The following was read by Francis Mackey, national chairman of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, at this year’s commemoration to mark the 102nd anniversary of the Sinnott’s Cross ambush.
For what died the sons of Róisín? And on the centenary year of his death we must also ask for what died General Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army? This salient question is not before the Irish people. And the more the advocacy of a Border Poll is trumpeted the more this question is once again relegated from the national narrative.
We have reached a point where explanations must be given to commemorate our patriot dead and obfuscation and dithering are employed when asked if they shall continue to do so if political positions are attained.
And this same doublespeak permeates the heart of the dialogue surrounding a Border Poll. The question arises of whether a simple majority is sufficient to carry the vote or perhaps, for the sake of some puerile reconciliation, a larger majority would be required.
The so-called New Ireland is forever drifting into a Commonwealth arrangement far removed from the sovereign Republic which Irish republicanism has striven and sacrificed to establish.
In the clamour and political self-serving rush to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement it is imperative that Irish republicans make our people aware that that agreement has made possible the 100th anniversary of partition.
There is absolutely nothing to celebrate about partition, be it for one day or one hundred years. From its inception it betrayed everything the Irish revolutionary tradition stood for and achieved. As a so-called stepping-stone to freedom it has only ever stepped backwards each time a treaty was agreed to sustain it.
Those Volunteers who engaged the Crown Forces at Sinnott’s Cross did so with the clear intention of being part of a broader and successful struggle to restore the national sovereignty of the Irish people.
In tandem with armed struggle those republicans brought both governance and law to the Irish people. They invoked history as a means to create their own history thus earning the right of inheritance of the republican mantle.
“We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.”
This is the bedrock of Irish republicanism. It is the only basis upon which a truly inclusive republic can be built for our people. Those who signed the Easter Proclamation transcended party politics. They were nation builders and completely selfless when it came to serving our people.
It is always difficult to struggle against the tide of populism. The onslaught of political and historical revisionism can be extremely disillusioning. But it is only from these graves, and these patriotic monuments that our faith in the republican struggle can be reinvigorated.
The Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement says the UK’s Legacy bill “risks traumatizing” victims and their families again.
The Committee said in a statement today, June 26, that the Bill would end inquests, Police Ombudsman investigations, civil cases, and police investigations into crimes committed as part of the Troubles.
In doing so, the Legacy Bill would remove vital avenues to the truth for the countless families in Northern Ireland who are grappling with the painful legacy of the Troubles.
Speaking on behalf of the Committee, Deputy O’Dowd said: “Since the Bill was first announced, the Committee has met with many victims and their families.
“We have witnessed their anguish at the prospect of losing vital opportunities to find out the truth of what happened to their loved ones and hold perpetrators to account. This Bill risks traumatising these victims once more.
“The Bill flies in the face of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. It is considered unacceptable by every political party in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
“It has also been criticised by the overwhelming majority of victims’ representative organisations, by civil society, church leaders, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Council of Europe, as well as Westminster’s Joint Committee on Human Rights.
“The Committee emphasises that the Bill is a unilateral move away from the 2014 Stormont House Agreement in which parties in Northern Ireland, together with the British and Irish governments, decided on mechanisms to better assist these families, and to pursue justice. That agreement was endorsed again by both governments, in the 2015 Fresh Start and the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deals.
“The Committee has sought to communicate its grave concerns at this proposal throughout the legislative process. While we welcome engagement with the Committee by Lord Caine and others, we are disappointed that our concerns and those of victims have not been addressed.
“The Committee calls on the British Government to withdraw the Legacy Bill. If the Bill is enacted, the Committee will ask the Irish Government to consider interstate litigation in the European Court of Human Rights. This course of action would demonstrate tangible support and solidarity with victims’ campaigners by sparing them the costly and arduous task of bringing individual cases to challenge the Bill.
“This year we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement was an extraordinary achievement of the UK and Irish Governments. The result of the Agreement – peace in Northern Ireland – was painstakingly achieved and must be protected. The work of reconciliation remains incomplete and could be undermined by the proposals in this Bill.
“The Committee calls on the UK Government to engage with the Irish Government in a spirit of partnership to find a way forward. The Governments must work together urgently to strengthen reconciliation in Northern Ireland and fulfill their shared obligations as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement.
The non-profit group Relatives for Justice said on Monday that it “warmly welcomes” the statement from the Committee:
On Monday, the UK House of Lords supported two amendments to the Bill – one calling for the removal of the Bill’s immunity provision, and another seeking to ensure a minimum standard for case reviews by the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR.)
Professor Emeritus Jim Mallory of Queen’s University has published a new paper suggesting that the Irish language can trace its origins to the arrival of the Beaker Bell culture in Ireland.
IrishCentral Staff
Jun 20, 2023
A DNA expert has suggested that the Irish language can trace its roots to the arrival of settlers from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe in Eastern Europe around 4,500 years ago.
Professor Emeritus Jim Mallory of Queen’s University, one of the foremost experts in genetics studies on the island of Ireland, has published a new paper suggesting that the Irish language can trace its origins to the arrival of the Beaker Bell culture in Ireland.
The Beaker Bell culture, which refers to the beaker-shaped drinking vessel, was dominant across Western Europe around 3,500 years ago and emanated from the northern shores of the Caspian and Black Seas.
Until recently, however, the lack of beaker-shaped objects uncovered in Ireland led archaeologists to believe that the culture made little impact in Ireland.
However, recent genetic breakthroughs have revealed that 84% of Irish males have a genetic marker associated with the Beaker Bell culture.
Sign up to IrishCentral’s newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish!Subscribe to IrishCentral
Experts have since concluded that the lack of beaker-like objects in Ireland is a result of people who settled in Ireland forming their own distinct culture separate from the rest of Western Europe.
Mallory added that there was an “overwhelming predominance of cremation burial” in Ireland, meaning physical evidence of the Beaker Bell culture was likely burned.
He said there is indisputable evidence that the majority of Irish people are descended from the Beaker Bell culture, with implications for the origins of the Irish language.
Irish is commonly referred to as one of the Celtic languages derived from Indo-European, but the Celtic language and culture was first identified by the Greeks around 600BC, roughly 2,000 years after members of the Beaker Bell culture first settled in Ireland.
Irish Central History Love Irish history? Share your favorite stories with other history buffs in the IrishCentral History Facebook group.
According to the Irish News, Mallory believes there was no subsequent invasion or settlement of Ireland until the arrival of the Vikings in the 8th century AD.
“Many linguists will be forced to reconsider a model of Irish origins that they had presumed was linguistically implausible,” Mallory said.
Mallory added that the only other plausible explanation for the origin of the Irish language is that a more recent source of Irish developed in the Bronze Age or Iron Age.
“In short, it seems that the geneticists have gifted not only archaeologists but also linguists with the opportunity of living in ‘interesting times’,” he told the publication.
The last march of eleven Molly Maguires before execution at Pottsville, Pennsylvania on June 21, 1877
The legend of the Molly Maguires is one that has haunted Pennsylvania and the wider US for more than a century. The Mollies, as they were often called, was an alleged secret society of Irish mineworkers based in northeast Pennsylvania who fought for workers’ rights and fairer wages for Irish Americans amid horrific working conditions.
It was one of the largest mass executions of any group by the US federal government in history, but the facts surrounding the labor movement that worked and organized in the Pennsylvania coal fields remain a mystery.
Indeed the truth of what happened, as well as the Mollies’ very existence, is debated among historians to this day, particularly whether they were heroes or villains. In any case, the tale remains part of local Pennsylvania lore.
An attack in 1877 on a coal mine owner (Image: James Dabney McCabe / Wikicommons / Public domain)
The story goes the name “Molly Maguire” was adopted in 1840s Ireland when an elderly woman reportedly named Molly Maguire was turfed out of her rental home by a ruthless landlord and left to fend for herself.
Threatening notes were soon plastered on landlords’ doors, in case they felt moved to treat their tenants the same way. The pieces of paper were signed “Molly Maguire”. It is not known whether the woman ever existed.
From around 1873, the Mollies, who belonged to secret societies in Ireland opposed to British rule, fled Famine-stricken Ireland in the hopes of a new life, but instead, they found themselves in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where conditions were a horror show, and the work was more akin to mine slavery.
“Wages were low, working conditions were atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries numbered in the hundreds each year,” according to one account.
On September 6, 1869, for instance, a blaze at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County claimed the lives of 110 coal miners. Relatives blamed the coal company for failing to finance a secondary exit for the mine.
In Schuylkill County, 566 miners were killed and 1,655 seriously hurt over a seven-year period because mine owners refused to install emergency exits or ventilating and pumping systems. Safety regulations, generally, were dire.
Pinkerton agent James McParland (Image: UGC / Wikicommons / Public domain)
In response, employees began to unite for a better quality environment, and this is when many claim the Mollies were secretly formed to continue the fight.
The lawlessness is said to have erupted during the American Civil War when Irish immigrant miners killed a number of mine supervisors and executives on local draft boards who tried to induct them into the Union Army.
The chaos continued, and Northeast Pennsylvania became like the Wild West. There was a constant, tense back and forth between coal operators and their workers, and it is believed some of them took matters into their own hands.
The details are fuzzy going forward, but what seems to be certain is that Frank Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, was secretly buying enough mines to gain control of the industry.
The Mollies had their own political machine and were reportedly in cahoots with the local Democrats, which had command of several local governments in Schuylkill County.
In a merciless bid to eliminate the last opposition to his control of the mines, in the early 1870s, Gowen hired James McParland, an Irish Catholic from Co Armagh, from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the Molly Maguires.
Sean Connery in the publicity portrait of ‘The Molly Maguires’ 1970 film (Image: Getty)
For two and a half years, the Ulsterman worked undercover as an informer, conspiring against his countrymen, but his cover was eventually blown. Gowen, under the title of the district attorney of Schuylkill County, then led the prosecution of the Molly Maguires who were indicted and then convicted largely on McParland’s testimony.
Members of the Mollies were accused of murder, arson, kidnapping, and other crimes. On June 21, 1877, the last of the Molly Maguires were hanged in the Carbon County Prison in Mauch Chunk.
British and Irish newspapers reported about the Mollies in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century. On July 7, 1845, an “address of ‘Molly Maguire’ to her children” containing twelve rules was published in Freeman’s Journal.
The person making the address claimed to be “Molly Maguire” of “Maguire’s Grove, Parish of Cloone”, in Co Leitrim. The rules advised Mollies about how they should conduct themselves in land disputes and were designed to build momentum among members.
Some of the rules included “no undermining of tenants, nor bailiff’s fees to be paid”, “keep from traveling by night”, and “avoid coming in contact with either the military or police; they are only doing what they cannot help” as well as “let bygones be bygones, unless in a very glaring case; but watch for the time to come”.
Whether the Mollies “let bygones be bygones” is, as mentioned, subject to speculation, but, to historian Harola Aurant, what happened was “one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history”.
The Molly Maguires, Ballyconnell, Co Cavan (Image: Kenneth Allan / Public domain / Wikicommons)
He added: “A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency; a private police force arrested the alleged offenders; the coal company attorneys prosecuted them. The state only provided the courtroom and hangman.”
The saga gripped the public so much that in 1970, it was transformed into an Oscar-nominated film, The Molly Maguires, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Richard Harris and Sean Connery.
Connery, already famous for playing a secret agent in the James Bond movies, played the part of Mollies’ leader, John Kehoe. Shortly before the movie hit the big screen, the actor offered his own lament for the group
He said: “Unless you give a man something, aside from malnutrition, you’re going to get retaliation, terrorism. I know what it’s like. Members of my family worked in the mines in Scotland.”
The Dubliners also wrote a song about the Mollies’ ordeal, that goes, “Make way for the Molly Maguires. They’re drinkers, they’re liars, but they’re men. Make way for the Molly Maguires. You’ll never see the likes of them again.”
Along with being dramatized and lyricized, the legend was made immortal when, in 2006, a Pennsylvania historical marker in memory of the men who lost their lives was erected in Pottsville, Schuylkill County, where the hangings unfolded. Irish pubs named after the Molly Maguires also stand in Phoenixville, PA, and Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.
There, visitors can pay their respects, and, if nothing else, simply acknowledge the extraordinary series of events that stunned the nation, and left a lasting impression of the fight and fortitude of the Irishmen in America.
It would have been difficult to convince members of the Irish Republican Army in July 1921, the time of the Truce with the British, that just a year later they would be divided into hostile factions a year later and seeking to kill each other.
Yet, Civil War broke out at the Four Courts in Dublin in June 1922 and rapidly spread around the country, as the Provisional Government forces attempted to wrest the territory of the prospective Free State from the anti-Treaty IRA, or as it called them, the ‘irregulars’.
Initially Michael Collins and his colleagues hoped that the war would be over in a matter of weeks and at first, both sides attempted to fight with clean hands, forbidding the killing of prisoners or attacks on unarmed combatants or civilians.
Yet the war did not end quickly, but rather dragged on as a guerrilla conflict for many months and developed its own deadly momentum of killing and reprisal. Former comrades became demonised into a malevolent enemy who had to destroyed.
Together Cork and Kerry saw over 400 deaths in the Civil War and it was in south Munster where the war’s worst atrocities took place. However the experience of the two counties was in some respects quite different. Kerry saw far more brutal and sustained reprisals by pro-Treaty troops than did County Cork. This article examines why.
A war that refused to end
Pro-Treaty soldier disembark from a ship at Fenit in August 1922.
Initially, most assumed that the war had ended in the second week of August 1922, when around 1,000 pro-treaty troops, led by Paddy O’Daly and Emmet Dalton landed by sea, first and Fenit in Kerry and then at three points on the Cork coast.
Tralee and Cork city were rapidly seized and the anti-Treatyites retired in disarray into the hill county along the Cork-Kerry border. The seaborne landings also collapsed the anti-Treaty frontline in county Limerick, allowing pro-Treaty forces led by Eoin O’Duffy and W.R.E. Murphy to roll almost unopposed into north Cork and Kerry.
However the anti-Treaty IRA had been dispersed rather than destroyed and in the weeks that followed, on the direction of their Chief of Staff Liam Lynch, their columns took up a campaign of guerrilla warfare, destroying road and rail infrastructure and ambushing vulnerable columns of National Army soldiers.
Though the anti-Treaty IRA in Cork and Kerry were displaced from the towns by the landings of August 1922, wresting the countryside from them proved a long and bloody business.
More so than against the British before the truce of 1921, the guerrillas were capable of quite large-scale assaults on towns, including Kenmare, which fell to the anti-Treatyites in September 1922 and remained in their possession until December, and Killorglin and Bantry which just held out after prolonged assaults. Cork and Kerry columns often cooperated across county borders and IRA Brigade areas in such actions.
The capture of Kenmare also saw large quantities of arms and ammunition fall into the anti-Treatyites’ hands and in its aftermath Kerry no. 2 IRA Brigade (South Kerry) commander, John Joe Rice, could write ‘there are no idle rifles in the Brigade area’ and ‘there is no day that the hospital in Killarney does not receive its supply of [National Army] wounded and dead’.[1]
While around twenty pro-Treaty troops had died in the Cork and Kerry landings in early August, by the end of September 1922 their fatal casualties in Counties Cork and Kerry had reached nearly one hundred. As Orson McMahon has noted, whereas anti-Treaty guerrillas saw their ambushes, mines and sniping attacks as legitimate means of guerrilla war, the National Army saw them as cowardly ‘sneak attacks’ on Irish soldiers and were particularly outraged by the use of ‘explosive’ or expanding bullets.[2]
The Dalton brothers: Charlie Dalton on the right, pictured with his brother Emmet, both in National Army uniform.
By September 1922 both National Army commander in County Cork, Emmet Dalton and his counterpart in Kerry, W.R.E Murphy were sounding an alarmed note. The former reporting that the situation in West Cork was ‘very bad’ with ‘a large concentration of irregulars’, and the latter, in Kerry, writing that ‘we are fighting against very superior forces in a mostly hostile country’.[3]
In Cork and even more so in Kerry, the anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas were generally locals, whereas the occupying pro-Treaty troops were often outsiders, initially largely from the Dublin Guard, though also including Claremen from the First Western Division, and later some elements of the Northern Division from Belfast. John Joe Rice, a Kerry IRA leader recalled, ‘the Dublin Guards treated South Kerry as a hostile country’. [4]
John Pinkman, a Liverpool-born ex IRA man in the Dublin Guards remembered, ‘most of our lads were Dubliners and retained the Dubliners’ traditional disdain for Irish country people’.[5]
It was no coincidence that many of the worst reprisals carried out on the pro-Treaty side followed the killing of men who had served in the IRA, particularly in Dublin, before the Truce and were now serving in the Dublin Guard. Many pro-Treaty soldiers, particularly veterans of Michael Collins IRA Intelligence unit the ‘Squad’, who largely officered the Dublin Guard, characterised their enemies as ‘ ‘trucileers’; youths who had not fought the British but were now waging a cowardly guerrilla war against the men of the ‘National forces’ who had been in forefront of War of Independence.
On the other side, anti-Treaty republicans came to see the ‘Free Staters’, not simply as outsiders, but also as British forces in green uniforms, noting the preponderance of ex British soldiers in their ranks and characterising the others as mercenaries, bought for the wages provided by the Free State.
This mutual incomprehension deepened as the war went on and motives for revenge grew.
Killings and reprisals in Cork and Kerry in 1922
An IRA flying column, at Kilflynn Kerry in 1922. (Courtesy of the Irish Volunteer website)
Among the pro-Treaty casualties in the autumn of 1922, famously, was National Army commander in Chief Michael Collins, killed in an ambush at Beal na Blath on August 22 but also former ‘Squad’ member, Tom Kehoe, blown up with a mine near Macroom along with six other soldiers on September 16. [6]
In Kerry, Captain Jim Burke of the First Western, again a former IRA officer, was among those killed in August as were two medics from the First Western, gunned down unarmed near Killarney while on a boating expedition.
Already by September 1922 a pattern of reprisal killing had become apparent in Cork and Kerry.
When the town of Kenmare fell to the anti-Treatyites on September 9, two brothers, the Scarteen O’Connors, local IRA men who had become officers in the National Army, were shot in their beds.[7]
This very quickly led to a rush of reprisals by pro-Treaty troops. The first such case, the killing of Timothy Kenefick in Cork on September 8 was ‘a particularly brutal murder’ by the Dublin troops, as Liam Lynch wrote, apparently involving torture before execution.[8] Another prisoner, James Buckley, was shot in reprisal for the mine that killed ex Squad man Tom Kehoe and six other soldiers and his body dumped in the hole created by the mine explosion.[9]
In Kerry, a 17-year-old prisoner Bertie Murphy, was shot dead in revenge for an ambush at Brennan’s Glen, while another prisoner, John Galvin, was beaten and then shot by First Western troops, his body dumped at Ballyseedy Cross, in revenge of the death of their captain, Jim Burke.[10]
In both Cork and Kerry, however, locally recruited National Army troops mutinied in objection to these killings by outsiders.
Mutiny
Free State troops arrive in Cork, August 1922.
In Cork, locally raised troops refused to go back out on patrol until the culprits for the killings of Kenefick and Buckley were sent away. Emmet Dalton their commander wrote back to Army Commander in Chief Richard Mulcahy in Dublin,
‘The shooting [of Buckley] was the work of the Squad. Now I personally approve of the action, but the men I have in my command are of such a temperament that they can look at scores of their companions being blown to atoms by a murderous trick without feeling annoyed but when an enemy is found with a rifle they will mutiny if he is shot. On this account I think it would be better if you kept the ‘Squad’ out of my area.’[11]
Most of the officers concerned were indeed duly sent back to Dublin.
This did not quite end National Army reprisals in Cork. Three anti-Treaty Volunteers were killed at Upton in October for instance, allegedly after surrender, according to Tom Barry, on the orders of an Army chaplain.[12] Nevertheless, the transfer of vengeful Dublin Guard officers out of the command area helped to keep a lid on revenge killings in Cork thereafter.
Whereas a mutiny by Cork pro-Treaty troops in objection to the killing of prisoners helped to limit reprisals there, a similar mutiny in Kerry was put down.
It may also have helped that Emmet Dalton resigned in late 1922 and was replaced by a local commander, David Reynolds in Cork.
In Kerry however, the response of Army Command to the objections of Kerry pro-Treaty troops to reprisals was different. Members of the Army’s Kerry Number One Brigade, composed of pro-Treaty Kerry IRA men, led by Ned Horan, like their counterparts in Cork, raised an uproar over the killing of John Galvin. Horan stated that he had ‘tried to preserve the honour of the National Army’ but that such incidents ‘only serve to incite public opinion against the Army… and if carried on we would soon find ourselves in arms against a hostile population such as existed against the Black and Tans’.[13]
W.R.E. Murphy however, the General Officer Commanding in Kerry, told Mulcahy that Galvin had been ‘a scoundrel’ and a ‘terror to the countryside’ and that Horan ‘had best be removed’ ‘for his own safety’… I will not sacrifice any officer or man from the First Western, a splendid lot of troops, for his cheap heroics’. Indeed he threatened that if there were further mutinies by Kerry troops ‘I will parade the lot of them in front of 1 Western Division and “Danny Boy’ [an armoured car] and shoot them down’.[14]
Horan duly resigned. Not long afterwards, an anti-Treatyite John Lawlor was executed near Ballyheigue by Michael Hogan of First Western, the same officer involved in the killing of John Galvin.[15]
Whereas events in Cork had forced some degree of accountability on the National Army troops there, Murphy’s response to Horan and his men’s objection to reprisal killings had the opposite effect in Kerry. A pattern of impunity had been established.
Paddy O’Daly, the commander of the Dublin Guard, who succeeded Murphy as General Officer Commanding in Kerry in December 1922, is often blamed for the subsequent killing of prisoners there and it is true that the worst reprisals in Kerry, occurred under his command. But clearly the pattern of pro-Treaty revenge killing in Kerry had already been established well before he took over from Murphy.
A change of command
Paddy O’Daly
Nevertheless, it was not until after the turn of the year, when there was a change of command in Kerry that pro-Treaty reprisals there truly escalated.
Murphy, a veteran of the British Army, had intended to execute four anti-Treaty IRA prisoners in Tralee, in December 1922 but appears to have backed down and commuted the sentences when local anti-Treaty commander Humphrey Murphey threatened to shoot eight civilian pro-Treaty supporters in retaliation.[16]
O’Daly, on the other hand, on January 20 1923, immediately exhibited a new hardness. Not long after he took over command, O’Daly had four anti-Treaty prisoners executed by firing squad in Tralee. Under the harsh new legislation, the prisoners were sentenced to death on O’Daly’s authority just the day before, without any meaningful trial, in retaliation for the IRA’s destruction of a railway bridge, which caused a train crash and the death of two railway workers.[17]
W.R.E Murphy was replaced as Officer Commanding Kerry by Paddy O’Daly in December 1922.
By the end of 1922, the pro-Treaty troops, having been reinforced substantially, believed that they were getting on top of the anti-Treaty guerrillas in both Cork and Kerry. Large sweeps secured areas previously inaccessible to the Free State forces include the Dingle peninsula and Kenmare. There was a brief flare up of anti-Treaty activity in Cork led by Tom Barry, whose column captured the towns of Ballineen and Enniskeane in December 1922 and assaulted Millstreet, jointly with Kerry units, in January 1923. In general though, by the new year the guerrillas in Cork and Kerry had been reduced to a fugitive existence, mostly in remote and mountainous areas along the county border.
Nevertheless the war stubbornly refused to end. Kerry in particular was one of the few locations in the country where, by spring 1923, anti-Treaty units were still capable of large operations.
Kerry’s ‘terror month’
The Ballyseedy memorial outside Tralee.
On March 5 for example a large party of anti-Treatyites attempted an assault on Cahirciveen, leading to an all-day fight at Gurrane in which at least three National Army and two anti-Treaty IRA combatants were killed. It was perhaps the frustration of the National Army at this continued and from their point of view futile, resistance that led to a ghastly series of atrocities in Kerry in March 1923.
The day after the fight at Gurrane came an incident which was to set off the worst series of reprisals, not only in Kerry but in the whole Civil War. Six National Army soldiers, led by Dublin Guard captains, Michael Dunne and Edward Stapleton, guided by a local Kerry officer Cadet Pat O’Connor, working on information gleaned from an informant, searched a field near Knocknagoshel for an IRA dug out. When they attempted to open the hiding place they triggered a trap mine which blew five of them (including the three officers) to pieces and grievously injured a sixth, blowing off his legs.[18]
March 1923 saw a series of infamous reprisals by National Army troops in Kerry.
Paddy O’Daly, once the commander of Michael Collins’ IRA Squad, was now head of the Kerry Command. Both Dunne and Stapleton, he noted in his report of the Knocknagoshel incident, had ‘brilliant pre-Truce [i.e. War of Independence] records’ in the IRA in Dublin, the latter in the Active Service Unit there. Their killing by a ‘cowardly trick’ of the ‘irregulars’, to his mindset, demanded revenge. [19]
O’Daly afterwards issued an order that in future ‘all mines will be lifted and all dumps cleared by irregular prisoners’. This was in fact cover for a series of premeditated reprisals. The following day, nine prisoners were taken from Ballymullen barracks in Tralee to Ballyseedy crossroads, where it was claimed that they were tasked with clearing a mined barricade, which subsequently exploded, killing all nine.[20]
In fact, one prisoner, Stephen Fuller survived, miraculously thrown clear by the blast, to tell the truth of the incident. The prisoners, all from IRA Kerry Number One Brigade, had been tied around a mine assembled by the pro-Treaty troops which was then detonated. It was, it is now clear, revenge for the bomb at Knocknagoshel.
David Neligan
Over the following days further massacres were carried out of prisoners from Kerry Two Brigade at Countess Bridge near Killarney where four prisoners were killed and finally at Cahirciveen where five men from Kerry Three Brigade were blown up, this time having first been shot in the legs to stop any from escaping.
Richard McElligott has shown that there was also another, unsuccessful attempt to blow up a batch of prisoners near Scartaglin.[21] Several more anti-Treaty prisoners were shot in the following days and by mid March the Army claimed to have killed thirty four ‘irregulars’ in that month in County Kerry, including ‘some of the most inveterate and irreconcilable opponents of the government’. [22]
Though some had died in combat, most, as the Army acknowledged, were killed in the series of reprisals that followed the bomb at Knocknagoshel, which they alleged were self-inflicted by ‘the irregulars’ on their own prisoners.
According to National Army officer Niall Harrington, who resigned over the incidents, the Army’s version of events was ‘completely untrue’.[23] The atrocities were planned by General Officer Commanding Kerry, Paddy O’Daly and head Intelligence Officer, David Neligan. Neligan, at one time a spy for Michael Collins in Dublin Castle, in his days as a detective ostensibly in British service, had developed a fearsome reputation in Kerry.
From information pieced together from Harrington and another National Army officer, McCarthy, the anti-Treaty IRA later concluded that it was Neligan who planned the reprisals but named further culprits also, all Dublin Guard officers and mostly former Dublin IRA men; Lieutenant Anderson took the prisoners out of jail in Tralee, Captain Clarke tied them together and placed the mine at Ballyseedy, Lieutenant Murtagh threw grenades at them, Captain Edward Flood detonated the mine and Commandant Joe Leonard shot the one survivor who they found. Other sources all name other culprits also, including another former Squad man, Ned Breslin.[24]
That Ballyseedy and the other mine explosions were in fact premeditated reprisals was never acknowledged by Army command, whose chief Richard Mulcahy exonerated O’Daly. When it emerged that Stephen Fuller had survived the blast at Ballyseedy, and was telling of what had happened there, the Army reported that ‘it is stated that he [Fuller] has now become insane’.[25]
Local republican Patrick Allman posted notices in Tralee repudiating that the mines that had killed prisoners had been laid by anti-Treatyites, stating ‘Kerry knows the truth’. The Army reported on ‘disgraceful scenes’ in the town when the mutilated bodies of the dead from Ballyseedy were handed back to relatives. The military coffins were smashed by the incensed relatives who transferred the remains of their loved ones to their own coffins. Cumman na mBan women disrupted mass services to lead prayers for the prisoners killed.[26]
The horrors of March 1923 would come to define the memory of the Civil War in Kerry.
Cork: a different pattern
Liam Deasy.
County Cork had nothing like the same intensity of reprisals as Kerry, and indeed lethal violence dropped sharply there in 1923 compared to 1922. Liam Deasy, a Corkman and head of the IRA First Southern Division called for surrender of his forces after his capture in early 1923 and column leader Tom Barry became involved in behind the scenes peace talks with pro-Treaty forces.
But nor was Cork without brutality in the final months of the conflict. On February 3, 1923 in what was in some ways a precursor of the mine atrocities in Kerry, the National Army rounded up both prisoners and local civilians at Newcestown and ordered them to remove a road barricade than contained an IRA trigger mine. The mine duly exploded, killing one anti-Treaty prisoner and two civilians and injured seven more. [27]
Cork did see reprisals in 1923 but in general there violence declined sharply in 1923 in stark contrast to neighouring Kerry.
On the other side, the anti-Treaty IRA in Cork responded to the one execution that was carried out there with reprisal against civilians accused of being Free State supporters. After the execution of William Healy of Donoughmore, who was shot by firing squad on 13 March 1923 at Cork County Prison, the local anti-Treatyites shot two civilians: William Goff Beale, a Quaker, whose cousin was a judge, was shot dead in Cork city ‘by two men saying it was reprisal for the executions’. The following day, Ben McCarthy aged 16 of Bantry taken from his home by four armed men and shot dead, with the notice ‘convicted spy’, fixed on his body, ‘shot as a reprisal for our four comrades executed this week’. [28]
They also burned many homes of pro-Treaty supporters, targeting among others Mary Collins Powell, the sister of Michael Collins and also targeted theatres and cinemas in Cork city, which they forbade to open ‘in a time of national mourning’. Indeed the Cork IRA were far more likely than their Kerry equivalents to target ‘enemy’ civilian supporters.
In general however, the Civil War in Cork had effectively ended by the spring of 1923, with the remaining guerrilla columns mostly concentrated in the mountains of West Cork and simply avoiding arrest. This would appear to show us that it was mass arrests, occasioned by a helpful civilian populace that was considerably more effective in defeating the anti-Treatyites than the brutal reprisals seen in Kerry in March 1923.
The bitter end
Clashmealcon caves (picture C/O RTE)
The anti-Treaty guerrilla campaign began to disintegrate in late April 1923, with the death in the Knockmealdown mountains of their leader Liam Lynch, which was quickly followed by an order by new IRA Chief of Staff Frank Aiken to cease fire and then to ‘dump arms’.
By this time also some 12,000 anti-Treatyites languished in prisons and internment camps. In Cork and Kerry their final mountain strongholds along the county border were finally being penetrated by pro-Treaty troops.
There was a final incident in Kerry, however that would come to symbolise the merciless conclusion of the conflict there. An anti-Treaty column led by Tim ‘Aero’ Lyons was trapped in a cave at Clashmeacon on April 16 1923. After a siege in which two National Army soldiers and three guerrillas, including Lyons himself were killed, the latter reputedly was offered a rope to lift him to safety which was then cut by the pro-Treaty troops, the remaining three column members surrendered.
One of them was Reginald Hathaway, an Englishman who had deserted from the British Army in 1921 and then the National Army before finally ending up in the ranks of the anti-Treaty IRA. According to Army reports, he had already surrendered once by this point ‘signing the form’ pledging not to bear arms against government troops, but had afterwards re-joined Lyons’ column. This time there would be no mercy for him. Hathaway volunteered to point out the remaining IRA dug outs in the area leading to several arrests. But despite this, he along with the two other men captured at Clashmealcon were executed by firing squad in Tralee on April 26. [29]
Well over half the anti-Treatyites killed in Kerry during the Civil War, compared to only one sixth in Cork, were killed after being taken prisoner.
Out of about 70 anti-Treatyites killed in Kerry in the Civil War, at least 41 were either executed or killed while prisoners. By contrast in Cork, only eleven out of about 65 deaths on the anti-Treaty side were due to execution, formal or summary, highlighting the stark difference between the character of violence in the two counties.[30]
The horrors of events in Kerry, however should not blind us to the fact that pro-Treaty troops in south Munster actually suffered higher fatal casualties than their opponents. Nearly 200 National Army soldiers lost their lives in Cork and Kerry. Between the two counties roughly 70 civilians also fell victim to the conflict between the summers of 1922 and 1923.
Paddy O’Daly, the author of some of the worst of the National Army’s excesses in Kerry was never punished for them. He was however eventually forced out of the Army in 1924 for his role in the brutal assault on two young women in Kenmare late in 1923. The Attorney General said the evidence against him was ‘strong’ but ‘to save the scandal of trying a GOC (General Officer Commanding), all three [officers concerned] should be given the alternative of resigning from the National Army or standing trial’. He concluded that the case was ‘horrible and distressing’.[31]
David Neligan, the other probable author of the March 1923 reprisals in Kerry, by contrast, went on to a post as head of Military Intelligence before becoming head of the Special Branch detective division of the Irish Free State’s police force, the Garda Siochana until the 1930s.
It appears surprising, that the Irish Civil War, a conflict between Irish republican former comrades, eventually provoked such savage violence and such bitter memories. A closer look however at the atrocities on the ground particularly in Kerry shows how the war developed its own bitter momentum. From their own perspective the National Army troops in Kerry were merely taking justified revenge on a wholly illegitimate and treacherous enemy, who were killed them, the true Irish soldiers, in significant numbers, long after the outcome of the war had truly been decided.
While in County Cork, the reaction of local troops to reprisals helped to limit their scope after September 1922, in Kerry the opposite pattern developed.
The impunity granted to the troops concerned, however cast a long shadow over the new Irish state, especially, though not only, in County Kerry.
