On 12 January 1921 a proclamation was issued which prohibited the use of motor cars, motor cycles or pedal cycles between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. A copy of the military governor’s proclamation was torn down in Fermoy on Liam Lynch’s instructions. The town was subsequently fined £100. As the fine remained unpaid, crown forces collected it in kind from four traders in the form of wines and spirits. The Daily Express on 4 January commented: ‘This is, of course, Martial Law. It is legal and disciplined. It is, we must believe, necessary. But it is horrible’.
A member of the volunteer forces, carrying arms when captured, could now be tried by drumhead court-martials and executed forthwith. Under this martial law the first official execution which took place was that of an officer of Liam Lynch’s brigade – Cornelius Murphy, one of the founder members of Millstreet battalion column. On 4 January, he went home to visit his parents in Kerry and was captured. He was taken to Cork military barracks, court-martialled on a charge of being in possession of a loaded revolver, and sentenced to death. He was shot on 1 February 1921.
Towards the end of January 1921 Lynch accompanied by some volunteers lay in wait for the Auxiliaries west of Newmarket. ‘Four lorries passed, but we had to let them go,’ said Paddy O’Brien, ‘because they had civilian hostages – this was part of the tactics which they used to foil our efforts.’
Next day the men waited from 6 a.m. until well after dark beside a dugout. ‘There was a thick wet fog, and the cold was penetrating.’ The following morning they again took up positions at 6 a.m. ‘This was a cold dry day. It was going to be a fight to the finish, Liam told us. It had to be because we were in a difficult ambush position, without any hope of retreat. Liam emphasised, it was we who were taking them on, and we had the advantage like Tom Barry at Kilmichael,’ Paddy O’Brien recalls. (Paddy O’Brien, Liscarroll was Tom Barry’s first cousin.)
About midday two cars were sighted approaching from the west. The first car skidded to a halt when the driver saw the trench. The second pulled up behind it. The ambush party opened fire. The occupants of the cars took shelter behind a fence. After some fighting, Lynch blew the whistle and called upon the military to surrender. Their reply was a further volley of fire, so the fight resumed until two of their party had been killed, and practically every one of them was wounded. Then they surrendered. The arms captured were all collected, loaded into one of the cars and driven away. Lynch had taken the precaution of having volunteers detailed to fell some partially sawn trees so that the road could be blocked. As a decoy the volunteers had also felled trees on other routes. Consequently the search party which scoured the area after the ambush were frustrated in their efforts.
The Millstreet battalion under C. J. Meaney had been studying the possibility of launching an attack on British troops using a train passing through the area. From mid-January various plans were tried but somehow never achieved fruition. Lynch decided to move into the area for further investigation. Trains travelling east and west were both potential targets and a position near Drishanebeg was selected. One evening, on 11 February at 6.30 p.m. as darkness approached, the column went into position. Plans had been made to bring this train to a halt. A volunteer was detailed to travel on the train, inspect it and signal at a point in Rathcoole where two armed men were waiting. At the signal the volunteers boarded the train as it was leaving the station and approached the driver compelling him to stop. In the darkness, a lighted bicycle lamp placed on the track indicated the exact position at which the engine should halt. At this spot the whistle was blown and the military in the train were called on to surrender; they answered with a rifle shot. Fire was opened upon the carriages containing the military party and continued for about fifteen minutes. The British party then surrendered; one had been killed and practically all were wounded. The column collected fifteen rifles and 700 rounds of ammunition. They had no casualties.
Lynch’s brigade suffered a reverse at Mourne Abbey on 15 February 1921. From information received, British officers were to hold a conference in the martial law area of Cork. On Sunday, 13 February Lynch assembled his men to occupy positions on the Fermoy/Cork road and the Mallow/Cork road with the intention of attacking a convoy going or returning from the conference. The usual signalling scouts and protective elements were posted and preparations were completed in the early hours of the morning of 15 February.
That morning, Siobhán Creedon, the intelligence agent, while cycling to Mallow, met two lorries of troops and police. When she reached Mallow she reported what she had seen to Daniel McDonnell of the Mallow company. McDonnell immediately cycled along the main road to Mourne Abbey and located Tadgh Byrne near the southern end of the ambush position. He gave him the information and together they crossed a stream flowing parallel to the road where Jack Cunningham and the riflemen were hidden. Then they heard the sound of gunfire. The protective section had been engaged. The shooting had started not on the main road but north-east of the ambuscade. The column suddenly found itself in the role of ambushed rather than ambusher. The British forces were equipped with machine-guns and adequate transport; therefore, those who could, withdrew. Three volunteers were killed and one who was badly wounded, subsequently died. Eight IRA men were captured, two of whom were later executed in Cork after trial by court-martial. It was the first time that one of Lynch’s columns was caught unaware and it appeared as if an informer had been at work. The volunteers became very uneasy.
Up to now Lynch had had no great problem of this nature within his brigade but it did appear, on this occasion, that accurate information had been passed on to the enemy. They not only knew the time, but the place and plan of the ambush. He immediately put his intelligence men to work; it took nearly a month (when a similar less disastrous event occurred) to discover how the information was being passed to the enemy. One of the pseudo-deserters, whom the volunteers had trusted, was found to be the culprit. He was dealt with accordingly.
All through the months of January, February and March 1921 there were several sniping attacks throughout the Second Cork brigade area and British forces were unable to stop them. The IRA battalions continued to harass wherever possible and during that period lost only a few men and no arms.
An extremely long and arduous ambush took place under Lynch’s command at Clonbainin between Kanturk and Millstreet on 3 March 1921, where Seán Moylan of Newmarket joined with Kerry No. 2 brigade under Commandant Tom McEllistrim, and a detachment from Charleville under Paddy O’Brien. At approximately 10 a.m. three military lorries passed unattacked because the mine failed to explode. Shortly after 2 p.m. three more lorries came into view. Fire was opened on the leading lorry. The ambush continued for some hours. In this engagement they collected quite an amount of ammunition and suffered no casualties. British casualties were thirteen killed and fifteen wounded. Because of British activity in Lombardstown, Lynch was forced to move brigade headquarters further west to Nadd.
On a raw, foggy March morning under driving rain, the British forces staged one of their elaborate and well-planned efforts to annihilate the brigade staff and the columns in the Cork No. 2 area. Forces were drawn from Cork, Ballincollig, Buttevant, Fermoy and Kanturk. Before midnight on 9 March the British forces in armoured vehicles had been moving out and were armed with rifles, machine-guns, mortars and grenades. They had intended to make a swoop and to converge on the IRA. It was a well-planned and efficiently carried-out operation but its success was limited because of Lynch’s prompt action on an intelligence report received earlier.
Earlier in the day on 9 March 1921 Judy O’Riordan of Buttevant passed on information of large-scale raiding in the Banteer direction. Lynch ordered the Charleville battalion out on a road-blocking task at certain specified points. This saved the Nadd column, which was in training, from a major disaster. Lynch had also sent dispatches to the Buttevant, Mallow and various other companies requesting them to engage in road-trenching, which completely upset the British forces. Several cars skidded and the British operation was unsuccessful.
Lynch, with Power and a number of men, went that same morning to Nadd Cross with the intention of attacking some passing lorries. The British detachment which came to Nadd Cross turned west, evidently with the intention of approaching their objective from the south. Units of the column in the scattered farmhouses were alerted. They, and the brigade officers, began to move westwards across the mountain. At one point unobserved British troops infiltrated the position and reached David Herlihy’s house where some men were sleeping. They rushed into the house, hustled the half-dressed occupants out, shouting, ‘We’ll give you some of your own stuff now!’ They lined the men up in a field and the officer said, ‘When I say run ... run!’ Morgan and Moloney made a dash for liberty and, though wounded, managed to get away. Three other men, Waters, Kiely and Herlihy were shot and then bayoneted to death.
The British forces, who had now been combing the entire area, were closing in on the volunteers. Fire was exchanged between some detachments and groups of volunteers. That evening Liam was informed that four were dead, including an unarmed civilian who was fired on and mortally wounded. Due to this and other circumstances it seemed to Liam that again his enemies were in possession of accurate information as to the volunteers’ movements. There was a striking similarity between what had happened at Mourne Abbey and what had now taken place at Nadd. The mystery was finally cleared up. A member of the Kanturk column who had aroused his companions’ suspicions was absent from Nadd during the attack. (He had served in the British army and had been with the column about two months.) Enquiries revealed that this man had known of the proposed ambush at Mourne Abbey several days before it was due to take place, likewise the Nadd raid. Two days before the Nadd raid he had said that he wanted to go to Kanturk to draw his British ex-service pension. Reflecting on the ambushes, which had taken place, the men realised that he had absented himself on each occasion that the military appeared to have been forewarned. Intelligence officer, Michael Moore warned the local men to watch this man’s movements.
One night after drinking he was seen entering the British barracks where he remained for quite a while. Moore sent the information by dispatch to Liam, but for some reason, which is unclear, Liam never received this message. However, the man’s guilt was confirmed when he was identified amongst the raiding group at Nadd dressed in the uniform of a Black and Tan. He was not seen again.1
1 Hundreds of men with British Army service loyally served in the IRA. His was an isolated case.