by Fergal Keane
The killers ran a few yards, swerved to the right into a laneway which led towards a sports field and beyond that, the immediate safety of the woods of Gurtenard. They raced to put as much distance as possible between themselves and any pursuers. They wore no balaclavas, scarves or face paint to hide their identity. One might be tempted to believe that this was evidence of brash confidence, that nobody would dare inform on them. But the possibility of being seen and identified by the police was high. The same pattern held for many IRA operations in this period. Men did not hide their faces. This was hardly because of tradition. The Whiteboys and Moonlighters of earlier times often carefully disguised themselves even though they largely operated by night in the age before electric light. But the guerrillas of this new army felt, and knew they must act, like soldiers, not fugitives who should be hiding their faces.
They passed a gaggle of schoolchildren and through the lane, a shortcut between town and country used by locals for decades, and ran directly into trouble.
The land agent and staunch loyalist Paul Sweetnam was crossing the field and saw the fleeing men. ‘Stand your ground and take your punishment,’ he shouted. Sweetnam could not have known they had just killed a senior police officer, but would have suspected some form of IRA activity. They ignored him and kept running, escaping through the woods to safety.
There is a mystery here. Brosnan later told Irish army interviewers that they ‘would have shot him on the spot only for the fact that our ammunition was very low’.8 Sweetnam fitted the profile of a despised enemy. He hosted the British military at his home. He had a bad name as a landlord’s agent during the Land War and had still been involved in evictions at the turn of the century. Now he had seen the faces of the men responsible for some sort of IRA attack. His evidence could have seen them hang. By their own account the gunmen had each been given between seven or eight rounds of ammunition. Fourteen of these had been used in the attack on O’Sullivan. There were still at least seven rounds left. Why did they not use these to kill a man who could possibly testify against them? Con Brosnan’s son Gerry heard his father say ‘they had only the authority to shoot one man’.9 Or it may just have been panic of the moment that drove the men onwards across the field without stopping to inflict more violence.*
Back on Church Street Dan Farrell turned around and walked back to find O’Sullivan lying face down in the gutter, between the wheel of a donkey cart and the footpath. He saw some children standing near the corpse. A ‘girl’ was crying.
The publican, Toomey, heard the shots but assumed it was a vehicle backfiring. Then he heard his wife cry out: ‘Oh My God, there is a man shot.’ Toomey went outside and together with Farrell dragged the dead policeman’s body out of the street. ‘I told Mr Farrelly [Farrell] to run for the priest and the doctor.’ Toomey and another man brought the stricken policeman into the public house. The limpness of the body told him that the doctor would be too late. ‘Mr O’Sullivan was dead when I lifted him,’ he said.10 More children were appearing on the scene. It was lunchtime and they were flocking home from the two local schools.
Soon afterwards a military curfew was imposed. People were confined to their houses. That night the Tans drove around Listowel firing at random. But there were no killings. The violence was limited, probably through the influence of the Army captain John Watson, who was now the most important authority in the town. The police were reeling. On the same day that Tobias O’Sullivan was killed, across the River Shannon in County Clare, six policemen, including an inspector and a sergeant, were killed in an ambush. The Listowel police were under pressure to make arrests. Eight men were brought in for questioning, and four charged with the murder. One of the men, twenty-nine-year-old John ‘Jaco’ Lenihan, was already suspected – correctly – of hiding weapons and taking part in IRA patrols. After the shooting of Tobias O’Sullivan the RIC came to his home on Charles Street at teatime, around six o’clock, and took him to Listowel barracks, where his ‘watch, pipe, tobacco, collar and tie’ were removed.11 Thereafter he was shuttled between police and military jails until finally being moved to Tralee barracks.
‘Tralee county jail was manned by RIC and Tans. The first three days here I received no food,’ he said in a statement. ‘After I had kicked the door of my cell several times the Tans came in and beat and threatened to kill me.’12 The identification parades dragged on for six weeks. Other potential witnesses were brought to the barracks and asked to look through a blind into an open yard where Lenihan and other prisoners were standing. He was eventually picked out and identified as one of the District Inspector’s killers.
The most dangerous period for the prisoners at Tralee, Lenihan remembered, was in the aftermath of the IRA attack on a train at Headfort in south Kerry on 21 March. Ten soldiers, two IRA men, three civilians and an informer were killed as a result of the ambush. The bodies of the dead soldiers were brought into the barracks and that night ‘the Tans and military went wild’, said Lenihan. ‘I with the other prisoners expected to be shot right away.’13 A soldier came to his cell door, handed him a set of rosary beads and whispered: ‘Say the rosary Paddy, I think you are for it.’14 But discipline prevailed. There were no arbitrary executions that night or in the fervid days that followed, though Lenihan said that he and the other prisoners were deprived of food for a week after the Headfort deaths.
The only trial for the O’Sullivan shooting revealed that a handful of locals were willing to defy the threats of the IRA and give evidence. Their names were not given but in a small town like Listowel and with the barracks infiltrated, the IRA would have known who they were. In the case of Lenihan it was a near neighbour who wrongly identified him as one of the shooters. The woman, who lived one door up from him on Charles Street, placed her hand on his shoulder and declared: ‘That is the man.’ She was the daughter of an ex-serviceman, and had been born in Malta when her father was stationed there. Lenihan had previously warned his IRA commanders that certain people on Charles Street were passing information on to the police, and was angry that they hadn’t moved to silence them.
When she was cross-examined in court the woman admitted that in a conversation with her mother later that day she claimed not to have seen the killing because she ‘was afraid she [the mother] would tell other people’.15 A policeman had also interviewed her on the day but she told him nothing ‘because I was afraid that I might be shot myself’. She had changed her mind by the time a second interview took place on Saturday – two days after the assassination. Under cross-examination she was accused of delaying the search for the alleged killers: ‘Do you know the result of your not giving evidence on Thursday was that no search was made for these men?’
‘Yes.’16
The woman served in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps during the Great War and had returned from England only seven months before. Then the defence moved to discredit her character, asking: ‘When you returned from service, I think you had the misfortune to have an illegitimate child?’ The prosecutor objected but the question was allowed and the witness ‘admitted it was so’. In the deeply conservative Ireland of the times the defence knew that such an admission would cast her as a woman of low moral character and create suspicion of her testimony. The young woman is thought to have fled Ireland soon after she gave evidence.
In the newspapers it was reported that Tobias O’Sullivan was walking with his four-year-old son John when he was shot. It first appeared the day after the assassination, based on information released by the publicity department of Dublin Castle. It was the story given to Parliament several weeks later by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, who described a visit by May O’Sullivan to the Viceregal lodge in Dublin. Greenwood told the House of Commons of how the District Inspector was killed as he held his son’s hand. Greenwood also claimed that before O’Sullivan died he asked his wife to bring her sons to meet the Chief Secretary whom he, allegedly, called ‘his champion’. However, no witness describes Mrs O’Sullivan listening to h
er dying husband speak and the idea that the Chief Secretary would have been foremost on his mind as he was dying, with a bullet having entered his brain, is, to put it mildly, improbable.
In having himself described as a ‘champion’ by a dying Irish policeman, Greenwood was well aware of the potential boost to his own reputation in the propaganda war with the IRA.
Two witnesses working in the barracks, looking out on Church Street from different windows, said they saw Tobias O’Sullivan holding the hand of his son at the barracks’ gate as he left for lunch. One of the witnesses claimed there was a man watching the District Inspector from the other side of the road; the other said there were two men watching. However both of these witnesses later picked out innocent men at an identification parade to catch the killers. None of the other witnesses, including the former RIC man Dan Farrell, mention seeing Tobias O’Sullivan walking from the barracks with his son. The same holds for the testifying gunmen. This is perhaps not surprising. It is the kind of terrible detail the men involved in the shooting might be strongly minded to leave out. Two witnesses did refer to children at the scene, possibly the young boys and girls from the local school, but this may also have included young John O’Sullivan. There was also mention of a ‘girl crying’. This could have been a schoolchild. But it might also have been the District Inspector’s wife May or another woman who came quickly on the scene. The world ‘girl’ is often used in this part of the country to refer to adult women. The woman who took part in the identification parade at Tralee, and picked out Jaco Lenihan, said she was standing at the door of O’Sullivan’s home, where she appears to have been working as a domestic servant, and was ‘watching the District Inspector’s son coming from school’.17 This may have been the older child, Bernard. The school is in the opposite direction from where Tobias O’Sullivan would have been walking but it is perfectly conceivable that the child came upon the aftermath of his father’s assassination. It is from Desiree Flynn, the policeman’s granddaughter, that I come closest to clarity about what happened. Her understanding is based on what she was told by her uncle Bernard, the oldest child of Tobias. He was between six and seven years of age when his father was gunned down. ‘It happened within sight of the family home. John ran out to see his father from the open door. He did not wander up Church Street to the police barracks as described in the witness testimony. He was four and would not have been roaming around, though he was big for his age. May saw Tobias being shot. Uncle Bernard saw him immediately afterwards and told me “they didn’t shoot him clean”.’18 According to Desiree, May O’Sullivan was watching her husband come up the street when he was attacked. Because of this, she was brought to the identity parade in Tralee but could not recognise any of the men as her husband’s killers and refused to be pressured by the police. I discuss all of this with Vincent Carmody. We agree it is impossible to know exactly what happened, not at this distance. But the O’Sullivan house was so close to the shooting, a question of yards, that the chances that his wife and children were confronted with a horrific scene are high. Con Brosnan’s son, Gerry, heard talk over the years, not from his father, about there being a child who ‘wasn’t in his [the District Inspector’s] arms but he was alongside him’. In this version Con told his comrades he was worried about what would happen to his own family after the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan. But from Con himself, Gerry heard nothing. He never questioned his father. Exact detail will probably never be established but there is no changing the essential truth of the event: May O’Sullivan had lost her husband, the children had lost their father, and would follow his coffin to Glasnevin cemetery, and live the rest of their lives without him. Of the eight men arrested two, Jaco Lenihan and Eddie Carmody, were sentenced to death for the murder of Tobias O’Sullivan. Con Brosnan and the others in the killing squad would surely have learned of the sentence. Two innocent men, men they knew, were sentenced to die for their actions.*
III
The news of the killing spread fast. The Associated Press circulated a short item after the killing saying Tobias O’Sullivan was ‘one of the most popular officers in the constabulary’. To gun down a senior RIC officer in such times invited swift reprisal. Locals retreated indoors. Businesses were closed. Some townspeople headed for the homes of relatives outside Listowel. From my grandfather’s front door, the Keanes could see the furious activity around the barracks all that afternoon and through the night. They lived a short distance away from a favourite drinking haunt of the RIC and the Tans. Lorryloads of Tans roared around the streets for hours. After the burning of Cork city centre and the rampage in Tralee at the end of the previous year, Listowel was at risk from severe retaliation. But the presence of the army appears to have deterred immediate violence. In the crucial hours after the killing, command of Listowel seems to have been taken over by the military.
Three days later, on Sunday 23 January, Captain Watson from the Loyal North Lancashires summoned prominent locals to a meeting at the Carnegie Free Library in the town. The army officer was introduced by the parish priest, Canon Dennis O’Connor, the same man who had given the last rites to the student priest John Lawlor after he was beaten by the Tans at New Year. O’Connor was the acknowledged moral leader of the community and had already denounced the murder at mass that morning. But his words at the meeting were not recorded.
Captain Watson said the authorities were ‘in possession of certain information regarding the identity of the perpetrators [and] it was up to the inhabitants of Listowel to supply further information’. Then came the warning. Watson said he had ‘taken every precaution in his power to protect the inhabitants … but, of course, there would be some official reprisals’.19
A week after the killing the most senior policeman in Munster, District Commisioner Phillip Holmes, came to Listowel to gather evidence. He collected statements from several locals and, on 28 January, set out on his return journey to Cork. Holmes never reached the city. He was ambushed and killed on the Kerry/Cork border and his entire cache of documents fell into the hands of the IRA. Among them were the statements with the names of his Listowel informants.
I imagine my grandmother and her brother at this point. Mick Purtill was on the move with the IRA, taking part in ambushes and vanishing across bogs and mountains. There was little time for him or his friend Con Brosnan to dwell on what had happened in Listowel. Hannah was still visiting her husband-to-be Bill Keane on Church Street, still working in the draper’s shop, still running messages and weapons, undeterred by the threats from the Tans.
There were brutal killings all over Ireland in those days. Children in other places had lost their parents. They had become victims themselves. But these things happened elsewhere. They did not provide context for this local trauma. The shooting of Tobias O’Sullivan happened outside the front doors of the people of Church Street. The District Inspector’s wife and children were known to many in Listowel. May O’Sullivan was a young mother and an Irish country person like themselves. The pool of blood between the wheel of the cart and the footpath was drying on their street. This knowledge fostered questions. How could this killing be acknowledged and understood in the houses where people heard the shots, among those who walked past the blood, heard the cries of the dead man’s wife and children? Schoolchildren had seen the gore. How would it be remembered in the years to come? This was the killing of an Irishman in the name of Ireland. Nobody celebrated this killing. But neither could I find any record of public mourning by locals. This was not out of malice but because the temper of the times dictated caution, a suppression of customary instincts. The memory of men killed by the Tans and Auxies would have hardened some hearts too. Tobias O’Sullivan would be carried away from Listowel in silence, and into silence he would vanish for decades, mediated by my own family into a ghost story, the green shape summoned by my father, moving night after night across the ceiling of 45 Church Street.
The war had come into the town. No policeman could feel safe walking the streets. A we
ek after Tobias O’Sullivan was killed a group of four policemen were drinking in Hannan’s bar on William Street. The stroll from the barracks to the bar is about ten minutes. They moved past people they knew, or people they thought they knew. But by then did they really know anybody? Who among the watchers, the cold faces, the fearful glancers, the occasional nodders, was noting the time and route, the number of men; how many were sizing them up for death? Three of the policemen were Irish, the other was an Auxiliary, a veteran of the trenches in France whose presence in Listowel at that time is a mystery since he had been officially discharged two weeks earlier.
Twenty-three-year-old Charles Ingledew was from Inverness and the son of a Seaforth Highlander, a regiment from the northern highlands of Scotland. Father and son fought in the Great War. When the war ended the younger Ingledew came home to Scotland to a world without work. The Irish war offered an escape. In November 1920, Charles joined the Auxiliaries and was posted to Listowel as a driver. By January he was in trouble. The police records show a punishment fine of £1, though the reason is not declared. Subsequent events suggest drinking might have been his problem.
The four policemen were the only customers in Hannan’s bar that night. It may have been late, after closing time, because Susie Hannan, the wife of the owner, heard Ingledew tap on the door, the usual signal for admission after hours. He and the other policemen were admitted by her sister. Constable Denis Gallogly recalled how they were led into the snug, the small parlour often tucked away inside the front door of Irish pubs. There was another knock. At that point Gallogly heard Ingledew say there was someone outside and he ‘didn’t want to know I am here’.20 The only light in the snug was a single candle. The policemen settled down. Pints were ordered. There was risk here. The IRA might have been tipped off. An ambush could be prepared at quick notice. The Hannans could possibly be targets simply for serving the police. Unless, of course, they were working for the IRA and passing on the gossip they heard from drinking constables.
