The heavy-handed tactics of the British merely succeeded in eliciting more support both for Sinn Féin and for the IRA. The harsh reprisals carried out by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries increased the determination of those fighting them. Having heard someone describe the Auxiliaries as ‘invincible’, Tom Barry and the Third West Cork Flying Column planned an ambush in Kilmichael, which not only inflicted devastating losses on the British, but also proved that the Auxiliaries could be defeated. Nonetheless, Fermoy, perhaps inevitably, suffered a night of reprisals following the ambush, including the murder of innocent civilians.
The British government had sought to suppress organisations it declared to be illegal by imprisoning men and women convicted, or even suspected, of political ‘crimes’. However, although hundreds of arrests were made, there were always other men and women ready to step into the gap. In a further effort to turn the people against the IRA, and in direct response to the Kilmichael ambush, Lord French, the Viceroy, declared Munster to be under martial law. General Macready announced that anyone aiding or abetting the IRA would face the penalty of death. Coinciding with these measures, the reprisals of the Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British Army reached a crescendo with the destruction of Cork in an orgy of violence and murder. In the House of Commons, Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary, blamed the IRA for the burning of the city.
Lloyd George’s legislative response to the crisis was the Government of Ireland Act, which replaced the Home Rule legislation, suspended because of the war in Europe. The Government of Ireland Act provided for two Home Rule parliaments, one in Dublin and one in Belfast, thus splitting Ireland along the six-county border. Although the Act retained provision for the unification of Ireland if the two parliaments agreed, it fell far short of Sinn Féin’s demands.
De Valera, fresh from his lengthy sojourn in the United States where he had raised millions of dollars in aid, arrived back in time for Christmas; the timing of his arrival was probably partly in response to Griffith’s arrest the previous month, but he was undoubtedly also influenced by the length and harshness of the war. Even as the year drew to a close, the conflict continued. In Dublin, in December, selected IRA men were formed into an Active Service Unit to ambush British patrols. And the year ended on a brutal note in Clare and also in Limerick where a dance in aid of the IRA was raided by the Black and Tans, British Army and RIC who engaged in violent attacks against those in attendance.
TOM BARRY AND THE KILMICHAEL AMBUSH
The first, and most successful attack carried out by the IRA against the Auxiliaries took place on 28 November 1920, near Kilmichael, County Cork, under the direction of Tom Barry. Barry was Commandant of the Third West Cork Flying Column, having risen speedily through the ranks of the IRA despite the fact that he was a former British soldier who had fought in Mesopotamia (Iraq) during the First World War. ‘Of all the ruthless forces that occupied Ireland through the centuries, those Auxiliaries were surely the worst,’ Barry wrote, referring to the hundred and fifty who had commandeered Macroom Castle as their barracks since August 1920. He stated that the Auxiliaries were openly established as a terrorist body and were habitual looters, describing their technique:
Fast lorries of them would come roaring into a village … firing shots and ordering all the inhabitants out of doors. No exceptions were allowed. Men and women, old and young, the sick and the decrepit were lined up against the walls with their hands up, questioned and searched. No raid was ever carried out by these ex-officers without their beating up with the butt ends of their revolvers, at least a half-dozen people … For hours they would hold the little community prisoners, and on more than one occasion, in different villages, they stripped all the men naked … and beat them mercilessly with belts and rifles.
Barry considered it strange that the IRA had not engaged the Auxiliaries properly since their arrival in August, allowing them to ‘bluster through the country for four or five months killing, beating, terrorising, and burning factories and homes’. He resolved to challenge them, spurred on by the stories he heard from locals who described the Auxiliaries as ‘invincible’ and ‘super-fighters’.1
Thirty-six Volunteers were assembled for the flying column and undertook special training for a week before the Kilmichael attack. Barry himself rode out by horse to establish the best place from which to ambush the enemy; however, he needed to figure out how to slow the Auxiliaries down on the road to give the IRA an opportunity to engage them. Paddy O’Brien had a very fine IRA officer’s tunic and Barry decided that if he borrowed it and stood out on the road, the Auxiliaries would be bound to stop and investigate. It was an audacious and risky plan.
Having marched for five hours in terrible rain, the column reached the ambush position on 28 November at 8.15am. Barry explained to his men that the position they occupied offered no line of retreat:
[The] fight could only end in the smashing of the Auxiliaries or the destruction of the Flying Column. There was no plan for a retirement until the Column marched away victoriously. This would be a fight to the end, and would be vital not only for West Cork, but for the whole nation … The Auxiliaries were killers without mercy. If they won, no prisoners would be brought back to Macroom. The alternative now was kill or be killed …2
The column was split into three main sections and, despite the lack of cover, the men managed to stay hidden in their soaked clothing for the next eight hours. A scout signalled the approach of the British just around five o’clock. As the first Crossley tender turned the bend, it slowed down when the driver spotted Barry standing in the middle of the road. An IRA Mills bomb was hurled into the driver’s cabin. As it exploded, a barrage of fire was unleashed on the Auxiliaries. Close-quarter fighting ensued, the Auxiliaries with their hand guns and the IRA using rifle butts and bayonets.
The nine Auxiliaries in the first lorry were wiped out and Barry and his men went to assist the other IRA sections, whose men were engaging the second lorry. Some of the Auxiliaries shouted, ‘We surrender’, and two IRA Volunteers stood up only to be shot by the British, who recommenced firing. Incensed by the false surrender, Barry gave the order to commence rapid fire and not to stop until he commanded it. The Auxiliaries were sandwiched between the IRA sections and some of them called out ‘surrender’ again. However, Barry ordered his men to continue firing until eventually two lorry loads of British lay silent on the road.
The driver of the second Crossley tender, Cecil Guthrie, escaped. Guthrie had murdered an innocent civilian, Jim Lehane, in Ballyvourney less than a month earlier and had openly boasted that he ‘got the bastard’.3 Guthrie was captured by the First Cork Brigade IRA later that night and executed. Only one Auxiliary survived, Lieutenant H.F. Forde, who was found the following day and brought to hospital; he was later awarded £10,000 compensation.
Of the IRA men, Michael McCarthy and Jim Sullivan were dead and sixteen-year-old Pat Deasy lay dying from his wounds, which would prove fatal later that night. The men of the IRA column were quick to collect eighteen rifles, thirty revolvers, 1,800 rounds of ammunition and a haul of Mills bombs. They then set the two trucks on fire.
Barry, somewhat used to the horrors of war from his time in Mesopotamia, realised that his men were in danger of shock from the battle. He ordered them to march up and down the road, halting them, marching them and drilling them until a sense of normality and discipline returned. The Flying Colum then marched through the rain for eleven miles and camped in an unoccupied cottage at Grannure. The men had been without a decent meal for thirty-six hours, had marched twenty-six miles, and were soaked through from the rain, but they had shown the people of Ireland that the Auxiliaries were not invincible.
The Cork Weekly Examiner reported on the funeral of the Auxiliaries as the cortège passed through Cork, for the coffins to be brought to England by sea. All businesses were ordered to close for three hours as sixteen coffins ‘shrouded in Union Jacks’ passed by. The eight Crossley cars, with two coffins on each, were observed in silence by an unusually large number of people on the streets. ‘At more than one point a youth or two had not had his head gear removed as the first coffins passed. A member of the guard of honour gave the order “remove your hat” which was immediately complied with.’4
REPRISALS FOR KILMICHAEL
Not surprisingly, the British were incensed by the successful ambush of two lorry loads of Auxiliaries. For days after, the area was awash with British forces who, in keeping with official policy, carried out reprisal attacks on the local people and their properties. The only farmhouse near the ambush site was burned to the ground. On 1 December, the Auxiliaries issued an order from Macroom Castle that all male inhabitants of Macroom were liable to be shot for having their hands in their pockets.
That same night, a party of Auxiliaries created havoc in Fermoy. They murdered the proprietor of the Blackwater Hotel, Nicholas de Sales Prendergast, a former captain in the British Army, who had fought in the First World War. Four Auxiliaries beat him up in the bar of the Royal Hotel and then dumped his body in the Blackwater river. When his wife called at a number of hotels seeking her husband, she was callously told by the drunken British to ‘try the Blackwater’.5 The following night, the Auxies, who were drunk again, dragged a shop owner, Mr Dooley, from his premises and threw him into the river as they had done with Prendergast. Dooley, however, managed to swim to safety despite the Auxiliaries shooting at him in the river. The Auxiliaries then went to his shop and set it on fire alongside two other premises.6
MARTIAL LAW IN MUNSTER
With the approval of the British Cabinet and on the order of Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant, martial law was declared on 10 December 1920 for certain counties in Munster, namely Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick. French’s proclamation, issued from Dublin Castle, specifically mentioned Kilmichael and contained some false accusations against the IRA intended to gain the sympathy of the populace. It falsely referenced ‘attacks on His Majesty’s forces, culminating in the ambush and massacre and mutilation with axes, of sixteen cadets of the Auxiliary Division, all of whom had served in the late war, by a large body of men who were wearing trench helmets and were disguised in the uniform of British soldiers’, and went on to appeal to ‘all loyal and well-affected subjects of the Crown to aid in upholding and maintaining the peace of this Realm and the supremacy and authority of the Crown, and to obey and conform to all orders and regulations of the military authority, issued by virtue of this proclamation.’7
On the strength of this, General Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces, issued an order on 12 December that all arms and ammunition must be surrendered by 27 December. Those who were found in possession of such items would be ‘liable on conviction of a military court to face DEATH’ (Macready’s capitals). Any person guilty of aiding and abetting the IRA would also face the penalty of death. Macready announced that the ‘Forces of the Crown in Ireland are hereby declared to be on Active Service’.8
THE BURNING OF CORK
The Burning of Cork by the Auxiliaries on the night of 11 December 1920 may have been in reprisal for Kilmichael but it was very much prompted by an IRA ambush of the British at Dillon’s Cross that evening. A particularly vicious group of Auxiliaries, K Company, had been making life miserable for the people of Cork. They had engaged in beatings, robberies, floggings and looting of public houses. The IRA understood that Captain James Kelly, the intelligence officer for the British in Cork, was due on patrol with the Auxiliaries.9 At 8pm, six IRA Volunteers under Seán O’Donoghue ambushed the Auxies’ Crossley tender as it left Victoria Barracks in the north district of the city. One Auxiliary, Spencer Chapman, was killed and a dozen were wounded. The Auxies and British soldiers were incensed and went on a rampage of violence first in the Dillon’s Cross area and then in the city centre.
Florence O’Donoghue, an intelligence officer for the IRA, wrote later about what happened:
Auxiliaries, Black and Tans, soldiers — some were half drunk, many were shouting and jeering, all were wild, furious, savage, exultant in the urge to destruction. A tram car going up Summerhill, full of passengers and on its last journey for the night, was set upon by Auxiliaries and Black and Tans; the passengers were dragged or pushed out upon the road, searched, threatened, abused, beaten with rifle butts and fired upon. A priest who was a passenger in the tram was singled out for special attention. He was put up against a wall, his overcoat, jacket and vest and collar were torn off; he was knocked sprawling upon the ground and told to say ‘To hell with the Pope.’ He refused and was told he would be shot. Another group intervened; he was kicked again and told to run … he was fired at [while attempting to run].
O’Donoghue described how ‘… hordes of armed men now issued forth, lorries laden with petrol tins swept through the empty streets and over the river bridges into the main thoroughfares. From the city police barracks other groups emerged, and soon the central streets of the city were overrun by swarming masses of violent men intent upon loot and destruction.’10
Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, first said that it was the IRA who had burned Cork, and then decided to blame the people of Cork themselves. However, witnesses recalled that the group who had set fire to Grant’s department store marched up to the building in military formation under the command of Auxiliary officers. The British who had set fire to Cash’s did so under sharp military commands. Before long, though, all discipline relaxed and an uncontrolled orgy of burning and looting began. One after another, all the principal businesses on Patrick Street were set on fire. At the Munster Arcade, where a number of people resided, shots were fired through the doors, the windows were smashed and bombs were thrown into the buildings.
The fire brigade did its best to cope with a situation far beyond the capabilities of its resources. The firemen tried to confine the fires at some points, but their efforts were hampered by the British who slashed their hoses with bayonets and even shot at the firemen themselves. One wounded fireman was taken away by ambulance, which in turn was fired upon.
Cork City Hall was attacked and the Auxiliaries and Tans placed explosives and petrol cans throughout the building, ensuring its total destruction. They then turned their attention to the Carnegie Library next door, where thousands of books were burned. Some firemen managed to get a hose onto the library but they were hampered by a group of RIC men who kept turning the hydrant off. Two IRA Volunteers, Con and Jeremiah Delaney of Dublin Hill, were taken out of their beds at two in the morning and shot dead by a party of military men with English accents.
Locals gather on the burnt-out streets of Cork following a night of violence and destruction by the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans.
The financial cost of the reprisals was estimated at three million pounds, similar to the cost of the destruction of Dublin during the 1916 Rising. A few hundred houses were destroyed and forty major business premises were wrecked. Later, the British military’s investigation into the burning of Cork, the ‘Strickland Report’, laid the blame on the Auxiliaries, but the British Government refused to publish the findings.
The British media, with few exceptions, were happy to collude with the government story that fires had spread from Patrick Street to City Hall, although this would have meant that the fires had skipped five hundred yards of buildings and crossed the River Lee. A fake map, repositioning City Hall beside Patrick Street, was even published in the newspapers in Britain. Without doubt, the culprits were members of K Company, who were removed from the city to Dunmanway. As a mark of disrespect to the people of the city they had set on fire, they wore a piece of burnt cork on their glengarry bonnets.
MURDER AT DUNMANWAY
On 15 December 1920, Patrick Brady, a resident magistrate from Skibbereen, was driving his car to Bandon Barracks, where he had official business, when he suffered engine trouble near Dunmanway, County Cork. The local parish priest, Rev. Canon Thomas Magner, who was out walking, stopped to chat, and then a young farmer and member of Cork No. 3 Brigade of the Volunteers, Timothy Crowley, came along to help.11
Two Crossley tenders carrying K Company Auxies were making their way to Cork for the funeral of Spencer Chapman who had been killed at the Dillon’s Cross ambush. As they passed the three men, Auxiliary Section Leader Vernon Hart stopped the lorry, disembarked, approached Timothy Crowley and shot him in the head. He then turned to the priest, made him kneel down and murdered him. Brady, the RM, survived only by running for his life. Hart, a close friend of Chapman’s, was subsequently tried in a military court and was declared guilty but insane.
VIOLENCE IN COUNTY CLARE
On 6 December, Five Crossley tenders of Black and Tans raided the village of Craggaknock, near Kilkee in County Clare. Information provided by a spy led them to believe that William Shanahan, an IRA officer, was attending a Republican court as a member of the Republican police. IRA scouts managed to warn Shanahan and he escaped moments before the Tans burst into the court. Enraged that they had failed to capture Shanahan, the Tans opened fire on the civilians and killed one man, Thomas Curtin. Twelve days later, they captured Shanahan and another IRA Volunteer, Michael MacNamara, in Doonbeg. The two men were held in the RIC Barracks in Kilrush, where they were subjected to five days of torture and interrogation. Three days before Christmas, the two men were driven towards Ennis in a Crossley tender. The Tans took Michael McNamara off the lorry at Darragh and told him he was free to go, but they shot him dead. They then bayoneted his corpse, tied it to the back of the tender and dragged it to Ennis. The other prisoner, William Shanahan, was brought to Ennis Jail where his brutal treatment continued. On a trip to the latrine, he was shot in the head at point blank range by Sergeant David Finlay.12
FORMATION OF THE DUBLIN ACTIVE SERVICE UNIT OF THE IRA
In December 1920, IRA GHQ decided to form an Active Service Unit made up of selected Volunteers from the four battalions of the Dublin Brigade. Members of the ASU were to be paid £4 per week and would be full-time. The ASU did not replace the Squad, which would continue to assassinate targets. Instead, it was designed to carry out ambushes. Typically the ASU members would wait on the streets in civilian attire and, as soon as the Auxiliaries or Black and Tans drove by in their trucks, the ASU would attack them with hand grenades followed by a rapid small-arms fire. About fifty IRA Volunteers, divided into four sections, made up the ASU, which was under the command of Paddy Flanagan. In the first ASU attack, two sections ambushed two Crossley tenders carrying Auxiliaries on Bachelors Walk in January 1921.
VIOLENCE AT IRA DANCE
The violent year 1920 ended with an attack by the RIC on a dance near Bruff, County Limerick. The unoccupied stately home of the Viscounts O’Grady at Caherguillamore was chosen for a dance on St Stephen’s Day. The purpose of the dance was to raise money for the Third East Limerick Battalion of the IRA, and the venue was not generally known until the 240 carefully selected guests were brought there by a guide. However, the local RIC, British Army and Black and Tans had managed to hear about the dance and, despite the secrecy of the plans, were informed of the venue. They surrounded the large house in huge numbers. Volunteers Harry Wade and Daniel Sheehan, acting as sentries, were shot and died the following day, while John Quinlan, another sentry, was shot dead. The British poured volleys of shots through the windows, and glass and bullets rained down on the young dancers.
The British then burst into the building, firing wildly in all directions. Éamon Moloney, an IRA Volunteer, shot one of the Tans, Alfred Hogsden from London, but Moloney was then shot dead himself. Volunteer Martin Conway, who was ‘on the run’, tried to escape but was shot on the road by the Black and Tans. There were some reports that he crawled, badly wounded, for miles but was found by the Tans and their bloodhounds and was then shot dead.
In the house, following the death of their comrade Hogsden, the Black and Tans went wild, engaging in violent retribution against the unarmed people at the dance. All the men were forced, one at a time, to run a gauntlet through RIC and Tans who severely beat them with rifle butts, whips and broken banisters and spindles. Each man was interrogated and beaten viciously. Their ordeal lasted for the entire night. All the women were held upstairs by drunken Tans, with the sound of their friends’ cries echoing through the house. Over the next couple of weeks, sixty men who had attended the dance were sentenced to between three and six months’ imprisonment. A further fifty-nine men were sentenced to jail in England for five years.13 The action of the RIC and Black and Tans was an acute blow to the East Limerick Battalion who lost so many Volunteers in one night. An IRA Volunteer later recalled that the ‘IRA swore vengeance, and in a short time a three-to-one toll of the Tans was exacted at Dromkeen’14 (see Dromkeen Ambush, Chapter Ten).
GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND ACT, 1920
With the European war over, the suspended Home Rule legislation was due to be enacted. However, much had changed since 1914. The Easter Rising of 1916 had contributed greatly to the meteoric rise of Sinn Féin. The Irish Parliamentary Party was defunct and the IRA was waging a guerrilla campaign against the British Empire. The Government of Ireland Act, 1920, replaced the Home Rule Act. It was introduced to the House of Commons on 25 February and was designed to appease the minority Unionist population in Ireland who opposed the notion of a Dublin Parliament. The Act provided for two parliaments, one in Dublin and one in Belfast, which essentially split the country.
Northern Ireland, a hitherto non-existent geographic region, would include the six counties of Armagh, Antrim, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone, the new entity being based entirely on a Unionist majority. Thus Unionists would still be part of the United Kingdom, and Britain would retain its economic interests in Ulster linen and, even more importantly, the Belfast ship-building industry. The Act included an oath of allegiance to the British Crown; if a majority of the parliamentary representatives failed to swear it, direct rule would be imposed.
The Act was not designed to appease Irish nationalists. The arch Conservative F.E. Smith, or Lord Birkenhead, served on Ulster Unionist MP Walter Long’s committee which formulated the new policy for Ireland. Lord Birkenhead remarked that he was absolutely satisfied that the ‘Sinn Feiners’ would refuse it. British Prime Minister Lloyd George initially wanted ‘Northern Ireland’ to include all nine counties of Ulster but he bowed to Craig’s wishes for a six-county Protestant-dominated state. On the positive side, the Act provided for a Council of Ireland, which would include representatives from both parliaments to discuss matters pertaining to the whole island. However, the Unionists chose to ignore the Council. The Government of Ireland Act, ensuring the partition of Ireland, became law on 23 December 1920. Elections for the two houses of Parliament, North and South, were due to be held in May 1921 (see Chapter Eleven).
RETURN OF ÉAMON DE VALERA
Meanwhile, Éamon de Valera’s nineteen months of travelling and lecturing, raising awareness and money in the United States, had come to an end. He secretly left the US on the Celtic and, despite British parties searching for him, he evaded arrest and was in Ireland for Christmas Day.15 De Valera had raised over a million pounds in the US, some of which went to fund the fledgling underground Irish State. Lloyd George, who rejected the idea of negotiating with Michael Collins for fear that this would recognise the legitimacy of the IRA, might be more inclined to treat with de Valera. In Lloyd George’s mind, de Valera was an acceptable face of Sinn Féin and was more of a politician than the ‘gunman’ Collins.
Notes
1. Barry, Tom, Guerilla Days in Ireland, Cork: Mercier Press, 1955, pg.36–37.
2. Ibid., pg.40–41.
3. Ryan, Meda, Tom Barry, IRA Freedom Fighter, Cork: Mercier Press, 2003, pg.36.
4. Cork Weekly Examiner, Saturday, 11 December 1920, pg.6.
5. Power, P.J., ‘A Night of Murder and Arson in Fermoy’, Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Tralee: The Kerryman, 1947, pg.210.
6. Coss, James, WS 1065, pg.9.
7. Cork Weekly News, Saturday, 18 December 1920, pg.1.
8. Ibid.
9. White, Gerry and Brendan O’Shea, The Burning of Cork, Cork: Mercier Press, 2006, pg.106.
10. O’Donoghue, F., ‘The Sacking of Cork’, Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Tralee: The Kerryman, 1947, pg.95–97.
11. White and O’Shea, The Burning of Cork, pg.165.
12. Ó Ruairc, Blood on the Banner, pg.212–213.
13. Toomey, The War of Independence in Limerick, pg.485–496.
14. ‘Seamus’, ‘The Engagement at Caherguillamore, Bruff’, Limerick’s Fighting Story, Tralee: The Kerryman, 1948, pg.199.
15. Macardle, The Irish Republic, pg.420.