by Fergal Keane
However, Tobias O’Sullivan stood by his men and denied that Lawlor had been struck. ‘I can find no evidence that any of the men under my command were in collision with civilians on the 1st Jan. 1921,’ he declared. ‘I examined the men on patrol duty that night and found no persons to support the truth of that rumour. I reported the matter and asked for an inquiry into it.’36
Two more policemen repeated the denial. Unlike Tobias O’Sullivan they had been present. A Sergeant William Watson said that after being searched, Lawlor ‘was ordered to go home, and he proceeded in the direction of his home. There were six other constables and myself present. I saw no blow struck.’37 The court of inquiry found that Lawlor died as a result of a blow from ‘person or persons unknown’ but that ‘no blame attaches in the matter to the Military authorities or to any member thereof’.38 The local army commander, Captain John Bidwell Watson of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, the veteran of the Great War in East Africa, commanded the court of inquiry. After the miseries of German East Africa he would have seen Listowel as a comparatively benign place when the troops first arrived the previous year. He was respected in the town, having put at least one of his soldiers on a charge for stealing cigarettes. But by now Watson knew where real power lay. Not with the army or with politicians in distant Westminster, but with the RIC and the local command of the Auxiliaries. He declared the witness evidence unreliable ‘as the wound is on the right side of the head and not the back where the blow is said to have been struck’.
The police were not officially blamed but a note scribbled on the official file says responsibility for the death lay ‘probably with the RIC’. The police had killed young Lawlor and everyone knew it. That was the nature of the war in Ireland in 1920–1. In the spirit of rampant viciousness of that winter, the Tans later shot Lawlor’s father’s cow as he brought it to pasture.
Three weeks later the IRA decided to try again to kill Tobias O’Sullivan.
In the days before, Con Brosnan and the rest of the killing squad were each given a revolver and seven or eight rounds of ammunition. None of the men tasked with killing the District Inspector had fired at a living target before. They took a single practice shot each to test the weapons and ammunition. For such inexperienced men to be sure of killing they needed to be close to O’Sullivan. The chances of getting killed, wounded, or caught and subsequently executed were high. The District Inspector was known to have bodyguards who accompanied him to and from the barracks every day. Con Brosnan recalled that they ‘had been informed of his movements by a number of scouts in Listowel who had been put on his trail as soon as the order was received’.39
Two brothers, Robert and Patrick McElligott, ran the intelligence operation. Read nearly ninety years afterwards, Paddy McElligott’s account of the planning of the killing is chillingly spare. ‘I supplied a detailed account of O’Sullivan’s movements to my brother who planned the execution,’40 he said. He did not reveal who supplied the detailed timings of Tobias O’Sullivan’s walks to and from his home near the barracks. But whoever was keeping the daily watch sealed his fate as surely as the gunmen.
The IRA was by now confident that the majority of locals could be depended on to stay silent. Rising resentment of the Crown forces and the fear of being labelled a spy deterred all but the bravest, most financially desperate, or foolhardy, from passing on intelligence. As in every war there were many who privately wished the killing and the disruption of their lives would end. But such words could easily be interpreted as disloyal and cast suspicion. There were loyalists in and around Listowel. Most were Protestants or landed gentry, but not exclusively. An IRA volunteer derisively remarked of Charles Street that it was ‘well known for the pro-British type of people living in it’. By this he meant ex-servicemen, and police and military families. James Kane, a former RIC sergeant who lived on the town square, was viewed with suspicion. He was a fisheries inspector and his job was to catch poachers, an occupation that linked him with the courts system and which required him to patrol stretches of the River Feale. Who knew what he saw and reported on his patrols? Then there was Paul Sweetnam, the agent for Lord Listowel, who mixed freely with the military and traversed the countryside with a watchful eye. And Sir Arthur Vicars, who hosted fishing parties for young officers of the Crown.
On the night of 19 January, Jack Ahern stayed at Con Brosnan’s house in Newtownsandes. The two other north Kerry IRA men, Dan O’Grady and Jack Sheehan, were at their own homes. Brosnan and Ahern made their way into Listowel separately the following morning at about ten o’clock, Brosnan by bicycle. It was one of the mildest Januaries on record. There was no ice or frost. Con would have felt the wind on his face as he pedalled down the road, the fields stretching before him towards the mountains and the sea.
In Listowel it was market day. There would already have been crowds of farmers and travelling salesmen on the streets. Around noon the four IRA men met at Stack’s, a public house about a hundred yards from the barracks and directly beside O’Sullivan’s home. According to Ahern it was known as ‘a friendly place for the boys’. They knew that O’Sullivan usually walked home for his lunch between half past twelve and one o’clock. Jack Sheehan was posted outside to watch and wait. When O’Sullivan appeared at the barracks gate, the scout would shadow him, walking ahead of the approaching policeman on the opposite side of the street. The men in the pub would see the scout and then rush outside to shoot O’Sullivan. The woman who ran the pub gave them drinks. On the threshold of killing, Ahern spoke to the others. ‘We all felt somewhat nervous … I said to Con Brosnan and Dan O’Grady: “We have a duty to perform and must do it.”’41
Just up the street, a couple of minutes’ walk, O’Sullivan’s wife, May, mother of his three young children, was at home waiting for her husband to return for his lunch.
* MacSweeney’s predecessor as Lord Mayor, Tomás MacCurtain, was shot by off-duty RIC men the previous March, as revenge for the IRA shooting of a policeman. To avenge MacCurtain, Michael Collins ordered the killing of RIC District Inspector Oswald Swanzy, whom an RIC informant had blamed for the assassination. Swanzy was shot dead in Lisburn, County Armagh, on 22 August 1920 by a gunman using MacCurtain’s own pistol. Just as was the case with the killing of Lieutenant Colonel Ferguson Smyth, the Swanzy assassination was followed by days of anti-Catholic rioting and the expulsion of Catholics from their homes and workplaces. The charred body of a Catholic man was found in a burned factory.
* Con Brosnan told the Bureau of Military History that he had helped guard the prisoner at Newtownsandes and that he was released after the intervention of the local parish priest. Brian OGrady went to Newtownsandes to secure Coughlan’s release but told the BMH that ‘the local company captain [Brosnan’s commanding officer] would not release him without a note from the Brigade O/C’. See Witness Statement 1,390, BMH.
9
Between Gutter and Cart
Come into the tossing dust
Scattering the peace of old deaths,
Wind rising out of the alleys
Carrying stuff of flame.
Lola Ridge, ‘Wind in the Alleys’, 19181
I
Vincent Carmody walked me over the ground. They say locally ‘he is a fair man to talk’. But that can be said of many men in the town. It is a place that encourages loquaciousness. Storytellers are valued. It is why Vincent loved my father, who spun stories to everyone he met on Church Street when he was a boy and when he returned from Dublin in his later years, weakened by illness, to find comfort among old friends. But where my father mythologised the past in colourful tumbling sentences, Vincent Carmody is Listowel’s historian of the real.
Every town and village in Ireland has people like Vincent who deepen our collective memory by foraging in the smaller fields of history. I came to him because of what he knew about the Tan days in Listowel. We started outside my grandparents’ home, 45 Church Street. These days it is a solicitor’s office. The old wooden entrance is gone, and
so too are the door jambs where my father used to point out the bullet hole left by the Tans one night they went firing down the street. The Keanes no longer live on Church Street but our presence is remembered here on a mural displaying a poem by John B. It is one of his earliest:
I love the flags that pave the walk
I love the mud between
The funny figures drawn in chalk
I love to hear the sound
Of drays upon their round
Of horses and their clocklike walk
I love to watch the corner people gawk
And hear what underlies their idle talk.2
He wrote the poem when he was a schoolboy. Twenty years later I would come here on my school holidays, Christmas and summer, to stay with Hannah. In my memory Church Street was a place of open doors and talking women, of donkeys and carts plodding back and forth from the creamery; a place of somnambulant men sitting at the bar amid the smell of porter and cigarettes in the numerous pubs.
Church Street in the early nineteenth century (Laurence Collection)
In parts of the rural hinterland electric light had only arrived a decade before my first memories begin in the 1960s. There was a relentless parade through my grandmother’s front door of country relatives and neighbours, like Alla Sheehy, the publican who always brought her tips for the races, and whose wife Nora Mai could ‘strip paint off a wall with her tongue’ if her temper was sour; and Toddy Connor who sold hairy bacon and cabbage with the furtive air of a gold smuggler; and Roger ‘True Blue’ who worshipped Michael Collins with a reverence that surpassed that of my grandmother. All of these people came in to impart or receive bits of local news. The life of Church Street flowed into the house and out again; it carried the stories of each family – those they would give up – so that they became a shared store of communal knowledge. All the boasting about children who had passed exams or entered the civil service was done here; the scandals of girls who had got in the family way or husbands who had strayed, were whispered and sighed over, and, unfailingly, the recital of sicknesses and terminal declines and upcoming funerals. In the intimate landscape of Church Street there was more generosity than malice and whatever happened here happened, in some way, to everybody. I wondered how my people reacted to the District Inspector and his young wife. Up and down the country RIC families were frequently boycotted in the manner of the Land War of the previous century. They would have avoided the policeman, although he was their neighbour. With Hannah active in the IRA, it would not have been prudent for her husband to be or his relatives to be on anything other than nodding terms with the most senior police officer in the town. But his wife, May O’Sullivan, went to the same shops as the Keanes on Church Street and went to mass in the same church. She may have felt the hostility of Republicans towards her husband and, perhaps, the cold shoulder of others uninvolved in politics but unwilling to break the communal compact of exclusion often imposed on police families. Did they acknowledge her and pass the time of day when she came up and down Church Street with her three children, the two boys and the toddler girl?
On the day Con Brosnan and his comrades came looking for Tobias O’Sullivan, my grandfather, Bill Keane, would have been teaching a few miles outside Listowel at Clounmacon national school. Hannah was likely either at work in the draper’s or on IRA business further out in the countryside. But my great-grandparents and their children Dan and Julianne, my grandfather’s siblings, would probably have been at home at No 45.
From our old front doorstep on Church Street, I looked up at the barracks, on the opposite side of the road to the left. It took me less than a minute to walk there with Vincent Carmody. The Gardaí have been in the building ever since the Free State days, doing much the same job as the RIC did before they became militarised during the Revolution. Nowadays, in addition to the routine work of rural policemen, there are drug dealers to chase, hard young men who care nothing for the law and have no ideology but greed.
We called in at the barracks, a squat, three-storey mid-Victorian building. I spotted a bronze plaque in the outer hallway erected to the memory of Constable Jeremiah Mee and the mutineers of 1920. A young Garda answered the door and politely informed us that as he didn’t have the keys he couldn’t admit us to the upstairs room where Tobias O’Sullivan had his office. ‘Can we come back maybe on Friday?’ Vincent asked. The policeman explained that the guards might be on strike then, the first such police strike in the history of the state. I thought about telling him that it would not be the first police strike in the history of Listowel, but I could see his mind was on the present. These days in Listowel only the local historians such as Vincent are bothered with the complexities of the distant past.
We walked out and at the gate I stopped and turned around to look at the upstairs windows with the view across the street and right, down towards my grandparents’ house. ‘Let’s go across here,’ said Vincent, leading the way out of the barracks’ garden and beckoning me to follow him left and up the street to the place where Tobias O’Sullivan met his destiny.
II
Inside the pub, time was dragging on. Half twelve passed with no sign of the District Inspector. I can imagine the newly promoted officer busy with work before heading home to his lunch, or ‘dinner’ as it is known in the country, the main meal of the day. There would have been meetings with his sergeants, the army officers and Auxiliary commanders. They had raids to plan, intelligence files to analyse, and liaison to manage with the RIC commands in Tralee and Dublin Castle. The building was well protected with sandbags, barbed wire and sentries, and the danger from within posed by the mutiny appeared to have passed. O’Sullivan was unaware that there was a spy in the barracks, one of Hannah’s comrades in Cumann na mBan, who was feeding information to the IRA. He would have realised by now, however, that Republicans wanted him dead. But still he insisted on living at home and not being barricaded into the barracks.
The District Inspector looked at the clock and saw it was time to set off home: just a few minutes’ walk, to the left out the gate and up Church Street towards where it becomes the road to Tarbert.
Around one o’clock a local man, Dan Farrell, decided to walk to the barracks to ask Tobias O’Sullivan about an award of money for his son. The young man, a former policeman, once defended the barracks from an attack but had since left the police force to live in America. On his way Farrell saw the District Inspector leaving the barracks and he crossed the road to walk towards him. We are talking of small distances, a matter of yards, of the moments between life and death waiting to spring. According to the historian priest Father Tony Gaughan, the two bodyguards who accompanied the District Inspector were sent back to the barracks at this point. He must have felt himself safe. O’Sullivan and Farrell stopped and chatted briefly just a few doors down from where the IRA unit was waiting. O’Sullivan told Farrell to come to the barracks later. Farrell walked away down Church Street, passing a slight bend in the road which took him out of view of the District Inspector. Their exchange was seen by the publican William Toomey and a local teacher, John Kirby, who were talking on the street outside the pub.
The scout, Jack Sheehan, saw O’Sullivan stop and talk to Farrell. This was a critical moment. He had already started walking ahead of O’Sullivan and now had to double back and loiter. Sheehan knew this could look suspicious. But if he was to alert the others to O’Sullivan’s approach he needed to stay abreast of him. He waited for the conversation between O’Sullivan and Dan Farrell to finish and presumably saw the bodyguards being sent back to the barracks. O’Sullivan started to walk again. Sheehan moved ahead, every step bringing the District Inspector closer to the gunmen. When Sheehan appeared opposite the pub window the others knew their quarry was close behind him. As Tobias O’Sullivan came alongside the pub window Con Brosnan stood up and walked out, quickly followed by the others. They would initially have been behind him.
Dan Farrell was down the street when he heard a succession of shots. ‘The fi
rst three shots were fired so closely together that I thought at the time they were one shot,’ he recalled.3 Another witness heard a shot and saw ‘a man with his hands raised to his head staggering on the footpath. Immediately behind, about three feet away, was a man dressed in a grey suit … and wearing a cap. His right arm was drawn up close to the body in such a position as might be adopted by a man firing a pistol. He was the only man I saw. I was very frightened and I went straight into my house where I remained.’4
The image of the wounded man with his hands to his head is haunting. The raised hands could not close the wound. They could not ward off further bullets. The strong man staggered his last yards before tumbling into death.
Con Brosnan remembered that he and Dan O’Grady fired four shots each. Jack Ahern said he fired six, ‘making sure that the execution was complete’.5 The post-mortem recorded that only four of these fourteen bullets hit their target. But even with inexperienced gunmen, at that range Tobias O’Sullivan had no chance of survival.
These are the physical facts of how death came to Tobias O’Sullivan.
The autopsy carried out by the army doctor on the day of the killing recorded that of the four bullets that hit the District Inspector two were fired from behind. One bullet struck the back of his head, the other entered between the spine and shoulder blade and passed into the chest. Another blasted into the side of his head between the ear and eye. Another bullet fractured his right arm. The report noted ‘considerable bleeding from the right ear’.6 There were lacerations where the bullets left the body. His jaw was fractured, his face and forehead were covered in bruises and cuts, possibly when he fell to the ground. Finally the report notes that the cause of death was due to ‘shock and haemorrhage following the fracture of the skull and laceration of the brain and caused by the above bullet wound’.7 Tobias O’Sullivan was possibly dead by time he hit the ground.
