by Fergal Keane
The IRA moved deeper into the mountains. IRA men had already staged walkouts from churches where there had been clerical criticism from the altar. And the men knew that not all the clergy opposed them. A friendly priest would always be found to whisper an act of contrition into the ear of a dying man or hear his last confession. They kept up the ambushes, hitting a general’s convoy five miles from Listowel and killing one of his escort. The Free State responded by using a tactic pioneered by the British. IRA prisoners were placed on vehicles as human shields. As winter came on, the Free State was still unable to defeat the IRA. From mid-November to early December the war took on the intimately merciless character which would define it in the nation’s collective memory. The first judicial executions of IRA prisoners under the emergency legislation took place at Kilmainham jail in Dublin. Republicans were being shot in the same jail and in the same manner as the heroes of 1916. This new rule of Ireland by Irishmen largely disavowed sentimental attachments.
On 30 November, General Lynch responded with his so-called ‘orders of frightfulness’ which targeted TDs (Teachta Dála – members of the Dáil) supportive of the executions, some judges and newspaper editors who were hostile to the Republican cause. On 7 December the IRA assassinated one TD and wounded another in an attack in Dublin. The following day the four most prominent IRA prisoners in Dublin were executed. All had been old comrades of members of the Free State government and army leaders. One, Rory O’Connor, had acted as best man at the wedding of the minister who signed his death warrant, Kevin O’Higgins. Liam Lynch responded by expanding the category of ‘traitor’ to all who supported the Free State and advocated the burning of their homes.
On 10 December, the seven-year-old son of a member of the Dáil was killed when the IRA burned down the family home. This prompted a newspaper to ask: ‘Since when has the burning of innocent children become part of the tactics of clean fighting?’30 Notices appeared in villages near Listowel warning that ‘for every Republican shot, two Staters will fall’.31 The father of the Justice Minister, Kevin O’Higgins, was shot in February 1923 after the IRA destroyed the family home. The army’s chief legal advisor wrote to General Mulcahy, the former IRA chief of staff and new Minister of Defence, that the execution of prisoners could be justified because the ‘circumstances of the nation at present justify almost anything that would serve to end the present [Irregular] campaign of murder and arson … [and] the execution of persons tried and convicted in pursuance of a resolution of the Dáil as a reprisal, is preferable to the execution of persons untried and unconvicted’.32 The Free State forces killed men after court-martial, and without any trial at all. A trial usually meant a hastily convened meeting of senior officers. Any man caught with a gun could expect to be shot on sight.
Around Listowel the peace that initially accompanied the return of the Free State troops vanished. Jittery soldiers shot one of their own men in the dark outside a dancehall. In the early New Year of 1923, the Republicans intensified their campaign against the railways, a vital source of provisions for civilians and military alike. On 19 January the IRA wrecked the tracks on the Listowel–Tralee line, causing the train to crash. The driver and his fireman died agonising deaths, scalded by boiling water and crushed by the locomotive. Four Republican prisoners were sentenced to death in reprisal. Four days after the derailment two railway workers were shot dead outside Tralee station. The National Army officer Niall Harrington claimed the killings had been carried out by men on his own side to further discredit the IRA. Near the Purtills’ farm at Ballydonoghue the IRA attacked and destroyed the station building. The Civil War divided the family of Hannah’s childhood friend, May Ahern. Her brother, for whom May had scouted during ambushes against the police, joined the Free State army with Mick Purtill. May went to the Republican side and turned her skills as a scout and weapons smuggler against the Free State. Years later, when applying for a military pension, she wrote of the conflict of personal and political loyalties of that time. Writing of her home she says: ‘I got my brother … to leave’33 – and this so that she could hide IRA men on the run. Her brother would have known why she wanted him to go. People made accommodations or they did not. They found ways of looking the other way or they hunted old comrades to death.
By January 1923, the National Army had promoted Paddy O’Daly to the rank of major-general in command of Kerry. He pressed Mulcahy in Dublin to confirm his orders for the execution of the four prisoners after the train derailment. The men had nothing to do with the derailment but were considered by O’Daly to be ‘exceptionally bad cases’.34
In a sign of where broader public sympathy stood, a deputation of railwaymen who had received death threats went to O’Daly to pledge that ‘neither murder nor assassination would prevent them from carrying out their duties’.35 Two days later the IRA held up the mail train between Ballybunion and Listowel, stole the mail and wrecked the engine and carriages, forcing the passengers to walk the rest of the journey.
A Free State soldier who witnessed the executions described how the men were lined up beside their coffins to be shot. According to Private Bill Bailey the condemned were kept waiting by the coffins because the commander of the firing squad was still in bed. ‘The men were looking into [the] coffins and they could see their names and then [they] got into coffins to see were they the right size, then they exchanged coffins and their names on [the] coffins.’36 According to the witness the firing squad was made up of young men, most of whom were crying.
Mick Purtill on his wedding day with Madge, after the war (Purtill Family)
O’Daly surrounded himself with old associates from the Squad. Most of his troops were either from Dublin or the west of Ireland – men without ties to the locality. Once the war was over they could leave and never have to face the relatives of those they had killed. For Con Brosnan and Mick Purtill it was different. Beyond the bare few lines in a military file in Dublin there is nothing to suggest how Mick dealt with any conflict of loyalties, except for something my cousin Liam Purtill said when he was remembering a story he heard from the family of an old comrade in the Flying Column. According to this source, Captain Mick Purtill was based at Tarbert when a patrol brought in an old friend – Con Dee – who was already a legend among local Republicans. Mick and Con had been on their very first IRA mission together at Ballybunion RIC barracks, and had hidden in the church at Ballydonoghue to escape a Tan round-up. Hannah Purtill had guided Con to safety across the fields. Con had later cheated death at the hands of the Tan firing squad at Knockanure by running until he collapsed from his wounds.
But the Civil War had placed Con Dee and Mick Purtill on opposite sides. Con had been captured in arms and the punishment was death by firing squad. By Liam Purtill’s account, Mick made a quick intervention. ‘He just shouted “My prisoner”, and took Con Dee away.’ Mick could not see his old comrade face a second firing squad. So he took him to Tarbert harbour and put him on a boat across the Shannon to County Clare. This is the story that has been handed down in our family. It invites so many questions. How did Mick explain the loss of the prisoner to his superiors, and what was his role at Tarbert? But he is gone and my cousin only remembers the short account the Dee family gave him. All we know is that it was a harsh time when neither side was given to the habit of mercy and that Mick Purtill took a risk to free his old friend. Con Dee was eventually recaptured and went on hunger strike before he was released and left permanently for the United States. Like so many of the defeated Republicans he found the new Ireland of the Free State a cold place. He died in Chicago in 1967 at the age of seventy-one, exiled from the country for which he had been willing to sacrifice his life.
It was local bad blood that set in chain the worst of the atrocities. Up to the present day there are Republicans who will shout ‘Ballyseedy’ to remind the descendants of the Free State government of their perfidy. Paddy O’Daly was the one who gave the orders but the source of the viciousness lay in the hill country of Knocknagoshel
, about twelve miles to the east of Listowel, among men who had known each other all of their lives. Pat O’Connor was a farmer who yearned for an end to the war. When he saw IRA Columns moving across his land he passed on the information to the Free State army. The IRA got wind of this, fined him £100 and warned against any further association with the soldiers. But O’Connor and his son Paddy ‘Pats’ were proud men. They would not be told what to do by a bunch of young bucks with guns. When the farmer refused to pay the IRA fine his home was raided and smashed up and his cattle and life savings seized. It meant financial ruin and a very public blow to the pride of the O’Connors.
At this point the story spirals towards a blood feud. The younger Paddy ‘Pats’ O’Connor’s response was to join the Free State army, where he would be accused of taking part in violent interrogations of Republican prisoners.
A decision was taken by the IRA to kill Paddy ‘Pats’ and he was lured by a tip-off to a dugout where arms were supposedly hidden. The dugout had been booby-trapped with a mine. O’Connor and four other soldiers – including three Dublin Guards known personally to O’Daly – were blown up, ripped to pieces by high explosive in the middle of the night. A survivor was hideously maimed. IRA man Seamus O’Connor, a native of Knocknagoshel, was lying in a dugout several miles away when he was woken by the blast. ‘Somebody lit a match and noted the time on his watch … “It’s the mine,” he said. “Lord have mercy on their souls.”’37 An IRA message reported ‘that a trigger mine was laid in Knocknagoshel for a member of the F. S. Army Lt. O’Connor who had made a hobby out of torturing Republican prisoners in Castleisland’.38
O’Daly responded by ordering a group of nine Republican prisoners to be brought before him in Tralee. At first the men were forced to look at the mutilated remains of the dead soldiers. One account, published within a year of the massacre, alleged that the men were beaten with hammers, had shots fired around their heads and were then shown their own coffins. This was written from a staunchly Republican standpoint but it rings true. The commander and his chief of intelligence, David Neligan, would become hate figures for a generation of Republicans.*
Early on 7 March 1923 and on Paddy O’Daly’s command, the nine men were loaded into a lorry and brought to Ballyseedy Cross, a known Republican ambush point. The men were taken out and made to sit on the ground among tree branches and other debris, under which had been hidden a landmine. The executioners were all men of the Dublin Guard. The blast blew eight men to pieces and sent Stephen Fuller flying through the air. The National Army issued a statement saying the prisoners were victims of an IRA landmine which had also injured several soldiers. A young Free State lieutenant, Niall Harrington, one of those men of conscience who appears on occasion in war, a man whose belief in truth overpowers atavism, a rare man in that place and time, suspected that the men had been summarily executed. Despite denials by his superiors Harrington carried out his own investigation and reached a damning conclusion: ‘Reprisals for the mine [Knocknagoshel] were deliberately planned by a clique of influential Dublin guards officers … the facts are that the mines used in the slaughter of the prisoners were constructed in Tralee under the supervision of two senior Dublin Guards officers.’39
An IRA account described how ‘the road was covered with blood, pieces of flesh, bones, boots, and clothing were scattered about’.40 When the army brought the coffins with the dead prisoners to Tralee, the victims’ families were asked to collect them for burial. But they refused to accept the military coffins. The bodies, or what was left of them, were taken out in front of the barracks. Looking at the mangled remains the relatives turned on the soldiers and ‘stoned every member of the Free State army they saw … [the bodies] were removed to other coffins and those provided by the Free State army were kicked through the Barrack gate’.41
Private Bill Bailey, a native of Tralee and more likely to be sympathetic to Kerry prisoners than the Dublin Guards, was on duty that day and recalled that around four in the afternoon relatives arrived with donkeys and carts to collect the dead. Seeing the rough coffins, and then opening them to identify their kin, the people became enraged, hurling abuse and stones at the soldiers. They smashed the coffins and transferred the bodies to others they had brought with them. Bailey claimed that the army band had been marched to the gate to greet the relatives. ‘Just before coffins were given out, the band lined up and played ragtime [jazz] inside [the] gate – “I’m the Sheikh of Araby” etc. on either side of the main gate. Completely shocked and dazed the people.’42 General O’Daly and his subordinates had carried out atrocities which they justified in the name of terrorising the IRA into submission. But they had also revelled in their ruthlessness.
O’Daly led the official investigation of the Ballyseedy incident and, unsurprisingly, exonerated himself and the Dublin Guard. He lied and the Minister of Defence, Richard Mulcahy, backed him up, preferring to protect the honour of the National Army than investigate atrocities on his own side. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, said nothing that would upset the Free State. As the IRA commander Ernie O’Malley bitterly remarked: ‘The thundering pulpits were strangely silent about what the crows ate in Kerry.’43 Only the Free State Lieutenant, Niall Harrington, displayed a moral compass, travelling to Dublin to make a report to the authorities. He was thanked and sent on his way back to Kerry. The north Kerry men seem to have been kept away from the worst violence. Perhaps they were not trusted to torture and kill old friends? Mick Purtill was based at Tarbert, twenty-seven miles from Ballyseedy, with his friend Con Brosnan.The dirty work around Tralee and south Kerry was left, largely, to the Dublin Guard.
There were further massacres of prisoners after Ballyseedy. In south Kerry the same tactic of tying men to mines was used to kill eight men in two separate blasts. Spring came and the IRA were being hunted down with relentless ferocity. Information continued to flow to the army. A detachment of the new national police force, the Garda Síochána, arrived in Listowel to take up the work once done by the RIC. But they were not armed and left the fighting to the army. The bitter end was approaching.
In the last fortnight of April 1923 there was a spasm of killing around north Kerry as O’Daly’s men fought the Republican diehards. After an ambush on a Free State patrol, Timothy ‘Aero’ Lyons and his group took refuge in the caves at Clashmealcon, about nine miles up the coast from Ballybunion. Lyons’s nickname came from his apparent ability to appear out of nowhere in attacks. But on this occasion a captured guerrilla told the army where he was hiding. The caves were surrounded and fires set outside to try and smoke Lyons and his comrades into the open. Two men tried to escape by night but were washed away by the sea. There was firing from the caves and two soldiers were killed. After two days Lyons came out and surrendered, but as he was being hauled up the rope snapped and he fell to the rocks below. The Free State soldiers fired on his body. His comrades gave themselves up and were subsequently executed. My grandfather’s friend, Dan Flavin, was in custody with the condemned men. At one point the other IRA prisoners were told they could save their lives if they would sign a document calling for an IRA surrender. They refused and were beaten. They lived in constant fear of being executed. ‘They took out seven men that night and ours was a corridor room through which they would have to pass. We got a terrible fright as the men passed out for you didn’t know who would be next,’ said Flavin. ‘Next morning four of them were carried to hospital. Their shirts were stuck to them with their own blood.’44
Another of our Church Street neighbours, Denis Quille, was among IRA prisoners who set fire to their jail near Dublin. ‘The prison was blazing. The Staters shouted at us to get in. In reply, we shouted, “Up Kerry!” “Up the Republic”.’45 The Free State guards opened fire with machine guns and killed a prisoner before a priest was summoned and stopped the shooting.
Seventy-seven Republican prisoners were officially executed during the eleven months of the Civil War, triple the number executed by the British during the Tan war. For
years Richard Mulcahy would endure the nickname ‘Dirty Dick’ and hear shouts of ‘Remember the 77’. Talk to many Fine Gael people of the older generation and they will agree that the executions were brutal but argue that nothing else would have saved the state. Except that there was no forgetting and no forgiving. In time some of the men who fought on the Republican side would help form the most successful political party in the history of the Irish state, and they would sit in parliament opposite the men who had sanctioned the executions and covered up the atrocities. Political power, decades of power, was their reward. In the wider public realm, in schools especially, there was silence about the brutal facts of what happened in north Kerry. But this was a different thing to forgetting.
* To be described as ‘black’ in this context means ‘ultra’ or ‘dyed-in-the-wool’.
* The nucleus of the Dublin Guards Regiment was formed out of men from the IRA’s Dublin Brigade and members of Michael Collins’s ‘Squad’. They took over the first British garrisons to be handed over to the Free State on 31 January 1921. As Civil War approached the ranks were swelled by men from the pro-Treaty IRA in southern border counties and unemployed youth in Dublin.
* This has never been conclusively proved and it is unlikely that it ever will be. As an ex-soldier, O’Neill was believed to have been the best shot, lending credence to the claim that he fired the fatal bullet. The University College Cork historian, Dr John Borgonovo, believes it likely Collins was hit by a ricochet from the armoured car. ‘I have never seen any documentation of his pulling the trigger, and I know another IRA veteran from West Cork also claimed to have fired the shot.’ (Correspondence with author, 20 Jun 17.)
