At the end of 1920, a tentative peace initiative had begun, involving Archbishop Patrick Clune as an intermediary (see Chapter Eleven). However, Prime Minister Lloyd George was heading a coalition government and coming under both military and Conservative pressure to destroy the IRA. His precondition that IRA arms should be surrendered before talks began was rejected outright. Following military advice, in January 1921, four more counties of Ireland were subjected to martial law, and the first executions were carried out under the orders of special military tribunals. In Dublin, the Igoe Gang carried out extensive searches of the city in pursuit of IRA suspects, some of whom they imprisoned and others of whom they shot. The IRA fought back. However, the Dripsey Ambush in Cork was a disaster for the IRA when information on their plans was passed to the British Army, resulting in the capture of a number of IRA Volunteers and the shooting of the informants by the IRA.
The distribution of land in Ireland was very uneven with large farms and estates owned by a small number of landlords, who extracted rents from their tenants, which enabled them to maintain ‘big houses’, many of which dotted the landscape, fuelling resentment and providing an obvious target for the IRA. A policy of burning the ‘big houses’ of the landed gentry was pursed by the IRA in order to exact revenge for the British policy of burning houses as reprisals. Hundreds of them were burnt down during the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war. The pursuance of this policy, especially in Cork, is discussed in this chapter, together with the specific case of Maria Lindsay, executed for informing.
The war raged on, with ambushes by flying columns increasing in number. While arrests and imprisonments also continued, so too did efforts to assist prisoners, as for example when three IRA men escaped from Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin with the help of a couple of sympathetic guards from the Welsh Regiment of the British Army. The IRA suffered a setback when Volunteers unintentionally killed a number of civilians in an attack on a train at Upton, which did little for public support. However, the actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries continued to offset such setbacks, arousing public horror and outrage. In February 1921, General Crozier, the Commander of the Auxiliaries, resigned his position over atrocities being committed by the men under his command.
However, the worst of the conflict was by no means over. On 20 February, a dozen IRA Volunteers were killed when they were surrounded at Clonmult, near Midleton in County Cork, in one of their deadliest encounters with the British. At the end of that month, IRA men went on a mission in Cork city to shoot as many British soldiers as they could, in revenge for the executions being carried out under the military tribunals. The following month, in an attack that had echoes of the shooting of Tomás MacCurtain, another Sinn Féin mayor, George Clancy of Limerick, was murdered by the Auxiliaries in his own home. Violence against women was also commonplace during the War of Independence, as will be discussed in more detail below.
MARTIAL LAW EXTENDED AND BRITISH MILITARY TRIBUNALS ESTABLISHED
On 5 January 1921, martial law was extended to Clare and Waterford, thus ensuring that the whole of Munster was under British Army rule. The two Leinster counties of Kilkenny and Wexford were also included. Internment had already been introduced all over Ireland after Bloody Sunday, meaning that anyone could be held without trial. The way was also paved for the arrest of anyone who was a member or even a supporter of Sinn Féin. Now, in areas under martial law, special military tribunals had the power to execute IRA suspects. Fourteen men were to die by firing squad in Cork and Limerick over the next six months. The first of these was Cornelius Murphy, on 1 February 1921, in Cork Detention Barracks. Murphy had been arrested for carrying a loaded revolver.
Less than a month later, six more IRA Volunteers were executed in the same manner in the same place, Cork Detention Barracks. Seán Allen, arrested for carrying a weapon, was shot by firing squad on 28 February 1921. He was executed with five others who had been captured during the Dripsey Ambush (see below): Thomas O’Brien, Daniel O’Callaghan, John Lyons, Timothy McCarthy and Patrick Mahoney. Four more IRA men were shot by firing squad on 28 April 1921, namely Maurice Moore and Patrick O’Sullivan who had both been captured at Clonmult (see below) and Patrick Ronayne and Thomas Mulcahy who had been captured at the Mourne Abbey Ambush (see below).
Patrick Casey was captured during an ambush at Knockanevin near Kildorrery on 1 May 1921 and was executed in Cork Detention Barracks the following day. Daniel O’Brien was captured on 11 May, when the British Army surrounded a house in Aughrim, County Cork. Five days later, on 16 May, he was shot by firing squad in Cork Detention Barracks. O’Brien had been a participant in the Kilmallock Ambush in April 1920 (see Chapter Five).
The only man executed in Limerick was IRA Captain Thomas Keane. He was with his comrade Henry Clancy when they were both captured by the Black and Tans at Ballysimon on 1 May. Clancy tried to make a run when the Tans were distracted but they shot him dead at close quarters. Thomas Keane, Captain of C Company, Second Battalion of the Mid-Limerick Brigade of the IRA, was executed by firing squad in the New Barracks, Limerick, on 4 June 1921.
Eugene Igoe of the Identification Branch of the Combined Intelligence Service at Dublin Castle.
IGOE GANG
Charles Dalton of IRA GHQ Intelligence recalled: ‘Towards the end of 1920 a young Irish Volunteer officer by the name of Howlett, who had arrived at Broadstone railway station from the West, was waylaid and shot dead by men dressed in civilian clothes.’1 In the IRA’s investigation into the matter, it was discovered that Howlett had been shot by a man called Eugene Igoe and a number of RIC men from the country. They came to be known as the Igoe Gang, although officially called the Identification Branch of the Combined Intelligence Service, and under the command of the Dublin Castle head of intelligence, Colonel Ormonde Winter. Máire Gleeson ran a small shop and tearooms, the West End Café, which was adjacent to the main entrance of the Phoenix Park. A member of Cumann na mBan, Máire reported that several plainclothes policemen who were living in the police depot in the Phoenix Park often ate at her restaurant. Although a plan to attack the Igoe Gang there was considered, their movements were too erratic and it was decided that Parkgate Street was not the best place to stage an ambush.
Patrick Moylett, who succeeded Harry Boland as President of the IRB when the latter went to the US, had known Igoe as a boy. He came from Attymas, about three miles outside Ballina, County Mayo. Moylett also knew him later in Galway where Igoe was stationed in the RIC. Moylett recalled an occasion when, on O’Connell Bridge in Dublin, he had bumped into Igoe and his girlfriend, Miss Elwood, who worked in a shop in Galway. When Michael Collins heard of this meeting later that day, he was astonished that Igoe had been walking the streets without his gang and told Moylett that he was lucky that Igoe had not shot him. Collins reckoned that ‘Igoe felt miserable any day he did not shoot a man.’2
By January 1921, Collins, as Director of Intelligence, had transferred a Volunteer by the name of Thomas Newell (also known as Sweeney Newell) to Dublin, as he also knew Igoe personally.3 Charles Dalton recalled that Newell ran into 4 Crow Street and said that he had seen Igoe and his gang heading up Grafton Street. Newell, who had reason to recall the date, remembered that it was 9.30am on 7 January 1921. Instructions were sent to the Squad HQ in Upper Abbey Street to assemble at St Stephen’s Green in the hopes of ambushing the Igoe Gang. However, as Dalton and Newell were making their way towards Stephen’s Green, they were captured by Igoe’s men and questioned on Dame Street. Vinny Byrne and other members of the Squad spotted them but did nothing. Bill Stapleton remembered, ‘On looking to the left we saw Charlie Dalton and Sweeney Newell standing, smoking, against the wall of an insurance building and chatting to one or two others.’4 The Squad mistook the Igoe gang for friends of the two IRA men.
During the interrogation, Newell realised that he had been recognised and said, ‘I know you, Igoe, and you know me.’ At this point, Dalton was released as the gang believed his story that he was a solicitor’s clerk. Newell was marched at gunpoint all the way up to the Four Courts area, constantly being questioned about his activities. He recalled that when they reached Greek Street, Igoe told him to run. Newell refused, knowing they would shoot him. Igoe gave him ‘a hell of a punch’, which sent him several yards into Greek Street where the gang unleashed a volley of shots at him. A police van arrived and brought the wounded Volunteer around the corner to the Bridewell police station, where they knocked several of his teeth out with the butt of a revolver.
Newell was eventually brought to hospital where he underwent eleven operations.5 Bill Stapleton mulled over the lost opportunity to get Igoe: ‘I am sorry to say that this was the nearest we ever got to the Murder Gang and I think, if we have any disappointments, I consider this to all of us would be one of the major ones.’6 Charlie Dalton considered Igoe’s group very capable: ‘Igoe’s party were effective in their duties and picked up a number of Volunteers, many of whom, fortunately, were imprisoned. This party became one of the most difficult and dangerous forces opposed to the IRA in Dublin.’7
SETBACK FOR THE IRA
Frank Flood, the IRA Lieutenant with the No.1 Section of the Dublin Active Service Unit (ASU), planned to attack a couple of RIC lorries at the Royal Canal Bridge in Drumcondra, on 21 January 1921. Having waited for an hour, at 9.30am, Flood and the ASU section moved a few hundred yards north only for an RIC truck to appear. Taking up new positions opposite St Patrick’s College and Richmond Road and Drumcondra Road, they waited for a second lorry. Flood noticed a DMP sergeant on patrol but thought that the policeman was oblivious to them. At 11am, the ASU section again decided to retire but then spotted an RIC lorry. The IRA men threw their grenades and opened fire. Suddenly a British Army armoured car and a Crossley tender of Auxiliaries from I Company came on the scene from the North Dublin Union, having been alerted by the patrolling DMP sergeant, who had, in fact, seen the IRA men and suspected that they were up to something. The first armoured car and tender were joined by two tenders of K Company Auxiliares and another armoured car from Dublin Castle.
Flood and the ASU attempted to disperse as they were hopelessly outnumbered by the British. Mick Magee, who had fought in the Four Courts in 1916, was mortally wounded by the British machine gunfire and he died the following day. After a chase, Frank Flood, Thomas Bryan, Patrick Doyle and Bernard Ryan were captured; they were subsequently hanged in Mountjoy Jail. Dermot O’Sullivan was also captured but his death sentence was reprieved as he was only seventeen years of age.
DRIPSEY AMBUSH
The Sixth Battalion of the First Cork Brigade suffered a heavy defeat in an ambush at Dripsey on 28 January 1921. A flying column from the seven companies of the Battalion had been formed in late 1920 and there were about sixty IRA Volunteers involved in it. They planned to attack a British convoy of seven Crossley tenders, which travelled the road every morning between Macroom and Cork. In preparation for the ambush, it was decided to give the flying column an intensive course of training, which lasted two weeks. The O/C, Jackie O’Leary, and his second in command, Frank Busteed, trained their comrades in ‘(i) Use of ground and cover, (ii) occupation of and withdrawal from a position, (iii) security measures, including scouting and field signalling, and (iv) Fire Control’, while the men were permanently billeted in the nearby parish of Donoughmore.8 On the morning of the ambush, the men of the flying column waited in their positions for the British. Trees had been sawn through and held fast by ropes, which were to be dropped once the enemy was in position, thus trapping the trucks. The River Lee, impassable at the point of the attack, ran parallel to the road, thus providing the perfect trap. Snipers and signallers waited for the arrival of the Crossley tenders.
However, the British Army had been warned of the planned attack; seventy-year-old Maria Lindsay of Leemount House and her chauffeur James Clark had informed on the IRA that morning. Seventy men from the Manchester Regiment of the British Army, accompanied by two armoured cars, descended on Dripsey. The IRA spotted the British a little too late as they were almost wholly surrounded, except for a narrow laneway. Under intense fire from the front and rear, most of the IRA men battled their way to relative safety. ‘Ultimately, after all night fighting, the Column reached safety … where a check was made of men and material. There was sadness in our camp as many of our comrades were wounded and many more in enemy hands.’9 Five of those men who were captured were sentenced by courts martial to be executed.
On 20 February, Maria Lindsay and James Clark were taken prisoner by Jackie O’Leary and the local IRA. They were held for a few days in Goulane, Donoughmore and later moved to the Rylane district.10 The IRA sent an ultimatum to the Commander of the British Army in Cork, Edward Peter Strickland, warning him that if the IRA prisoners were executed, the same fate would befall Lindsay and Clark.11 Strickland consulted with Nevil Macready, the Commander of the British Army in Ireland. Macready told him not to treat with the IRA. In his memoirs, he explained his rationale: ‘I could not listen to such a proposal, which would have resulted in the kidnapping of loyal or influential persons every time a death sentence was passed on a rebel.’12
Seán Allen and the five men captured at Dripsey — Thomas O’Brien, Daniel O’Callaghan, John Lyons, Timothy McCarthy and Patrick Mahoney — were executed in Cork on 28 February 1921. That day, the IRA in Cork exacted revenge on the British by shooting six British soldiers in Cork city (see below). A couple of weeks later, the IRA executed Maria Lindsay and James Clark as spies. Michael O’Donoghue of the Second Battalion Cork IRA wrote in his witness statement that ‘stark military necessity obsessed the British Army of occupation, while desperate instincts of self-preservation and stark ruthless resistance motivated the merciless retaliation of the Irish Republican Army.’13
BURNING OF THE ‘BIG HOUSES’
Maria Lindsay’s large mansion was set alight by the IRA in revenge for the fact that she had told the British about the Dripsey ambush. She was a loyalist, loyal to the British Empire and to Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. She was also a member of the Church of Ireland and her chauffeur, James Clark, was a Presbyterian. They were shot as spies and not as Protestants, their religion being irrelevant.
The burning of Lindsay’s house was part of IRA tactics. Between January 1920 and the Truce in July 1921, nearly eighty Big Houses were set alight and destroyed. These houses represented Anglo-Irish landlordism and those who lived on large estates in comfort and wealth were viewed as a manifestation of imperialism and personified as ‘The English’. The Big Houses were often generous hosts to the local British Army and, in the case of Maria Lindsay’s home, could be trusted by the forces who were fighting an enemy that tended to be drawn from the small farming classes or, in Dublin, the workers.
The Cork IRA pursued with a particular vigour this policy of destroying the large houses on estates. Indeed, nearly a third of all the mansions destroyed during the war were in Cork. Edward Horgan described an attack on Dunsland, the palatial Glanmire residence of Joseph Pike, chairman of the City of Cork Steamship Company and a leading member of the Irish Unionist Alliance in Cork: ‘This was a well-known rendezvous for British officers, the Pikes being strong loyalists.’14 About thirty Volunteers carrying tins of petrol ‘ordered all the occupants (about twenty) out of the building at the point of a revolver, and set fire to the place, completely destroying it.’
The remains of the Pike mansion in Cork, destroyed by the IRA. Between January 1920 and the Truce in July 1921, nearly eighty ‘big houses’ were set alight and destroyed.
Meanwhile, the British were actively engaged in burning the homes of IRA suspects. Besides their wanton destruction of Cork city in November 1920 (see Chapter Nine), Tom Barry, O/C Third West Cork Flying Column, recalled that ‘the destruction of Republican homesteads was an important plank of British terrorist policy, aimed to intimidate the Irish people into their old submissions. Farmhouses, labourers’ cottages and shops went up in flames as the British fire gangs passed, leaving desolation and misery in their wake.’ Barry recounted how the IRA in Cork sent a note to the British Commander informing him that for every Republican home destroyed, the homes of two British loyalists would be destroyed. As a consequence of that, the ‘British Loyalists were paying dearly, the demesne walls were tumbling and the British Ascendancy was being destroyed.’15
Tom Ryan, a member of Number 2 Flying Squad of the Third Tipperary Brigade, remembered the British burning a few houses following an IRA ambush. Ryan and his comrades decided to burn a local Big House that belonged to a landlord named Perry. Ryan recalls that Perry was in his pyjamas when they called to his house but was somewhat relieved that the IRA had ‘merely come to burn down the house, at which he smiled all over and requested us to give him permission to take a glass of spirits … When he drank his whiskey, he told us that he had a very valuable library of books and requested permission to save these from the flames … and about ten men were detailed to remove the books from the house, following which straw was spread around the rooms and other men came to sprinkle this with petrol.’16 In Limerick, Dan Doody remembered four houses belonging to ‘prominent supporters’ of the IRA being burned by the British after an ambush in May 1921. The IRA ‘carried out a counter reprisal in the same month, burning Springfield Castle, belonging to Lord Muskerry’.17
DROMKEEN AMBUSH
On the first Thursday of every month, two lorry loads of Black and Tans and RIC men left Pallas Barracks in Limerick for Fedamore, with money to pay the police. The Mid-Limerick and East Limerick flying columns decided to ambush the police at Dromkeen on 3 February 1921. Richard O’Connell recalled ushering civilians into local houses to keep them out of harm’s way.18 There were about six IRA Volunteers in a farmhouse at a bend in the road beside a graveyard where a number of the East Limerick Brigade were in position. The lorries would have to come down a hill for about three hundred yards where the road then split into two. Both of these roads were blocked off by the IRA.
When the ambush began, the first lorry careered into a wall, and the driver and the local District Inspector, Thomas Sanson, were thrown clear and ran for their lives. Seán Meade said Sanson ‘buried himself in a heap of horse manure, heaped in a field. In the excitement he was not noticed and escaped.’19 The police in the first lorry were mostly killed by a grenade that the IRA flung into it. The second Crossley tender was attacked midway up the hill. ‘After it had been fired on for a time, the occupants seemed to have all been killed, except one RIC man who got out and lay by the front wheel … and he was blazing away … Johnny Vaughan got down on one knee and got him.’20 However, Maurice Meade, a member of Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade and a former British soldier, says in his witness statement: ‘It was I actually who took this fellow out from under the lorry and shot him on the road.’21
When all the firing was done, the IRA walked amongst the wreckage, and ‘two tans, who had been shamming death, started to get up and run.’ They were quickly captured and court martialled on the spot. According to O’Connell, Maurice Meade was appointed to carry out the executions: ‘Maurice put one Tan behind the other and shot the two of them with one bullet, because, he said, there was no use wasting ammunition on them.’ However, Maurice Meade himself told a different, more plausible, story:
Donncadh O’Hannigan called me and said, ‘Here, Maurice, will you shoot one of them?’ I agreed to do so. He gave Stapleton the job of executing the other. I took my man down the road and shot him. Then I went down to see how Stapleton was getting on, and found that he disliked the job and did not want to do it, so I took this fellow over and executed him also. The reason for shooting these Tans after they had surrendered was that O’Hannigan had an order from GHQ in Dublin that we were to shoot all Tans and Peelers who fell into our hands.22
Eleven policemen and Tans were killed in the ambush at Dromkeen. When reinforcements of the Tans arrived from Pallas Barracks, they burned eleven houses in the district.
THE DRUMCONDRA MURDERS
James Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, two men with no connection to the IRA, were apprehended on Talbot Street, Dublin, on 9 February 1921, after an evening at a cinema. They were arrested by F Company of the Auxiliaries and taken to Dublin Castle. Hours later, Murphy and Kennedy were found by the Dublin Metropolitan Police in Clonturk Park, Drumcondra. Metal buckets had been placed on their heads and they had been shot at close range and left for dead on the street. James Murphy, however, was still alive and managed to say before he died that Captain W.L. King of F Company had taken them from Dublin Castle and told them that they ‘were going for a drive’. King, alongside two of his fellow Auxiliaries, Herbert Hinchcliffe and Frederick Welsh, were charged with what the newspapers called ‘the Drumcondra murders’.
The court martial of the accused Auxiliaries was held in City Hall on 12 to 14 April. Witnesses in Dublin Castle had seen the accused mistreating the murdered men and also reported seeing King, Hinchcliffe and Welsh get into a car with Murphy and Kennedy. The Auxiliaries had been heard to say that they were ‘going out to shoot’. The Irish Independent reported that ‘peculiar statements’ had been made by a number of Auxiliaries at the court martial, who swore that the accused had been in the Castle at the time of the murders. The court martial ruled that Murphy’s evidence was inadmissible and, despite the evidence pointing to their guilt, all three men were acquitted.
ESCAPE FROM KILMAINHAM GAOL
Kilmainham Gaol (jail) is very significant in Republican lore as Robert Emmet spent his last night there before his execution. As discussed in Chapter One, Emmet was the leader of a very small uprising on 23 July 1803, and he was captured in August and sentenced in September to be hanged and beheaded. This punishment was carried out on 20 September 1803 outside St Catherine’s Church on Thomas Street in Dublin after he had been taken from Kilmainham Gaol. Fourteen men were executed in the stone-breakers’ yard in the jail after the Easter Rising in 1916, further adding to the status of Kilmainham as a shrine to Irish revolutionaries.
One of the most audacious escapes carried out by the IRA during the war was from Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921. Simon Donnelly, Vice-Commandant of the Third Battalion, Dublin Brigade related how he was captured on 10 February by the British, and brought initially to Dublin Castle where he was questioned by the notorious Captain ‘Hoppy’ Hardy who was infamous as a bully and for his brutal methods of attempting to force information from prisoners. Donnelly was then taken to Kilmainham Gaol, suspected of involvement in the shooting of British spies on Bloody Sunday. There he met with Ernie O’Malley, Commandant General of the Second Southern Division of the IRA. Donnelly described O’Malley, who was using the alias Bernard Stewart, as ‘one of the bravest and most resourceful soldiers who had fought for Irish Independence’.23 Frank Teeling, who had been wounded and captured on Bloody Sunday and was due to be executed, was also being held in the jail. Other IRA prisoners housed in Kilmainham at the time were Frank Flood, Thomas Bryan, Patrick Doyle and Bernard Ryan from the Drumcondra Ambush (see above), and Thomas Whelan and Paddy Moran who were also held on a charge of murder. It was imperative that Frank Teeling should escape, and so a plan was devised.
Prisoners Thomas Whelan and Paddy Moran pose with their prison guards. Both men were executed in March 1921.
Thanks to two sympathetic Welsh soldiers, communications were established with the IRA on the outside, and Oscar Traynor, O/C of the Dublin Brigade, coordinated a plan of escape. A bolt-cutters, procured by Volunteer Mick Smith, with the handles cut off and detachable tubular steel handles fashioned in their place, was smuggled in and given to the prisoners by one of the Welsh soldiers. This was to be used to break open the padlock on the outer gate of the prison. The British tended not to lock the cells, knowing that the gates to the prison were always locked. Perhaps to save time, or just out of laziness, the warders tended to push home the bolts on the cell doors and leave the padlocks open. Donnelly realised that a prisoner could slip his hand out through the peephole and ease back the bolt from its socket. In addition, a ‘Plan B’ was formulated; this involved a rope and a rope ladder, which could be thrown over the wall from the outside of the prison. The night of 13 February was chosen and, rather than risk a mass breakout, the numbers were kept low to increase the chance of escape for Frank Teeling, Ernie O’Malley and Simon Donnelly.
Members of F Company of the Fourth Battalion were waiting in the vicinity when the three prisoners made their way to the side gate in the jail where they needed to break open a padlock. However, the makeshift handles on the bolt-cutters had been wrongly fitted and did not give enough leverage to cut through the lock. Whispering quickly to their comrades, they decided to try the rope-ladder plan. The rope attached to the ladder was thrown over the high wall but it sank into a groove in the masonry at the top of the wall and, when they pulled hard on it, the rope broke away. The three men returned, dispirited, to their cells.
The following day, one of the sympathetic Welsh soldiers went to Oscar Traynor to explain what had gone wrong, and Traynor again demonstrated the method for fitting the handles to the bolt-cutters. That evening at 6.30pm, to show his loyalty to the prisoners, the Welshman himself cut the lock for the escapees. Their problem now was that the bolt was heavily rusted. Using butter rations that they had saved, they greased up the bolt and, after much pressure, managed to loosen it quietly. The three prisoners escaped and the soldier slipped back into the jail.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this escape is that Oscar Traynor wanted the escape to include Paddy Moran, O/C of D Company, Second Battalion. Donnelly did try to encourage Moran to join them in the escape but Moran had lots of alibis and was convinced that he would get a fair hearing at his court martial. It was not to be and Paddy Moran was executed in Mountjoy Jail on 14 March 1921, a month after the Kilmainham Gaol escape (see below).
General Macready was livid when he heard about the escape. In a letter to Sir John Anderson, the joint Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, he wrote:
We have had a real disaster. The man Teeling and two other unimportant men escaped last night from Kilmainham Prison and got clean away. It is about the worst blow I have had for a very long time, and I am naturally furious … it is perfectly obvious that the escape could not have been made without the collusion of the men of the Welsh Regiment who were on duty there. I will certainly take the most drastic action against those responsible.24
And what of the British soldiers who helped the IRA? Patrick Kennedy remembered them as Paddy Holland and another by the name of Storkman. Kennedy recalled in his witness statement that he had introduced them to Oscar Traynor in Kirwan’s pub. Kennedy wrote that one of the soldiers deserted the British Army and the other was sentenced to eight years in prison but was released in 1923 and received a gratuity from the Irish Free State of a few hundred pounds.25
MOURNE ABBEY AMBUSH
Tuesday, 15 February 1921 was a bad day for the Second Cork Brigade. An ambush was arranged in the Mourne Abbey district to attack a British convoy which was expected ‘to be escorting General Cummings, O/C Buttevant Military Post, to a conference of the officers commanding the British Forces in the Southern Command’.26 John O’Sullivan recalled that instructions were issued by the Battalion O/C, Tadhg Byrne, to mobilise at Jordan’s Bridge on the main Cork–Mallow road at 5am. Selected men from the Burnfort and Analeentha companies received similar instructions.27 ‘The Volunteers from the Burnfort Company under Tadg Looney were in position at the eastern side of the road on a high projection of rock more or less directly over the position selected to hold up the convoy,’ recalled Jeremiah Daly, Vice O/C Mallow Battalion, Second Cork Brigade IRA.28 Daly remembered hearing shots some time after 11am and, when he looked in the direction of the shooting, seeing about forty or fifty soldiers walking in extended order across the fields at the rear of the party from Burnfort Company at what was known as Leary’s Rock.
The Burnfort IRA men were almost completely surrounded in a short space of time. They endeavoured to withdraw in the direction of their home districts but met with considerable opposition. It was only their intimate knowledge of the area that saved them from complete annihilation. Three Volunteers from the Burnfort Company were killed: Patrick Dorgan, Patrick Flynn and Edward Creedon. Michael Looney was mortally wounded and died later.29 Eight prisoners were arrested by the British and two of them were executed in Cork Detention Barracks: twenty-four-year-old Patrick Ronayne and Thomas Mulcahy who was eighteen.
UPTON TRAIN AMBUSH
Whilst the IRA enjoyed the support of the majority of the people of Ireland in their fight for freedom, sometimes ambushes resulted in heavy civilian casualties, which affected their popularity. One such occasion was the Upton Train Ambush in Cork, which also took place on 15 February 1921. A company of IRA Volunteers, consisting of ten local men armed with rifles and hand-guns, planned to ambush a train carrying British soldiers between Cork and Bandon. Two scouts with bicycles were stationed at Kinsale Junction to report the number of military on the train to the men at Upton.30 The train was due in Upton at 9.30am so ten minutes beforehand some of the ambushers waited in the station whilst a few others waited in a goods store and behind a low wall beside the railway line.
In the event, the scouts on the bicycles at Kinsale Junction failed to make Upton before the train. Instead of the small party of military in the central carriage, there were fifty British soldiers scattered throughout the train. Amongst these were a large number of civilians. As soon as the train stopped at Upton station, the IRA opened fire. The British military were quick to respond and, very soon, two Volunteers, Seán Phelan and Batt Falvey, had been killed. Three others received terrible wounds; they were Pat O’Sullivan, John Hartnett and Dan O’Mahoney. The Brigade O/C, Charlie Hurley, received a very serious wound to the face when he was firing on the train from an overhead bridge. Tom Kelleher opened rapid fire on the British soldiers who were advancing in all directions, but after ten minutes of shooting, the IRA retreated from what was a hopeless engagement.
Sadly, six civilians, including two railway workers, lost their lives in the shooting. Two more died later from their wounds. IRA Volunteer Dan O’Mahoney died a few years later as a result of his wounds. Pat O’Sullivan was eventually brought to Cork Hospital with a bad wound in the stomach. Diarmuid O’Leary recalled in his witness statement that he was in hospital with O’Sullivan. According to O’Leary, ‘One night, following an ambush in Cork city, in which some soldiers were killed, a few military came into the room and proceeded to beat this man unmercifully with the butts of their revolvers. He died from the effects of the beating.’31
Patrick Coakley, an IRA captain turned informer, was ‘arrested’ at the scene by the British. He then gave the British information on the location of the Third Cork Brigade HQ that led to the capture and death of Charlie Hurley and the Battle of Crossbarry (see Chapter Eleven). It is possible that Coakley had also given the British advance warning of the planned ambush at Upton.
RESIGNATION OF GENERAL CROZIER
General Frank Percy Crozier, Commander of the Auxiliaries, was becoming increasingly despondent about the discipline of his force. Seamus Finn, Adjutant of the Meath Brigade IRA, wrote that a garrison of Auxiliaries and Tans posted in Trim ‘gave real hell to the townsfolk’.32 The Auxiliaries of N Company looted Chandler’s public house in Trim on 9 February 1921. They beat up Bob Chandler and kicked him down the stairs. The bottles of spirits they didn’t drink they smashed. They ill-treated Chandler’s elderly invalid mother, stole many valuables, made a bonfire of clothing and furniture, and set the pub on fire. In an attempt to instil some much-needed discipline, Crozier dismissed eighteen Auxiliaries from N Company. However, Hugh Henry Tudor, as Commander of the RIC, reinstated them. On 19 February 1921, Crozier resigned as Commander of the Auxiliaries. He maintained that the Auxiliaries he had dismissed had threatened that they would make revelations about all the assassinations that had taken place under the aegis of the English regime, and especially about those of Kennedy and Murphy (the Drumcondra murders). Crozier reckoned that the British Government was ‘obliged to reinstate these Auxiliaries’, leaving him with no choice but to resign.33
CLONMULT
The Active Service Unit or flying column of the Fourth Battalion of the First Cork Brigade, under the orders of Commandant Diarmuid Hurley, took possession of a disused farmhouse overlooking the village of Clonmult, seven miles northeast of Midleton, County Cork. The house had a thatched roof, and a large cowshed was attached to the building at one end; the other end adjoined a small grove of twenty trees. About twenty IRA Volunteers drawn from various companies in East Cork were taking part in intensive training as an active service unit.34 Hurley and a couple of his officers were away scoping out the potential for an assault on the British and he left Captain Jack O’Connell in charge of the men, with instructions to break camp on Sunday, 20 February. At 4.15pm that day, Michael Desmond and John Joe Joyce were filling water bottles for their comrades when they realised that British soldiers were surrounding their encampment. They shot their way back towards their comrades and warned them, but the wounds they received in the attempt proved fatal.
After about an hour of intense fighting, the acting O/C, Jack O’Connell, decided to lead a small charge out of the building at the British, in the hope that someone might break through the lines and get help. The five IRA men in the charge were met by a hail of gunfire, and Michael Hallahan, Richard Hegarty and James Aherne were killed in the attempt. Diarmuid O’Leary recalled how he ‘got out into the haggard, but, seeing the other boys fall, decided there was no hope of escape and dashed back into the house amidst a hail of bullets’.35 Jack O’Connell did manage to break through the British cordon and made contact with some local Volunteers.
Members of the East Cork Flying Column, many of whom were killed in Clonmult on 20 February 1921. Left to Right: Michael Desmond (killed in action at Clonmult), Pat Higgins (shot after surrender at Clonmult, survived but was sentenced to death but reprieved because of the Truce), James Glavin (killed after surrender at Clonmult), Donal Dennehy (killed after surrender at Clonmult), Joseph Aherne (Vice-Commandant), Richard Hegarty (killed in action at Clonmult), Joe Morrissey (killed after surrender at Clonmult), Michael Hallahan (killed in action at Clonmult), Maurice Moore (captured at Clonmult and executed on 28 April 1921) and Paddy White.
The British called on the trapped Volunteers to surrender but were greeted with a chorus of ‘The Soldier’s Song’, and the battle raged on. After an hour, instead of the hoped-for IRA reinforcements, a company of Black and Tans arrived to reinforce the British Army. The roof of the cottage was set on fire, and ‘Through the doors and windows British lead poured in a relentless stream’.36 An attempt was made to break through the gable but Volunteers James Glavin and Diarmuid ‘Sonny’ O’Leary were wounded and fell back into the cottage, O’Leary becoming unconscious. There was nothing to do but surrender.
Pat Higgins, Liam Aherne, Jeremiah Aherne, David Desmond (brother to Michael), Christopher O’Sullivan, Donal Dennehy, James Glavin and Joe Morrissey came out. Pat Higgins recounted the horror:
We were lined up alongside an outhouse with our hands up. The Tans came along and shot every man … A Tan put his revolver to my mouth and fired. I felt as if I was falling through a bottomless pit. Then I thought I heard a voice saying, ‘This fellow is not dead, we will finish him off.’ Only for the military officer coming along, I, too, would be gone.37
The other seven men were dead, murdered at point-blank range by the Tans. Two more IRA men, Patrick O’Sullivan and Maurice Moore, who were carrying their wounded comrade, Diarmuid O’Leary, came out just as a British Army officer ordered the Tans to stop shooting. The North East Cork IRA column did eventually arrive but it was too late and all they found was the cottage on fire.38
Clonmult ranks as one of the deadliest attacks on the IRA. Five IRA Volunteers were killed in the battle. After surrendering, seven others were murdered. Two more, Patrick O’Sullivan and Maurice Moore, were executed by firing squad in Cork on 28 April.
SIX BRITISH SOLDIERS SHOT IN CORK CITY
Michael O’Donoghue recollected a mobilisation order received by the members of A Company, ASU, on 28 February 1921. By 6.30pm all had reported at College Tower, University College Cork, and were issued with small firearms and ammunition from an IRA dump. Their instructions were clear and simple: to shoot on sight every British soldier and policeman in uniform on the streets of Cork city. A Company was not alone as all the Cork city companies of the Brigade were given the same orders. Their mission was to ‘exact bloody revenge for the execution by firing squad of the six republican prisoners that same morning’.39 A Company ASU was to operate around Patrick Street and the adjoining streets between South Mall and Coal Quay, a particularly dangerous section as there were a number of police barracks in the area. O’Donoghue remembered that ‘[an] air of grim foreboding seemed to overhang the whole place. No policeman in uniform was anywhere to be seen in the whole section.’ Seven o’clock was zero hour and, at that exact time, shooting seemed to ‘break out all over’. Three British soldiers came running towards the A Company IRA. Two were shot immediately and the third, in a blind panic, ran for his life into a shop where he was followed by O’Donoghue who remembered the soldier huddled ‘crying in a corner against the counter’ just before he shot him dead.40 In total, six British soldiers were killed that evening in revenge for the six IRA men who had been executed that morning.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Violence, physical and sexual, against women is a terror device used by men especially during times of conflict when they know that they are unlikely to suffer recriminations for their actions. It was commonplace during the war in Ireland. Often, women were subjected to having their hair roughly shorn by British forces. The IRA also employed this as a punishment for women who were seen to have fraternised with the enemy. Although physical violence was discussed, rape and sexual assaults were rarely reported. There are many reasons for this; victim blaming and Catholic guilt complexes might be part of it. However, there was also the fact that any woman who reported sexual assault was liable to be targeted by the perpetrators of the crime. George Berkeley from the Peace With Ireland Council recalled in his diary in 1921 that he ‘received a letter from Mrs. Corbally describing a case of rape in Ireland. A woman was raped and when she made a complaint [to the authorities] her house was burnt as a reprisal.’41
In Limerick, James Maloney remembered that ‘IRA men’s sisters and other girls had to go on-the-run fearing rape.’42 Seamus Fitzgerald, a TD in the First Dáil, was asked to collate atrocities carried out in Cork and also recalled two cases of sexual assault — one the rape of a pregnant woman in Blackpool ‘and in the same locality a middle-aged woman successfully resisted a similar attempt.’43 In December 1920, Kate Maher was violently raped and murdered by British soldiers in Dundrum, County Tipperary. It is clear that, besides murder and intimidation, British forces also subjected the women of Ireland to sexual assaults during the war but we will probably never know the full extent of this barbarity.
MAYOR OF LIMERICK KILLED
George Clancy was a Gaelic League enthusiast who, while a student at the Catholic University in St Stephen’s Green, included among his friends James Joyce, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Tom Kettle. With Arthur Griffith he joined the Celtic Literary Society. Having joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, Clancy was arrested after the 1916 Rising and imprisoned in Cork, but after a hunger strike was released before he came to trial. He and his wife Máire organised for the Dáil Loan in the Limerick area.
In the municipal elections of 1920, Clancy was offered the mayoralty but declined as he felt he was inexperienced; Michael O’Callaghan was made Mayor of Limerick city instead. Both men were Sinn Féin councillors and worked closely together. O’Callaghan’s life was threatened after the murder of Tomás MacCurtain, the Lord Mayor of Cork (see Chapter Four), and Clancy ensured that armed guards were placed at the Mayor’s house. However, when curfew was imposed on Limerick by the military authorities, any person found out of doors after 10pm was liable to arrest and, if in possession of weapons, liable to be shot. In January 1921, Clancy replaced O’Callaghan as Mayor of Limerick. The Clancy home had been raided innumerable times by the Auxiliaries and the RIC. Now that he was the Mayor, the raids became more frequent and threatening in manner.
On 6 March 1921, Máire Clancy buried her father; in the early hours of the following morning, three tall men wearing motor goggles, with their caps drawn down over their faces, barged into the home. Máire and George had opened the door and the men demanded that Clancy come outside. He refused and one of the Auxiliaries shouted at him, ‘Then take this’ and fired three shots at Limerick’s Mayor.44 Máire tried to come between the gunman and her husband but to no avail. She remembered hearing seven shots in all. Máire was wounded and George died in her arms some time later.
George Clancy was one of three people murdered that night in their homes in Limerick. His comrade Michael O’Callaghan, the previous Mayor, was shot by the same men. Joseph O’Donoghue, a city clerk, was also killed that night. George Clancy was immortalised in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the character Michael Davin, a friend of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus.
AN tÓGLACH, MARCH 1921
The organ of the Volunteers, An tÓglach, remained defiant in March 1921:
It is now generally realised and even admitted by the enemy that his new campaign of intensified terrorism, massacres and burnings and drastic military measures has proved a hopeless failure. The high hopes treasured by the champions of savagery have not been realised. Their confident predictions of an early breakup of the Irish Republican Army, of a disintegration of Republicanism, of a rapid breaking of the spirit of the people of Ireland, have not been fulfilled … Today the Irish people’s spirit remains unbroken, their loyalty to the Republic undiminished, today the Army of the Irish Republic is stronger, better armed, more efficient and more active than ever before.45
BRITISH EXECUTIONS OF IRA
Besides the executions in areas under martial law, nine IRA men were also hanged, like their comrade Kevin Barry, in Mountjoy Jail, Dublin. On 14 March 1921, six Volunteers were hanged. Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Whelan from Galway was accused of the Bloody Sunday shooting of Captain G.T. Baggallay, an army prosecutor who had been a member of the military courts that sentenced Volunteers to death. Paddy Moran, a greengrocer’s assistant who had fought in Jacob’s in 1916 under Thomas MacDonagh, was charged with the shooting on Bloody Sunday of Lieutenant Peter Ames, an American working as a British military intelligence officer. Both men protested their innocence but were found guilty.
Four of the Volunteers were charged in connection with the ambush in Drumcondra, Dublin on 21 January 1921 (see Chapter Ten). They were: Frank Flood, Lieutenant in the ASU and a UCD student and great friend of Kevin Barry’s; Patrick Doyle, ASU (whose brother was killed in the attack on the Custom House in May 1921); twenty-year-old Bernard Ryan, ASU; and Thomas Bryan, a former hunger striker and ASU Volunteer. Thomas Traynor was captured during an IRA ambush of Auxiliaries on Great Brunswick Street. A father of ten children, he was tortured and beaten by the Igoe Gang and hanged in Mountjoy Jail on 25 April 1921. Traynor had fought in 1916 in Boland’s Mills, under Éamon de Valera.
Edmond Foley was tried twice, as was Patrick Maher, for the shooting of the RIC men during the Knocklong rescue. Their third trial was by court martial and they were hanged on 7 June 1921 in Mountjoy Jail.46 The ten IRA men hanged in Mountjoy Jail were given state funerals on 4 October 2001, and nine of them were reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery. Patrick Maher was reinterred in a family plot in Ballylanders, County Limerick.
THE MAYO IRA
Support for the Volunteers in County Mayo was strong and the county had its fair share of killings and reprisals. In July 1920, the Mayo Brigade of the Irish Volunteers had been reorganised into four brigades: North, South, East and West. Commandants Tom Maguire (South Mayo), Tom Ruane (North Mayo), Seán Corcoran (East Mayo) and Tom Derrig (West Mayo) were chosen by GHQ to command them. Commandant Michael Kilroy was later selected to replace Tom Derrig after his capture by the British.
By the spring of 1921, the Mayo brigades were equipped and seeking action with the RIC and British troops. The first successful ambush was carried out on a Border Regiment lorry travelling from Ballinrobe to Castlebar at Kilfaul, near Partry, by Commandant Tom Maguire’s South Mayo Brigade. The British policy of bloody reprisal became clear in the aftermath when farmer Thomas Horan was shot in the head and mortally wounded by Black and Tans as they searched his home in Shrah.
On 29 March, a Black and Tan called William Stephens was mortally wounded by the IRA in Ballyhaunis. Two days later, masked men dragged an IRA Volunteer, Michael Coen, from his home at Lecarrow near Ballyhaunis. He was severely beaten and stabbed to death by bayonets.
TOURMAKEADY AMBUSH
In May 1921, Tom Maguire, O/C South Mayo Flying Column, took over Tourmakeady village in preparation for an ambush on an RIC patrol. Maguire’s men were mostly armed with shotguns. They did, however, kill two Black and Tans, Constables Hubert Oakes and Christopher O’Regan, and they mortally wounded RIC Sergeant John Regan. Another IRA section opened fire on a Crossley tender and killed Constable William Power. The RIC managed to make it to Hewitt’s Hotel and the IRA retreated towards the Partry Mountains. The police alerted the RIC in Ballinrobe and called for reinforcements.47
Two lorries containing British soldiers arrived at Tourmakeady and another couple of trucks made their way to the northern end of the Partry Mountains. Further British reinforcements were called for from Castlebar and from the RIC Barracks at Westport. The British Army was advancing on the flying column and Lieutenant Ibberson, a cross-country runner, took off his officer’s tunic and ran at speed towards the retreating IRA. He managed to shoot and wound Tom Maguire and killed IRA Section Commander Michael O’Brien. The IRA returned fire on Ibberson. Although wounded seven times, he remained standing but retreated, covered in blood. Meanwhile, two IRA men from the ambush, Patrick King and Philip Hallinan, were captured by the British. They were severely beaten on the spot and in Ballinrobe RIC Barracks, and many homes in the area were burned out.
When darkness fell, the IRA managed to escape, and the British spent the following days searching for the elusive South Mayo Flying Column.
Notes
1. Dalton, Charles, WS 434, pg.21.
2. Moylett, Patrick, WS 767, pg.49.
3. Dalton, Charles, WS 434, pg.23.
4. Stapleton, William, WS 822, pg.72.
5. Newell, Thomas (Sweeney), WS 698, pg.7.
6. Stapleton, William, WS 822, pg.74.
7. Dalton, Charles, WS 434, pg.27.
8. Dwyer, Denis, WS 712, pg.6.
9. Ibid., pg.9.
10. Manning, John, WS 1720, pg.24.
11. O’Donoghue, Michael, WS 1741, p145.
12. Macready, Nevil, Annals of an Active Life, Vol. 2, New York: Doran and Company, 1925, pg.543.
13. O’Donoghue, Michael, WS 1741, pg.145.
14. Horgan, Edward, WS 1644, pg.12.
15. Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, pg.116.
16. Ryan, Thomas, WS 783, pg.101.
17. Doody, Daniel, WS 796, pg.7.
18. O’Connell, Richard, WS 656, pg.20.
19. Meade, Seán, WS 737, pg.9.
20. O’Connell, Richard, WS 656, pg.21.
21. Meade, Maurice, WS 891, pg.26.
22. Ibid., pg.27–28.
23. Donnelly, Simon in The Complete Book of Irish Jailbreaks 1918–1921, Tralee, County Kerry: Anvil Books, 1971, pg.115.
24. Price, Dominic, We Bled Together, Cork: The Collins Press, 2017, pg.207.
25. Kennedy, Patrick, WS 499, pg.8.
26. Daly, Jeremiah, WS 1015, pg.6.
27. O’Sullivan, John, WS 1376 pg.9
28. Daly, Jeremiah, WS 1015, pg.6.
29. Willis, Richard and John Bolster, WS 808, pg.12–13.
30. Neville, Frank, WS 443, pg.12.
31. O’Leary, Diarmuid, WS 1589, pg.9.
32. Finn, Seamus, WS 858, pg.10–11.
33. Berkeley, George, WS 994, pg.121.
34. Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Tralee: The Kerryman, 1947, pg.235.
35. O’Leary, Diarmuid, WS 1589, pg.6.
36. Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, pg.238.
37. Higgins, Patrick, WS 1467, pg.6.
38. Buckley, William, WS 1009, pg.17.
39. O’Donoghue, Michael, WS 1741, pg.146.
40. Ibid., pg.148.
41. Berkeley, George, WS 994, pg.123.
42. James Maloney, WS 1525, pg.23.
43. Seamus Fitzgerald, WS 1737, pg.31.
44. Clancy, Máire, WS 806, pg.6–17.
45. An tÓglach, March 1921, pg.1.
46. A member of the Black and Tans by the name of William Mitchell was hanged the same day as Foley and Maher. Mitchell, possibly innocent, was charged in connection with burglary and the murder of Robert Dixon, a magistrate in Wicklow.
47. Price, Dominic, The Flame and the Candle, Cork: The Collins Press, 2012, pg.135–139.