The main Volunteer organisers in south Tipperary were Eamon O’Duibhir, Seán Treacy and Pierce McCan. Joost Augusteijn, in From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, claims the RIC didn’t detect evidence of the existence of Irish Volunteers in south Tipperary until the end of 1915: ‘By January 1916 the RIC … had become aware of 380 Irish Volunteers in five units … one in Ballagh under Eamon O’Dwyer, one under Pierce McCan around Cashel, one in Fethard, one in Clonmel under Frank Drohan and one near Tipperary town under Seán Treacy.’ None of these men saw the coming revolution through to its conclusion. Treacy and McCan died, and Drohan and O’Duibhir eventually withdrew from the fray, dismayed by the realities of guerrilla warfare.
The RIC talked in their reports of a local farmer – O’Duibhir – who had contacts with Dublin and who was busy organising malcontents into some sort of separatist movement. O’Duibhir (1883–1963) was a burly, complex, good-humoured man valued throughout his area, busy putting the Sinn Féin policy of economic autonomy into practice. He sold insurance on behalf of Irish insurance companies, encouraging people who sought cover to withdraw their business from the then-dominant English firms. By 1916, O’Duibhir, a farmer/entrepreneur, more prosperous than most other leaders of the nascent south Tipperary IRA, was county centre for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). There were thirty-two such individuals in the country, one for each county. The county centre’s job was to recruit suitable new members, to organise the spread of IRB branches throughout the county, and to encourage the infiltration of other “Irish Ireland” organisations by IRB members.
The IRB – a secret society disapproved of by the catholic church and by many republicans – was the lineal successor to the clandestine fenians. The fenians’ 1867 rebellion had been a dismal failure, but surviving old fenians – like Roscarbery’s O’Donovan Rossa and Tipperary’s John O’Leary – had a profound influence on the 1916 leaders and on young IRA organisers like Breen and Treacy. Between 1908 and 1914, the IRB revived itself and was the chief organising force behind the 1916 Rising. It subsequently infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. Michael Collins became its leader in 1919. Their oath asserted:
‘In the presence of God, I, … , do solemnly swear that I will do my utmost to establish the independence of Ireland and that I will bear true allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the government of the Irish Republic and implicitly obey the constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and all my superior officers and that I will preserve inviolable the secrets of the organisation.’
It was Seán Treacy who administered this oath to Dan Breen. Breen later quit the IRB when they attempted to rein in his activities. Ernie O’Malley – never a member – afterwards accused the IRB of undermining the ideal of the republic.
O’Duibhir said that his interest in separatist thinking had been awakened early in the century by Irish language lessons in the Weekly Freeman’s Journal. The learning of Irish, in chronic decline all over rural Ireland, suggested to thoughtful men like O’Duibhir that they belonged to a place which was culturally unlike England.
Through a locally organised Irish class he came to know a lot of like-minded individuals. In 1908, they started a Sinn Féin club in the parish. Politically and openly, these people eventually involved themselves in the anti-ranch campaign, the anti-conscription movement and in the broad range of farmers’ concerns.
The November 1913 trip to Munster by IRB man Seán Mac Dermott – which had such a profound effect on Breen – is often mentioned as the event which triggered the start of covert paramilitary action in south Tipperary. He spoke at the Tivoli Hall in Tipperary town. Seán Fitzpatrick – later in the flying columns with Dinny Lacey and Dan Breen – talked of a speech which ‘aroused the dormant, but by no means dead, national spirit of the townspeople … a shot in the arm for Irish Irelanders amongst his audience.’
Through Gaelic League connections Eamon O’Duibhir had already met the passionate, intense, young Seán Treacy, busy organising Volunteers in Tipperary town – ten miles away from O’Duibhir’s base at Ballagh. It fell to O’Duibhir – a natural leader, educator and organiser – to call a meeting in Ballagh, at the time of the MacDermott visit, at which an Irish National Volunteer company was formed. This company then assisted others in getting units going. Irish language classes arranged by O’Duibhir played a key part in recruiting men and women to parallel organisations like the Irish National Volunteers, the IRB and Sinn Féin. Thomas Ryan – eventually a member of the Second South Tipperary Flying Column under Seán Hogan – said that it was these classes which awakened his interest in Irish history and, by implication, since the two things are rarely separated, in Irish politics.
Joost Augusteijn says that by 1914 there were 2,000 Volunteers in south Tipperary.
In those early days Pierce McCan (1882–1919) was as important as Eamon O’Duibhir. McCan was rich, the son of wealthy catholics whose fortune had been made in Australia. The McCan family owned several homes and Pierce grew up on a 1,000 acre estate, complete with a mansion house residence, at Ballyowen, near Cashel. He became a progressive farmer whose methods were admired by his less prosperous neighbours. He formed a Volunteer company from the men working on his land and was able to train and drill them there clandestinely.
McCan, who was to be involved in nearly every nationalist organisation, was educated like an English gentleman. As a child he had a private tutor, Southendy, who was brought over from England. After that he was sent to Rockwell College and then Clongowes, as if his family was determined to send him on a grand tour of the best catholic boarding schools Ireland had to offer. In 1900, he visited France, before going to Denmark to look into Danish farming methods. By 1909 he was, like the entire revolutionary generation, caught up in Irish language classes. Love of the language caused him to holiday in the west of Ireland where he developed an affinity for the wild windy vistas of the Aran Islands and the highlands of Donegal.
Through the ubiquitous Gaelic League (by 1908, there were eighteen Gaelic League branches in Tipperary) McCan knew many IRB and revolutionary people in Dublin. In 1914, together with Frank Drohan and Rockwell College Irish teacher, Séamus O’Neill, McCan organised a Volunteer group in Clonmel. Perhaps because of his class background and because he had once shared a platform with Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, many thought that McCan was more of a Home Ruler than a Sinn Féiner but he was especially close to Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin.
When Redmond urged the Volunteers to join the British army and participate in the Great War – effectively signing the death warrant of the once-illustrious Parliamentary Party – the Volunteer movement split in September 1914. The vast majority supported Redmond and became the National Volunteer organisation. McCan refused to back Redmond and the Doon Volunteers were the only corps in Tipperary whose members refused to join the British army. ‘This was probably because Seán Treacy and Dan Breen were members of it,’ suggests Tipperary historian, John Shelley.
When the greatly depleted Volunteers regrouped at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in October 1914 – with wary conspiratorial IRB figures like Bulmer Hobson, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott playing prominent roles – Pierce McCan and Eamon O’Duibhir led the small Tipperary delegation.
Two years later, during the 1916 Rising, McCan made every effort to bring the Tipperary Volunteers into the rebellion. He was arrested and sent from his patrician mansion to the gloomy Arbour Hill prison where he witnessed the execution and burial of men who were his friends and comrades.
In a memoir of his incarceration he described what he saw in the prison yard: ‘At one end a huge trench was dug … the full length of the end of the yard. A very small portion of the upper end of this grave, for grave it was, had been filled in. Under this filling lay the corpses of Pearse, MacDermott and the rest … who had been shot. Full boxes of quicklime were thrown on the ground nearby. There were a few empty ones there also, the contents of which had been doubtlessly thrown upon the dead bodies of my friends and fellow Volunteers of a few days ago.’
McCan was subsequently sent to Frongoch interment camp, a university for the revolution about to happen. When he got back to Tipperary the first thing he did was re-start Irish language classes. He played an active role in setting up branches of Sinn Féin in Clonmel, Rosegreen, Killenaule, Tipperary and Carrick-on-Suir.
By December 1917, he was encouraging boycotts against state institutions like crown courts and the RIC. He called on people to turn to republican alternatives and emphasised the ultimate necessity of violence.
On 19 May 1918, McCan was arrested for his part in the fabricated German Plot and jailed in England. He was one of the large number of Sinn Féin MPs elected in 1918 – his constituency was east Tipperary – who were unable to attend the meeting of the first dáil because they were incarcerated. In prison he contracted the flu bug then sweeping through Europe and died in March 1919. His funeral, a choreographed political affair, was one of the events which restored the fortunes of the embryonic IRA after Soloheadbeg. Michael Collins and Harry Boland* were just two of the republican luminaries who participated in the Dublin end of the funeral at the pro-cathedral – an occasion said to have been attended by 10,000 mourners.