by Fergal Keane
* In June 1921, the Northern Ireland parliament met for the first time in Belfast, beginning an epoch of Unionist rule that would last until the 1970s. By the time the Boundary Commission came to deliberate in the mid-1920s, events had occurred that turned southern minds away from questions of national re-unification.
12
The War of the Brothers
When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London’s streets, cold and dank in the night air. Think – what have I got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past 700 years. Will anyone be satisfied with the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this – early this morning I signed my own death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, how ridiculous – a bullet might just as well have done the job 5 years ago.
Michael Collins to his friend John O’Kane, after signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, December 1921
I
As you leave the kitchen for the yard there is a flight of stairs that leads to the living quarters above my uncle John B’s pub on William Street. During their lifetimes, John B. and his wife, my auntie Mary, regarded this as the family sanctuary, out of bounds to the well-wishers and occasional cranks who descended on the pub to see the famous writer. It was also the place where John B wrote his plays, short stories and poems and thousands of words of newspaper columns, in the small room that overlooked the road that led to Ballydonoghue and Ballybunion.
I climbed those stairs hundreds of times. Every time I did so I passed the black-and-white photograph of General Michael Collins, in full military uniform, smiling out from a day in the last months of his life. I doubt any photograph in the house mattered as much. He towered over the usual icons of the Irish kitchen – John F. Kennedy, the Pope, even the Sacred Heart and His flickering candle. Collins was the reason Mick Purtill joined the new army of the Free State and took up arms against his former comrades in the north Kerry Flying Column. Collins was ‘the Big Fellow’. They didn’t know him personally so might never have called him plain ‘Mick’ as his friends did. But they knew what he represented to them. He was the man who had run the British ragged and made his volunteers feel proud. He was their wartime leader, more than Dev could ever have hoped to be – though, at that point, they did not lack respect for Dev.
My grandmother’s idol Michael Collins (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)
They would have seen Collins when he came to Listowel during the election campaign after the Treaty and Mick Purtill would certainly have seen him when the Big Fellow visited the troops just days before the Civil War broke out. My grandmother always said Collins was authentic. By this she meant you could trust what he promised. Their forefathers had been led by people like Daniel O’Connell, the son of Catholic gentry, and Charles Stewart Parnell, an Anglo-Irish landowner. But Collins was the child of a farmer. He was like them and he had risen to lead his people. In my family a wistful romanticism coexisted with flinty realism. Collins was handsome and dashing. He lent himself easily to myth-making. The Purtills did not love Collins the bureaucrat who ran the underground Ministry of Finance with forensic diligence. Rather they were seduced by the ‘laughing boy’ who summoned up an imagined heroic past. He was all flesh and blood. A man to drink a pint and sing a song with. A man to fight. For all his fabled intelligence and learning, de Valera could never match that glamour. He was more the boy you went to copy your homework from, than the one you called out to come and play.
Pragmatism also played a big part in my family’s decision to accept a compromise. Like so many in the country, the Purtills were tired of conflict. They did not want an endless war against the British whose reprisals had hit the neighbouring towns and villages hard. The rural economy had ground to a halt, beyond the cultivation of food for subsistence. The Purtills had enough of a stake in the land to yearn for stability. Perhaps also, something of their older Home Rule, constitutionalist heritage was reasserting itself. For all the willingness to risk their lives, my grandmother and her brother must have been shaken by the escalation of the previous six months. I do not believe they were instinctual revolutionaries, rather that they felt enough of the job had been done for the guns to be put away.
I was never able to ask my grandmother or her brother Mick what they thought of the Civil War. Mick Purtill was part of that vicious struggle and my grandmother would have lost the friendship of old comrades in the bitterness that followed. There was a lot of talk when I was growing up of Civil War politics. My family was ‘black’ Fine Gael, and remain so to this day.* Mick Purtill became a Fine Gael councillor in the 1950s. His son, my cousin Liam, is now a local councillor for the party Collins founded. At every general and local election, family members have been part of the Fine Gael machine in north Kerry. I never questioned this as a child. It was how things were and as natural as supporting Kerry in Gaelic football, Cork in hurling and Munster in rugby.
Yet I know that John B felt conflicted by the tribal politics. He had too subtle a mind to believe either side owned the truth, and the cant and clientelism that grew out of the Civil War era of politics disgusted him. But that is in the future, after the madness that consumed his homeplace.
This is how it broke down in north Kerry. Figures compiled by the historian priest Father Anthony Gaughan show that of roughly forty-four men in the IRA Flying Column, twenty-four went against the Treaty, seventeen with the Free State, and five were uncommitted. Most of Mick Purtill’s comrades in the 3rd Battalion either went Free State or decided to be neutral. Among those who were anti-Treaty was Timothy Houlihan, who had fled with Mick from the Tans after the abortive attack on Ballybunion police station just a few months before. Together they had hidden in a farmhouse while the Tans were outside. Now one was destined to become a hunter, the other the hunted.
Con Brosnan and the men who killed Tobias O’Sullivan, and some of those who shot James Kane after leading him across the summer fields at night, took the side of the Free State. Con had stature and whichever way he turned men would have followed him. As one of the men who was with him on the night of the Kane shooting put it: ‘Connie Brosnan was a good influence to get the men to become Free State.’1 Was it strange that men who had done some of the most ruthless close-quarter killing in the name of the Republic should now accept something less? I doubt they saw it like that. Collins was the most ruthless death-dealer of them all, and he got up in the Dáil debate on the Treaty to claim that it ‘gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire … but the freedom to achieve it’.2 The Treaty gave the Irish people an independent state within the British empire with their own army, police and control over taxation and foreign affairs. But there was an oath to the King and a Governor General to represent his interests; the six Ulster counties remained under Unionist rule and would not join the new state; and the British would have bases at key ports around the coast.
The Treaty debate got vicious quickly. The animosities previously kept in check by the exigencies of war convulsed the movement. Collins and the other negotiators were damned for signing the Treaty before they had referred it to Dublin as they were obliged to do. Collins said the Dail had the final say. The Treaty would not become law until it was ratified by a majority of deputies. Jealousies, remembered slights – real and imagined – resentments over status, tore away at the bonds of comradeship. The Tipperary IRA leader, Séamus Robinson, implied Collins was a coward and cast doubt on his war record. The official report of the Treaty debate is stippled with pained exchanges. ‘Now, from my knowledge of character and psychology, which I’m conceited enough to think is not too bad, I’m forced to think that the reported Michael Collins cannot be the same Michael Collins who was so weak as to compromise the Republic.’3 Collins’s celebrity status in the movement made him enemies, not just people who could be derided as jealous, but those who mistrusted his secretiveness and the way in which so many around him observed a blind loyalty.
As so often before in the history of all nations,
the glorious dead were summoned as witnesses to the spectacle, except that this time they were being asked to act as a ghostly chorus in a war of brother against brother. Fionán Lynch from Kerry, an ally of Collins, declared that ‘the bones of the dead have been rattled indecently in this assembly’.4 At the end of the debate, de Valera and the rest of the anti-Treatyites walked out.
‘Deserters all!’ Collins shouted after them. ‘We will now call on the Irish people to rally to us. Deserters all.’5
Madame Markiewicz, the Anglo-Irish grandee turned revolutionary, sentenced to death for her role in 1916 but then reprieved, traded angry words with Collins during the debate, at one point accusing him of having a romantic dalliance with a British royal – a lurch onto the wilder shores of Anglophobia. ‘Oath breakers and cowards,’ she railed.
Collins’s temper broke. He knew the worst insult he could hurl at de Valera, born in New York, and Markiewicz, the lady from the big house. The words were not worthy of a man who wanted to unite his nation, but the insults of past days, the strain of the debate, were showing. ‘Foreigners,’ he shouted, ‘Americans, English.’
There was little discussion about the partition of the island. Years later when I read the debates for the first time I was living in Belfast. There were still people killing and being killed because of the decisions made in the early 1920s. But the division of the island did not loom large in the passionate exchanges of 1921/22. Patrick Pearse’s mother was an exception. Her son would not have signed a treaty which left the country divided, she said.
II
So take it down from the mast, Irish traitors,
It’s the flag we Republicans claim.
It can never belong to Free Staters,
For you’ve brought on it nothing but shame.
‘Take it Down from the Mast’, song by James Ryan, 1923
The flesh of the dead would be scattered on roads and in trees. Things came to pass in north Kerry that the Black and Tans and Auxies would never have been allowed to get away with by their commanders. Words preceded deeds. Before it even began, de Valera came to County Kerry and made a speech in Killarney on 18 March 1922, returning to a theme that had preoccupied him in the previous few days. With that intense look of his, the pedantic hammering home of his own absolute logic, he declared his prophecy: ‘in future in order to achieve freedom, if our Volunteers continue – and I hope they will continue until the goal is reached – if we continue on that movement which was begun when the Volunteers were started, and we suppose this Treaty is ratified by your votes, then these men, in order to achieve freedom, would have to (as I … said yesterday) march over the dead bodies of their own brothers. They will have to wade through Irish blood.’6
Dev was making clear that the democratic process would not matter if it went against the Republicans. He knew the Bishop of Kerry had urged Catholics to support the Treaty two weeks before. It did not matter. The intensely pious Dev was on his own course and it did not matter to him that the bishops would excommunicate IRA men, and priests damn them from the pulpit. Later de Valera insisted he had been misrepresented. But he was speaking in a flame-soaked building and he knew it.
At the beginning of the same month, the Free State army set up its local headquarters in the Listowel Workhouse. Mick Purtill had been promoted to the rank of captain in the fledgling army and was part of a garrison of around 250 men. He is mentioned in the military archives as being an intelligence officer. This must have meant spying on the composition of enemy units, their armaments, sources of intelligence, who was helping them in the civilian population, where they hid from Free State patrols.
At this stage, however, there was still some collaboration between the two sides. Dublin was far away and old friendships still mattered. At least some of the men who had gone Free State might have been open to switching sides. The most prominent of the Listowel Republicans, Denis Quille, went for a drink with the Free State commander in Listowel, Tim Kennelly, a neighbour of the Purtills from near Ballydonoghue. Talk got around to guns. According to Quille, Kennelly offered to hand over weapons and control of the Workhouse to the Republicans. But when the moment came and the IRA arrived, Kennelly told them the deal was off. Somebody further up the line ensured there would be no handover. Quille remembered that Con Brosnan and Brian O’Grady, with whom he had shot James Kane, were among those who accompanied Kennelly to the meeting. A second attempt was made to talk the north Kerry Free State men into joining the Republicans, but that too failed.
In late April, Michael Collins came to Tralee and was confronted with a large armed Republican counter-demonstration. There was a bitter fistfight between pro- and anti-Treaty leaders which Collins himself had to break up. Later, as he addressed a crowd of several hundred, shots were fired around the perimeter, just as he was telling them the Treaty wasn’t worth fighting a civil war over.
From his post at the Workhouse, Mick Purtill observed the situation in Listowel with growing apprehension. The Republicans were taking over key buildings around the square. They faced the Free State detachment in the Listowel Arms Hotel with interlocking fields of fire. There were also gunmen on all the approaches to other Free State positions in the town. By now Listowel was beginning to look increasingly isolated, one of two Free State islands in a Republican sea. The rest of Kerry was in Republican hands. The town sat forty-six miles behind what would become the Republican front line at Limerick. At the end of the month the garrison was buoyed by the delivery of 200 rifles, two Lewis guns and new uniforms. But still there was no outbreak of fighting. Rival patrols turned about and marched away when they met on the town’s streets. Hannah Purtill continued to travel regularly to Listowel to visit her husband-to-be and organise their wedding. The curfews of the Tan days, midnight raids and random shootings may have gone, but the whole town felt the rising tensions.
Armoured car outside Listowel barracks during the Civil War when the town was briefly held by Republicans (Vincent Carmody)
My grandfather, Bill Keane, taught his class at Clounmacon national school and walked past the rival armies every school day. But when the summer holidays arrived he could retreat to his books and the nightly consolations of porter. He would still drop in to chat with his friend, the bookseller Dan Flavin, and I picture them speaking of poetry and prose, the divisions outside gathering with unstoppable and lethal intent but passed over in the quiet of the shop.
A love of literature kept friendship alive. It was Dan who supplied the classics of English and American literature to my grandfather. He believed in the purity of the Republican ideal, unsullied by an oath of allegiance which under Irish leaders would promise to ‘be faithful to HM King George V, his heirs and successors by law in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain’. For Dan Flavin it was about equality between all men, the dream of the French revolution and of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. Dan Flavin could not support a settlement which he felt betrayed that ideal.
In the Dáil the Treaty was carried by a slim majority – sixty-four votes against fifty-seven.
The fighting started in Dublin. On 28 June 1922, Irishmen shelled other Irishmen in the capital city where they had risen together against the British at Easter six years before. They attacked the Republican headquarters at the Four Courts with artillery and some gun crews provided by the British. Two days later the tension in Listowel exploded. At half past eight on the morning of 30 June, Republicans opened fire on Free State troops who had taken over Walsh’s drapery store. Bullets flew across the square and smashed into the stonework of the Listowel Arms Hotel. A correspondent in the town reported that ‘the rifle and Lewis gun cross-street firing was terrific, and during the hours of operation the non-combatant inhabitants were kept confined to their houses’.7 The first casualty of the Civil War in Kerry was twenty-year-old Private Edward Sheehy, the son of a local insurance broker, who was shot through the heart. By five o’clock in the afternoon the Free State garrison had surrendered. A joint statement f
rom the Republican leader, Humphrey Murphy, and his Free State counterpart, Tim Kennelly, announced that as Kerrymen they did not want to fight each other in a civil war. ‘We the officers of the opposing forces,’ they stated, ‘have declared that Ireland’s interests cannot be served by war. When comrades who fought together have shot one another down neither the Republic nor the Free State will benefit … unfortunately the dreaded spectre of civil war is now in our midst.’8 Neither man, at that moment, could have imagined the bitterness and horror that was to come.
Fifty men immediately deserted to the Republicans, although the newspapers would claim that the entire Free State force had switched sides. Mick Purtill and Con Brosnan stayed loyal to Collins. They briefly became prisoners along with nearly two hundred other men. But the IRA released them, hoping some, at least, would give up the fight. It was a mobile army with scant resources to jail and feed large numbers of prisoners. The Free State men went home and waited. The Republicans left a small detachment in Listowel and headed for the front line in Limerick, where the Free State army was advancing.
Before they left there was a funeral service for young Edward Sheehy. The procession moved up Church Street, past the Keanes’ front door, past the police barracks and the gutter where Tobias O’Sullivan bled to death. They reached the cemetery next to the football field and filed slowly towards the graveside. Directly ahead, at the end of the graveyard, a gate led into Gurtenard Wood and below that, invisible because of the trees, the River Feale. Looking back, after all that was to come, men on both sides might have marvelled at this moment when Free State and Republican soldiers stood to attention for the dead youth. The Cork Examiner noted that ‘the most pathetic feature was when his comrades in uniform, but without equipment, formed a firing party, carrying rifles lent to them by Republicans’.9 A local brass band played the funeral march. It was a last moment of brotherhood in north Kerry, the final shared gesture of the dying revolution. The following January, Sheehy’s distraught father wrote to the Free State authorities asking that his son be given a headstone over his grave:
