by Fergal Keane
His body lies in a nameless grave in the local public cemetery. Though he gave the last drop of his heart’s blood for the Free State, yet over the grave there is nothing to show how he died or what he died for. I wish I had the means of rectifying this. Twenty-two years of age and six feet two in height and an athlete of the first order, it is not surprising that his mother’s health should have suffered from the loss of such a son. It is a serious state of things for me that her present state of health is so impaired that at any moment I am liable to lose her also.10
Two weeks later the army replied regretting that ‘owing to the present disordered state of the country it has not been possible to erect suitable tablets in memory of those who have given their lives for the Free State’, and advising that it was ‘the intention of the Government to erect suitable memorials at the earliest possible moment’.11
Up in Dublin the Republicans suffered swift defeat. Falling back, they established a front line which theoretically stretched from Waterford in the south-east to Limerick in the mid-west, the boundary of the so-called ‘Munster Republic’. But they lacked the numbers and the artillery to hold a fixed front line of more than eighty miles. Most of the troops were guerrilla fighters with no experience of conventional warfare in which territory was seized and held. On 21 July, less than a month after the outbreak of the Civil War, the Free State captured Limerick city, about forty-six miles across the Shannon estuary from Listowel. One of the Purtills’ neighbours from Ballydonoghue, Patrick Foran, was killed in the fighting, the first Kerry Republican to die in the Civil War. Suddenly men were retreating back down the roads from Limerick. In Kilmallock, where District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan had defended the barracks against the IRA, the IRA was now under siege by the Free State army. The town stood in the way of the advance deeper into Munster. A New York Times correspondent observed Free State troops moving south: ‘As I sat watching on a gray stone wall they marched past singing cheerful songs,’ and called out to him: ‘Praise be to God, the Guards are coming.’ The ‘faith of the countryside in the Dublin Guards is almost legendary,’ he noted.12 The faith of some country people in the Guards may have been legendary, but it was by no means unanimous. The Dubliners were outsiders down here in Munster and in Kerry they would become notorious.* The New York Times reported that all eyes were ‘directed towards Kilmallock, where the fighting has been stubborn and the casualties numerous’.13 The town fell to the Free State on 5 August 1922. More than forty men from both sides were killed.
Soon after the fall of Limerick city the main IRA leader in north Kerry, Humphrey Murphy, went to a meeting of concerned locals in Tralee. The farmers had called the gathering but businessmen and trade unionists came too. They were all worried about the state of the country, with mounting reports of crime and social breakdown. ‘Irregulars continue to harass the people,’ noted The New York Times. ‘Shopkeepers and farmers are pillaged without mercy and cattle and sheep slaughtered in the fields.’14 With no proper police force and the IRA focused on the fighting, any thug with a gun could rob and intimidate with little fear of prosecution. The fundamental conservatism of Irish rural life was attempting to assert itself. The IRA leader had a very different message for them. A schoolteacher of vehement separatist principles, his words must have inspired a mood of foreboding in the audience. Murphy promised endless war: ‘I am certain they are going to fail as the Black and Tans failed, because the war did not come properly until it came to Cork and Kerry. We will defend every town to the last. You will have towns in ruins and famine finishing those who have escaped the bullet. We will stop at nothing, and we are going to win even if it takes years.’15
The very idea that an IRA leader could summon up famine as a weapon is indicative of the furious temper of the times. Did he consciously echo the history of sword and hunger in his words? He was certainly well enough educated to be aware of the historical context. Murphy was deliberately putting the wind up his audience, knowing his words would be reported back to the Free State authorities. The respectable citizens of the district might wish for an easy life. The IRA had no intention of obliging them.
III
When Redmond was about two yards from me I fired and he fell mortally wounded, shot through the head.
Paddy O’Daly, leader, ‘The Squad’16
Nobody told me to bring kid gloves to Kerry. So, I didn’t bring them.17
General Paddy O’Daly, National Army
With IRA attention focused on the Free State advance, after Kilmallock the National Army sought an alternative to a potentially long bloody march through Munster. There was an easily realisable alternative. At the end of July 1922, a coastal steamer, the Lady Wicklow, set off from Dublin with over five hundred men, soldiers of the Dublin Guard, an armoured car and an eighteen-pound field gun. The ship also carried the man whose methods would stain the reputation of army and government and leave a trail of bitterness.
General Paddy O’Daly, commander of the Dublin Guard, was a former leader of Michael Collins’s ‘Squad’, the close-kit unit which had carried out the campaign of assassination against British intelligence officials, RIC officers and informers in Dublin. Like the rest of the Squad his bond of loyalty to Collins was absolute. O’Daly had shot men up close in the name of the Republic. He knew what it was to see the terror in the eyes of a man about to be killed and what it meant to deny him mercy. There were some who said later that he took too easily to the business of killing. He told of how Collins once chastised him ‘in a towering rage’ after hearing rumours that O’Daly planned to kill a policeman who had knocked over one of O’Daly’s children, a disabled girl:
Michael Collins then gave me a lecture on revenge and said that the man who had revenge in his heart was not fit to be a Volunteer. I had to convince him that I had no thought of shooting Winters, but I passed the remark that if Winters was on our list I would like to carry out the job.18
Revenge would come all to easily to Paddy O’Daly in the war ahead. A comrade from the close-knit Squad, Tom Keogh, and six of his men had been blown up and killed by an IRA landmine the previous September. The Black and Tans and the Auxies had their share of men traumatised or hardened by their experiences of the Western Front. On both sides in Kerry were Irishmen brutalised, accustomed to killing in the War of Independence. Now into Kerry came men like O’Daly and the Free State army head of intelligence, David Neligan, a Limerickman, who had spent the years of the War of Independence as an IRA mole inside both the RIC Special Branch and MI5. O’Daly and Neligan were determined to end the war in Kerry quickly and by whatever means they could get away with.
The rank and file of the Free State army was a mix of ex-IRA men, new recruits with no fighting background, and former members of the Irish regiments of the British Army. When the National Army appeared offshore at Fenit in north Kerry on 2 August, the IRA was taken by surprise. A landmine hastily placed on the pier failed to explode because locals disarmed it, fearing the damage to their livelihoods if the pier blew up. This was a strong indicator of local feeling. The IRA fought a rearguard action towards Tralee, about eight miles away. At one point they fired on medics clearly marked with the Red Cross insignia. O’Daly took this as proof of the IRA’s refusal to abide by the laws of war.
Further up the coast there was another landing at Tarbert and the relief force for Listowel reached the town within three hours. The IRA melted away. Marching into town, the Free Staters found the Workhouse and police barracks burned out. A communiqué on the invasion of north Kerry asserted that ‘the progress of the troops was greeted everywhere by enthusiastic welcomes from the civilian population who had been treated disgracefully by the Irregulars’.19 But this was an exaggeration. There had been thieving and bullying by individual volunteers but – unusually for civil war – no campaign of killing directed against civilians.
Normal life had, however, become impossible after the Republican takeover of Listowel. Restrictions on movement returned and there was an attempt t
o shut down the mail service. Notices appeared close to the town warning postmen that they would be shot. A letter from a Listowel resident to the Cork Examiner from the times contains a litany of complaints against the IRA:
Many happenings have taken place in Listowel and district during the last month due to the stoppage of trains services … as well as the dislocation of telegraph wires and telephone apparatus, no means of communication was to be had with the outside world. To complete our misery, roads leading to the town were destroyed by trenches, making it impossible for farmers to carry on their usual avocations to the town, as a result no fairs or markets took place, traders have to all intent and purposes closed down. The strike on the wage question … and disruption of rail added to our distress … e.g. numerous bridges were destroyed.20
The reference to the wage strike reveals another troubling aspect for the local establishment. Farm labourers, the perennially downtrodden caste of rural society, had gone on strike for better pay. For the bigger farmers this radicalism was the consequence of the IRA takeover. Food supplies were disrupted by an IRA campaign against the rail system.
These are matters which taken as singular events would aggravate but eventually drift out of the public consciousness. But when events multiply a collective view starts to take root and every event that conforms to that view is seized on and added to the weight of evidence, and this evidence becomes the justification for all that is to follow. In this way the Free State commanders can construct a story for the nation, but most importantly for themselves: ‘We did what had to be done to save Ireland from anarchy.’
On 12 August, Collins visited Tralee to thank the troops for recapturing the town from the Irregulars. On the same day a Free State army patrol was ambushed two miles outside Listowel: a soldier was killed and another wounded. This was followed by the blowing up of bridges and a train line. Five days later two young Free State army medics, one of them only sixteen, were shot dead at a beauty spot near Killarney. They were unarmed and wearing Red Cross insignia. These were still early days, but on both sides any reticence about shedding the blood of fellow Irishmen was vanishing.
In the third week of August 1922, the frail hopes of any compromise disappeared. Everybody on Collins’s side and most of his enemies would remember where they were when the news came in. Mick Purtill was on duty at Free State headquarters in Listowel. My grandmother would have been at home in Ballydonoghue. At first people did not know whether to believe it. In their minds he was beyond the reach of mortal men. But the news did not change. That night Hannah Purtill wept for her lost leader and for the Revolution that had descended into fratricide.
Collins was killed by the IRA on 22 August at Béal na mBláth (the Mouth of the Flowers) in his native West Cork, shot dead in an ambush by veteran Cork guerrilla fighters. Before leaving for Cork he had been warned by a senior officer that he was taking an unnecessary risk, to which he is said to have replied: ‘Surely they won’t kill me in my own county?’21
When his convoy was ambushed on a country road he chose to fight rather than flee his attackers. His killer was reputed to be a former RIC man and British soldier, Denis ‘Sonny’ O’Neill, who shot Collins as the Commander-in-Chief stood firing back at the ambushers from the middle of a country road.* Collins abandoned the basic principle of defence when he strode out from the cover of his armoured car as the enemy retreated and was gunned down with a single shot to the head by a man who had once fought on the same side as him. The slain leader died in the arms of his comrade General Emmet Dalton, a veteran of the Tan war and also of the Somme and several other bloody encounters. Facing roadblocks and downed bridges, Dalton and the rest of Collins’s escort had to carry the commander’s body across the fields with ‘blood and brain matter dripping down on top us’.22
The alleged killer of Collins, Dennis ‘Sonny’ O’Neill, had later claimed, when applying for an army pension, that he only ‘accidentally ran into the Ballinablath [sic] thing’.23 The officers of the army pensions board described him as ‘having a downcast appearance, hardly ever smiles, never looks a person in the face when speaking … a first class shot and a strict disciplinarian’.24 It took ninety-two years for the files on O’Neill to be released, though his name had been locally mentioned for decades in relation to the killing of Collins. But, in the way of the country, they kept the information to themselves. The man who may have carried out the most notorious political killing of the Revolution was granted a military pension in 1939 but took his story to the grave.
There were conspiracy theories. My father blamed de Valera and said Dev’s own wife never forgave him for what happened to Collins. De Valera had been in the area and knew that Collins was also in West Cork, lending credence to the theory. But whatever responsibility Dev bore for his fiery words at the start of the conflict, it was wrong to blame him for Collins’s death. By August 1922, de Valera had little influence on the military leadership of the IRA and was in the area trying to convince IRA leaders to lay down their arms. The war had found its own savage momentum without any help from Dev.
To the end Collins was true to his nature: he never fought without contemplating how the end of fighting might be brought about, and he was not yet ready for a war of extirpation against the Republicans. The month before his death he had warned that abusing them publicly was ‘not the best way to tackle them. The men who are prepared to go to the extreme limit are misguided, but practically all of them are sincere.’25 At least some of his Republican enemies would have felt the same about him.
Collins’s comrade and army chief of staff, General Richard Mulcahy, urged that ‘no cruel act of reprisal blemish your bright honour … The Army serves – strengthened by its sorrow.’26 But the viciousness would come. The death of Collins dismantled the last hopes on the Free State side of a compromise, and the words of new political chief of the Free State, W. T. Cosgrave, president of the Dáil, cast the war as an existential struggle and set the tone for what would follow. ‘I am not going to hesitate and if the country is to live and we have to exterminate 10,000 Republicans, the three millions of people are bigger than this 10,000.’27 This was August, less than a month into the Civil War, and the most senior constitutional politician in the land was talking about extermination. This was not a nod and a wink from the political elite but plain words that could be used to justify extreme measures. Paddy O’Daly and David Neligan had the backing they needed for a campaign without kid gloves.
The first death-squad actions took place before the end of August in Tralee. Men were abducted under cover of darkness, taken to a remote place and shot. The war settled into localised butchery. The IRA lacked the strength to engage the National Army in big battles. Even if it could take territory there were not enough men to hold it. But it did not act like an organisation preparing to attend its own funeral. In September, the IRA cut telegraph wires and blew up a railway bridge near the ruins of Arthur Vicars’s house at Kilmorna. Then they attacked the village of Tarbert and, after pumping gallons of petrol into the building and firing incendiary bullets, seized the Free State headquarters. They might have incinerated their old comrades but the bullets failed to ignite the fuel. The countryside was in a state of perpetual apprehension. Armed men appeared at remote farmhouses in the middle of the night seeking food and shelter. Nobody dared refuse, though some did pass on information to the Free State.
Throughout the autumn months, tip-offs flowed to the army. Captain Mick Purtill used local knowledge to track the movements of the IRA units around the district and had filed into his memory the safe houses and bunkers from his own time with the Flying Column. There were sweeps through the countryside, much like the British in the latter stages of the Tan war, and more than two hundred Republicans were captured. Because this was Irish army, with the support of a significant number of locals, their intelligence officers could obtain information undreamt of by the Crown forces in the War of Independence. Still the IRA was able to keep up sufficient momentum to kill an
estimated thirty-five National Army soldiers and wound a hundred in September and October, compared to nine deaths in their own ranks. Four of those were reprisal killings. An IRA prisoner John Galvin was shot after his arm was broken under torture and he confessed to the killing of a soldier. Seventeen-year-old Bertie Murphy was also shot, after being tortured. In September the government brought in an Emergency Powers Bill allowing the state to execute those caught in possession of arms and explosives. It was carried by forty-eight votes to eighteen. A two-week amnesty was offered to IRA men. If they came in and pledged not to take up arms again the war would be over. The Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter calling on Republicans to lay down their arms and accept the amnesty, and threatened to refuse sacraments to IRA men who ignored the bishops’ commands.
But Humphrey Murphy and the other defenders of the Republic ignored the overture from the government and regarded the Church hierarchy as the religious wing of the Free State. The chief of staff, General Liam Lynch, was one of the small group who had tried to bridge the divide between the two factions of the IRA and prevent civil war. But when war came he proved every bit as ruthless as his Free State adversaries. Lynch was twenty-nine years old at the time and wrote of how sad ‘it was to risk having to clash with our old comrades but we cannot count the cost’.28 Four months later Lynch’s tone towards his old friends had changed dramatically. He told a comrade that the IRA ‘have now been hopelessly let down by their former comrades & leaders … they have stooped to lower methods than the British, including murder gangs & vile propaganda … Who could have dreamt that all our hopes could have been so blighted.’29
