by Fergal Keane
James Kane’s body was left where he had fallen. The killers walked back through the fields. Nobody seems to have spoken until they reached a safe distance from the road, when O’Grady remarked to Denis Quille that a ‘brave man died tonight’. ‘I thoroughly agree with you,’ Quille replied. Then they rested, smoked and ‘blessed the man who discovered tobacco’. A small sum of money found in the dead man’s pocket, along with his will, was posted to James Kane’s family a few days after his killing.
11
The Republic Bold
You may sing and speak about Easter Week or the heroes of Ninety-Eight, Of the Fenian men who roamed the glen in victory or defeat, Their names are placed on history’s page, their memory will endure, Not a song is sung for our darling sons in the Valley of Knockanure.
Bryan McMahon, ‘The Valley of Knockanure’, 1946
I
By the spring of 1921 the forces of the Crown were lashing out across the north Kerry countryside. After the killing of Arthur Vicars, they hunted the IRA but struggled to find them. The home of one of my grandfather’s friends, the bookseller Dan Flavin, was burned down. Flavin was a leading Sinn Féiner but he had nothing to do with the killing. Most of what happened went unreported in the national newspapers; it was part of an accumulating local viciousness. But one incident in Con Brosnan’s country became notorious. Knockanure lay between Listowel and Newtownsandes, close to Kilmorna where Arthur Vicars had been shot in April.
The men of the Flying Column were weary and beleaguered by infection. They were suffering from the ‘IRA itch’, a nuisance plague visited on men living in the dirt of dugouts and hay sheds. Scabies is the medical term for it. I suffered from it when travelling in the gorges of the Panshir valley with the Afghan Mujahidin as they advanced on Kabul during a long-forgotten spring offensive. The mites burrow under the skin, blossoming into angry red blisters. The urge to scratch is irresistible. The skin breaks and weeps. Scabs form.
An outbreak of the condition among members of the north Kerry Flying Column forced a break for recuperation in early May. It was while resting that the men heard of somebody in Listowel informing. A barmaid overheard a woman telling police how they might capture the men of an IRA Column just across the border in Limerick. There was to be a religious retreat in Athea run by the Redemptorist fathers, the most famous of the travelling missions that passed through rural Ireland in these days. The missioners were hellfire men, denouncing sins of the flesh with such vigour that – in the words of the poet Paddy Kavanagh – ‘the crooked old Men sat up and took notice … they began to dream themselves violent young stallions who needed fasting and prayer to keep them on the narrow path’.1 These Redemptorists were also sympathetic to IRA men on the run. The woman in the bar told the police she was sure the men of the West Limerick Column would be in Athea to attend to their spiritual needs. She promised to get more information from a friend who was selling religious goods at the retreat. Con Dee and another man decided they would warn the Limerick volunteers of the looming danger. The mission passed without incident and Dee and two of his comrades were on their way back to Knockanure when they met other members of the Flying Column.
Some of them wore puttees – wraparound leggings – a standard accoutrement of men on Column duty. That alone could have justified summary execution in the minds of some Tans. Around half past nine on 12 May 1921, Dee and three others were sitting on the bridge at Gortaglanna, about five miles from Listowel, when they heard a Tan patrol approaching. By this stage every IRA man in Ireland could recognise the growl of a Crossley Tender engine. There were two lorries and an open-top car. Dee, his cousin Patrick Walsh, Patrick Dalton and Jerry Lyons scattered into a field. But they were too late. The Tans were on them quickly. They were beaten with fists and rifles, pistol-whipped around their heads. ‘Murderers’ and ‘Bastards’ the Tans yelled. Paddy Dalton said to one of the others: ‘We are done.’
Another young man, also an IRA member, was dragged from a nearby house but his mother begged the Tan commander, a Scotsman, telling him that she had taken care of wounded Scots soldiers as a nurse in London during the Great War. Her son was released.
A Flying Column in County Tipperary (Wikimedia Commons)
The others were marched to the lorries and driven for half a mile. At this stage they were probably wondering if they might somehow survive, having not been shot at the bridge. Then the lorries turned around and drove back for about a mile. The road runs along the top of the valley, with fertile farmland below and marshy open ground above. They passed the spot where they had been sitting and chatting a few minutes beforehand. The Tans stopped and ordered them out. Con Dee gave his version soon after the killings: ‘I looked at my companions; I saw blood on Jerry Lyons’s face and on Paddy Walsh’s mouth. Paddy Dalton was bleeding from the nose. We were then asked to run but we refused. We were again beaten with the rifles and ordered into a field by the roadside. We refused but were forced into the field. We asked for a trial but the Black and Tans laughed and jeered and called us murderers.’2
For the last two years these young men had evaded the Crown forces. They had lived in dread of being caught by the Tans. And now they were captured here, without weapons, on this lonely road with no witnesses but the Tans. Con Dee was with Mick Purtill once when they were surrounded by Tans near Ballydonoghue.They hid in the local church and eventually escaped across the fields. Now Con was trapped.
The four men were lined up in front of the Tan firing party. Dee reckoned they were no more than five yards away. Shots blasted out of the rifles. Jerry Lyons threw up his arms and fell, moaning as he hit the ground. Dee noticed a bloody patch appear on Lyons’s waistcoat. He also suddenly understood that the Tan opposite him hadn’t fired yet. Dee took to his heels. It cannot have been more than a fraction of a second between realisation and flight. ‘I was gone about twelve yards when I got wounded in the right thigh. My leg bent under me, but I held on running although I had to limp. I felt that I was being chased and I heard the bullets whizzing past me.’3
I walked where Con Dee had run. It was hard going, uphill across uneven ground. The adrenalin must have driven him on, up to the top of the hill with the Tans in pursuit. He ran until weariness and blood loss brought him crashing into a drain where he hid for forty-eight hours until he was eventually rescued by locals. Vincent Carmody’s great-uncle was one of those who helped Dee, and for years afterwards would receive a Christmas letter with a gift of money in gratitude for his help. Two days later the British released a statement announcing that a force of a hundred IRA men had ambushed the RIC, wounding two constables and leading to the deaths of ‘three unknown rebels’.4 Big lies and small lies. They were the currency of the times.
In the hills a doctor was summoned to attend to Con Dee. He was passed from one safe house to another as he recuperated in the months that followed. The bodies of his three comrades were tied to the back of the Tan lorries and reportedly dragged along the road towards Listowel. At the men’s funerals, attended by thousands, the forces of the Crown baton-charged mourners, the customary civilities having long been obliterated.
Mick Purtill and the rest of the Flying Column were lucky to escape capture as summer wore on. In late June the army and the RIC launched a sweep through the Stack’s Mountains and several nearby villages, part of a new saturation search policy intended to pursue the guerrillas to the point of exhaustion. They kept moving despite their exhaustion, and escaped the dragnet ‘by about ten minutes’.5
II
To say that we were jubilant would be untrue. It was more bewilderment. Through the years of struggle, the hangings and executions and sufferings had generated in us something unchristian. Our lust to kill had not been satisfied.
IRA volunteer, County Monaghan, 19216
There had been serious talk of peace since the previous December, 1920, the same month that the IRA was planning the assassination of Tobias O’Sullivan. Michael Collins never believed that an outright military v
ictory was possible. War was the continuation of the political struggle by other means. When news leaked of secret talks between emissaries of both sides Collins declared: ‘We were not asking a truce … if one were offered we would not reject it, but we did not ask for it. That is the position.’7 He was already balancing the hopes of competing constituencies: a people worn down by terror and a substantial group within the IRA who feared peace might mean a compromise on the principle of a republic.
The mere act of sitting down with the British in London induced deep suspicion on the part of some Republicans, the old fear that the respectable classes would hijack the Revolution. While hiding in the mountains along the Cork/Kerry border, Sean O’Hegarty, commander of the Cork No. 1 Brigade, half-joked to a colleague: ‘What will happen is we’ll wake up some morning to find ourselves members of the civil population, with peace made and our occupation and our power gone. Then I’ll go back to the poorhouse and I suppose you’ll start selling collars again.’8 Michael Collins knew that the Truce represented a gamble. He also feared that after nearly three years of war the army of the Republic was exhausted and depleted.
The shrewder political minds on the British side accepted that political negotiation was the only workable solution. King George V was horrified by the behaviour of the Black and Tans and backed the peacemakers. But the military leadership was reluctant to enter negotiations. Not for the last time in twentieth-century colonial history a rigid military believed the defeat of the enemy was close at hand. To achieve it there was a plan for martial law across the twenty-six southern counties accompanied by a dramatic escalation of the military campaign. Forewarned by his spies and British peacemakers, Michael Collins rightly feared the impact of this on the IRA’s fighting ability and the people’s morale. His plan to counter state terror was to target any government official that the IRA could find – from Lord Lieutenant to the humblest civil servants. ‘Not to single out an particular institution but to get at them all.’9
An Australian–Irish archbishop, Dr Clune of Perth, was brought in as mediator. On board ship travelling from Ireland to Britain, his grace encountered the principal British negotiator, Sir Alfred Cope, Assistant Secretary for Ireland, who had become convinced the policy of state terror was counterproductive. Recognising each other, the clergyman and the civil servant stood chatting about the prospects for peace.
Cope was a civil service meritocrat. Born into a large working-class family in south London, he went to work at the age of fourteen. Within ten years he was employed by the Inland Revenue as a detective. This was followed by a stint in the Department of Pensions and after that a steady rise through the civil service. His great strengths were extraordinary stamina, a forensic intelligence and the capacity to see matters as they really were, never an historical strong point of British administrators in Ireland. He would later say that it was ‘impossible to govern an enlightened country without the consent of the governed’ and that governments should not ‘always be suspicious of the hand which declares friendship’.10 Cope was, unsurprisingly, a highly suspect figure for the British security establishment, but he provided a model for the figure of civil service negotiator – shrewd, patient, energetic, flexible – who would occasionally appear in Anglo-Irish history throughout the next seventy years.
Standing near the archbishop and the civil servant on the ferry was a party of senior British military officers. Seeing them Cope remarked: ‘I do not like to see these fellows crossing in such strong numbers. They have convinced themselves that they have the boys in the hills beaten, and they want no talk of a truce to interfere with them now. But the Prime Minister may not listen.’11
Lloyd George was listening. Dependent on the Conservatives to maintain his coalition government, he initially moved warily, backing the military’s insistence that the IRA surrender its weapons before agreeing to any truce. There were increasingly dire warnings from the military leaders. The RIC director of intelligence, Colonel Ormonde Winter (described by a colleague as looking like ‘a little white snake … clever as paint, probably entirely non-moral … a super sleuth, and a most amazing original’12), predicted that a truce ‘will only afford them more breathing space, and more time to negotiate the purchase of arms … there will be no peace. And that is all there is to it.’13 The British military was correct in one key aspect. The Truce provided a critical respite for the IRA, not beaten but certainly under immense strain with thousands of men arrested and a shortage of war materiel. A Crown offensive under martial law conditions could have seriously compromised the guerrillas’ ability to wage war. By the late spring of 1921 the crucial condition for peace-making existed. Enough people on both sides believed peace offered more than war.
The IRA was allowed to carry on recruiting and training but committed to ceasing attacks on Crown forces and civilians and any ‘provocative displays of forces, armed and unarmed’.14 Attacks on government and private property were also forbidden. The IRA appeared to have gained more, as Colonel Winter feared. There would be ‘no incoming troops … No movements for military purposes of troops and munitions … No pursuit of Irish officers or men or material or military stores … No secret agents … No attempts to discover the haunts and habits of Irish officers and men … No pursuit of lines of communication or connection.’15
On the night in July 1921 that the Truce was agreed, a Kerry IRA man was in Dublin to meet with Michael Collins. Tadhg Kennedy, a brigade intelligence officer from the village of Ardfert, had once entertained hopes of becoming a naval civil servant. His uncle was a Royal Navy officer and nominated him for a clerkship. Kennedy’s was a story of loyalties that, but for circumstance, might easily have swung the other way. He was also typical of a cultural Irishness that found its own niche in the imperial structure. ‘I often saw my uncle and other Irish officers Collins, Aherne, Payne, etc. play cards in the Officers’ Mess at Chatham Dockyard and they never spoke a word except in Irish, and they were all native Irish speakers!’ he recalled.16 But Kennedy’s Fenian father threw his civil service nomination in the fire and Tadhg devoted himself to hunting enemies of the Republic.
Tadhg Kennedy had news for Collins about a detective in Dublin Castle who wanted to supply information. There was also another matter that needed Collins’s adjudication. A Listowel man had attempted to frame a neighbour as an informer because he wanted his land. ‘Mr Maher then told me,’ Kennedy recalled, ‘that a man named Relihan who was employed as a Roller driver by the Kerry County Council had made some kind of a claim to his land, that his people had owned it about one hundred years previously.’17 Under the cover of war, old grudges and claims were given new momentum. It was land, always land, that mobilised the malice in men’s hearts. Not only had Relihan tried to frame the other man, but he had been discovered supplying intelligence to the police. Now Kennedy wanted Collins’s decision on what to do about him. With much subterfuge a meeting was arranged with Collins at Vaughan’s Hotel, a haunt of Republican leaders in the centre of the city. The Kerry man was surprised to find the usually reliable night porter drunk. Collins appeared behind him.
‘When we got inside the door in the hall he told me the war was over,’ Kennedy remembered. He also told him that Sir Alfred Cope, Under Secretary of State for Ireland, was in the ‘room to which he was taking me’.18 Kennedy was to be polite but not disclose any information.
The astonished Kennedy was duly introduced to Cope and his two RIC bodyguards, one of whom recognised him immediately. He was a fellow Kerryman. ‘Mick again announced about the Truce and we were both supplied with champagne and brandy and we drank quite a quantity of it. Cope and I got talking and we discussed the troubled times and I was regretting it was over and said I enjoyed it.’19
The two architects of the peace and the Kerry intelligence officer drank glass after glass, or so Kennedy thought. Later he found out that Collins, ever wary, was drinking some non-alcoholic drink with the colour of brandy. ‘Both Cope and myself passed out completely,’ he rememb
ered. Kennedy’s testament is a fascinating coda to nearly three years of savage warfare, although it is difficult to imagine Collins being invited to spend a similar evening with a senior British police or Army officer. The spy Relihan was saved by the Truce.
The last official day of the war found Mick Purtill and his comrades laying mines on the main road from Lixnaw, preparing to ambush military lorries expected along the route. The lorries never came. In this part of the country the war between rebels and the Crown was almost over. The men were lying up in safe houses when word of the Truce arrived. A message from IRA headquarters in Dublin was carried by hand to commanders around the country: ‘In view of the conversations now being entered into by our government with the government of Great Britain, and in pursuance of mutual conversations, active operations by our forces will be suspended as from noon, Monday, 11 July.’20
The killers of Tobias O’Sullivan had one last mission. This needed no orders from the Kerry IRA commanders. It was a personal matter. They set out in a group for Tarbert with nine others. When they reached the outskirts of the town, Jack Ahern, Dan O’Grady and Con Brosnan went forward to carry out a reconnaissance. It had been six weeks since Jack Sheehan had been killed, shot dead by the Tan marksman Farnlow as he tried to escape across the fields by his parents’ house. Sheehan’s former comrades had come to avenge him. Their time was limited, the official Truce between the IRA and the British was less than a day away. They approached Mulcahy’s pub where they’d been tipped off that Farnlow and other Tans were drinking. Ahern sent Brosnan and O’Grady back to the outskirts of Tarbert to bring on the rest of the unit. Almost immediately the Tans began exiting the pub. ‘I was in the open street near the pub on the opposite corner and had to think quickly what to do. There were four of them so I opened fire with the revolver,’21 Ahern said. There was no return fire until the Tans reached the barracks. But by then Ahern was away. Farnlow was wounded but survived and returned to England.
