane was a schoolteacher who had recently returned home from County Tipperary to take up a job near Listowel.
A few days later he got a message to her, asking if she would walk out with him – an invitation which meant exactly that and no more in this conservative rural community. They walked by the River Feale and through Gurtenard Wood. Hannah was taken by his courteous manner and his way with words. This was how their courtship developed. With words, a fine spring torrent of them, as Bill declaimed poetry, they followed the lazy course of the Feale upriver. They walked and laughed. He seemed to know everything about the town and he joked about the residents and their foibles as they passed the houses on Church Street, a long meandering thoroughfare of shops, public houses and private homes which ran parallel to open fields and woodland on one side, and the heart of Listowel on the other. Hannah was taken to meet his family, into the house on Church Street where Bill’s parents and his brother and sister lived, and where he would continue to live even when he and Hannah got married. Cheek by jowl. This was the way and Hannah knew she must accept it.
She could tell the Keanes were very different people to her own. They were different from most people. Out in Ballydonoghue there was always work to be done. The Purtills were constantly on the go, fixing and patching, labouring, digging and sowing, tending the livestock. The Keanes worked hard too. But they liked to talk. They were fond of drink and storytelling and there was an eccentric streak in them that could flower into wildness. They were what the country people might, affectionately, call ‘half-cracked’. Bill had a stock of books that he kept in a cupboard in the kitchen. His brother Dan lived up in the attic, accompanied, my father told me, by a tame jackdaw. He worked as a cattle jobber, a go-between who made deals with farmers bringing their livestock to market. His skills were much in demand but the revolutionary war was disrupting his business. Their sister, Juleanne, showed no inclination to leave the house on Church Street for marriage. She was a good-looking woman but rebuffed the advances of all callers. Both siblings were wary of the newcomer in their brother’s life, but Hannah Purtill was too preoccupied with the war and her love affair with Bill to pay too much attention to the personal dynamics on Church Street.
The Keanes lived cl
ose to Listowel police barracks, about one minute’s walk out the front door to the right, close enough to hear any commotion and to be kept awake at night by the distinctive noise of the Crossley Tender engines of the RIC and military. This proximity would not have escaped Hannah’s attention and she and her comrades in Cumann na mBan kept up the flow of weapons and messages to the IRA. They hid men on the run, like Liam McCabe, who had been injured fleeing from an ambush. McCabe had blood poisoning and needed to be treated in hospital. The women managed to smuggle him into Listowel hospital under cover for three months. They were helped by the nuns who ran the wards and whose militant piety would have daunted the most determined searchers. McCabe remembered that when more than a hundred Crown forces men surrounded the hospital, two nuns ‘helped me from my bed to a part of the hospital already searched and from there to the back of the Altar in another part of the hospital’.49 He was then spirited out to a safe house.
The local RIC were under relentless strain. During May the empty police hut near Ballydonoghue was set on fire. The vacated barracks at Lixnaw was burned down a few days later. So it went on across the county. Remote stations were being given up without a fight and trains going between Limerick and Tralee were held up. A company of troops from the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment was deployed to Listowel, but the government still held back from flooding Ireland with troops or launching a military offensive. To do so would be to acknowledge that revolutionary war was under way. Instead they sent in paramilitary police, offering their enemies a propaganda gift which would keep giving long into posterity.
* Between 1947 and 1957 the Irish state collected the testimony of 1,733 witnesses and participants to the revolutionary period. The aim was to create an oral history of the period leading from the foundation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 to the signing of the Truce in 1921. The interviews were carried out by army officers and civil servants working for the Bureau of Military History established by the Department of Defence. The statements were locked away until the last of the witnesses passed away in 2003. The material has helped to transform how Irish people view the period.
* Two previous Home Rule bills, in 1886 and 1893, had been defeated by Unionists and their allies, first in the House of Commons and then the House of Lords. The removal of the Lords veto power enabled Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to present a third Home Rule Bill in April 1912. This could now only be delayed by the Lords for up to two years, making the parliamentary passage of Home Rule appear inevitable.
* The IRB was the official name of the Fenians who had maintained their secret structures since the failure of the rebellions of the nineteenth century. It drew considerable organisational and financial support from the Irish diaspora in America. Its members dominated the leadership of the Easter rebels and the IRA during the War of Independence. Its tradition of secrecy created divisions in the Republican movement during the war against the British administration in Ireland. The Civil War of 1922–3 exposed the depth of internal resentments and the organisation disappeared from the political scene.
* The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 with the dedicated aim of promoting Irish as a spoken language and encouraging the growth of a national literature in the vernacular. The movement was open to all faiths and, in theory, was meant to be non-political. But from the outset it was home to a significant number of militant nationalists. The majority of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation were members of the league.
* The Gaelic Athletic Association is the most powerful cultural and sporting organisation in Ireland. It was founded in 1882 to promote the games of football, hurling, camogie and handball. The GAA has over 500,000 members. It banned soldiers and policemen from membership until 2001.
* Michael O’Rahilly was a son of the Irish middle class educated at the Jesuits’ Clongowes Wood College and then in New York where he studied to become a doctor. He was drawn to the idea of national rebirth implicit in the Cultural Revival. He gave himself the title ‘The O’Rahilly’ in emulation of those used by ancient Gaelic chieftains.
* James Fintan Lalor, Mar 1807–Dec 1849, was a leader of the Young Irelander movement which organised a brief rebellion in 1848. As a Republican theorist his writings profoundly influenced generations of nationalists.
* A few years earlier McKenna had given evidence against men who had been jailed for illegal military drilling. But the sentences were short – drilling was not a high offence at that stage in the conflict – and the men were quickly released. This day, however, McKenna and his constables were more likely to have been targeted for their weapons.It is also possible they were attacked because they had taken part in court proceedings. The IRA was attempting to disrupt normal courts. The Republican movement ran its own ‘Sinn Féin courts’ as part of the strategy of creating a parallel state ready to supplant the British.
5
Tans
And heedless of churches
and dead men’s bones
With an armoured car leading
And massed in vans
Come the ‘devil-may-cares’
Called the Black and Tans
RIC propaganda ballad, 1920
I
If you believed my father, they were the sweepings of Britain’s jails: to a man they were murderers, cut-throats and rapists in the long inglorious line of Elizabeth I’s pillagers, Cromwell’s butchers and the gibbet-bearing redcoats. The Black and Tans could match them all for cruelty. I knew my father was given to hyperbolic declarations but he was only reflecting a national orthodoxy from which no substantial strain of political opinion demurred. My grandmother Hannah, in one of her rare comments about the war, called them ‘bad hoors’ who ‘treated us like peasants’. They were intended as ready to fight reinforcements for the exhausted Royal Irish Constabulary and many among the ten thousand who served were recruited from the ranks of military demobbed after the Great War. The name Black and Tan came from the fact that the police had insufficient supplies of the RIC uniform and so the new recruits were dressed in a mismatch of police dark green and military light khaki, a blend that reminded some Munster wit of the coats of a pack of hunting dogs named ‘the Black and Tans’.
The first of them arrived in March 1920. Very soon after there were reports of drunkenness and abuse of civilians. Even British troops regarded the Tans as men to be avoided. Private Arthur Robinson from the East Yorkshire Regiment went into a pub with a comrade only to be confronted by a drunken Tan. ‘He was drunk and he fired between us … we went for him and he cleared off … he was a big man. Some of them had big heads. That was their attitude.’1 In British Army accounts there is a consistent theme: the temporary constables in the Black and Tans operated outside the rules; they were ‘a pretty rough and tough lot’ whose culture was ‘to shoot first and ask questions afterwards’.2 Horace Todman was a teenage bugler with the South Wales Borderers when he was sent to Ireland as part of the army. On his first night in the country a body was brought in to the barracks, ‘very grey, a man of about thirty in ordinary clothes [with] a very neat little bullet wound in his head’.3 Because of a lack of space, Todman spent the night in the same room as the corpse. He remembered the Tans being ‘really hated by the local people … [and] our own people didn’t like them’.4
Tans in Dublin (Bettmann/Getty Images)
The Black and Tans were followed in July by a self-contained paramilitary force recruited from among ex-officers. An advertisement in the London Times appealed to former army officers who had ‘Courage, Discretion, Tact and Judgement’ to join a new ‘Corps d’elite’: the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were offered £1 a day and generous leave. A high proportion of this new force were men who had risen through the ranks of the military during the Great War. Unlike the Tans, the ‘Auxies’ were meant to bring the war to the IRA. In theory they were a division of the RIC but in practice they operated as an independent strike force. They were the first of the counter-insurgency forces of the colonial wars of the
twentieth century and many would go on to serve in Palestine during the Arab revolt. The public tended to regard them with the same contempt as the Tans. The IRA learned to fear them.
One regular British officer, who served in Ireland and later commanded former Auxiliaries in Palestine, called them ‘a bit rough’ but ‘a magnificent crowd of men’ who had resorted to harsh measures after seeing awful sights such as ‘friends murdered and stuffed down a drain’.5 Brigadier John Rymer-Jones was a veteran of the Western Front himself and conceded that it was a mistake sending men who had been immersed in the horror of the trenches straight into a war of ambush among civilians. ‘I think the trouble is that when you have had a war like that,’ he later reflected, ‘you should avoid if at all possible putting those same people into a position where they are being attacked by Sinn Féiners … or IRA … If you have been through a long war … you take it as an insult if people are attacking you.’6
