by Fergal Keane
‘They were enjoying themselves,’ recalled Susie Hannan. Then she saw Ingledew take out his revolver. He ‘began playing with it. I was frightened and asked one of his friends to tell him to put it away … the friend said it was “quite safe”’.21 Ingledew was almost certainly drunk. As he played with the gun he asked the others: ‘What would the old head say if he had seen this?’ – a reference probably to O’Sullivan, his recently deceased boss. Ingledew blew out the candle. It was re-lit. He blew it out again. In that moment of darkness there was a shot.
‘We four were all chatting in a friendly manner,’ Constable Andrew Sheridan told the subsequent inquiry. ‘At a moment when the room was in darkness, I heard a shot which at first I thought was from outside and I ducked.’22 When the candle was lit again, Ingledew was lying dead on the floor with a bullet wound to his forehead. The coroner’s court returned a verdict of accidental shooting. Inside his file an officer wrote: ‘It is apparently a case of too much drink – no foul play.’23
But what really killed Charles Ingledew, veteran of the Western Front and the dirty war in north Kerry? He was a troubled and traumatised man. Why was he still in Listowel two weeks after his discharge? Perhaps war was the only home he knew. In this place and time, death could come in the swift dying of a candle. Blood covered floors, splashed upon walls, seeped under the frames of doors. It deadened country kitchens with silence. The war did not explain, or ask for explanations in return.
IV
At night they listened to the sounds of the barracks: shouts, the clatter of boots, engines growling. A town waiting. Denis Quille, IRA volunteer and neighbour of the Keanes, said Captain Watson encountered a party of Tans preparing to take revenge but he ‘told them to go back to their barracks and stay in’.24 The newspapers reported that markets and fairs were shut for months on end. At home in Church Street, Dan Keane would have cursed the bans that threatened his livelihood as a cattle jobber. The official newspaper of the Republican movement reported that before dawn on 3 February in 1921, thirty prominent residents were hauled out of bed by the Black and Tans and ‘were placed in a big cage of barbed wire which had been erected for that purpose. They were “kept on view” for over an hour.’25 In this way the Tans reminded everyone who was in charge.
Immediately after the shooting the killers of Tobias O’Sullivan went into hiding using the network of safe houses around the district.
Con Brosnan made an elementary mistake by sending a dispatch signed ‘Con’ to his IRA company commander. It did not implicate him in the killing but it revealed his status as a member of the IRA. The messenger was arrested by the RIC and the incriminating dispatch found. The Brosnan home and public house in Newtownsandes were burned to the ground. Con Brosnan’s sisters were later sent to a convent, became nuns and eventually left for America. The rest of the family was dependent on the kindness of relatives and neighbours. The demolition of the homes of suspected insurgents would become commonplace in the counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century.
The hunt for IRA volunteers was stepped up. The army, Auxiliaries, RIC, including the Black and Tans, swept the countryside. They hunted the IRA but could not pin them down in a single decisive battle. Unarmed men were shot down. Prisoners were beaten and executed. Young men playing cards were fired on and two badly wounded. There were unexpected gestures of mercy. Two British soldiers who were lured to a remote hillside were simply stripped of their uniforms and weapons and released. Had they been Tans or Auxiliaries the response might have been very different. The tempo of war varied day by day. The police killed the cousin of the Flying Column leader in reprisal for an attack on a train near my grandmother’s farm. Robert McElligott, one of the brothers who planned the death of Tobias O’Sullivan just weeks before, was killed fighting Crown forces near Tralee in February. His brother could not attend the funeral but alleged later that ‘people attending were rounded up, abused, searched and beaten. The wreaths numbering forty, which had been placed on the grave were taken out on the public road and broken up by the Tans.’26
They kept killing: the IRA, the RIC, the Tans, the army and the Auxies. One man’s death could not alter the logic of the war. In the first six months of 1921, twenty-two of O’Sullivan’s comrades were killed in north Kerry. The IRA lost twenty-seven in the same period.
The squad responsible for killing Tobias O’Sullivan had been immediately accepted into the ranks of the newly formed north Kerry Flying Column. Con Brosnan, Dan O’Grady, Jack Ahern and Jack Sheehan had proved themselves bold and ruthless and a tight bond had formed between the four. Towards the end of January 1921 they and other members of the Flying Column were moving west of Listowel, billeted in the Stack’s Mountains that range beyond the town towards the Limerick border.
IRA graves, Listowel (Author Photo)
My uncle, John B, who spent his young summers here with his relatives, described the Stack’s as ‘too small to be called mountains, too big to be called hills’. The highest peak is just over eleven hundred feet. When the Elizabethans arrived here centuries earlier they found all the land forested, tough country in which to fight an elusive Irish enemy. The forests were gone by Con Brosnan’s day, but the area was still a formidable redoubt, a mix of moorland and bog where a protective human cloak enveloped the fighters. They could rest and be fed at trusted local farms, where the tradition of silence in the face of official interrogation was absolute.
About thirty men of the Column zigzagged across the Stack’s that January, marching ‘through a continuous downpour of rain and lashing wind’.27 Most would have been wearing labourer’s boots, the belts of their trench coats pulled tight and peaked countryman’s caps pulled down over their foreheads. The West Cork IRA leader, Tom Barry, described his own men on a similar march: ‘Their faces were unshaven, unwashed and greying with fatigue but their steps were still springy as they came in to pass where I stood, their shoulders jerked back so that no one would assume they were tiring … they not only looked rough but they were tough. Yet I knew them as light-hearted youths who would normally have been happy working on their farms or in the towns or back at their schools, had they not volunteered to fight.’28
On the second night Brosnan and Dan O’Grady were on guard when they spotted lights in the distance. Despite the rainstorm it was still possible to tell that the lights were coming towards them. A scout was sent forward and came back within minutes. ‘Holy … they are on top of us!’29 he cursed. Volunteers asleep in the farm buildings were swiftly woken. Soon the entire Column of nearly thirty men was on the move again, marching away from the lights of the advancing force. ‘We retreated some distance … it was one of the worst nights I can remember,’ recalled Brian O’Grady. ‘A biting north-westerly gale, with heavy rain and sleet, went through our clothing into the skin.’30 The bad weather saved the Column. The enemy retreated. At dawn Brian O’Grady was scanning the main road with a pair of German field glasses when he saw six lorries heading away towards Listowel. Later that morning the Auxiliaries approached within a mile of the hideout but failed to spot the Column. The Auxiliaries were led by the notorious Major John McKinnon, who was hated by locals after burning the homes of those he suspected of IRA involvement. In another incident McKinnon tied a suspect by his feet to a horse and had him dragged along the country roads. By April, the major was dead, shot by the IRA as he played golf.
Over the next few months, with the weather growing milder, the Flying Column kept on the move, crossing open countryside; sleeping in farms, barns and dugouts, carefully concealed in woods or scrubland.
Towards the end of February Con Brosnan and his comrades attacked the RIC again in the bandit country of Ballylongford, and killed two Black and Tans. Brian O’Grady described the cost for civilians of this incident:
In the early hours of the following morning several lorry loads of Black and Tans and RIC arrived in the village and burned down the local hall, the private house of Tom Carmody, his mother’s private house and of Eugen
e O’Sullivan, Mrs McCabe’s, Mrs Barrett’s, Martin Collins’s public house, Michael Morris’s butcher shop and Mrs Enright’s sweet shop. Two houses on the Well road were also burned. All shops were looted; barrels of stout and whiskey were machine-gunned. Shops looted included the drapery houses of Messrs. Lynch, Banbury and Finucane.31
The Column attacked a party of ten RIC in Tarbert village, close to the mouth of the River Shannon, wounding two. But they were caught unawares by a Royal Marine detachment which opened fire, forcing the men to retreat. A month later they were back in Tarbert, again attacking the RIC. The town had a name as a haunt of retired colonels and loyalists. Every raid was aimed at demonstrating that the guerrillas could strike where they wanted.
In March 1921, Mick Purtill and three others were sent to Ballybunion to kill three Tans who were ‘“out on their own” in doing the blackguard in the town’.32 By this the IRA meant men with a reputation for harassing and ill-treating locals. What happened after may help to explain Mick’s reluctance to speak later of those times. Notable police or soldiers were often quickly identified by name and targeted. All it took was a nod in a man’s direction by a local who had suffered abuse, his name slipped by a friendly RIC man inside the barracks or overheard in a bar, then the usual watching of behaviour, routines and times. The role of public avenger was central to the IRA’s claim to defend an oppressed community. Given the Tans’ reputation for hard drinking, striking when they were inside or leaving a pub made tactical sense. The problem with the pub used by the Tans in Ballybunion was that it stood opposite the police barracks. The gunmen would need to enter, kill quickly and be gone up the main street and into the darkness of the countryside before the large force of RIC was alerted.
The seaside town of Ballybunion – ‘Bally B’ as we called it growing up – is just over three miles from the Purtill family farm. Then, and now, it was a favoured summer resort for people from across Munster. It faces onto the Atlantic with steep cliffs and golden sands. The cliffs are dominated by a castle ruined in the wars of the sixteenth century. On the March night in 1921 when Mick Purtill and his unit walked up the main street, Ballybunion would have had a desolate, out-of-season feel. Each man carried a rifle and a pistol. They were met by a waiting scout who nodded towards the pub to indicate the Tans were inside. It would take seconds to reach the door, a few seconds more to identify and shoot the Tans.
Halfway across the street the darkness erupted. From the window of the RIC barracks, machine-gun fire swept the street. ‘We immediately ran for it,’ said Volunteer Timothy Houlihan.
They made for the countryside and headed across the fields, walking until three in the morning when they reached the house of a friendly farmer named Walsh. They were given beds for the night but kept their weapons close by. The adrenalin of the attack had been spent and the men were washed by an immense weariness, their craving for rest trampling over the natural instinct of flight. At night here the only sounds were the barking of farm dogs and the occasional cry of curlews out on the bog.
The men had been asleep at Walsh’s farm for two hours when potential disaster approached along the lane. On the edge of dawn, a lorryload of Tans appeared. I am trying to picture the man I knew as uncle Mick – solid and quiet, always with half a crown for you to buy an ice cream, the farmer and local politician – as he was then, a slender youth in his early twenties listening to the motor of the lorry getting louder as it came along the lane and then hearing the voices of the Tans outside. Mick would have clasped his rifle knowing that if they found him there would be no quarter in a fight against their superior numbers. Death stood in the yard outside. Walsh was interrogated. As the questions went back and forth there was a growing feeling of relief: the Tans were lost and needed directions to Ballylongford. The farmer was press-ganged into showing them the way. The lorry moved off into the growing light towards Ballylongford. Twice on this mission Mick Purtill had come close to being killed. Later he found out why the machine gun in the barracks had suddenly opened up on them in Ballybunion. An informer had tipped off the police.
Fear of spies remained pervasive. Despite the threat of execution there were still people willing to give information. Michael Collins’s claim to have paralysed the British intelligence-gathering capacity clearly did not hold entirely true for north Kerry. A Miss Carroll was abducted by the IRA solely because she had received a letter from the RIC apologising for having taken her bicycle. She was accused of being ‘very friendly with a couple of the Tans’ and put under house arrest until the end of the conflict.33 Motives varied. Solid loyalists did not need persuasion to inform. But nationalists could be compromised if their personal circumstances made them vulnerable to cajoling or coercion. The IRA testimonies refer to a Mrs Wallace, who was lured into carrying letters for the RIC because they promised an early release from prison for her husband who was in the IRA. She was also accused of being ‘friendly with the enemy garrison in Ballylongford’ but doesn’t appear to have been punished.34
In the official telling it was all one great struggle. The dashing men in their long coats swooping down on the Black and Tans, armed with rifles and boundless courage and led by wise, respected commanders, and all pressing inexorably to victory. That was not the true story of the war in north Kerry. It is not the true story of guerrilla war anywhere. There were brave men and women and there were less than brave men and women; there were commanders who were loved by their men and others regarded with disdain; at times victory seemed closer, at others very far away. As summer approached the IRA command moved to replace the leader of the north Kerry IRA, Paddy Cahill, who was seen as overly cautious. Dublin wanted more action as a prelude to negotiations. The move was a failure and the newcomer, an outsider from Tipperary, could not sway the local loyalty of Cahill’s supporters.
There were not the numbers or resources, to mount a large offensive. The war would not be nudged out of its predictable routine of harassment, ambush, reprisal, assassination. A small, nasty war but enough to keep the country off balance, and to kill the unwise, the suspect and the unprotected.
* Sweetnam was called to give evidence at the subsequent court martial in Cork but failed to turn up. According to the historian Father Anthony Gaughan, the land agent apparently got off the train when it was stopped outside Listowel by the IRA searching for Tans, among them Darcy, who had threatened my grandmother and was high on the execution list. Fearing they were looking for him, Sweetnam ran away.
* They were spared by the signing of the Truce between Irish and British forces on 11 July 1921. Jaco Lenihan’s grandson Donal would captain and manage successive British and Irish Lions rugby tours.
10
Executions
For there’s blood on the field and blood on the foam
And blood on the body when Man goes home.
And a voice valedictory … Who is for victory?
Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?
‘Who Goes Home?’ G. K. Chesterton, 19141
I
Sir Arthur Vicars and the estate at Kilmorna were being closely watched. In May of the previous year Vicars had refused to open his strong room and was suspected by some IRA men of stockpiling weapons and spying. His continued association with British officers deepened the mistrust. On 7 April 1921, the IRA laid an ambush near his home at Kilmorna after hearing that Captain Watson, the army officer who had addressed local notables after the killing and was credited with helping to protect some locals from the ill-disciplined soldiers and Tans, was fishing there with a party of soldiers.
My great-uncle Mick Purtill was one of the attackers, along with Dan O’Grady, who had helped kill Tobias O’Sullivan. Captain Watson was well guarded. There were ten soldiers with him, all cycling along the narrow road. They had reached a stretch between two bends when the shooting started. Two soldiers went down wounded. Then Watson was hit on the forehead and dropped. One of Mick Purtill’s closest comrades, a neighbour from Ballydonoghue, Michael Galvin, was sure th
e officer was dead. He stepped out of cover and was immediately shot dead by Watson. The captain had had only suffered a flesh wound. This was the closest death had come to my great-uncle since the war began and his third brush with danger in a matter of weeks. His friend lay bleeding to death in the roadway but in that moment there was no time to contemplate the loss.
St John’s Protestant Church, Listowel (History collection 2016/Alamy Stock Photo)
They were almost trapped by a force of Tans and soldiers who had rushed to the scene from Listowel. The Volunteers escaped over the fields. That night the angry Tans shot dead a drunken ex-soldier who had strayed out after curfew. The army brought Galvin’s body to Listowel but nobody would come to identify him. There was a brutally pragmatic calculation to be made. Reprisals were being taken against the homes and families of those involved in IRA violence. One account alleged that Michael Galvin’s mother was taken to the mortuary but ‘refused to make an identification lest there should be reprisals against the dead man’s brother and comrades’.2 The army buried Galvin in an unmarked plot in Teampallin Ban, the Famine graveyard on the edge of Listowel. A few weeks later his comrades returned in the middle of the night, disinterred the body and reburied it in Gale cemetery near Ballydonoghue.
