by Fergal Keane
III
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Derek Mahon, ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’, 1973
After he was killed there was a big fuss. May O’Sullivan was brought to Dublin to meet the Lord Lieutenant. There was the funeral and what seemed like all the policemen in Ireland marching behind his coffin. On the little mass card for the dead policeman, he is called Toby. May was twenty-six, widowed with three children, the youngest not yet two years old.
Tobias was twelve years older than his wife, a good husband, a devoted father. He was her strong man, his were the solid arms that carried the family through dangerous times. Now he was gone. He was unmourned by the majority of his fellow countrymen and women. To many of them Tobias O’Sullivan obeyed the wrong leaders. He wore the wrong uniform. A child said that once to his daughter Sara. She was only a child herself, and it was something said in a playground. ‘A pity he died in the wrong colours.’ It was a thing a child would say in the Ireland of that time. But Sara never forgot those words. The pain was there at the very end when her mind was wandering back to the land where her father had grown up, and she would recite the names of villages and townlands and all that she could remember of the O’Sullivans of Connemara.
After her husband was buried May went back to her own people in County Mayo. They were small farmers whose fields looked out on the heights of Croagh Patrick. But even in this remoteness the war followed. Her twenty-four-year-old brother was harassed by the Tans and ended up becoming involved with the IRA.
There was no new chapter for the widow of Tobias O’Sullivan. Five months after he was killed May died in a Dublin hospital of ‘galloping’ Tuberculosis, a virulent form of the disease which would have wreaked havoc on a body weakened by the trauma of that January day in Listowel. Tobias’s brother took over guardianship of the children, returning from Jamaica where he was chief of police and placing them in boarding schools. The boys went to de Valera’s alma mater, Blackrock College in Dublin; little Sara was sent to the nuns at Sion Hill. ‘She was basically reared by the nuns,’ remembered her daughter Desiree. The orphaned O’Sullivan children grew up in a country which had disowned the memory of men like their father. The two boys, Bernard and John, emigrated. John went to America and Bernard to Malaya and later London. When he retired, the boy who remembered seeing his father’s body on Church Street came home to live in County Galway. John went to Texas, raised a family but died at the age of fifty. His niece Desiree believed he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, the lingering effect of the trauma that occurred in Listowel more than four decades before. Only Sara stayed in Ireland and lived to see the country embrace modernity. She married a man who was a big supporter of de Valera and Fianna Fáil; the couple loved each other all of their lives but Sara would never attend any of the party functions.
When the fiftieth anniversary of 1916 came around, Sara’s son Morgan, the grandson of Tobias O’Sullivan, was part of the military guard of honour at the official commemoration. He was a member of the FCA, the army reserve. But he did not connect the Revolution with the death of his grandfather. By this stage the killing of Tobias O’Sullivan was a mere whisper from the past. There were no family masses, the custom for some, to commemorate the anniversary of his death. It was only years later that Morgan and Desiree began to excavate their family history. ‘I didn’t know where my grandfather was shot, that he was shot in Listowel,’ Morgan said.19 Why did the family not speak publicly about their grandfather before now? What Desiree said in reply haunts me. ‘Because nobody ever asked.’
Desiree had grown up in a country where the questions were not even asked, let alone answered. Her mother, the daughter of the dead policeman, believed no good would come of looking into the past, so much so that she refused ever to visit Listowel or countenance one of her children going to the place that had broken her family. Maybe that was the cost of that child’s remark in the playground. The wrong uniform. The pain she felt was kept inside, her life devoted to the happiness of those closest to her. But Desiree was followed by questions. Who was Tobias? How did he die? She could not leave the past to rest. It was something of the brave O’Sullivan spirit, I believe, that made her go secretly to Listowel, aged seventeen, hitching down the country with a friend to see where her grandfather was killed. Later she returned with her husband and her own children. When she tells me all this there are tears in her eyes. We are nearly one hundred years on from the killing but the loss of generations sits on the table before us, among the family pictures, in the eyes of Tobias and his wife May, in the years before the war.
Ireland no longer disdains to speak of those days. Memory is no longer a penance. On the day that the Republic celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising I stood in Dublin opposite the reviewing stand where the nation’s president and leading politicians reviewed the ceremonial march. How far it all felt from the monochrome of Dev’s celebrations I had attended as a child fifty years before. The preceding months had been full of debates about the true meaning of the Rising and its legacy in all of our lives. The island had come through thirty years of bloody violence in the north; the Republic was emerging from an economic crisis that had been unleashed by venal politicians, greedy banks and reckless property developers. This time around there would be no revolutionary romanticism. As the procession passed there was an announcement: ‘Now approaching are representatives of the families of Gardaí killed in the line of duty.’ The crowd applauded. The dignitaries on the reviewing stand rose to their feet. I looked across and noticed that among those standing and clapping his hands was the former IRA leader, Martin McGuinness. I dropped my reporter’s distance and joined in the applause.
I could not ignore the shadows around this day of commemoration. There was much in the evolution of the modern state to make this an occasion for careful self-examination: the cronyism and corruption that fermented unchecked for decades; we were shamed by the revelations of systemic sexual abuse in institutions run by the clergy, and of the appalling treatment handed out to unmarried mothers in church-run homes. With all this, knowing the sordid details, accepting they were part of the country that made me, I still felt proud of the Republic on that Easter Sunday 2016. My country was a democracy with an unarmed police force governed by the rule of law. It had an independent judiciary and a free press. Its citizens felt free to speak their minds and challenge the political classes whenever they wished. I have lived and worked in places where these things are denied; I believe I know their value.
My people played a small part in the Revolution. Like many other Irish families. Because they were the kind of people they were, who lived in the times they did, I finish with unanswered questions. I have written their story as best I know it, feeling much is unreachable, concealed by forgetting or the necessary fictions of a violent age, what people told and re-told in order to live with the consequences of war. I am reminded of the old Irish proverb: Bíonn dhá insint ar scéal agus dhá leagan déag ar amhrán – there are two versions of any story, and twelve versions of every song. As for the dead, from the quiet corner of Glasnevin cemetery, close by the River Tolka, where Tobias O’Sullivan is buried with May, to Ballydonoghue and Church Street and Moyvane, where Hannah and Mick and Con were born and fought their war, I believe they each loved their country. It was Ireland’s tragedy that people who loved the same land could become such bitter enemies.
* The economic war followed de Valera’s refusal to repay the loans made by the British government to Irish farmers to buy land before independence. De Valera reasoned that land which had been seized from the native Irish should never have to have been paid for in the first place. The British placed a tariff of twenty per cent on Irish exports to the United Kingdom. It is estimated that the conflict cost the Irish Free State around £48 million, with unemployment rising from 29,000 in 19
31 to 138,000 in just a few years.
* The scholar Enda Delaney noted that the figure of 400,000 emigrants represented a sixth of the total recorded population. By 1971 one in three of those aged under thirty had left the country. See Delaney, The Vanishing Irish, in Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea and Carmel Quinlan (eds), Ireland: The Lost Decade, Cork, 2004.
Acknowledgements
To my late father Eamonn I owe an enduring debt of gratitude for sparking my interest in history, and to my mother Maura for encouraging my reading of history and urging the necessity of fair-mindedness. To Anne, and to Daniel and Holly, all of your support through so much of my life has been central to any capacity I have had to tell the stories I need to tell.
I am grateful to my ancestral tribes in Kerry – the Keanes, Purtills, Schusters and O’Connors – who shared their stories and have always been supremely hospitable families. Denis Keane and Anne Klaben, the last surviving children of Hannah Purtill, supported this project from the beginning and have always understood the importance of looking back with clear eyes.
My cousin Conor Keane was an invaluable support in researching the story of the killing of District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan and the life of Con Brosnan. It was Conor who opened the door into the deeper story of Tobias O’Sullivan’s life and whose judgements I have come to value immensely. Thanks also to Joanna, who walked the lanes of Ballydonoghue with me, and to John and Billy for their memories of life at 45 Church Street, and cousin John Schuster whose last-minute assistance was inestimably important. To the Hassetts in Cork, thank you for your warm support through all my travels and occasional travails.
In Listowel I am indebted to Vincent Carmody for his support and guidance and amazing store of historical knowledge. Eamonn Dillon was hugely helpful in researching the story of the Protestants of the Listowel area. On the larger historical issues I am grateful to Marianne Elliott, biographer of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, and Professor Emeritus at Liverpool University, who read the manuscript closely with an acute eye for the eruption of unsupported generalisations.
At University College Cork, Dr John Borgonovo, whose own work on the Revolution has been illuminating, read the manuscript and supplied careful insights. Any mistakes are my own.
Thanks are owed to the staff of the National Library of Ireland; the National Archives of Ireland; and the staff of the Military Archives in Dublin where Commandant Victor Laing, now retired, first gave me access to the files of my forebears; in London I am grateful to the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives at Kew and the British Library.
Thank you also to editors Kate Johnson and Iain Hunt and publisher Arabella Pike at HarperCollins, and to my agent David Godwin, for their dedication in seeing this work through to completion. At the BBC Andrew Roy and Daniel Fisher have always showed a benevolent understanding of the temperament of those who report war for a living. My comrade on the road, Tony Fallshaw, is a constant source of wisdom. To the families of Con Brosnan and Tobias O’Sullivan my respect and immense gratitude for agreeing to speak about the traumatic past. Thanks to Jimmy Deenihan who always fought the good fight on the field and in the Dáil.
To Alice Doyard, thank you for the enduring gifts of your friendship. To my siblings Eamon, Niamh and Niall, thank you all for being who you are. Finally to my late aunt and uncle, John B. and Mary: I’d never have written a line of a book without your loving support.
A Short Note on Sources
In the absence of any family memoirs, diaries or letters, and with only the sparse memories of relatives and what I could recall from childhood conversations myself, I faced a considerable challenge in attempting to recreate the two Irish wars my grandmother, Hannah Purtill, had known.
I turned first to the archives of the Bureau of Military History, which contain the statements of 1,722 witnesses to the revolutionary period. This priceless resource gives us the Revolution in the words of the men, and some of the women, who were there. The interviews with the north Kerry veterans allowed me to piece together some of the action in which my forebears were involved. Memory is always selective, changed by time and circumstance. That is true of veterans of all wars, but the sense of a people in turmoil is vividly expressed. The Military Pensions Collection provided invaluable material relating to the war service of my grandmother and her comrades in Cumann na mBan. The records of the National Archives in London and the Imperial War Museum helped provide a British perspective on the conflict. I have also drawn on the writings and primary research of the IRA commander and gifted chronicler of the Revolution, Ernie O’Malley, who spoke to many who fought against the Treaty.
Anybody writing about the history of north Kerry does so in the long shadow of Father Anthony Gaughan, whose history of Listowel remains the defining work on the long story of my father’s town. I am also indebted to the work of T. Ryle Dwyer, Tom Doyle, Tim Horgan and Sinead Joy, all of whom shed important light on the trauma of north Kerry during the War of Independence and the Civil War. For a deeper understanding of the events at Ballyseedy, I turned to Pat Butler’s exemplary documentary Ballyseedy, broadcast by RTE in 1997. David Leeson’s study of the Black and Tans was also an invaluable resource.
The advent of online archives and a multiplicity of documents, from unpublished theses to digital versions of centuries-old books, has hugely enhanced the possibilities of research. I will always cherish the feeling of a paper book in my hands but am an enthusiast for the possibilities of the digital age.
In particular I would commend the website www.theirishstory.com run by historian John Dorney. It is a source of reasoned and often fascinating reading. It was here I was first acquainted with the work of the young Kerry historian Thomas Earls Fitzgerald who has investigated attacks on civilians during the revolutionary period.
The website www.irishlifeandlore.com run by Maurice and Jane O’Keefe in Tralee is a rich source for anybody looking into the lives of Irish forebears, particularly those who grew up in rural areas.
I am particularly grateful to the Mercier Press Cork for permission to quote from their extensive list of writers on the revolutionary period, particularly the works of Ernie O’Malley and Father Anthony Gaughan.
The poet Derek Mahon has long been an inspiration to my understanding of the island on which I grew up. Lines from his ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ from New Collected Poems (2011) are reproduced by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press.
I am grateful also to Blackstaff Press for allowing me to quote the poem ‘Neither an Elegy Nor a Manifesto’ by John Hewitt, and to Bloodaxe Books for their permission to feature Brendan Kennelly’s work My Dark Fathers.
All efforts have been made to seek copyright clearance where it is required. Where it has not been possible any omissions that are pointed out will be corrected in future editions.
In addition to the material available in various archives and books, I am grateful to the following scholars whose doctoral theses helped provide invaluable information and context:
Timothy Breen, The Government’s Executions Policy during the Irish Civil War 1922–1923, National University of Ireland
Gemma M. Clark, Fire, Boycott, Threat and Harm: Social and Political Violence within the Local Community – A Study of Three Munster Counties during the Irish Civil War 1922–23, Queen’s College, Oxford
David Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police in the First Irish War 1920–21, McMaster University
Donnacha Seán Lucey, Land and Popular Politics in County Kerry 1872–86, National University of Ireland
Mike Rast, Tactics, Politics and Propaganda in the Irish War of Independence, 1917–1921, Georgia State University
Martin White, The Greenshirts: Fascism in the Irish Free State 1933–45, University College London
Notes
Abbreviations used in Notes:
BMH – Bureau of Military History, Dublin.
IWM – Imperial War Museum archives, London
MSPC – Military Services
Pension Collection, Dublin
NAI – National Archives of Ireland, Dublin
NLI – National Library of Ireland
TNA – The National Archives, Kew, London
Prologue: We Killed All Mankind
1. Dublin Penny Journal, Dublin, 1836, p. 292.
2. Fynes Moryson, An History of Ireland, Dublin, 1604.
3. Ibid.
4. Quoted in The Catholic Encyclopaedia, London, 1914.
5. James Joyce, Ulysses, London, 1922, section 15 – Circe.
6. Anon. ballad, The Merry Ploughboy, released by Dermot O’Brien, 1966.
7. Quoted in Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, Cambridge, 1989, p. 27.
8. Dion Boucicault, The Shaughraun, London, 1874, Act I, Scene I.
9. Interview with author.
10. Thomas Kinsella, The Táin, Oxford, 1969, pp. 150–3.
11. J. G. Kohl, Travels in Ireland, cited in Fr J. Anthony Gaughan, Listowel and its Vicinity, Dublin, 1974, pp. 123–4.
12. Cited in Martin Dillon, The Shankill Butchers, London, 1999, pp. 20–3.
13. 2014/32/2058, 1984, NAI.
14. Guardian, 3 Feb 1972.
15. Robert Kee, Ireland – A Television History, BBC Television in co-operation with Radio Telefis Eireann, 1980, Episode 10.
16. Colum McCann, TransAtlantic, London, 2014, p. 252.
1: The Night Sweats with Terror
1. Author interview with Breda Thunder, Dublin, 2014.
2. Rajkumari Shanker, The Story of Gandhi, Delhi, 1969, p. 84.
3. ‘Defence of the North-West Frontier’, Hansard, 21 May 1921.
