by Fergal Keane
Clung to old stoic principle,
And he dismissed his weaknesses
As folly.
His sinning was inchoate;
Drank ill-advisedly
… I am terribly proud of my father
For he was a loveable man.7
Bill Keane died in August 1963. Hannah would outlive him by twenty-six years. There was much to be proud of in her life. None of her children knew hunger or war. They had, as the saying goes, ‘made well for themselves’. But my grandmother sheltered a sadness. She feared the shadow of drink. ‘The curse of the Keanes,’ she’d say. Hannah feared what it might do to her son Eamonn, my father. By the beginning of the 1970s he had already lost his marriage and been hospitalised repeatedly through alcoholism. In the end it would kill him, though Hannah did not live to see this. I saw her weep one New Year’s Eve when he arrived home late and we stood to sing a poignant ‘Auld Lang Syne’. When I was a teenager she would ask me occasionally: ‘What’s to become of him?’ I had no answer. I was past the point of reassuring pieties.
Mother and son were unable to communicate except about horses. I watched her and Eamonn trade tips at the dining-room table and then carried their bets to the bookies. I would always enjoy that brief ease between them. Beyond this, there were only terse sentences, and silence, the great full silences of an Irish kitchen where none are at peace. I knew that my father was proud of her, especially of her stand against the Tans. But he could no more tell her this than he could abandon the bottle. As a child he had sought an attachment to her that she could not give, burdened as she was by the cares of the household. A shy, sensitive boy with a stutter – a dreamer – he was ill suited to the hard world of post-revolutionary Ireland. His aunt, Juleanne, my grandfather’s sister, stepped into the vacuum and became the protector and spoiler of my father, sheltering him behind her countrywoman’s shawl. Eamonn became the child of the spinster aunt and drifted away from his mother.
Hannah suffered bouts of depression. It came and went, an endlessly turning and returning tide. It could send her to bed for days. Where did it come from? The Purtills were not depressives. Was it from struggling to raise nine children with a husband who was loving but beset by a weakness for drink? Did some of it come from the war?
As a child I could only observe the silent sadness. Once I climbed the stairs to bring her a cup of tea in her bedroom. I remember her lying still, tears flowing down her cheeks. I came to the side of the bed and placed the tray on the small straw chair. She did not look at me but stared into the distance. It was explained to me as ‘bad nerves’, the failsafe description for all emotional disturbance in those days. Hannah was also plagued by imagined bouts of ill health, complaining of aches and pains which always, in her mind, hinted at the probability of terminal ailments.
It is tempting to project backwards, now that I know what war can do to a human being, what it can plant and how long the malady can take to grow. I do think the war was part of it: the fierce excitement of those years, and the dawning knowledge of the human cost, and then living in the world that grew out of the war, a landscape of marginal choices where power in public life was claimed by the men. This strong, intelligent and courageous woman joined the majority of her fellow women rebels in a life of child-rearing, cooking, budgeting, cleaning, and obeying the dictates of a church which strove to command their minds and bodies. This was the rural world in which Hannah Keane lived and whose rules she quietly accepted. But I believe it wore her down.
At the end of John B’s play Big Maggie, about a matriarch fighting to dominate her family after the death of a feckless husband, the principal character delivers a monologue that is both a startling expression of sexual liberation and a denunciation of the state in which she grew to womanhood. Bear in mind it was written in 1969 while the Church still enjoyed considerable power, especially in rural Ireland:
Oh I curse the stifling, smothering breath of the religion that withered my loving and my living and my womanhood. I should have been springing like a shoot of corn … and all too soon I’ll be dead but I can have anything I want for a while. By God I can have any man I fancy and who fancies me … The weal of the chastity cord is still around my belly and the incense is in my nostrils. I’m too long a prisoner but I’ll savour what I can, while I can and let the last hour be the sorest.8
Auntie Anne recalled that her mother was quietly proud of her role in Cumann na mBan. That was on the very rare occasions Hannah spoke about it. The state made little of the women’s contribution until recent years, long after my grandmother’s death. There is still no dedicated memorial to the volunteers of Cumann na mBan.
I am nearly finished with my writing when my grandmother’s file comes into the light. War stories in a thick dossier in the Military Archives in Dublin. The letters, forms and testaments are from the late 1960s. Bill is dead by then and Hannah is applying for her war service medal and the military pension due to all who fought for Ireland. At first the state will not recognise the stand she took for her country. The bureaucracy is faced with vast numbers of claims. There is no proof, she is told. A government minister writes: ‘I regret that under the circumstances, the medal cannot be awarded to her and that consequently, she is not a qualified person for the award of a special allowance under the Army pensions Acts.’9
Then something remarkable happens. The divisions of the Civil War are set to one side. Old friendships assert themselves. It turns out that the files proving her service were taken in Free State raids on the home of her commanding officer, Mae Brennan, who had taken the Republican side. They have vanished in the intervening decades. Now, nearly forty years after the end of the war her former CO speaks up for my grandmother. Yes, she had been with her in the fight for independence and yes, she deserved her medal and pension. As I read on there is another surprise. The shadow of Tobias O’Sullivan comes out of the pages. One of those who testifies for Hannah is Jack Ahern, who was among the four men who killed the District Inspector. He writes a short note from his home in Newtownsandes, dated 4 November 1968: ‘I Jack Ahern of the North Kerry Flying Column do hereby certify that I knew Hannah Keane (nee Purtill) to be an active member of Listowel branch of C, na mBan during the years 1920 & 1921.’10
May Ahern, who also fought against the Free State, writes and tells of how she and Hannah were together ‘on many occasions acting on instructions from the Flying Column’. And for the first time the handed-down story of Hannah and the Tan Darcy is made real by an eyewitness. It happened on an April evening in 1921 and the two young women were assigned to track Darcy’s movements, almost certainly as a prelude to an assassination. They walked into the square in Listowel and were passing the Bank of Ireland when ‘suddenly he leaped out at us with a gun in his hand and threatened us, and ordered us out of town’11 Darcy also went to Hannah’s employer, the draper Moran, and told him to sack her within twenty-four hours. The draper refused. Now in this old file the fear with which my grandmother lived comes to life. Darcy must have loathed her. Yet she refused to flee. There were relatives of her soon-to-be in-laws the Keanes living in the Stack’s Mountains. Other family scattered around north Kerry. She could have gone deep into the country but did not. As I learned in researching this book, it was Darcy who was shot and ended up leaving Listowel.
One of the most poignant files I encountered in researching this book was the military pension application from Amelia Wilmot, an old comrade of Hannah’s and the woman who had smuggled guns and letters out of Listowel RIC barracks under the noses of the Black and Tans. She was renting a room on Charles Street – once famous as ‘the haunt of pro-British types’ – and in December 1946 she wrote to the government telling officials that ‘I am 76 years of age and now unable to do anything. I find it impossible to live on my present income … as I am crippled I cannot manage to exist any longer on my present income … I have had to go into debt for necessities.’12 A further letter pleads that she needs help quickly to avoid having to go to the coun
ty home, the modern-day equivalent of the poorhouse. The state granted her request but it was a scandal that she ever had to plead for it.
Of the Civil War Hannah said nothing, but I know that she remained friends with May Ahern. The childhood bonds forged in the fields and lanes of Ballydonoghue were strong enough to survive the fratricide. Towards the end of her life, a studio photograph was taken where my grandmother is facing sideways towards the camera. The background is dark, looking as if it might overtake her. But Hannah faces the lens with equanimity. Hers is the face of a survivor. When the image was sent to me by a cousin I felt sadness, but also a surge of pride. She left no diaries or letters so it is this photograph that stands for me as the final testament to her character. This is a woman who knows what she has lived through and who does not wish to hide it. Her need to see things exactly as they are, is pure Purtill.
II
After the Civil War Con Brosnan settled back in his home village. The name had changed, from Newtownsandes to Moyvane. He rebuilt the pub and the home burned down by the Tans after the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan. But his family was scattered by then. The three girls were gone to America. Two brothers left for England. One of them joined the Royal Navy and became a doctor. Con had a Free State army pension and some income from the pub and the small family farm. Like many veterans of war, Con Brosnan did not speak of what he had seen and done or what had happened to his friends and comrades. It was as if the war had never happened. Except that it was everywhere. You couldn’t miss it in the bitterness of the politics. Con wanted the hatred to stop. This much we know for certain.
In Kerry only Gaelic football could unite people. It provided a collective identity that transcended politics. If beating Dublin or Mayo in an All-Ireland final meant putting politics to one side, then that is what you did. ‘’T’was football helped to cure the bad blood,’ remembered Gerry Brosnan.13 Con was talented – among the best players of his generation. In Kerry this made him a legend. He is remembered for reaching out to his Civil War enemies on the football field, even arranging safe passage for wanted IRA men so that they could represent Kerry. In 1924, a year after the Civil War ended, Kerry won the All-Ireland final with a team almost roughly divided between pro- and anti-Treaty players. When Con Brosnan was coming to the end of his playing career, a Republican, Joe Barrett, ensured that he was given the captaincy. Another old Civil War enemy, John Joe Landers, said Con had faced down the bitterness of both sides: ‘Regardless of pressure from within his own side of the divide, or from the other side, he did what he believed had to be done to bring about peace and healing. He was the ultimate peacemaker in Kerry football after the Civil War.’14
Con played for Kerry and then trained the county team. He encouraged youngsters so much that ‘he couldn’t keep a halfpenny from buying footballs for them’.15 It was only on a tour to the United States that the bitterness surfaced. In New York the exiled Republicans nurtured a remorseless hatred of the Free Staters. Con was warned not to go on the Kerry tour there after the Civil War. He ignored the threat. Another comrade was told that he would be taken off the pitch in a coffin if he played in New York. He chose to face down the intimidation once more. As it happened the man who made the threat was stretchered off.
Con was a Gaelic Athletic Association hero in a county where there was no higher accolade. He had the aura of a leader, a man who made magic on the pitch so that men wanted to be in his company when the final whistle went and the talk of sporting battle went on and on in the pubs. During the election campaign of 1932, Con Brosnan stood for Cumann na nGaedheal, loyal to the memory of Collins. There was big talk of him being elected, a candidate who was popular on both sides of the house and a crowned king of football.
The older Con Brosnan. He prayed every day for those he shot (Kerryman newspaper)
He failed by just four hundred votes to win a seat. It was around this time that depression began to manifest itself. After the election he still played local football and trained the Kerry team that won the All-Ireland on the eve of the Second World War. Two of his sons played for Kerry. But at times he drank more than was good for a man who was starting to suffer from an emotional imbalance. Depression would follow him all his life.
Con lived in a time before the widespread availability of talking therapy in Ireland or treatment of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that he prayed, every day, for the men he killed.
Gerry Brosnan believes his father might have suffered from depression even if there had been no war, and his understanding of his father’s psychological make-up is far greater than that of any outsider.
But Con Brosnan was only twenty-one when he took part in the killings of Tobias O’Sullivan and James Kane. He had lost friends killed in the War of Independence. And he had fought against friends in the Civil War. An image comes back: Ballybunion, a few days into the Truce, six months after the assassination of Tobias O’Sullivan, and three young men are wading into the surf, free after years on the run. Con Brosnan is knocked over repeatedly by the Atlantic waves, until the others come to rescue him. It is a picture that seems like a foreshadowing of what is to come in the long future. Con Brosnan died when he was seventy-five, having seen two sons become doctors, their university fees paid by his brother in the Royal Navy. He could also trust that Gerry would make a good life as a farmer. But it is hard not to believe that the war followed him to the end.
Jack Ahern who led the group that killed the District Inspector went back to the life of farming in Newtownsandes. But he too was shadowed by the memory of Tobias O’Sullivan. ‘He prayed for that man every night of his life,’ his son, Father Dan Ahern, told me. Apart from this solitary revelation, Jack Ahern never spoke of the war.16
I have reported on many killings: fathers and mothers killed in front of their children, entire families butchered together by cheering, laughing mobs. The first shootings I covered were in Northern Ireland. The killers I met were often hardened men. Some of them were twenty years into the conflict, veterans of police interrogation cells and prisons; men who looked at a spot on the wall and refused to answer the questions no matter how long they were kept awake. They had killed people in front of their wives and children. And they had kept on killing. For years in some cases. For obvious reasons the killers were not going to admit anything to me. It would have meant a swift arrest for murder. I knew I could have interviewed them for the next ten years and would only have been told that the violence was justified, however ‘regrettable’ were the effects on civilians. If they ever did accept responsibility it would be that offered by a soldier acting under the conditions of war against an occupying army.
After the Troubles ended I did meet some who struggled with ghosts. They were left to face the silences they had delivered into the lives of others. An IRA man from mid-Ulster who shot a neighbour, a part-time soldier, told me he had been a different person back then. ‘I look back and wonder how I did it. I knew his children. I live with him Fergal and I always will.’ I met a loyalist gunman who had shot a Catholic man in a sectarian murder in the 1970s. Billy Hutchinson went to prison for his UVF activities and afterwards emerged as a political leader of working-class loyalism. The man he killed had nothing to do with the IRA or politics. He was a Catholic in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked Billy how he dealt with the memory of killing. His response was one sentence, darkly suggestive of inner upheaval: ‘I sometimes wake up at the night thinking of the things I have done.’17 The things I have done.
It wasn’t until later, years after Belfast, that I started to think about the revolutionary generation, wondering how they dealt with their memories. The more I covered wars the more I wondered. I had never been called on to kill or to be part of the process of killing. Yet the memories of the dead follow me constantly. My guilt has been the guilt of omission. It was for the people I had left behind in the hands of killers in Rwanda. It lay in every gesture of farewell in ruined cities and refugee camps. Like my forebears I
knew what it was to live in fear of my life, but only for short periods, a few weeks at most, with the prospect of a flight to another, safer place always glittering at the end of the road. Nobody hunted me down. But the wars followed me home, nonetheless. In my late thirties I experienced a severe depressive breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of war experiences. I shared therapy groups with soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. There was much that separated us, but we all felt that the experience of war was something we could never communicate back here in the normal world.
I did not belong to the solid band that went to the wars and returned essentially undamaged. I believe that Mick Purtill did. He built his farm, at Kilcolgan, not far from Ballydonoghue, and raised his family. My uncle Mick is remembered as a man who worked from dawn until night in his fields. At ploughing time he would be alert to the slightest error in the geometry of the drills ‘and would do the whole thing over again if it wasn’t right’.18 His relaxations were coursing with greyhounds and Gaelic football, a sport at which he excelled and represented Kerry at junior level. When he died the army sent a colour party and gave him a military burial with shots fired over the grave.
None of the children remembered him being beset by haunted moments. This was not because he was callous or hardened. My cousin Liam remembered a man ‘who never raised his hand to strike a child’. I believe Mick compartmentalised his experiences. They belonged in a time and place that was gone, and he had the ability to keep them there. Mick Purtill lived to see his sons and daughters prosper. They bought farms of their own. The fields around Listowel became the birthplace of one of the world’s largest food corporations, Kerry Group, bringing prosperity to the town and billions into the national exchequer. Mick Purtill was an ardent supporter of Ireland’s entry into what was then the European Economic Community. When Ireland eventually voted to legalise contraception and then divorce, Mick Purtill, though still devoutly Catholic, did not rebel against the liberalising spirit of the times. Once he was sure that his family, and the land they lived on, was secure, Mick was content to let individual conscience have its day.
