by Fergal Keane
My grandmother was still living at home in Ballydonoghue when news of the Truce came through. At the age of twenty-two Hannah was a veteran of the guerrilla war, and still a devoted supporter of Michael Collins. If the peace was good enough for Collins it was good enough for her. Besides she was to be married soon. Her parents had paid the dowry of £150 – a solid sum in those times – and she was making ready for the move into Listowel, to the house on Church Street, to live with her husband Bill, his parents, his eccentric brother Dan and sister Juleanne. She had survived the Tan war. The conflict had not ended with clarity with the British driven out and a Republican government ruling the whole island from Dublin, but the killing had stopped. The relief for my grandmother must have been immense. Not only had the threat been removed from herself, but from her beloved brother Mick, and from her comrades in Cumann na mBan. The first months of the year had been filled with savage violence around Listowel. To live with the possibility of violent death every day and night, to feel the fear of raids in the darkness and informers hiding in your midst hurts the human personality. Fear is the most distorting of all emotions. Now Hannah could hope. While Collins prepared to sit down with Lloyd George and Churchill, she got on with the plans for her wedding.
There were a few last fatal spasms left in the war in Kerry. In Castleisland four IRA men and five soldiers were killed; in Killarney, the Royal Fusiliers were ambushed and two soldiers killed, and a hotel chambermaid, Hannah Carey, was fatally wounded by a stray bullet, the last casualty before the Truce. But on the day of the Truce, my great-uncle Mick came into Listowel and walked without fear of arrest for the first time in two years. He bought drinks for his comrades.
In the early days of the peace Con Brosnan came into Listowel with his brother and a neighbour from Moyvane. The three were going to Ballybunion to the beach; after two years on the run it was Con’s first taste of a normal existence. The three were walking down the street past the RIC barracks, back over the ground where he had stalked and killed Tobias O’Sullivan, when Con saw a group of Black and Tans. They were standing in front of the barracks. The neighbour from Moyvane, eighteen-year-old Michael Finucane, recalled what happened:
As soon as he saw them … Con Brosnan said to me, ‘We’ll go over direct here.’ They had taken no notice but the minute they saw him they all became electric. They stood up, and each one was riveted to the ground. Each one knew about him … they saw his picture every day. They were looking for him. They were looking for two years for him … They couldn’t touch him, or they didn’t want to touch him. I saw the expression of every man in this crowd … stupefied … they were stunned to see him there.22
Con walked across to the Tans, Finucane believed, to show that he ‘could fight any man alive’. Afterwards they took the train to Ballybunion and the three men swam into a strong Atlantic tide. Michael Finucane recalled Con being knocked over by the waves, standing up, being knocked over again, until he was exhausted and the other two intervened and helped him from the water.
Across the county there were celebrations. In Tralee, a brass band played rebel airs and rockets were fired. The locals jeered the Black and Tans, but there was no violence. Some of Mick Purtill’s close comrades did not join in the celebrations. Those who had spent three years fighting in the hills could not believe the Truce would last. They knew that the British had not been defeated. The Truce only bought time. What if the British refused the Republic? The Flying Columns were warned to remain alert and keep training. There was a flood of new members, scornfully called ‘Trucileers’ because they joined after July 1921 when there was no immediate chance of capture or death. In Listowel the new recruits headed for Davie Carrol’s drapery store to purchase puttees. A local wit dubbed them ‘Davey Carrol’s Fusiliers’. The Cork IRA leader, Seán Moylan, was caustic about many of those who joined the IRA during the Truce:
The Truce gave these fellows an opportunity for posing as war-hardened soldiers. In public houses, at dance halls, on the road in ‘commandeered’ motor cars, they pushed ordinary decent civilians aside and earned for the IRA a reputation for bullying, insobriety and dishonesty that sapped public confidence. More than this they were an evil influence on young, generous, adventurous boys who, knowing of IRA achievements, sought, too, an opportunity of proving themselves.23
Scores of men made their way home from the prisons to north Kerry. But the man wrongly accused of the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan was not among them. People accused of capital offences were not immediately released. Jaco Lenihan was due to have been hanged at eight in the morning on the Saturday before the Truce came into effect. To try and force their immediate release Lenihan and a few others began a hunger strike which lasted for five days until a priest persuaded them to stop. By the time he was freed, on 14 January 1922, the struggles against British power in the south of Ireland had ended.
Newly released prisoner Éamon Broy, who had acted as one of Michael Collins’s spies inside the RIC, remembered a spirit of hope. The day he came out of jail he was brought to meet Collins at a Dublin pub. ‘We sat together at a table and he was full of optimism,’ Broy remembered.24 Collins spoke of forming an Irish government and encouraging Irishmen who had gone abroad to work, in the empire and America, to come home: he would bring back the ‘trained minds to help us’.25 But the IRA leader was worried about ‘too much rejoicing going on all over the country, and too much relaxation’.26
That summer, the livestock markets opened again. The curfews ended. Young men and woman could once more gather at country crossroads in the long evenings. In Ballydonoghue, Mick Purtill went back to help his father and siblings with the work of the farm. Hannah joined them when she was not working at the draper’s. There was no danger of a Tan patrol firing at them as they worked the fields. The forces of the Crown stayed in their barracks. But Listowel was unsettled. You can say a war is over. It can be declared finished between the two armies. But you cannot legislate for local grudges, not when your army is made up of so many small armies, and of men who have become accustomed to having the power of life and death at the end of a finger. Bad blood does not easily wash away. There were many in the IRA who felt the war should never have ended, and many on the other side who agreed.
For a policeman like Thomas Enright, war had been a constant since 1915. In some respects he represented a choice Mick Purtill might have made, had his father not been slightly more prosperous or had a larger family to support. Enright had grown up on a small farm near the Purtills. He was the eldest of ten children. His descendant, Donal McMahon, wrote that all ten emigrated to North America in the early part of the century. Thomas made his way to Vancouver and worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the Great War broke out he enlisted and fought with the Canadians at the Somme and was badly wounded. While convalescing back in Vancouver he met a nurse who was a Listowel woman. For reasons that are not explained – homesickness, the urge to return to action perhaps – the two left Vancouver for Ireland in July 1919. The war with the IRA had been under way for nearly seven months. Thomas Enright enlisted in the RIC in April 1920. Four months later he was made a sergeant with the Auxiliaries. His military service had helped him gain the promotion.
When the Truce was declared, Enright was in charge of barracks defence in Thurles, County Tipperary. By mid-December 1921, with the Truce five months old and holding, Thomas was sure he had survived. He no longer needed to worry about an IRA assault with bombs and massed numbers. He was living a normal life.
Like many men from this part of Ireland Enright was a big fan of hare coursing. His dogs were well known on the tracks of Munster. One of his best, Bedford Lass, was named after his home place in Listowel. In the third week of December, Enright decided to take Bedford Lass to race in Thurles. But for Maurice Meade, another coursing fan, and still an active member of the IRA, Enright’s appearance at the meet was an opportunity to settle a score. Meade was a veteran of the 1920 attack on Kilmallock where he faced Tobias O’Sullivan and
his beseiged constables. He and other IRA men claimed later that Enright had been in charge of a police death squad. One account claimed that he had led a masked group to raid the house of a publican who was thrown downstairs, breaking his neck in the fall. ‘Sergeant Enright, who was in charge of the raiders, shot him dead to put an end to his agony … a detailed account of his shooting was given to me during the Truce period by Sergeant Enright himself.’27
But Thomas Enright’s fate was decided because of a more recent incident. On 10 December 1921, a train carrying IRA prisoners home from internment was attacked at Thurles station. A bomb was thrown and an IRA man killed. The Times of London reported that ‘the bombs were thrown under cover of the fog signals which were being exploded as a greeting to the returning men’.28 The British authorities and the IRA were perplexed. There seemed to be no obvious motive. The IRA sent an investigator, John Sharkey, to find out what had happened. ‘Our information was that a bomb had been thrown by a Sergeant Enright of the RIC … The townspeople of Thurles appeared to be in a state of terror that night.’29
Maurice Meade assembled a team to kill Enright. The retaliation would have to be swift, while the memory of the original atrocity was still fresh in people’s minds. Meade later told the army historians: ‘this man … was particularly active and bitter against our men, on one occasion bombing some of our captured men. For this we decided he should pay the death penalty. No opportunity to carry this out had arisen until the Truce occurred, but when we saw him at the coursing meeting, even though the Truce was then in operation, we agreed to shoot him and we did so that night.’30
A newspaper report noted that Enright was shot from behind. Afterwards the IRA headquarters condemned the killing, saying: ‘such deeds are not the acts of members of the IRA, but are the acts of cowardly individuals who endeavour to cloak their misdeeds in such a manner that they may be interpreted as the actions of soldiers of the Republican Army’.31 Already definitions had shifted. What was acceptable a few months earlier had now become ‘cowardly’. Thomas Enright’s body was taken home to Listowel for burial. The funeral was held just before Christmas. It was a quiet affair.
The first and last men to die in Ireland’s guerrilla war against Britain were Irishmen and both from north Kerry. Three years and nine months had passed between the shooting of IRA men John Browne and Richard Laide in the attack on Gortatlea police station on 13 April 1918 and the death of Thomas Enright. A recent study estimated that 2,141 people died in the War of Independence: 514 police, 262 British Army, 514 IRA and almost 900 civilians.* But the past was swiftly closing over Browne and Thomas Enright, and James Kane and Arthur Vicars, over John Houlihan bayoneted in front of his mother, and Dalton, Lyons and Walsh shot at Knockanure, and over Tobias O’Sullivan and the Royal Irish Constabulary and all the centuries of British rule in Ireland. The old story of rebels and the Crown was over in the south. The Truce confronted Republicans with the challenge of compromise and it would tear their movement apart.
In the beginning there was eager anticipation. Just after the Truce was agreed, Éamon de Valera, as president of the Dáil, wrote to Collins about his meeting with Lloyd George in London. Dev sounded positive:
I am sure you are anxious to hear whether any important developments have taken place. The position is simply this – that L.G. is developing a proposal which he wishes me to bring in my pocket as a proposal to the Irish Nation for its consideration. The meetings have been between us two alone as principals. The idea on which we the Ministry started out remains unchanged. You will be glad to know that I am not dissatisfied with the general situation.32
But Dev’s emollient tone vanished over the next six months. It became obvious that an all-Ireland republic was not going to materialise. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 had partitioned the country and given Unionists an effective veto over unity.* In the north the Truce did not bring an end to violence. Sectarian tensions, never far from the surface, frequently erupted into violence. In February 1922, six Catholic children were killed when a bomb was thrown while they were playing outside their homes on Weaver Street in Belfast. The following April four Protestant workers were shot dead after being lined up inside a garage and asked their religion. A fifth man, who was Catholic, was allowed to leave. In May 1922 the IRA in the new state of Northern Ireland began an offensive. In Belfast the Truce was disregarded.
Between July 1920 and July 1922 more than five hundred people were killed in Belfast, fifty-eight per cent of them Catholics, a city where they formed just a quarter of the population. Thousands of Catholic workers were driven from their places of employment. Collins eventually intervened, making common cause in this with the men who became his enemies as the Republican movement was rent apart by divisions over negotiations with the British. It did not change the military outcome or improve the lot of the Catholics: the IRA campaign in the north was defeated.
To my family in Listowel the north was too far distant to be a concern worth dying for. In 1921 they were preoccupied with recovering from the strain of war. A month after the Truce came into effect the Dáil met openly for the first time with a huge and happy crowd surrounding Dublin’s Mansion House. Seán Moylan remembered ‘an atmosphere of confidence and victory’.33 As he wandered around the corridors he saw the legends of the struggle. There was Michael Collins, ‘big, handsome, in high spirits, a centre of attraction’, and Liam Mellows, revolutionary and intellectual, who told Moylan that ‘many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised’.34 His words were prophetic. Mellows and Collins would be dead within the year, fighting on opposing sides.
The British were not about to allow the Irish to depart the empire. Such a precedent would inspire other nationalist movements. The government would demand an oath of allegiance to the King. For so many of the fighting men in north Kerry the oath was more than a rhetorical abstraction. It struck at the heart of the separatist ideal. Had they killed and died only to end up paying obeisance to the British Crown? As a volunteer in County Monaghan put it, with the eternal weariness of the soldier confronted with compromise and backroom deal-making: ‘During the period of the Truce, the politicians and respectables took over. It was they who interpreted our dream, the dream we fought for. It was they who decided the terms to which we must agree. In the mind of every [IRA] soldier was a little Republic in which he was the hero. But his dream was shattered.’35
The time of heroes had passed. Nothing would ever seem as simple again. To a majority of the IRA in Kerry the oath of allegiance became a symbol of humiliation. The bitter arguments among the national leadership would be replicated in the north Kerry Flying Column. Men prepared for a new war.
Denis Quille was with Con Brosnan on the night the fisheries inspector James Kane was killed. They had been solid comrades for several years. But for Quille it would be a republic or nothing. Up and down Church Street and out in Ballydonoghue families and neighbours divided: the Purtills and the Keanes were with Collins and compromise. Jack Ahern, who led the squad that killed Tobias O’Sullivan, also took the Free State side. Hannah immediately felt the effects of the schism on Cumann na mBan. The leadership was taken over by committed separatists and a letter was sent from headquarters ordering the women to ‘support the existing Republic by every possible means’. More ominously it sought the names of those who were ‘on the side which seeks to subvert the Republic’.36 Hannah was one such subversive, as was her brother Mick and Con Brosnan. But in the split that was coming their mutual friend Con Dee, who survived the Tan death squad at Knockanure, went to the side of those who would become known in the pejorative description of the Free Staters as the ‘Irregulars’, or in de Valera’s description, ‘the Legion of the Rearguard’.
In London, Michael Collins, Arthur Griffiths and three other colleagues signed the Treaty with Britain at twenty past two in the morning on 6 December 1921, breaking a promise to de Valera and the rest of the cabinet that they would sign nothing until it had been brought back to
Dublin for approval. Collins and the others signed conscious of the threat of ‘terrible and immediate war’, as Lloyd George put it to the delegates.
The Treaty negotiations became the bedrock of competing national myths. My father said Dev knew that the Treaty would be the best deal on offer and wanted Collins to take the blame for the compromise. But I need to remember that my father and all my kin saw only the worst in all that Dev did or said. It is equally possible that Dev was playing for time with the British and, in standard negotiating practice, holding back the assent of his cabinet to the last minute in the hope of more concessions. If so Dev misunderstood the British and he misunderstood Collins. The Republican version is that Collins and Griffith, who was never a Republican anyway, were outwitted and browbeaten, even seduced by the glamour and temptations of London, until they succumbed to the wily Lloyd George. Collins argued with justice that the Treaty needed to be ratified by the Dáil. He had not signed away the Republic but achieved a stepping stone to freedom. There are elements of truth and myth in each accounting, thankfully long picked apart by Irish and British historians, so that looking back I do not see heroes and villains but men and women caught in the grip of events, confronted by pressures for which nothing in their life experience could have prepared them, their passionate idealism mixing with human frailty, and propelling them towards a great rendering. It was all inestimably sad.
* For a fuller breakdown of casualties see Eunan O’Halpin, Counting Terror: Bloody Sunday and the Dead of the Irish Revolution, in David Fitzpatick (ed.), Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923, Dublin, 2012, pp. 141–152.
