Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The two exhausted sides stumbled to the bargaining table in London during the winter and spring of 1921 to work on a peace treaty.

  The treaty established the “Irish Free State,” a kind of dominion within the British Empire. Britain would keep possession of two “treaty ports” in Ireland—Cobb and Kingstown. The province of Ulster, its precise boundaries undetermined, whose Protestants had sworn to fight against union with the rest of Ireland, was granted de facto existence as a part of the United Kingdom, and an oath of allegiance to the British crown would be required of all officials of the Free State government.

  Collins, Arthur Griffith, William Cosgrave, and Kevin O’Higgins, the leaders of the moderate wing of the revolutionaries, did not like the treaty. But they were sick of the conflict and the killing and knew that it was the best deal they could get. They signed the treaty (signatures that were death warrants for two of them) and persuaded the majority of the Dáil to ratify it.

  As Collins (called “the Big Fella” because of his broad shoulders and his commanding presence) said, “It’s not the total freedom we want, but we can turn it into total freedom.”

  De Valera, the president of the “Republic” (nicknamed “Long Fella” because of his height), disagreed, resigned as president, and rejected the treaty. So in early 1921 the two men and the factions they represented were at war with one another, although Collins had taken care of Dev’s family when the latter was in jail because of his participation in the Easter Rising and indeed had arranged for his escape from prison.

  Thus began the Irish Civil War in which the former allies in the Anglo-Irish War executed, assassinated, and murdered one another with reckless enthusiasm. Both sides called each other traitor and showed no mercy in their killings.

  The “Big Fella” was one of the first to die—he himself had predicted that he would not survive the conflict.

  Years later, long after the Civil War ended, De Valera followed Collins’s plan to turn the Free State slowly into an independent nation. Yet for all his long life “Dev” felt that he lived in the shadow of Collins.

  I opened a book I had been reading and flipped to a full-page picture of Michael Collins—a broad-faced, square-shouldered Irishman with brown wavy hair and a smile that was almost a mischievous grin. I knew his kind well: the life of any party, witty, handsome, and intelligent beneath the fast talk, not altogether unlike my brother George.

  The picture was taken at the beginning of the Anglo-Irish War. Collins must have been about twenty-five. At the end he was said to be thin and worn and close to despair because of the horror of former comrades killing one another.

  He who takes the sword . . .

  A very old, and much handled, clipping from the Cork Examiner in Ma’s pile of clippings gave the first account of his death.

  GENERAL COLLINS SLAIN

  August 1922

  Bulletin. According to reports just received in Cork, General Michael Collins, Acting Minister of Defense for the Irish Free State, is believed to have been killed in an ambush between Skibbereen and Crookston in Bealnablath. It would appear that General Collins was the only casualty of a brief skirmish between his convoy and a band of Irregulars. Born in Sam’s Cross in West Cork, General Collins was thirty-one years old.

  Killed in his own country where he thought he would be safe, killed in an expedition into the front lines where the chairman of the Provisional Government, minister of defense, and commander in chief of the Free State Army (and the soul of the Free State government) ought not to have been, killed at the head of a column fighting a skirmish. Killed under mysterious circumstances.

  A loss for Ireland and for the world.

  I knew the whole story because I had read the books about him before the Special Branch warned me off my research about the Civil War in the West and Liam O’Riada’s participation in it.

  It was not clear exactly what happened. Apparently most of those who waited in ambush had left the scene because the convoy was late in arriving. Only a handful of men in a rear guard opened fire on the armored car, touring car, and Crosley tenders as they turned into the gloomy little vale. Collins died after the shooting had apparently stopped, killed by a single bullet to the head.

  Nor is it certain who organized the ambush and why. Some stories say that Irregulars feared an attempt to capture De Valera, who was nearby, though the convoy was on an inspection and not a military mission and Dev was not likely to forget then that Collins had organized his escape from a London jail. Later when he learned of Collins’s death, he lamented that the last man who could stop the Civil War was dead.

  Erskine Childers, an English officer fighting with the Irish (later executed by the Free State), who had become a leader in the “Irregulars” (as the antitreaty forces were called by the Free State government), was only ten miles away and knew nothing of either the convoy or the ambush.

  While the IRA (as the Irregulars called themselves) felt that Collins was a traitor, they were not eager to claim credit for his death. They professed to know nothing about the attack.

  Moreover, the fact that Collins was killed after the skirmish was over has led some to claim that he was shot by a member of his own convoy who had a grudge against him—or perhaps who wanted to replace him.

  The most common belief today is that the affair was an accident of war—a chance meeting between two small units in the mountains of West Cork, a short, ugly firefight, a final shot fired at a high officer (with red collar tabs on his green uniform) by a retreating rifleman, most likely a Kerry man called Dennis “Sonny” Neill who had been a sharpshooter in the British army during World War I—and a daily communicant at that. No one, however, especially if one is Irish, willingly gives up a conspiracy theory.

  My hand was trembling as I picked up the last of Ma’s clippings. Had Ma saved the clipping because Pa killed Michael Collins? Surely he had killed others if he was part of Daniel O’Kelly’s flying squad. He would not have known that the officer with the red tabs was Collins. And what would the Galway flying squad be doing in West Cork on August 22, 1922?

  I can remember Ma on the subject of Collins. “Well, my dear, he was a great man, now wasn’t he? And don’t let anyone tell you anything different. He might have been wrong about the treaty, but wasn’t his death a terrible loss to all of us? Sure, didn’t a lot of them on the other side weep when they heard the news that he’d been killed, and right in his own county too?”

  Would she have spoken so easily if she knew Pa had killed him, however unintentionally? Was that the reason they could never return to Ireland?

  I recalled the rest of the history of the Civil War as I stared out the window at the rain falling on Jury’s outdoor swimming pool. I should go down and swim in it. Keep my resolution about exercising, even if it rained.

  De Valera learned what happened when the guerrillas lose the sea of the people in which to swim. Most of the Irish people were satisfied with the Free State. Irish Americans, who had furnished the money to support the revolution, lost interest after the treaty was signed. What difference did the two “treaty ports” make? And if the Protestants in the six counties wanted to remain part of England, well, it was only fair to let them do so, wasn’t it?

  So after two years of the Civil War, the Long Fella ordered the Irregulars to “dump” their arms and run for seats in the Dáil. After serving a year in jail, he managed to find a way to take the oath of allegiance to the British crown when he was elected to the Dáil in 1927. His own conscience thus salved, he moved from being the leader of a rebellion against the Free State to the opposition leader in the Dáil. In 1932 he won the election and became president of the Executive Council (prime minister) himself (and “Taoiseach” in 1937 under a new constitution). The “pro-treaty” party and the “anti-treaty” party have alternated in power ever since. Eventually Dev would outlaw the IRA—the handful of intransigents who would not accept his decision to switch from the bullet to the ballot.

  They have no
t gone away.

  I paused to figure out which party was running things now. It was Dev’s party, the anti-Free State party. Ireland moved almost overnight from settling differences by civil war to settling them by elections. A reasonable enough change.

  But why . . .

  I finally looked at the last, no, it was the second-to-the-last clipping.

  O’CEALLAIGH SLAIN

  September 1922

  The body of Domhnall O’Ceallaigh, commander of the Galway Brigade of the irregulars, was found late yesterday at Maam Cross, the site of his numerous executions of suspected traitors. His body was riddled with bullets. The Garda Siochana have no suspects in the killing, though they theorize that it was the result of another internal quarrel among the remnants of the irregulars.

  In recent months O’Ceallaigh is reported to have lost most of his supporters and has narrowly escaped capture by the Gardai Siochana on several occasions. Commandant O’Ceallaigh was thirty years old.

  When informed of the Commandant’s death, we are told that Lieutenant General Richard Mulcahy, Commander in Chief of the National Army, remarked in Dublin, “He was a brave man and in many ways a great Irish patriot. It is unfortunate that he did not understand everything that is required of a patriot. However, that fact does not distract from his very real accomplishments as an army commander.”

  It is rumored that Commandant O’Ceallaigh’s adjutant, Captain Liam O’Riada, has succeeded him as Commanding Officer of the now depleted Brigade.

  So Pa did fight with Daniel O’Kelly! And replaced him as guerrilla commander. But, wait a minute, this was in late 1922, about the time that Pa and Ma were married and left Ireland, never to return.

  There was probably nothing left of the brigade to disband. But couldn’t he have joined Dev and become legal? Or was the price the Free State might have put on his head too high for that ever to happen? Was there no room in the New Ireland, forgiving as it might finally have been willing to be, for the killer of Michael Collins?

  I thought about that for a minute or two. The old animosities were not forgotten. After all, despite the official figures of eight hundred dead in the Civil War (more than in the Anglo-Irish War), perhaps as many as four thousand people had died. There was much reason to hate. But the animosities were less important for those who remained in Ireland and tried to make the new nation work as a peaceful and democratic country than for those who migrated to the United States in the early 1920s and kept their hates alive.

  Childers’s son became president of Ireland and Cosgrave’s son served as Taoiseach under him. They might not have been friends, but they didn’t try to kill one another. Quite the contrary, they probably went out of their way to be civil to one another in sessions of the Dáil.

  Ma and Pa didn’t seem to hate anyone, however. Nor to pay much attention to Irish news or politics. Pa became an Organization Democrat and a Cubs fan. I sat on his knee and watched the ’69 Cubs blow the pennant, to the deep dismay of both of us. Whatever had happened, they cut all their ties, even ties of interest with Ireland.

  Why would that bother anyone more than seventy years later? The mystery of who killed Michael Collins and Daniel O’Kelly might be a fascinating historical detective story, but who cared anymore—beyond perhaps a few argumentative folks in the pubs who too much of the drink had taken?

  It didn’t make much sense.

  I glanced at my map of County Galway. Maam Cross was not all that far from Carraroe, just up the road, so to speak. Was Nuala part of the group that was watching me?

  Then I realized that my suspicion was silly. No one would know that I might wander into O’Neill’s pub on a rainy autumn afternoon.

  Though if they found out afterward of my interest in her, they might. . . .

  It wasn’t likely but it was a possibility.

  The last clipping was dated 1932—the year Mom was born. It was a picture with a caption.

  COUNCIL PRESIDENT DEDICATES

  MEMORIAL IN OUGHTERARD

  Mr. De Valera, the President of the Executive Council, is shown at the dedication of a statue of Commandant Daniel O’Kelly in Oughterard. Commandant O’Kelly was a hero of the Anglo-Irish War. He and his flying squad of the Galway Brigade of the Irish Volunteers saved the town after a night of drunken depredations by the British Auxiliary Forces, the hated Black and Tans.

  Was there a subtle irony in Ma’s inclusion of that picture? Was she saying that the gombeen man Kelly was a hero again and her husband still a fugitive?

  What did it all mean? What did it matter even if I found out what it meant?

  It was, nonetheless, a fascinating mystery puzzle that I had to solve.

  I went down to the lobby and made Xerox copies of Ma’s file. The old newsprint wouldn’t last much longer. Then I returned to the room, put the copies in a thin file folder in my luggage, and left the originals inside the Margery Forester biography of Michael Collins on one of the end tables in the parlor of my suite. Later I’d reread the newspaper article on Collins and compare it with the biography. Then I’d put the stack of clippings back in Ma’s archives, which now lined one wall of my suite.

  Was Pa, who told me stories and sang songs for me as far back as I could remember, the man who killed Michael Collins? Or maybe the killer of Daniel O’ Kelly?

  Or maybe both?

  –– 6 ––

  I DID go to watch her in The Playboy, even though I swore to myself that I would not do so.

  Mind you, I had wandered about the classic squares and playing fields of TCD looking for her among the swarms of students, now mostly Irish and Catholic, who walked briskly to and from classes—as if they didn’t know that there would be no jobs for most of them when they graduated.

  The Players bulletin board in the vestibule between Front Gate and Front Court announced that the Players were presenting John M. Synge’s “once-controversial play,” in 103 Front Court at half eight on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Marie Fionnuala McGrail would play Pegeen Mike.

  So that’s how she spelled her name.

  I fiddled with Grandma Nell’s archives on Friday and Saturday night and decided on Sunday afternoon that I’d ride out to Houth on the DART and watch the tide go out. Or come in. Or whatever.

  And stay there till after the play was over.

  I went out on the train all right and marveled at the green sea in the golden autumn sunset, a splash of red and purple like the expensive mass vestments the pastor of Saint Mark’s back home occasionally exhumed from his treasure chest of pre-Vatican Council relics.

  Then I rode right back into Dublin and hiked over to Trinity College.

  The “theater” was small and half empty at that—a few young people on an inexpensive date, some elderly folks with nothing else to do, a couple of “Yank” tourists—I could recognize them by now—and some fusty-looking faculty types.

  I think you are all in for a surprise, I muttered to myself.

  My image of Playboy was formed by the film Siobhan McKenna made twenty years ago, staged on the strand at Inch in Dingle Bay. The College Players didn’t have the wonderful Kerry scenery to work with. Moreover, the setting of the inside of a public house in the West of Ireland at the turn of the century was pretty much left to the audience’s imagination.

  They didn’t have Siobhan McKenna either, God be good to her.

  But they had Nuala, my Nuala.

  Sensibly she didn’t try to be the late Ms. McKenna. She played Pegeen Mike her own way—a tomboy with headlong energy, a fierce temper, and a fiercer wit.

  The rest of the cast seemed to think they were lucky to be on the same stage with her.

  At first I was put off by the fact that Siobhan McKenna, my fair Nuala was not. How dare this slip of a girl from Carraroe play Pegeen Mike as if Synge’s heroine was an energetic teenage hoyden?

  As the play continued, however, utterly dominated by Nuala Anne McGrail’s passion, I began to see her point. She was engaging in an intelligent and origina
l interpretation of the story. Synge might not have liked it (though perhaps he would have liked Nuala), but it was a challenging reading of the play.

  The audience loved it, aware, I suspect, that this “wee lass” up on the stage was one of their own. When she delivered her last sad lines, there were a few dry eyes in the place but not many.

  “ ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only playboy of the Western World.’ “

  I must be honest: Mine was not one of the dry eyes.

  I walked up to the front of the hall and cornered one of the young women ushers. “Would you ever be giving this bunch of weeds to herself?”

  Note that I was talking their language again, this time quite unselfconsciously.

  “Is it a dozen roses now?” the apple-cheeked child enthused, glancing at my height. “Ah, sure, wouldn’t she be happy to accept them herself?”

  “Ah, it wouldn’t be right for me to intrude in her privacy, would it now?”

  I scrawled “from one Pegeen Mike to a much better one” on the blank card attached to the bouquet and shoved it into the kid’s hand.

  “Should I tell her who it’s from?” she asked dubiously.

  “Won’t she be knowing as soon as she sees them? But couldn’t you say it was from a tall Yank? And won’t she sniff and say, well, he’s not the worst of them?”

  “Isn’t that a compliment in our country?”

  She looked at the roses so wistfully that I wished I had brought a second dozen for my go-between.

  I hurried out of the building, lest herself come running madly after me. She could sing and she could act and she was studying accounting.

  She was also a detective, I would learn later, a puzzle solver, a young Irish Ms. Marple maybe, someone who knew the answer to the puzzle long before anyone else. Looking back on our adventure, I now realize that I played Watson to her Holmes most of the time. She was so clever that I didn’t realize my role until the very end.