Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love

Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love Fergal Keane A family story of blood and memory and the haunting power of the past.2018 WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER EWART-BIGGS MEMORIAL PRIZE2017 WINNER OF THE NON-FICTION IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDA SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERAfter nearly three decades reporting conflict from all over the world for the BBC, Fergal Keane has gone home to Ireland to tell a story that lies at the root of his fascination with war. It is a family story of war and love, and how the ghosts of the past return to shape the present.Wounds is a powerful memoir about Irish people who found themselves caught up in the revolution that followed the 1916 Rising, and in the pitiless violence of civil war in north Kerry after the British left in 1922.It is the story of Keane’s grandmother Hannah Purtill, her brother Mick and his friend Con Brosnan, and how they and their neighbours took up guns to fight the British Empire and create an independent Ireland. And it is the story of another Irishman, Tobias O’Sullivan, who fought against them as a policeman because he believed it was his duty to uphold the law of his country.Many thousands of people took part in the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. Whatever side they chose, all were changed in some way by the costs of violence. Keane uses the experiences of his ancestral homeland in north Kerry to examine why people will kill for a cause and how the act of killing reverberates through the generations. (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) Copyright (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017 Copyright © Fergal Keane 2017 Cover image shows the Clonmult IRA unit, reproduced courtesy of Cork City and County Archives Fergal Keane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Maps by Martin Brown A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008189273 Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008189266 Version: 2018-07-30 Dedication (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) For Dan and Holly, children of peace Contents Cover (#ud1337387-2e43-5bb1-85de-5877f604e91d) Title Page (#ufe220466-fa54-51f9-acae-7107706fad89) Copyright (#ud5e2c194-bc23-5772-8210-716a5108e0e8) Dedication (#u7ae320c6-78a7-5a87-8322-6d23818d112e) Maps (#u1a47c7f4-bd3e-5f9b-a214-3ff67772f743) Prologue: We Killed All Mankind (#ubd282b57-a22d-5db5-b94e-2ac50d69655d) 1. The Night Sweats with Terror (#u59da2349-94df-522c-a639-49c8a559beca) 2. The Ground Beneath Their Feet (#u7ca13542-7dcd-5999-ba2f-4fa33cb5c737) 3. My Dark Fathers (#u2df32d8a-127b-587c-8e5a-66ac18375912) 4. Revolution (#u201a7c2f-2a9b-5140-ab9c-d04fcdde56cc) 5. Tans (#litres_trial_promo) 6. The Abode of Wolves (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Sunshine Elsewhere (#litres_trial_promo) 8. Assassins (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Between Gutter and Cart (#litres_trial_promo) 10. Executions (#litres_trial_promo) 11. The Republic Bold (#litres_trial_promo) 12. The War of the Brothers (#litres_trial_promo) 13. A New Ireland (#litres_trial_promo) 14. Inheritance (#litres_trial_promo) 15. Afterwards (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) A Short Note on Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Chronology of Major Events (#litres_trial_promo) Glossary (#litres_trial_promo) Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) Prologue We Killed All Mankind (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) His manner was that the heads of all those (of what sort so ever they were) which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies, and brought to the place where he encamped at night: and should there be laid on the ground, by each side of the way leading into his own tent: so that none could come into his tent for any cause, but commonly he must pass through a lane of heads … and yet did it bring great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends lie on the ground before their faces, as they came to speak with the said Colonel. Thomas Churchyard, A Generall Rehearsall of Warres, 1579 I This is the story of my grandmother Hannah Purtill, who was a rebel, and her brother Mick and his friend Con Brosnan, and how they took up guns to fight the British Empire and create an independent Ireland. And it is the story of another Irishman, Tobias O’Sullivan, who fought against them because he believed it was his duty to uphold the law of his country. It is the story too of the breaking of bonds and of civil war and of how the wounds of the past shaped the island on which I grew up. Many thousands of people took part in the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. The story of my own family is one that might differ in some details but is shared by numerous other Irish families. They may have taken different sides but all were changed in some way, and lived in a new state defined by the costs of violence. I have spent much of my life trying to understand why people will kill for a cause and how the act of killing reverberates through the generations. This book is, in part, an attempt to understand my own obsession with war. It starts in my grandmother’s house in the north Kerry town of Listowel, in the middle of the 1960s. The house is asleep. My brother and sister are in beds at the other side of the room. My mother is in the room across the landing, next to the door leading up into the attic where cracked uncle Dan once lived among the cobwebs and the crows. The last drinkers have left Alla Sheehy’s next door. His wife Nora Mai is sweeping the floor. She will be muttering, drawing hard on a cigarette, cursing the hour and the work, under the eternal gaze of the stuffed fox on the counter. A Garda will pass soon on his rounds, his ear alert for the murmur of secret drinkers. There are several dozen pubs in Listowel and he will stop to listen at each one. But the only noise is from the dogs barking in the lane between the houses and the sports field. ‘They can sense it,’ my father says. ‘Stay quiet now. Stay quiet and you will hear them.’ He sits at the end of my bed. I can only make out his shape. There is comfort in the tiny orange glow of his cigarette. ‘Listen close,’ he says again, ‘the riders will come soon.’ I am ten years old. My imagination swells in the darkness. My father lives between the story and the reality. He has spent his life faltering between the two. It is his gift and his tragedy. He can make me believe anything. ‘Now! Now! Sit up,’ he says. ‘Do you hear them? They are riding to hell!’ I hear everything that he wills into being: the hooves pounding the midnight earth, the hard music of armour, sword and spur and men’s voices shouting in the late autumn of 1600. Captain Wilmot’s cavalry – armed with the finest muskets Queen Elizabeth’s treasury can procure – stop before the gates of Listowel Castle and by the banks of the River Feale, which flows out of the mountains in neighbouring County Limerick, meandering around Listowel on its way to the Atlantic coast nearby. The garrison refuse to surrender. Above the swift water heads fly. The blood seeps into the salmon pools. Nine Englishmen are killed, but the Irish cannot hold out. They beg for terms but are refused. They must accept the captain’s discretion, which means death in a more or less dreadful form. Wilmot kills them by hanging, a comparative leniency by the bloody standards of the day, according to my father. After the surrender, the legs of eighteen suffocating men kick to the laughter of Wilmot’s men. My father reaches to his throat to mimic the act of hanging. The priest who is found with the garrison is spared, however. Not for him the breaking of joints with heavy irons, the agonising death that is the fate of another clergymen found near Dingle. The priest has a bargain to offer. He tells Wilmot that the rebel Lord Kerry’s son, ‘but 5 years old … almost naked and besmirched with dirt’,1 (#litres_trial_promo) has been smuggled out of the castle by an old woman. Who better than the heir to lure the lord into surrender? The old woman and boy are found in a hollow cave and are sent to Dublin with the priest, but their fate is not recorded. My father pulls ghosts out of history every night. I know that in reality there are no riders as the field behind my grandmother’s house is unmarked when I check it the next morning. ‘Sure that’s your father for the stories,’ Hannah jokes to me when I return. My grandmother has stories too. She is part of more recent wars. If only she would tell me. She fought the English and was threatened with execution. But her stories will remain untold in her own voice. I am grown and my father is dead when I discover how faithfully he brought the Elizabethan past to life. In the late sixteenth century the conquering English had swept their enemies before them. After capturing Listowel they rode on into Limerick. The president of Munster, Sir George Carew, reported back to London that they had killed ‘all man-kind that were found therein, for a terror to those that should give relief to renegade traitors; thence we came into Arlogh Woods [in County Limerick] where we did the like, not leaving behind us man or beast or corn or cattle’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Livestock was slain by the thousand and corn trampled and burned. The Irish peasants were butchered or driven away so that rebels and plotting Spaniards ‘might make no use of them’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Ireland was a nest of potential traitors. The possibility of the invasion of England through the ‘back door’, to the west, loomed large in the imaginations of Tudor statesmen and soldiers. Rebellions supported by the pope and the Spanish king reinforced the English terror of the Protestant Reformation being reversed. Such endings, they knew well, only came in tides of blood. Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham had been in Paris on 24 August 1572 and lucky to escape the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant Huguenots. A delighted Pope Gregory XIII offered a Te Deum and had a special medal struck rejoicing that the Catholic people had triumphed ‘over such a perfidious race’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) The European wars of religion brought an exterminatory savagery to Ireland. In the Munster of my ancestors unknown thousands were killed in battle, slaughtered out of hand, and starved or killed by disease. The severed heads that lined the path to the tent of Sir Humphrey Gilbert – celebrated soldier–explorer and half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh – were deemed a necessary price for making Ireland a land ripe for the benefits of English civilisation, lining the pockets of English adventurers, and keeping England safe from the existential threat posed by the kings of Catholic Europe. II History began with my father’s stories. It was our history. He had no interest in complex agency, only in the evidence of English perfidy of which there was abundant evidence on our long walks during holidays around the ruined castles of north Kerry. Eamonn was a professional actor, one of the most gifted of his generation, and his voice, the rich, beguiling voice of those stories, has followed me all my days. I walked beside him through the lands of the O’Connors – taken by the English Sandes family, who came with Cromwell in 1649 – to Carrigafoyle Castle with its gaping breach where the Spaniards and Italians, and their Irish allies, were massacred fleeing into the mud of the estuary – and to Teampallin Ban on the edge of Listowel where, under the thick summer grass, lay the bones of the Famine dead. That was the ‘hungry grass’ said my father. Walk on the graves and you would always be hungry. My father the actor (Author’s Private Collection) In those days Eamonn was a romantic nationalist. My mother Maura was a supporter of the Irish Labour Party and a committed feminist. She disdained nationalist politics. For her the struggle to achieve equal pay and control over her own body were the greater causes. A memory: being sent to Gleeson’s chemist on the corner in Terenure, five minutes’ walk from home, to ask for a package. The brown paper envelope I carried home contained ‘the pill’, something so secret I could not tell a soul. Only later did I learn how the chemist and my mother, in their quiet way, defied the law of the land which forbade women the right to decide if and when they would have children. Maura was raised in a house where no politics was spoken. Her father, Paddy Hassett, had been an IRA man in Cork but he had left the movement when the Civil War started in 1922. Most of his colleagues took up arms against the new Irish state. The only other trace of the revolutionary past I can find in my mother’s life was her friendship with our neighbour, Philippa McPhillips, niece of Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State Justice Minister assassinated by the IRA in 1927 in revenge for his part in the draconian policy of executing Republican prisoners during the Civil War. It was not a political friendship – they were good neighbours – but my mother always spoke of O’Higgins as a man who had been doing what he believed was his best for the country. He was a man we should remember, she said. Still, when my father suggested I should be named after a dead IRA man, my mother acquiesced: Eamonn Keane was a force of nature and not easily refused. Twenty-year-old Fergal O’Hanlon had been killed during a border campaign raid on an RUC barracks on New Year’s Day 1957. The raid was a disaster, and the IRA campaign faded away for lack of support. But O’Hanlon and his comrade Sean South were ritually immortalised by way of ballad: Oh hark to the tale of young Fergal ? hAnluain Who died in Brookboro’ to make Ireland free For his heart he had pledged to the cause of his country And he took to the hills like a bold rapparee And he feared not to walk to the walls of the barracks A volley of death poured from window to door Alas for young Fergal, his life blood for freedom Oh Brookboro’ pavements profused to pour. (Maiti? ?’Cinn?ide, 1957) I grew up in Dublin. The city of the mid- to late 1960s was a place of rapid social change. The crammed tenements of James Joyce’s ‘Nighttown’ with its ‘rows of flimsy houses with gaping doors’,5 (#litres_trial_promo) were mostly gone, their residents dispatched to the suburban council estates and tower blocks as a new Ireland, impatient for prosperity, straining to be free of dullness and small horizons, came into being. Nationalism had a grip on us still. But it had to compete with other temptations. The city of elderly rebels and glowering bishops was also the home to the poet Seamus Heaney, the budding rock musician Phil Lynott, the young lawyer and future president Mary Robinson; the theatres and actors’ green rooms of my father’s professional life were filled with characters who seemed to live bohemian lives untroubled by the orthodoxies of church and state. The country’s most famous gay couple – though it could never be stated openly – ran the Gate Theatre next to the Garden of Remembrance where the heroes of the 1916 rebellion were commemorated. My mother intimated that Miche?l McLiamm?ir and Hilton Edwards were ‘different’ and left it at that. To me they were simply a slightly more mysterious element in the noisy, extravagant, colourful world through which my father moved in the late 1960s. They were part of my cultural milieu, along with English football teams and imported American television series. Still, my father’s attachment to romantic nationalism defined how I saw history. Or I should say how I ‘felt’ history – because thinking played much the lesser part of all that I absorbed in those days. Dominic Behan visited our home in Dublin. So did the Sinn F?in leader and IRA man Tom?s Mac Giolla, and several other Republican luminaries, though by then the IRA was drifting far to the left. My father played the role of the martyred hero Robert Emmet in a benefit concert for Sinn F?in. By that stage the leadership of the organization had drifted to the left, towards doctrinaire Marxism and away from the militarist nationalism of earlier times, but it could still summon up the martyred dead to rally more traditional supporters. My father never hated the English as a people. In drink he would swear damnation on the ghost of Cromwell and weep over the loss of ‘the north’. But he was too imbued with the magic of the English language to be capable of cultural or racial chauvinism. Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne and John Keats had lived in his head since childhood. In one of his many flights of fancy he would even claim kinship with the great Shakespearean English actor Edmund Kean. Irish history for my father was a series of tragic episodes culminating in the sacred bliss of martyrdom and national redemption. In 1965, the year I was sent to school, Roger Casement’s remains were finally brought home to Ireland. The British had hanged Casement as a traitor in 1916 after he attempted to bring German guns ashore to support the Easter Rising. For nearly fifty years the authorities had refused to allow Casement’s body to be exhumed from his grave in London’s Pentonville Prison, and repatriated. When in March his body was finally brought back to Dublin for burial, my father placed a portrait of Casement on our living-room mantelpiece and told me to be proud of a man who had given up all the honours England could offer in order to fight for Ireland. On the day of his belated state funeral we were given a half day off from school. The ceremony was broadcast on national television. Our eighty-two-year-old President, ?amon de Valera, defied the advice of his doctors and went to Glasnevin cemetery to tell the nation that Casement’s name ‘would be honoured, not merely here, but by oppressed peoples everywhere’. The following year, Ireland commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising. I remember a ballad that was constantly on the radio. We sang it when we played games of the ‘Rebels and the English’ in the lanes of Terenure in the suburbs of Dublin. I can recall some of the words still: And we’re all off to Dublin in the green, in the green Where the helmets glisten in the sun Where the bay’nets flash and the rifles crash To the rattle of a Thompson gun …6 (#litres_trial_promo) The song, by ‘Dermot O’Brien and his Clubmen’, stayed in the charts at number one for six weeks. There was also a slew of commemorative plays, concerts and films for the fiftieth anniversary. Nineteen sixty-six was a big year for my father. He played the hero William Farrell in the television drama When Do You Die, Friend?, which was set during the failed rebellion of 1798. The performance won him the country’s premier acting award. I watched a video of the production for the first time a few years ago. There is a wildness in my father’s eyes. It erupted suddenly in my present. I felt shaken as the old wildness in his nature flashed before me. I was later sent to school at Terenure College, a private school run by the Carmelite order, where there was conspicuously little in the way of nationalism apart from some small echoes in the singing classes of Leo Maguire, a kind man we nicknamed ‘The Crow’, whose radio programme on RTE featured such staples as ‘The Bold Fenian Men’ and ‘The Wearing of the Green’, harmless stuff in those becalmed days. What I did not know was that during the Civil War the IRA blew up a Free State armoured car outside our school, badly wounding three soldiers and two civilians. None of that bloody past whispered in the trees that lined our rugby pitches. On Easter Sunday 1966, my father took me into Dublin to watch the anniversary parade of soldiers passing Dublin’s General Post Office. De Valera was there to take the salute, although he stood too far above the heads of the crowd for me to see. Elderly men with medals formed a guard of honour below the reviewing stand. They did not look like heroes; they were just old men in raincoats and hats. Only the dead could be heroes. Like Patrick Pearse, my personal idol in those days. He was handsome and proud and gloriously doomed. My father often recited his poems and speeches. I read them now and shiver. After nearly three decades reporting conflict I recognise in the words of Pearse a man who spoke of the glory of war only because he had not yet known war: ‘We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people,’ he wrote, ‘but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.’7 (#litres_trial_promo) In Ireland they were still shooting the ‘wrong’ people a hundred years after Pearse’s death. The dissident Republican gunmen who swore fealty to his dream, and the criminal gangs who killed with weapons bought from retired revolutionaries, were at it still. The following year, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, my father played the lead role in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, a melodrama set during the Fenian struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. Early in the play one of the characters speaks of the dispossession of her people by the English and swears vengeance: ‘When these lands were torn from Owen Roe O’Neal in the old times he laid his curse on the spoilers … the land seemed to swallow them up one by one.’8 (#litres_trial_promo) Eamonn played a roguish poacher who outwits the devilish oppressors. During the play he was shot and seemed to be dead. I had been warned that it would happen but the impact of the gunfire, the sight of him falling, apparently dead, was still traumatic. Afterwards I found him alive backstage. My first experience of the power of the gun ended in smiles and embraces. I was sent to Scoil Bhr?de, an Irish-speaking school in the city which had been founded by Louise Gavan Duffy, a suffragist and veteran of the 1916 Rising, and built on land where Patrick Pearse first established a school in 1908. Michael Collins reputedly hid there during the guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland. We children read aloud the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic and memorised the names of the fallen leaders. ‘We stood twice as tall,’ Bean U? Cl?irigh, my old teacher, told me years later. ‘We felt we could stand with any nation on earth.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) All I had to do was breathe the air of the place to feel pride in the glorious dead. I learned that heroism in battle came from a time before the wars with the English. My father read to me the legend of C? Chulainn, our greatest hero, who loomed out of the mythic past dripping in the gore of his enemies. Pitiless and self-distorting violence runs through the narratives: The first warp-spasm seized C? Chulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front … The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.10 (#litres_trial_promo) C? Chulainn met his end strapped to a stone, sword in hand, facing the corpses of his enemies piled in walls around him, a raven perched on his shoulder as he faced his last reckoning with the enemies of Ulster. He died gloriously, of course. My father was of a generation schooled in classical literature. He could read in ancient Greek, in which he came first in Ireland in the Leaving Certificate exams, and as a boy heard his father read Homer’s Iliad aloud, until he was old enough to read it for himself. In the previous century, Irish peasant children had listened to the stories of Achilles and Ulysses from roadside teachers. A German travel writer visiting north Kerry in 1842 discerned a more dutiful reason for the prevalence of Latin speakers among local shepherds, recording that it was ‘generally acquired in reference to the church … it has not been purely for the sake of the aesthetic enjoyment to derived from it or simply for the cultivation of their minds’.11 (#litres_trial_promo) But such rich cultural reference did influence minds, and it took no vast leap of the imagination to see in our own C? Chulainn a hero to compete with Achilles. For Sunday outings my parents would sometimes take us to Tara, seat of the ancient kings, or to nearby Newgrange, where each December the winter solstice illuminated the tombs of our ancient Irish ancestors. I did not need heroes from American films or English comic books. I was a suggestible child, borne along by my father’s passion, my teachers’ certainty and the vividness of our native legends. History and mythology, one blending seamlessly with the other. I was now acutely conscious of my father’s alcoholism. And so I learned the consolation of stories. I escaped the painful present by entering into the heroic past. In that same year, 1966, events were beginning to unravel in the north that would change all of our lives. The sight of marching nationalists in the Republic unsettled the working-class Protestants of the north, where a Unionist government maintained all power in the hands of the Protestant majority. In the north, the commemoration of the Easter Rising had been a muted affair, but it took little in the way of nationalist self-assertion to prompt a return to the old habit of sectarian murder in Belfast. The Ulster Volunteer Force, named after an earlier Protestant militia, shot and killed two Catholic men in May and June. A Protestant pensioner died when flames from a burning Catholic pub spread to her home. The UVF followed up with a general warning that foreshadowed the murderous years to come. ‘From this day, we declare war against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups,’ it announced. ‘Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid, then more extreme methods will be adopted … we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.’12 (#litres_trial_promo) Violence permeated the memory of the Republic. It pulsed through the everyday reality of the north. IRA membership was not an essential qualification for murder at the hands of loyalists. At times any Catholic would do. But the early Troubles did not impinge on my life. The north was far away. In 1968, as the first big civil rights marches were taking place, I went on a trip to Belfast with my mother’s school. I remember the surprise of seeing red pillar boxes, a Union flag flying at the border, the model shop on Queen Street where I bought toy soldiers, the coach stopping on the coast at Newcastle on the way back so that we could hunt under the stones for eels and crabs. It was a brief moment of calm. The following year catastrophe enveloped the six counties. It lasted for decades, long enough for me to grow to adulthood and eventually move the hundred or so miles north to work as a journalist in Belfast. The Troubles confounded my father. He and my mother had visited Belfast the year before I was born. They’d stayed in a theatrical boarding house on Duncairn Gardens in the north of the city. It was run by Mrs Burns, a kind-hearted Protestant woman who had welcomed generations of actors. But less than a decade later, the district had become a notorious sectarian flashpoint. Near where my parents had once walked freely, a ‘peace’ wall would be erected to keep Protestants and Catholics apart. My father’s romantic nationalism could not survive the onset of the Troubles. He veered between outrage at the British and outrage at the Provisional IRA. When IRA bombs killed civilians he would insist that these new guerrillas had nothing in common with the ‘Old IRA’, in which his mother Hannah and her brother had served. My father believed in the story of the good clean fight. He denied any kinship between the IRA Flying Columns of north Kerry and the men in balaclavas from the Falls Road and Crossmaglen. By then, the rebel in him had vanished. How could he rhapsodise about the glorious dead of long ago while we watched on the nightly news the burned remains of civilians being gathered up on Bloody Friday? Neither my father nor my mother, or any of my close relatives, understood the north. Until 1969 it had had no practical impact on their lives. They watched from Dublin as curfews were declared and the first British troops arrived. Then came refugee camps in the south for embattled Catholics: 10,000 crossed into the Republic in 1972 – the year of Bloody Sunday, and Bloody Friday;* (#ulink_5dbb1082-3b6d-5964-a65c-3d0597f62f33) the year my parents broke up; the year we escaped my father’s headlong descent into alcoholism. The north was burning and blowing up but I was lost in the small room of my own sorrow. Nothing made sense. The refugees were kept further north. But I remember a group came to the seaside in Ardmore, County Waterford, one weekend in August in the early seventies. They were hard kids from the streets of Belfast and they scared us. An Irish government file from the time gives a good indication of how many southerners felt about the new arrivals: ‘Refugees are not always frightened people who are thankful for the assistance being given them. Some of them can be very demanding and ungrateful, even obstreperous and fractious – as well as, particularly in the case of teenage boys, destructive.’13 (#litres_trial_promo) Oh yes, we in the Republic had moved a long way from the destructive impulses of war. When crowds clashed with police outside the British embassy in Dublin, a Garda told the Guardian newspaper that ‘We didn’t know what was happening in the North until this lot attacked us.’14 (#litres_trial_promo) The Provisional IRA became active in the Republic, training and hiding and, very occasionally, shooting at our own security forces. We had army patrols outside the banks, special courts to try IRA suspects and a ‘Heavy Gang’ of policemen who battered confessions out of prisoners. The word ‘subversive’ entered our daily vocabulary. To a middle-class boy like me, Republicans were aggressive young men in pubs selling the Sinn F?in newspaper An Phoblacht, a different and dangerous tribe whom we needed no encouragement to shun. In universities and schools we were now being taught a different history. The story of relentless English awfulness – and let there be no doubt, there had been plenty of it – was replaced by a more nuanced narrative in which the past was complex and sometimes confounding. I realised by the mid-1970s, as the death toll from shootings and bombings in the north moved towards the thousands, that history was a great deal more than the stories my father had told me. It lay in the untold, in the silences that surrounded the killing in which my own family had been involved, and in the Civil War that had divided family members from old comrades. But for all the new spirit of historical revisionism we were not encouraged to ask the obvious contemporary question: What did the violence of our own past have to do with what we saw nightly on our televisions? What made the violence of my grandmother Hannah’s time right and the violence of the ‘Provos’ wrong? Why was Michael Collins a freedom fighter and Gerry Adams a terrorist? Interrogating these questions did not suit the agenda of the governments that ruled Ireland during the years of modern IRA violence. They were dealing with a secret army that wanted not only to bomb Ireland to unity but overthrow the southern government in the process. Both our main political parties had been founded by men who put bullets into the heads of informers, policemen and soldiers. By the time I was a teenager the last of them was long gone from public life. Their successors, the children of the Revolution, demanded that violence be kept in the past where it could do no harm. In short, we had had enough of that kind of thing. In this ambition they were enthusiastically supported by the mass of the population. Whatever it took to keep the Provisional IRA and other Republicans in check down south was, by and large, fine with the Irish people. There might be emotional surges after Bloody Sunday in 1972 or the Republican hunger strikes at the Maze prison in the early 1980s, but the guns of Easter 1916 or the killers in the ‘Tan war’ were not who we were now. The Provisional IRA on the other hand took their cue from the minority within a minority who had declared an All-Ireland Republic with the Easter Rising of 1916, and as long as there was a republic to be fought for they claimed legitimacy for killing in its name. Down south they were hounded and despised, an embarrassing, bearded fringe who occasionally added to the store of public loathing and mistrust by killing a policeman or soldier in the Republic. Any attempt to contrast and compare with the ‘Old IRA’ was officially discouraged for fear of giving comfort to the Provos. The northern slaughter helped to shut down discussion of the War of Independence and the Civil War – what we now call the Irish Revolution – in families too. I knew only that my paternal grandmother and her brothers, and my maternal grandfather, fought the ‘Black and Tans’, the special paramilitary reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Given all we had been taught as children about the old oppressor it was easy for us, who had no knowledge of blood, to accept that the IRA of the War of Independence would shoot the English to drive them out of Ireland. I was not aware that many of those shot were fellow Irishmen wearing police uniforms. In this reading the Old IRA followed in a direct line from the rebels who faced Elizabeth’s army at Listowel Castle. They killed the invaders. Nobody spoke to me of the dead Irishmen who fought for the other side; much less of the fratricidal combat that engulfed north Kerry after the British departed in 1922. In my teens I was not inclined to enquire about the long-ago war. It did not interest me much then. I was already looking abroad to the stories of other nations. In Cork City Library, after my family had moved to Cork from Dublin, I devoured biographies of Napoleon and Bismarck. It was the big sweep of history that had me then. The relentless drumbeat of bad news from the north only pushed me to look further away from all of Ireland. There was another, more painfully personal reason. When my parents separated in 1972 contact with my father’s family, with my grandmother and her people, dropped away. I would see her a couple of times a year at most. Even if I had had the inclination, and she had been willing to speak, there was never the time to ask Hannah the questions. In my mother’s family a similar silence prevailed. Although their father had fought in the War of Independence, my maternal uncles and aunts, with whom I spent most of my time, were largely apolitical. They bemoaned the tragedy of the north but felt helpless; their daily lives and ambitions were circumscribed by an attachment to family and to place, to Cork city where we lived a comfortable middle-class existence far from Belfast and its horrors. It was only much later that I began to ask the questions that had been lying in wait for years. But by then those who might have given me answers were dead or ailing. Paddy Hassett, my maternal grandfather who fought in Cork, was long gone. He had told his own children nothing of his war service. My aunts and uncles knew only slim details of what had happened in north Kerry during the Revolution. It was only thanks to an interview broadcast in 1980, a year after I entered journalism, that I became aware of the darker history that had engulfed my family in north Kerry. It took an English journalist, Robert Kee, to produce the first full television history of Ireland. Kee interviewed Black and Tans and British soldiers. He spoke with IRA men who described killing informers and ambushing soldiers. The combatants were old men now, sitting in suburban sitting rooms in their cardigans, calmly retelling the events of nearly sixty years before. It was also the first time I had heard any participant speak of what happened after the British left in 1922, and of how those who rejected the negotiated Anglo-Irish Treaty turned on the new Free State government. Men and women who had fought together against the British became mortal enemies. I remember a sense of shock because the episode on the Civil War focused on an incident in north Kerry where my family had taken the Free State side. I knew the Free State army had carried out severe reprisals for IRA attacks during the Civil War, but the sort of blood vengeance of ‘Ballyseedy’ evoked the stories my father told me of English massacres. Not on the same scale, of course, but with an unsettling viciousness. In March 1923, in retaliation for the killing of five Free State soldiers in a mine attack, nine IRA prisoners were taken from Tralee barracks to the crossroads at Ballyseedy. One man survived the events that followed. I listened avidly to the story Stephen Fuller told Robert Kee. He began by recalling the moment the prisoners were taken from jail in Tralee: He gave us a cigarette and said, ‘That is the last cigarette ye’ll ever smoke. We’re going to blow ye up with a mine.’ We were marched out to a lorry and made to lie flat down and taken out to Ballyseedy … the language, the bad language wasn’t too good. One fellah called us ‘Irish bastards’ … They tied our hands behind our back and left about a foot between the hands and the next fellah. They tied us in a circle around the mine. They tied our legs, and the knees as well, with a rope. And they took off our caps and said we could be praying away as long as we like. The next fellah to me said his prayers, and I said mine too … He said goodbye, and I said goodbye, and the next fellah picked it up and said, ‘Goodbye lads’, and up it went. And I went up with it of course.15 (#litres_trial_promo) The flesh of the butchered men was found in the trees overlooking the road. The interview with Fuller was for me a moment of revelation. He told his story without emotion or embellishment. I had grown up conscious of the bitterness that followed the Civil War. I knew that our main political parties, Fianna F?il and Fine Gael, had grown out of the conflict and that my own family were ‘black’ Fine Gael. Die-hard Collinsites. The side that blew up Fuller and the others at Ballyseedy. Now, in the words of Stephen Fuller, I could begin to glimpse the lived experience of the time rather than surmise the truth from the shreds of political rhetoric. Irish men killed Irish men in the war of 1922–23. They killed each other in the war that went before it: Irish killing Irish with a fury that shocks to read of decades later. Did it shock them, I wondered, when in the long years afterwards they sat and reflected on the war? The Fuller interview shook from my memory another of my father’s stories. ‘Watch the ceiling,’ he’d say. ‘Watch and you will see him.’ A man in green uniform would appear and float through the darkness, if I would only wait. ‘He is an English soldier and he was killed on the street outside. Wait and he will come.’ The soldier never came. Another of my father’s yarns. But years later I find out that Eamonn was telling a version of a truth. A man had been killed on our street, shot dead close to the Keane family home. He was killed by an IRA unit that included a family friend with whom my grandmother and her brother had soldiered. The war had been sweeping across the hills and fields around my grandparents’ town of Listowel for nearly two years when District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old married man, an Irish Catholic from County Galway, was shot dead. He was the son of a farmer, the same stock as my grandmother Hannah’s people, and he left a widow and three young children behind. Yet his name was never mentioned. There is no monument to his memory, even though at the time of the killing he was the most powerful man in the locality and it was one of the most talked about events in the area’s recent history. There are many other uncommemorated deaths and events in the journey that forms this book. It is the story of why my own people were willing to kill, and of how people and nations live with the blood that follows deeds – a story that, in one country or another, I have been trying to tell for the last thirty years but not, until now, in my own place. It has been a journey in search of unwilling ghosts. My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick left no diaries, letters or tape-recorded interviews. What I have are the few confidences shared with their family, some personal files from the military archives, the accounts of comrades in arms, the official histories and contemporary press reports, and my own memories of those rebels of my blood and of the place that made them. I have tried to avoid yielding to my own collection of biases; however, a story of family such as this cannot be free of the writer’s personal shading. When writing of the Civil War I am acutely conscious that I come from a family that took the pro-Treaty side and, later, became stalwarts of the political organization founded by Michael Collins and his comrades. But I have tried to describe the vicious cycle of violence in north Kerry as it happened at the time and as it was experienced by the people of my past, doing so, as much as possible, without the benefit of hindsight, and without acquiescing to the justifications offered by either side. This book does not set out to be an academic history of the period, or a forensic account of every military encounter or killing in north Kerry. Others have done this with great skill. This is a memoir written about everyday Irish people who found themselves caught up on both sides in the great national drama that followed the rebellion of 1916. It is not a narrative which all historians of the period are sure to agree with, or indeed which other members of my family will necessarily endorse: every one of them will see the past through their own experiences and memories. The one bias to which I will readily admit is a loathing of war and of all who celebrate the killing of their fellow men and women. The good soldier shows humility in the remembrance of horror. I have reached an age where I find myself constantly looking back in the direction of my forebears, seeking to understand myself, and my preoccupations, through the stories of their lives. It is only with the coming of peace on the island of Ireland that I have felt able to interrogate my family past with the sense of perspective that the dead deserve. It felt too close while blood was being daily spilled in the north. ‘We return to the lives of those who have gone before us,’ wrote the novelist Colum McCann. ‘Until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.’16 (#litres_trial_promo) Home is where all my journeys of war begin and end. * (#ulink_9138d59c-bc4b-54a5-ba26-36147a331010) On 30 January 1972, soldiers from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, killing thirteen unarmed people. On 2 February angry crowds marched on the British embassy in Dublin and set it alight. In the events that became known as ‘Bloody Friday’ the IRA carried out multiple bombings in central Belfast on 21 July 1972. The attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured more than one hundred. 1 The Night Sweats with Terror (#u60540a93-1119-515e-a380-83f97fb31654) ‘It is not,’ he urged, ‘by weak inaction that great empires are held together; there must be the struggle of brave men in arms; might is right with those who are at the summit of power.’ Tacitus, The Annals, AD 109 ‘The freedom of Ireland depends in the long run not upon the play of politics, nor international dealings, but upon the will of the Irish people to be free.’ An t-?glach, Dublin, 29 October 1918 I It was a January morning of low grey skies. On Dublin’s Sackville Street crowds stood in fidgeting silence – street boys, daily paper hawkers, beggars and pickpockets, the old women from the Moore Street market, all gawking at the solemn faces marching up the left flank of the broad thoroughfare. With the cort?ge out of sight, they turned and went back to that other life of small trades and smaller change. They would have known that this policeman’s death was bigger than the usual run. Half the police and army top brass in Ireland seemed to be there: first came the bands with their sombre music, bands from the Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Immediately behind them came General Tudor, the most senior British security official in Ireland, along with a phalanx of senior police and military officers. The coffin lay on a gun carriage and was flanked by Auxiliaries marching with rifles reversed. A newspaper reported that some Auxies had taken the hats off men who failed to bare their heads in respect as the cort?ge passed. He had been killed down the country, in Kerry, but he came from County Galway in the west. His RIC comrades followed in slow procession beside and behind. The constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary were marching out of history and towards oblivion behind a coffin draped in the Union flag: colours that would vanish from these streets in less than two years. But the marching men could not foresee the end of empire in Ireland. The British imperium stretched from the Pitcairn Islands across the Pacific and the Bay of Bengal, across the Hindu Kush to Delhi, across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Palestine, through the Strait of Gibraltar until it reached this embattled western frontier, these streets of Dublin, capital of Britain’s first colony. The funeral marchers knew of the unravelling in the wider world. Some would have had brothers and cousins still fighting the small wars of peace that erupted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The Great War was over. But the Bolsheviks were fighting to save their revolution. Churchill had dispatched an expeditionary force to Russia to bolster anti-Communist ‘White’ forces, in the vicious civil war. As a child I remember seeing a photograph of a soldier, Sergeant Jamesie Harris of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, crouching in the snow. He was the father of my mother’s best friend, Breda, and went to ‘fight back the Red menace and collect the shillin’ a day’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) The Great War irrevocably changed Breda’s father. The man in the picture has a wanderlust, perpetually seeking a camaraderie impossible to find in the tenements of Charlemont Street where as many as nine people lived in a single room. More practically the Dublin of escalating guerrilla war was a risky place for an ex-serviceman, unless he was going to offer his services to the Republicans. As long as Jamesie Harris’s fellow soldiers were being shot at and grenaded by the IRA, marching across the snows of Russia seemed much the better option. At the Paris peace talks in 1919 the Irish delegation had been ignored, as had Vietnam, represented by Ho Chi Minh, and T. E. Lawrence with the Arabian commission, who quickly discovered the worth of promises made during war. The treaties of Versailles and S?vres merely rearranged imperialism. Out with the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans and in with the Italians, the Japanese and, greatest and youngest of the looming giants, the United States, a behemoth that oscillated between isolationism and the logic of its expansive energy. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was being devoured by Britain, France and Greece until Turkish nationalism, in the form of Kemal Atat?rk, halted their advance. Great armies clashed on the plains of Asia Minor and in the coastal cities of the Aegean. Smoke swirled over the port of Smyrna in 1922 while thousands of Greeks and other Christian minorities were butchered by the Turks. Versailles did not deliver freedom to the small nation of Ireland. But the future IRA leader Michael Collins surely never expected it would. With his ingrained pragmatism he would have understood the crude realities of power in the post-war world. But they did not daunt him and the other leaders of the Republican movement. In Ireland by January 1921, thousands of regular troops were supporting sixteen thousand regular police and paramilitary forces in the war against the IRA. Until these past twelve months in Ireland the British had managed to suppress colonial revolt. In the late nineteenth century, countless tribes went down before the machine guns and cannon of imperial armies: Zulus, Xhosa, Ashanti, Matabele, Shona, the Mahdi and his Dervishes at Omdurman. The Boers gave them a fright but ultimately succumbed. The Great War expanded the machinery of terror available to the industrial powers. The Iraqi tribes were crushed with air power and Maxim guns, their villages burned while high explosive shredded and carbonised those bearing arms and those who did not. In India the viceroy was in the midst of plans to welcome the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, on a visit during which nationalist agitation was expected. Mahatma Gandhi asked angrily: ‘Do the British think we are children? Do they think that parades for the prince will make us forget atrocities in the Punjab or the perpetual delay in granting us Home Rule?’2 (#litres_trial_promo) In the House of Lords, Lord Sydenham was worried about the rising militancy of religiously inspired warriors, young men who had forgotten the thrashing handed out to their fathers when they rebelled in 1897 on the North-West Frontier. ‘It is always the young tribesmen who are easily accessible to the Mullahs, and they can at any time be led either to attack their neighbours or make raids into British India.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) Across Africa, nationalist movements were organising and challenging white rule: the African National Congress was formed in 1912, four years before the Easter Rising. The new nationalists in Africa, Asia and the Middle East were ruthlessly suppressed. In Ireland alone, from 1920 onwards, the anti-colonial struggle was escalating towards a decisive showdown. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, worried that ‘if we have lost Ireland we have lost the Empire’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) The funeral of District Inspector O’Sullivan was the latest way station in the decline of British power in Ireland. The funeral procession passed the ruins of Dublin’s General Post Office. How distant the Easter week of 1916 must have seemed now to the marching policemen and soldiers. The war of symbolic martyrdom was over. The poets and dreamers were dead. New leaders imbued with ruthless purpose had emerged to challenge the empire. Michael Collins and his ‘Squad’ of assassins tracked down police constables, spies and informers. There would be no more heroic failures. This was to be a revolution of steel not poetry. In north Kerry, my grandmother and her brother joined with farmers’ children from across Ireland. They fought alongside the hard men of the inner cities and idealistic college students from the middle classes. They were part of a rebel army which would never offer itself up to such easy destruction as had the men and women of 1916. The GPO veteran Collins wrote that the new force would not be ‘like the standing armies of even the small independent countries of Europe [but] riflemen scouts … capable of acting as a self-contained unit’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) The concept of the IRA Flying Column was born. Collins was helping to develop a new form of warfare: assassination and ambush, fast-moving squads of guerrillas – the so-called Flying Columns – would move across the countryside, being sustained by the people. The Boers had tried this with some success, moving across the expanses of the South African veld, before the British burned their farms, rounded up their women and children and stuck them in concentration camps. Such a repressive policy could not be so easily implemented in Ireland, just a few hours’ sailing from mainland Britain, and with a watchful press and parliamentary oversight. His approach would pre-date Mao Zedong’s seminal On Guerrilla Warfare by seventeen years. It would be studied closely by Ho Chi Minh later, as he prepared to liberate Vietnam from French rule, and by many other insurgents, from Algeria to the Far East. But Collins’s ambitions for the fall of empire in Ireland did not appear imminently realisable at the start of the conflict. The British government tried to meet terror with terror. It was brutal enough to push the Irish people deeper into the embrace of the guerrillas. Addressing the Oxford Union, W. B. Yeats condemned ‘the horrible things done to ordinary law-abiding people by these maddened men’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) He was referring to the paramilitary police who had been recruited to augment the exhausted police. Over ten thousand served in Ireland. Many were veterans of the trenches of France and Flanders. In Dublin, Nelson still stood on his pillar gazing south across the Liffey; behind him in the Phoenix Park the Chief Secretary for Ireland was still firmly ensconced in the Vice-Regal Lodge. The manager of the Shelbourne Hotel had closed his doors, in deference to the reduced custom occasioned by war, but he could see better days ahead, a return to the normal order, and he ensured that the ‘grande old dame’ of St Stephen’s Green was regularly patrolled by the last remaining porter, upon whom ‘devolved the ghostly duty of an inspection tour in the unnatural day-and-night darkness, in the silence piled up floor upon floor’.7 (#litres_trial_promo) The past offered some reassurance. There had not been a nationwide rebellion in Ireland for more than a century when the failure of the rising of 1798 led directly to the Act of Union that hobbled Ireland to Britain in 1801.* (#ulink_d27d8f8d-b524-5e44-b253-2f859f59a17f) The most recent outbreak had been a small and failed uprising in 1867, staged by the Fenians, a secret society dedicated to the expulsion of the British Crown from Ireland and to the establishment of an independent republic. In the 1880s the Fenians launched a bombing campaign in Britain, the first major terrorist attacks of the modern age, striking at the London transport system, police stations and prisons, and the dining room of the House of Commons. They even staged an abortive invasion of British Canada.* (#ulink_69934ab8-d7c4-50af-8235-885ab3b40436) Their rebellion, in Ireland, had amounted to a handful of skirmishes. But the ideas and organisational structures of Fenianism survived. The movement’s short spasm of violence would also allow leaders such as Patrick Pearse to claim an unbroken tradition of armed resistance through the centuries of British rule. The official name of the Fenian movement was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and it would recover from defeat in 1867 to shape the political thinking of a new generation of Irish separatists in the early twentieth century. Michael Collins was an IRB man and steeped in its traditions of secrecy; they would serve him well in the guerrilla war that erupted in 1919. It was Collins more than anybody else who forged the war machine that had killed District Inspector O’Sullivan. He would have been in Dublin, on the late January day of the policeman’s burial; his spies would likely have been mingling among the mourners and reported on its progress and on what they overheard. At the top of O’Connell Street, a crowd of onlookers gathered near the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell, his arm pointing into the past, towards Home Rule and peaceful change and all that had been devoured in the age of revolution. The crowd had their backs turned to the monument and its chiselled words: ‘No Man has a right to fix the Boundary to the march of a nation.’ But the nation was marching after coffins. The days of Parnell, the Home Rulers and great parliamentary speeches were over. This new era was crowded with killing. That same month, a few miles away in Drumcondra the police captured five IRA men after a failed ambush. An informer betrayed their position. After courts martial the five were hanged, among them a nineteen-year-old student from University College Dublin. The reaction from the IRA was to wait a little. Then, eight weeks later, the informer was found, abducted and shot. Blood begat blood. Andrew Moynihan, a married farmer in Ballymacelligott, twenty miles south of Listowel in County Kerry, was found with incriminating documents by the police. He was shot while trying to escape. There was a problem with this explanation. A fleeing man would surely have his back to his pursuers. But Moynihan was shot in the chest and the face.8 (#litres_trial_promo) His killer was a Black and Tan, and veteran of the war in France. There was a perfunctory investigation but no charges were pressed. At London’s Mansion House, Prime Minister Lloyd George had confidently declared: ‘by the steps we have taken [in Ireland], we have murder by the throat’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) But in the counties of Ireland murder spat back. It roamed Dublin, tracking secret agents and killing them where they slept, smashed into sleeping tenements, coiled in ambush on remote bog roads, ran up the stairs of redbrick Georgian houses in tree-lined suburbs, leaped in flames through the roofs of Anglo-Irish mansions, and always vanished into the sullen, unrevealing faces of the crowd. And murder also wore the uniforms of the British military, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries, regular policemen, and secret agents who dispensed with the law. Yeats captured the mood of the time: Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The night can sweat with terror …10 (#litres_trial_promo) The police and army filed into Glasnevin cemetery to lay their dead comrade to rest. District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan was an Irish Catholic and a supporter of Home Rule within the British Empire, the path pursued by the majority of Irish nationalists until the upheaval produced by the rebellion of 1916. O’Sullivan would be buried in the same vast graveyard as nationalist heroes like Parnell, Daniel O’Connell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The following year, Michael Collins, the leader of the war that claimed the policeman’s life, would be buried here too, shot dead by his former comrades in arms. It was here, six years previously, that Patrick Pearse had delivered the graveside oration for his Fenian friend, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse’s pledge that ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ would become the rallying cry for the Revolution to come. The forces of the Crown stood to attention. Behind them was a group of around a hundred or more mourners. As the Path? news cameras roll a young boy, a street urchin possibly, suddenly darts forward to pluck something from the ground, just behind the Auxiliaries. What has he found? A dropped coin perhaps. Nobody pays him any attention. And he vanishes out of shot. Tobias O’Sullivan is buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church. At the grave a woman stands in a mourning veil with two small boys dressed in black coats and caps. These are Bernard and John, the dead policeman’s sons. The woman is Mary, his widow, known to her family and friends as May, and she and some others are briefly seen looking away from the grave. That is because Tobias O’Sullivan’s daughter, his youngest child, Sara, aged two, is crying, hidden behind the row of larger figures at the grave’s edge, and being taken care of by another family member. The two boys look as if they are in a trance. The gravediggers, two young men in shirtsleeves, stare at the boys. They are in fact young policemen, because the gravediggers are on strike. The film is from the era before sound. But we can imagine the graveside murmur. The stifled cries as earth is piled upon earth. A newspaper reported on ‘pathetic scenes at the graveside, the widow and her two young sons weeping pitifully as the police buglers played the Last Post’.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Tobias O’Sullivan is buried as an Irish policeman under the British Empire and as such is destined to be officially ‘unremembered’ in a newly independent Irish state. The only memorials for men like O’Sullivan will exist in quiet homes – a photograph or keepsake on the mantelpiece beside a votive candle; the bloodstained tunic he was wearing when he was shot, kept in a private place until his widow has died and eventually it vanishes. These Irishmen who killed and were killed by other Irishmen in the War of Independence are not commemorated or publicly mourned. An old IRA man who fought in north Kerry remarked wistfully of the War of Independence: ‘We didn’t handle them properly for their brothers were in the IRA. In August 1920, the RIC were beating up the [Black and] Tans … we should have been able to pull the RIC our way if we had worked it properly.’12 (#litres_trial_promo) The RIC was disbanded after independence. But the wounds of death were not forgotten. Not by those who loved the dead. Or by those who killed them. Tobias O’Sullivan was shot on Church Street in Listowel, near the house where my father grew up. He died at the hands of my grandmother’s comrades in the IRA. Hannah never spoke to me of his death or indeed of her comrades who died at the hands of the police and army. But decades after the killing, the shade of District Inspector O’Sullivan lingered in the hidden memories of Church Street. The dead have a way of coming back, if they ever went away at all. II The day I donned my first uniform was one of the happiest in my life, and I felt that Dublin belonged to me as I swaggered down Grafton Street with my black cane stick, gloves neatly under my shoulder strap and my whistle chain across my breast.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Constable Jeremiah Mee Tobias O’Sullivan stood at around six foot two and was sturdy with wavy dark hair and a thick moustache. A photograph of him in the last year of his life shows him gazing at the camera with a dogged expression. He came from the same Catholic faith as his assassins, and a similar rural background. But he had chosen to defend the existing order and for this his compatriots were ready to kill him. His family traced their roots to the Gaelic lordship of O’Sullivan Beare, who had fought the English until he was forced into exile in 1603 and was murdered fifteen years later, apparently by an English spy, as he left mass in Madrid. The family believed their ancestors had retreated north-west with O’Sullivan Beare after the battle of Kinsale in County Cork in 1602, when the forces of Elizabeth I defeated a combined Irish and Spanish force, presaging the death of the Gaelic order and the triumph of colonial power. According to family lore, the O’Sullivans fought on and were present at Aughrim in County Galway when their leader Donal Cam O’Sullivan defeated a larger English-led army in January 1603. These were the stories of resilience and hardiness that were told to the young Tobias O’Sullivan. He grew up in this Irish-speaking district believing he had inherited the blood of warriors. Tobias was born on 14 May 1877 in Doorus, a long narrow peninsula that reaches into Lough Corrib, a place of forbidding beauty where high mountains loom over lake and fields. He was the seventh of nine children whose mother died in childbirth when Tobias was just four years old. The O’Sullivans occupied a two-storey farmhouse on the lakeshore where the family owned boats for fishing and grazed sheep on twenty-six acres, a solid holding in those days. But Tobias’s father had known great hardship. He was seven years old when the potato crop failed and the Famine followed. Tobias would have heard stories of the catastrophe. ‘The very dogs which had lost their masters or were driven from their homes became roving denizens of this district,’ reported an English land surveyor at the time; they ‘lived on the unburied or partially buried corpses of their late owners and others, and there was no help for it, as all were prostrate alike, the territory so extensive, and the people so secluded and unknown’.14 (#litres_trial_promo) In fact Tobias’s own grandfather, Patrick O’Sullivan, died of cholera during the Famine after going to help a shepherd who worked for him while the man lay dying. When he became ill himself he sent word back not to fetch him, conscious that he could infect others of his family. The O’Sullivans buried him on Inchagoill, a sacred island on Lough Corrib. At the height of the Famine the area also saw a concerted effort to convert Catholics to Protestantism, with considerable sectarian animosity between elements of the two churches. The evictions that accompanied the Famine, and escalated in its aftermath, deepened the alienation. As late as November 1875, ten families were forced off the land near Oughterard, around twenty miles from the O’Sullivans; among them was an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack on hearing that he was to be made homeless. When the RIC were called in to enforce the eviction one officer had hot coals poured down his back. Thirty men and women were injured by a subsequent police bayonet charge. By 1880 meetings of the Land League in the area were drawing crowds of more than five thousand people to the slogan ‘land for the landless people, land for the children of men’.* (#ulink_254440f2-c174-57c0-82db-470c099f117f) An English traveller wrote that ‘the law was ignored and agrarian crime respected and unpunished’. How can ‘this almost universally disaffected tone be changed into one of content and loyalty?’ he asked.15 (#litres_trial_promo) The young Tobias would have been aware of the complicated history of the police in the area. The Irish Constabulary were obliged to enforce the law of the land. They took part in evictions. They infiltrated and informed on secret anti-government societies. But Tobias was one among many thousands of Irishmen who signed up to the ranks of the police, joining in November 1899 at the age of twenty-two. Many hundreds of thousands of others joined the Irish regiments of the British Army. Without them, the writ of Britannia, from Ireland to the empire’s most far-flung borders, would have been hard to maintain. It was a choice made by members of my mother’s family too, as we will see. The O’Sullivan family had strong police links. Tobias’s older brother Bernard spent eight years in the RIC and became an inspector of police in Jamaica. Another brother rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army. Two of his cousins would become RIC sergeants in Limerick. Tobias O’Sullivan and his wife, Mary, known to her family as May (Desiree Flynn) Tobias O’Sullivan was an achiever. He was educated at the Galway Grammar School, a protestant institution with a strong academic reputation which admitted Catholic boys. Eleven years after joining the RIC, Tobias came second in Ireland in the exams for sergeant. He was ambitious with relatives on both sides who were doing well in business, the sons and daughters of the growing Catholic middle class. Growing up Tobias would have heard stories of the bravery of a local man, John Purcell, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Neighbours’ sons were far more likely to have joined the British Army than a militant nationalist organisation. Besides, the ranks of the Crown forces offered rare escape from rural poverty. The Connaught Rangers regiment recruited heavily from the young men of the region, and throughout the nineteenth century fought in wars across the British Empire. Why did young men join the police? At home the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary offered upward mobility. There was strong competition for positions. Tobias O’Sullivan joined the police with his two brothers and a cousin. My maternal great-grandfather made the same choice with his three brothers. For many young men in rural Ireland the RIC constable was accepted as a pillar of authority and respectability. Even after the upheavals of the Land War the commanding position of the police sergeant in village and town seemed immutable. ‘They all went to him for everything,’ one officer remarked, ‘he was the chief advisor and all.’16 (#litres_trial_promo) The police constable’s salary was equivalent to that of the bank clerk, the civil servant and the schoolteacher, but the prospects of advancement were better. And while the young schoolteacher and bank clerk would be confined within the narrow space of a classroom or behind a counter, the police constable could get out in the open air, meeting people from town and country. RIC constables had to read and write, and their literacy gave them an additional measure of respectability. There were also other advantages such as the fact that uniforms and boots were supplied free, and married men received a lodging allowance. They were also an armed police force, although in the years before the Revolution they rarely carried their weapons on patrol. When O’Sullivan joined at the turn of the century the make-up of the force represented the sectarian reality in Ireland: eighty per cent of the constables were Catholic, but Catholics only made up ten per cent of the district and county inspectors. The leadership was dominated by Protestants; the strong Catholic middle class was still excluded from the upper echelons of the state security apparatus. A university education could not break this glass ceiling. No such restrictions existed in the colonies, however. A bright Catholic boy like Michael O’ Dwyer, for instance, one of fourteen children of a farmer in County Tipperary, could rise to become Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in which role he imposed martial law and defended his subordinate’s role in the massacre of between 400 and 1,000 Sikh civilians at Amritsar. (O’Dwyer lost his job and ultimately his life. A Sikh tracked him down and killed him in London twenty-one years later.) As the twentieth century opened, most Irishmen thought their position within the empire was settled. There was certainly enough consent from the governed for Her Majesty’s police to enforce the law largely unhindered. During Queen Victoria’s three-week visit to Ireland in April 1900 she had delighted in the ‘endless streets full of enthusiastic people’ in Dublin and the great fireworks display that lit the skies over the city.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Later she entertained 52,000 children to a ‘Patriotic Children’s Treat’ in Phoenix Park. Irish separatists demonstrated. W. B. Yeats denounced the royal visit and called attention to the plight of the Boers fighting ‘an empire that has robbed [them] of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers’. A year earlier, when the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain visited Trinity College Dublin, pro-Boer demonstrations turned into full-scale rioting. With a prescience that was generally lacking in Dublin Castle, Under Secretary for Ireland David Harrel warned that the Boer struggle created ‘this idea amongst the younger men of getting the possession of arms’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) A cultural revolution was under way, encouraged by Yeats and Lady Gregory who wrote of Irish themes in English, and by Irish language activists seeking to overturn English influence in the cultural sphere. The future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, the son of a Protestant clergyman, deplored the ‘constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas’.19 (#litres_trial_promo) But in those days a rural policeman like Tobias O’Sullivan was more likely to be preoccupied with disputes over rights of way and grazing, petty theft, illegal poitin distilling and prosecuting the owners of unlicensed livestock than with the dangers posed by nationalist agitators. By 1907 he was stationed in County Sligo where his name appears in court reports, a constable prosecuting groups of men involved in agitation against dairy farms. They were men of no property who sought fields in which to plant crops; they drove the cattle onto the roads, a symbol of wealth that lay perennially beyond their reach. My maternal great-grandfather, Patrick Hassett, was a thirty-year veteran of the police force by the time Tobias O’Sullivan joined up. A tall, sturdy figure with a piercing gaze, I know Patrick was physically brave. A newspaper report from 1895 refers to him as a man of ‘rare coolness and self-possession’ and describes how he killed a rabid dog with the stock of his rifle in order to save the life of a young boy.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet the politics of the age seeped through. Two court cases from Patrick’s service speak of an Ireland more unsettled than the British understood. One afternoon in Cork city, towards the close of the nineteenth century, he, his brother and a fellow constable hailed a horse-drawn cab. They asked to be taken to a police barracks on the western fringe of the city. The driver was the worse for drink and, for reasons unknown, resentful of the police. As soon as they had climbed on board he drove the horse at a furious pace, causing a collision with another cart, carrying lumber. My great-grandfather and his comrades were thrown into the road. His brother John suffered a broken collarbone. But when Patrick Hassett made to arrest the driver a crowd gathered and began to jostle the police. My great-grandfather drew his sword. Then the chanting began: ‘Boycott the police!’ Constable Hassett emerged unscathed with his prisoner, but the newspapers would later describe how the case had caused ‘some stir in the city … when it was reported that a serious conflict took place between the police and the people’.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Three years later in rural Waterford, Patrick was dispatched to arrest a land campaigner and local Home Rule councillor who had shot at a wealthy Catholic farmer. Patrick succeeded in disarming the assailant who told him: ‘God is on my side … I had every right to do it.’22 (#litres_trial_promo) The fight was about land and the big farmer’s purchase of ground rented by the poorer man. Land and who lost it, who stole it, who worked it, who gained from it, was the marrow of my ancestors’ lives. As I travelled further I would discover in north Kerry, in the fields of my grandmother’s people, how nothing was more political than the ground beneath their feet. My great-grandfather was lucky to have retired from the RIC by the time a choice had to be made about what kind of country he was willing to fight for. In his last years, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, there was a growing campaign to isolate policemen and their families from the communities in which they lived. The boycott chant he heard in Cork now echoed across rural communities. In 1897 the Gaelic Athletic Association, which attracted hundreds of thousands of young men to the sports of hurling and Gaelic football, banned police and soldiers from membership. Retired policemen faced discrimination in jobs controlled by nationalist town and county councils. When the War of Independence escalated the boycott extended to undertakers who were warned not to transport the bodies of dead policemen back to their home districts. After the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, many policemen became conflicted about their role. The outbreak of guerrilla war in 1919 put the RIC directly in the firing line of the IRA. The first victims of the IRA were Irish policemen: eighteen were killed before the end of the year. By the middle of the following year more than fifty were resigning every week to avoid the violence. Policemen and their families were directly boycotted. Hundreds of remote police barracks were closed because they could not be defended. Scores of others were burned down. Tobias O’Sullivan was the sergeant in charge of Athea barracks in County Limerick when it was closed in early 1920 and the police redeployed to more easily defended locations. The village was about eight miles from Listowel where he would be posted the following year. But first he was sent to the County Limerick town of Kilmallock which had a strong barracks in the heart of the town. Twenty years into his police career, O’Sullivan was determined not to be intimidated by the IRA. His resolve hardened in the face of the escalating campaign which branded men like him as traitors. An IRA poster in Cork in March 1920 was explicit in its threat: ‘Whereas the spies and traitors known as the Royal Irish Constabulary are holding this country for the enemy … we do hereby proclaim said spies and traitors, and do hereby solemnly warn prospective recruits that they join the RIC at their own peril. All nations are agreed as to the fate of traitors. It is the sanction of God and man.’23 (#litres_trial_promo) Some police cooperated with the IRA. The flow of information from inside police barracks, and from the British administration’s headquarters at Dublin Castle, was instrumental in the IRA’s successful targeting of spies and informers. Others looked the other way when confronted with information about IRA operations. Yet the majority remained loyal. This was partly to do with tradition and discipline, and also the power of the status quo. Every previous rebellion in Irish history had been suppressed and life had always returned to a version of normal. To men like Tobias O’Sullivan the gunmen presented a vision of chaos, threatening the destruction of the more ordered world that had emerged from the anguish of the great Famine and the struggle for land. Late nineteenth-century British governments had been reformist. In the words of Irish chief secretary Gerald Balfour, they set about ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’. Still Home Rule within the empire was now promised, a perilous pledge given the obduracy of Ulster Unionists, but a distinct probability in some form in the early years of the twentieth century. An Ireland run by the armed separatists would probably have horrified O’Sullivan. The British Empire had been shaken by the Great War but in 1920 nothing indicated that it was on the cusp of irreversible decline. Tobias O’Sullivan must have felt he was on the right side of history. His wife May went with him, into the heart of a war she knew could claim her husband’s life at any moment. When they married Ireland was already restive. But nobody then anticipated that revolution was looming. May’s family had experienced eviction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, migrating south from County Fermanagh after their first dispossession. They lived on a small, poor farm in Aughagower in County Mayo, around thirty miles from the O’Sullivan homestead. Tobias may have met her at a country fair or when he went into John Gibbons’ grocery shop in Westport where she worked as an assistant. Nearly seventeen years older, Tobias was handsome and would have radiated calm authority. They married in February 1915 with the world at war and Ireland slipping towards revolution. * (#ulink_cee7bf95-5ddb-59f5-a47c-d3c7da4d5775) The rebellion was inspired by the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and led by the United Irishmen, many of them Protestants, who wanted to sever Ireland’s connection with Britain. As many as thirty thousand people are believed to have died before the rebellion collapsed after a brutal campaign of government repression. What began, in part, as rebellion to create an Ireland free of sectarian division ended in massacre and deepened alienation between Catholic and Protestant. * (#ulink_cee7bf95-5ddb-59f5-a47c-d3c7da4d5775) The Fenians enjoyed military victories over mixed Canadian and British forces until the arrival of colonial reinforcements prompted them to return to the United States. The final death toll from the campaign was an estimated thirty-two Canadians, one British soldier and six Fenians. * (#ulink_26ec4f58-8768-5b17-9293-80821043473e) The Irish National Land League was founded in 1879 to campaign for the rights of tenant farmers. It evolved into the biggest mass movement since the campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Act of Union led by Daniel O’Connell. The confrontation with landlords and the government became known as the Land War. Its leaders were Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. It is widely credited with effecting major social change in rural Ireland. 2 The Ground Beneath Their Feet (#ulink_a83fe639-b209-5906-9c73-3bff953ea64e) Come all ye loyal heroes wherever you may be Don’t hire with any master till you know what your work will be For you must rise up early from the clear daylight till dawn Or else you won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn … My shoes they are well worn now, and my socks are getting thin And my heart is always trembling for fear they might let in My heart is always trembling from the clear daylight till dawn I’m afraid I won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn Anonymous ballad, nineteenth century I I walk the land in late October. I am coming down past Ballydonoghue church where my grandmother Hannah was baptised and married, where her father and mother were baptised, married and buried, where her brother Mick hid from the Tans, and where my people still farm and course their greyhounds and cheer Kerry’s Gaelic football team. The wind is in from the Atlantic and growing stronger as the sun sets on Tralee Bay. It is forty years and more since I last walked these lanes. It has been too long. After my parents’ marriage fell apart the trips to Kerry became fewer, and when I did come it was to see my cousins in the town. I keep close to the hedgerow to avoid the gusts. At the end of the hill I turn right towards Lisselton cemetery, which my grandmother would pass on her way to school early in the twentieth century. As the lane curves around towards the graveyard there is a small patch of ground on which lumps of rough-hewn stone are scattered. They are small, each less than the size of a football. There is a sign that reads: ‘Don’t pray for us/ no sins we knew/ But for our parents/ they’ll pray for you.’ This is the Ceallurach, the burial ground of the unbaptised children of the Famine. In Hannah Purtill’s time there was no sign here to mark the land. They didn’t need one. Everybody knew. My grandmother went to school when there were still living survivors of the disaster. Even then, when people sought every patch of ground to work, the little field was left to become overgrown: outside the burial rites of the church but sacred in its own forbidding, heartbreaking way. Nobody would ever use the land. I am not a stranger to mass graves. In other places I have seen those mounds bulging out of the earth, the shreds of clothing and shards of bone, and humanity reduced to mulch. I have always seen them as an end result. They have been reached after the sermons of hatred, relentless droughts or the advent of some vast pestilence. But at Lisselton the graves of the dead feel like a beginning. They point me in the direction I need to be going. If I am to understand why my people picked up guns and became revolutionaries some of the answer lies here in these Atlantic fields. On this October evening I begin to walk back into my history. Before leaving I pray for the dead. Remembrance was private, to be kept suppressed in the heart. For with such immense loss, field after field of it across the county, with so many counting the absences, what could they do but face forwards, lean their shoulders into the work of surviving and hold their grief for night-time, after the quenching of lamps. Hannah Purtill was born about two miles away from the burial place, in 1901. She was one of four children. The family was small by the standard expectations of the Catholic Church. Perhaps my great-grandfather Edmund Purtill decided he would only rear the number of children his small farm could support. He laboured for the bigger farmers and worked his own few rented acres. Edmund was poor but not dirt poor. There was food on the table each day and his children went to school. I believe the Purtills came originally out of County Clare where the land was some of the worst in the country. I can find records of them in Ballydonoghue as far back as the 1830s. Rocky, marshy fields that gave nothing back without turning men and women old before their time, or driving their children to America. The Purtills were survivors. Famine had been part of their rural existence for centuries. Those who could work took to their feet rather than starve. Sometimes families followed. At some point in the nineteenth century the Purtills migrated across the River Shannon to north Kerry. The migrants were sometimes called spailp?ns, meaning labourers. There was a poem we studied at school called ‘An Spailp?n F?nach’ (The Wandering Labourer) about the plight of migrant workers in rural Ireland. The man declares he will give up his life of drudgery and serve with the army of Napoleon: Never again will I go to Cashel, Selling and trading my health, Nor to the hiring-fair, sitting by the wall, A lounger on the roadside, You’ll not see a hook in my hand for harvesting, A flail or a short spade, But the flag of France over my bed, And the pike for stabbing. The poem was part of our compulsory school Irish course and I regarded it as a chore. In those days I learned it in Irish, and I had yet to learn a love for the language my father spoke fluently. My Purtill ancestors’ world was too distant and I could not then conceive of a kinship with those hard-pressed men and women of the nineteenth century. The Purtills owned a couple of cows. The dairy cow had a mortal significance for the small farmer. The Famine had taught them not to depend on a subsistence crop that might fail. My uncle, John B. Keane, said that the ‘the milch cow was goddess … beautiful when she is young … [and] all education, all houses, all food depend on the milk cow, whether we like it or not’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) The old homestead was still standing when I was a child. By then the Purtills owned some land and a small herd of cattle. I remember whitewash and thatch and the smell of turf burning on the range and a yard spattered with cow dung after the herd had been brought in for milking. I was allowed to milk one of the more docile cows, my grand-uncle Ned urging me on throughout with a cry of ‘Good man boyeen, pull away let you.’ The old cottage was knocked down decades ago and replaced by a modern bungalow. When I last visited, my elderly cousin Willie was in the yard tending to his greyhounds. He lives there alone. As long as Willie can remember the Purtills raced dogs and hunted. There is a shotgun inside his front door for shooting rabbits and foxes, and, I am sure, to deter any intruder who might try and break in. I would call my Purtill relatives ‘hardy’ people. Willie remembers his parents and grandparents, how ‘they worked like slaves’ and were never sick. If you wanted a poem written or a song sung then you asked their in-laws, the Keanes. If you wanted work done or men to fight a war, then go to the Purtills. The townland of Ballydonoghue occupies around eight hundred acres between the north Kerry hills and the Atlantic. The sea is close by; the Purtills could smell it as they led the cattle to pasture and back. In winter it gave them hard weather and flooded the fields and lanes. Across in the Shannon river direction lies the hill of Cnoc an ?ir (the Hill of Gold) where, in my father’s stories, the star-crossed lovers Diarmuid and Gr?inne hid from the pursuing Fianna warriors in the world before history. The beautiful Gr?inne was to marry the ageing Fionn, leader of the Fianna, but eloped instead with his younger comrade, Diarmuid, the finest of all the Fianna men. Years later, after they are apparently reconciled, Diarmuid was gored by a wild boar while out hunting with Fionn. All Fionn needed to do, my father explained, was to give him a drink of water from his hands to save his life. But he allowed the water to slip through his fingers. The memory of the old betrayal sent Diarmuid to his grave. Memories were long, said my father. Hannah and Bill, my grandparents (Family Collection) I revelled in the summer holidays in north Kerry. Legends flickered into life before my eager-to-believe eyes. This world was larger, it was fantastical, and before it my life in the city was reduced to a brittle impermanence. Here a part of my tribe belonged and would always belong. In those days it was not the land-hungry peasantry I saw as my ancestors but, encouraged by my father, a race of warriors and kings and storytellers. My people in Ballydonoghue did not leave behind written accounts of their lives. They passed on stories by word of mouth. They came from a tradition of fabulism. On May eve children were sent to pick up bluebells to place on the hearth to keep away the people of the spirit world who fluttered on the edge of dusk as child-stealers and harbingers of death. It was considered the worst of luck to plough a fairy fort, usually a mound in the middle of a field in which the people of the spirit world lived, waiting their time to reclaim the earth. Fairies controlled the world of the spirits. To cross them was to invite disaster. Foreshadowings of mortality abounded. My grandmother Hannah’s favourite story was about a man who was passing by Lisselton graveyard one night when he heard the sounds of a football match. ‘Will you help out?’ a player asks. ‘We are a man down.’ Like any good Kerryman he joins in and scores several goals. At the end he is approached and told ‘You will be back next week for good’. Within the week the man was dead and buried. There were legends that hardened into fact, and hard facts that were softened until they became bearable. I found some local schoolchildren’s essays from the 1930s, when Ballydonoghue was little changed from my grandmother’s time. Cottages were still being lit by lamps, short journeys were made by foot, longer ones by donkey and cart; the social life of the parish revolved around Sunday mass and other religious devotions, weekend football games, and conversations at the gates of the creamery. There were dances, but these were often frowned upon and sometimes banned by the priests. A matchmaker by the name of Dan Paddy Andy O’Sullivan brought lonely farmers and prospective wives together. He also ran a dancehall, and in his youth he fought in the guerrilla war against the English alongside my grandmother and my uncles. ‘The name of my home district is Ballydonoghue,’ wrote one of the schoolchildren, eight-year-old Hanna Kelly.2 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘About fifteen families live there and the population is over a hundred … some of the houses are thatched and some of them are slated. Most of the houses are labourers’ cottages.’ Gaelic was no longer spoken as the people’s tongue. But in everyday speech the translated forms of the old language infused conversation with a lyric intensity. They were heirs to hedge schools and vanished bardic poets and were natural storytellers with a broad extravagant accent that urbane city folk might mock but whose rootedness they quietly envied. The children’s essays noted the departure of young men and women for England and America, and remarked on the handful of Irish speakers who were left in the area. They wrote about the ruins of an old Yeoman’s barracks – a Protestant militia raised during the early 1790s – and about the lost grave of a Dane from Viking times, and of a fort with a pot of gold. Wide stretches of bog dominated the ground around Ballydonoghue. Willie Purtill used to joke that he graduated from school to the bog at the age of fourteen. Once or twice I footed turf with my cousins. It was backbreaking work for a city boy, and boring for a child who had inherited the Keanes’ capacity for dreaming and being easily distracted. But it was made bearable by the promise of sweets and minerals later. The bog stretched towards the Atlantic and I remember how, if you missed your footing, the mulch below sucked your boots off as you tried to walk out, and how once, after rain at Easter, the bogholes glittered like a thousand broken mirrors in the watery sunlight. At the end of the summer bog cotton flowered: to me it looked like snow or the windblown feathers of swans fallen to earth. It could be picked to be stuffed into pillows and cushions. Over the years there had been attempts to drain part of the bog and create more arable land and pasture. Between 1840 and 1843 the landlord, Sir Pierce Mahony, a liberal Protestant and ally of Catholic Emancipation, obtained more than ?600 in drainage grants from the state. But within a year of the last grant the potato Famine had begun: there were more pressing priorities than drainage and the bog endured. The mid-century traveller Lydia Jane Fisher wrote lyrically of the local landscape, where the green and blue flax flower contrasted ‘with the golden oats, the brown meadows, and the dark green of the potato – all uniting to make the grand mosaic of Nature particularly beautiful at this season. The foxglove, the heath, and the bog myrtle refreshed our senses.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) But a more realistic appreciation was given by James Fraser who saw that ‘the soil is generally poor, and still more poorly cultivated. The houses of the gentry are few and far between, and the huts of the peasantry are miserable.’4 (#litres_trial_promo) Those who worked the land, like the Purtills, would not have seen any romance. It was the Keanes, their book-loving future in-laws in the town of Listowel, who would be able to rhapsodise to their hearts’ content about the joys of spring fields. I recall listening to my father, Eamonn, and a Purtill relative discussing the subject one afternoon in Ballydonoghue. ‘What you have, you hold,’ said my father. ‘Do you hear that boy?’ he said. ‘What you have you hold.’ Land defined the borders of the imagination. To be a man of substance you needed to own the ground underneath you. My father spoke of a relative who was a middleman at cattle fairs but he had no fields of his own. He was famous for his ability to strike bargains between farmers. To show that he was a man of substance he once pinned a five-pound note to his coat. It might seem a comical gesture until you think about the longing that lay behind it. He had no land and never would have. He would always be the dealer in other people’s livestock. The hunger for land warped men’s spirits. It could drive them to acts of malice. If a cow died on your rented acres you might dump it on your neighbour’s holding to transfer the bad luck. In her eighties one old woman recalled how a row between two hay mowers at the height of the threshing led to one being deliberately poisoned so that he had acute diarrhoea. ‘It was arranged to put something in his tea. In no time he had the runs. There was nothing for it but take off his trousers and work away [for] he was not going to be stopped.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) My uncle, John B, wrote a play called The Field about a man who kills an interloper in a dispute over the purchase of a field. The field is invested with a sacred quality whose importance can only be understood by those who work its soil. After the murder, a Catholic bishop addresses locals at mass: This is a parish in which you understand hunger. But there are many hungers. There is hunger for food – a natural hunger. There is the hunger of the flesh – a natural understandable hunger. There is a hunger for home, for love, for children. These things are good – they are good because they are necessary. But there is also the hunger for land. And in this parish, you, and your fathers before you, knew what it was to starve because you did not own your own land – and that has increased; this unappeasable hunger for land … How far are you prepared to go to satisfy this hunger? Are you prepared to go to the point of robbery? Are you prepared to go to the point of murder? Are you prepared to kill for land?6 (#litres_trial_promo) The answer is yes. Yes, again and again. Why not when, without it, you are scattered and dissolved? Those whose ancestors had starved to death for want of land, who had been dispossessed at the point of a sword, whose oral history had been embedded in the minds of generations, stressing the shame of being a people without land of their own. Land drove men to blood. It is impossible to understand the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed unless you know the story of the land. It is where the hardest of all memories lay, where the grievance and loss accumulated and became ready to flower into violence. At one point this part of north Kerry had been notorious for faction fighting. In the middle of the nineteenth century feuds between clans and villages would be settled in battles between groups several hundred strong. Deaths and terrible injuries were common. It was said that some of the bad blood could be traced to the plantation of families from neighbouring County Clare during the age of plantation. But this was local talk. Faction fighting was a feature of rural Ireland in this period, often reflecting communal divisions over land usage, employment and social status. One account from the early nineteenth century described how ‘in an instant hundreds of sticks were up – hundreds of heads were broken. In vain the parish priest and his curate rode through the crowd, striking right and left with their whips, in vain a few policemen tried to quell the riot; on it goes until one or other of the factions is beaten and flies’.7 (#litres_trial_promo) The fighting stick, the shillelagh, was often sharpened to ensure the scalp was cut or weighted with lead to bludgeon the enemy. Most often the matter was settled once blood had been drawn, and the wounded man would retire from the field. One of the most notorious blood feuds, between the Cooleen and Mulvihill factions, was said to be rooted in an ancient dispute over land. In 1834 it came to a head as more than two thousand people took part in a savage battle of Ballyeagh Strand, close to Ballydonoghue. Men and women, including mounted detachments, set about each other with clubs, slash hooks, horseshoes and guns. Twenty people tried to escape in a boat, which overturned in a swift current. As the survivors tried to reach shore they were pelted with stones and driven back into the waters to drown. Not even the local parish priest would give evidence at the subsequent public inquiry. Silence was the law of the land. The fighting could be exported across the ocean. In the same year as the battle of Ballyeagh, Irish factions fought each other along the banks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland and on the rail lines between Canada and Louisiana – but they fought each other here not for land but for jobs. The violence of the land was threaded throughout the stories of my childhood. About a mile up the hill from the old Purtill homestead there is a crossroads from where you can see across the plain to Ballyheigue Bay. It was here that An Gabha Beag (‘the Little Blacksmith’), the local leader of the rebel ‘Whiteboys’, was hanged by the English in the early nineteenth century. His name was James Nolan and Hannah used to tell us that he had to be hanged three times because in his forge he had fashioned an iron collar which he placed under his smock to protect his neck. Eventually the redcoats found it and James Nolan was sent to his maker. According to the stories collected by the Ballydonoghue schoolchildren, the landlord responsible for the blacksmith’s death was a Mr Raymond, whose family would haunt the later history of the area. In one version the hanged rebel’s family come to Gabha’s workshop in the dead of night: ‘At MIDNIGHT, so the end of this terrible story goes, seven of the dead men’s nearest relatives came to the forge and there, by the uncanny light of the fire, cursed Raymond’s kith and kin across the anvil. Their curses … did not fall on sticks or stones.’8 (#litres_trial_promo) The Raymonds were to be damned for all time. The Whiteboys were a cry of revenge against the exactions of landlords and their agents, against parsons and sometimes priests, against those who turned fields where potatoes grew into grazing for cattle, against the men who fenced and enclosed and who demanded tithes and rents. Named after the white smocks they wore in their night raids, they fought for the rights of tenant farmers and against the system of tithes that maintained the Protestant clergy. The tithes could be exacted in cash or kind and provoked bitter resentment among the Catholic poor. The Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1836) recorded that in Lisselton parish, which included Ballydonoghue, the Reverend Anthony Stoughton who, along with his brother Thomas, owned much of the land in the district was in receipt of tithes worth approximately ?10,000 in today’s money. He also received income from several other parishes in the district. After appeals from the tenants, Stoughton and his brother agreed to reduce their tithe demands, earning gratitude ‘for their kind and considerate mode of dealing with us respecting our Tithes; by which one of our heavy burthens has been considerably lightened – and we sincerely regret that all other Proprietors of Tithes do not follow an example which would in a great measure tend to tranquilize the minds of the people at large’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) The bigger Catholic landowners, as well as priests who charged for their services at funerals and weddings or condemned the Whiteboys from the pulpit, could also be targets. The raiders maimed and killed cattle, terrorised and sometimes assassinated unpopular landlords and their agents. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, encountered the Whiteboys whilst visiting County Tipperary and saw how they ‘moved as exactly as regular troops and appeared to be thoroughly disciplined’.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The violence was episodic but caused widespread terror. A Whiteboy general, William O’Driscoll, declared: ‘We will continue to oppose our oppressors by the most justifiable means in our power, either until they are glutted with our blood, or until humanity raises her angry voice in the councils of the nation to protect the toiling peasant and lighten his burden.’11 (#litres_trial_promo) The Whiteboy oath was everything. It gave men a feeling of belonging. And it warned against betrayal. The avenging secret society bound together by oaths became the most powerful force to challenge the established order in early nineteenth-century rural Ireland. ‘I sware I will to the best of my power,’ the oath-taker would declare, to: Cut Down Kings, Queens and Princes, Earls, Lords, and all such with Land Jobbin and Herrisy.12 (#litres_trial_promo) The English writer Arthur Young, who toured Ireland in the 1770s, wrote about the Whiteboy insurrections and the oppression of the labouring poor. ‘A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute,’ he noted. ‘Disrespect or anything towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security.’ Young, who had travelled all over the British Isles, was shocked to observe in Ireland long lines of workers’ carts forced into the ditches so that a gentleman’s carriage could pass by. ‘It is manifest,’ Young wrote of the mounting insurgency, ‘that the gentlemen of England never thought of a radical cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows.’ He then added with unsettling prescience: ‘A better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British Empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth.’13 (#litres_trial_promo) A landlord in Con Brosnan’s home area of Newtownsandes described the situation in March 1786. ‘We are so pestered with Whiteboys in this country that we can attend to nothing else.’ Landlords were restricted because ‘all law ceases but what the Whiteboys like; not a process is to be served, not a cow drove, nor a man removed from his farm on pain of hanging’. The Whiteboys had erected gallows in Newtownsandes, Listowel and Ballylongford with ‘their entire aim … levelled at the tithes’.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Traditions of violent resistance were becoming embedded. A decade later a local man, Phil Cunningham, became a leader of the United Irishmen rebellion in County Tipperary. Transported to Australia he died leading a rebellion against the British in 1803. The fear of a native revolt accompanied by French invasion loomed large in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics, as the Whiteboy attacks created panic among local Protestant populations. One informer’s account refers to a ‘meeting of the White Boys at Myre [in Tipperary, where] it was resolved on to burn the houses of the Protestants, and to massacre them in one night, after a landing made by the French, as was expected’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) Government retribution was harsh. Hundreds of rebels or suspected rebels were transported to Australia. Public hangings were often carried out in the rebels’ home districts. Con Shine, a local carpenter, recalled an execution by soldiers near Listowel in 1808, as told to him by his family: ‘They drove 2 poles in the ground below at the cross and put another pole across they then put him standing in a horse’s car put a rope around his neck then pulled away the car and left him hanging there. He was hanging there all day. The soldiers use to come often and give him a swing for sport and leave him swing away for himself. All the doors were shut that day. You would not see a head out the door.’16 (#litres_trial_promo) Around Ballydonoghue the Catholic Church condemned the Whiteboy attacks and pledged ‘firm attachment to Our Gracious King and to the Constitution … we will not enter into conspiracy against the laws of our country’.17 (#litres_trial_promo) A priest in Listowel went further and urged his flock to collect ?26 as a reward for anybody giving information on those responsible for the burning houses in the parish. The state archives for the period reflect the efforts made by local priests to discourage support for the Whiteboys. The Listowel magistrate, John Church, records parish meetings across north Kerry and praises the efforts of the clergy while noting claims by the church that the disturbances were caused by poverty and poor weather ‘more than any political motive as maliciously insinuated in some publick Prints’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) By the late 1820s the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Kerryman Daniel O’Connell was on the threshold of success. The church did not want chaos and violence. From the time of the Reformation Catholics had faced a range of restrictions. But in the wake of Cromwellian (1649–53) and then Williamite (1688–91) wars, the repression intensified and a wide range of ‘Penal Laws’ was gradually introduced, targeting Catholics, as well as Presbyterians and other dissenters from the Anglican order. The laws were meant to ensure the ascendancy of Anglicans, with restrictions on Catholic landholding, worship, education, and even a prohibition on Catholics owning a horse worth more than ?5. This last imposition was to ensure that strong swift beasts that would be useful for cavalry were kept out of the hands of Catholics. Enforcement varied in different places and with the passage of time some of the most punitive laws were rescinded, but by the 1820s Catholics were still excluded from Parliament and from being judges or senior civil servants. The effect was to make religion synonymous with the power of the minority. Very soon the reverse would obtain. The campaign to achieve Catholic Emancipation galvanised the Irish poor and gave Europe its first great campaign of peaceful mass protest. By 1829 the battle for religious liberty was won and the confessional demography of Irish life had been asserted. The Catholic Church emerged as the most powerful force in Irish life, a role it would not willingly relinquish for the next century and more. But the Church would struggle to control the unrest which arose from the poverty and injustice of the times. The Whiteboys were succeeded by the ‘Rockites’ in the 1820s, inspired by the millenarian writings of Signor Pastorini, the pseudonym for the English Catholic bishop, Charles Walmesley, who predicted the imminent demise of Protestantism. The north Kerry poet Tom?s Ruadh O’Suilleabh?in saw the coming deliverance of his people from landlordism and English rule: It is written in Pastorini That the Irish will not have to pay rent And the seas will be speckled with ships Coming around Cape Clear.19 (#litres_trial_promo) The local landlords around Ballydonoghue were frightened by the threats of a Protestant apocalypse. In nearby Tarbert one landowner learned of Pastorini’s tract being read ‘among the lower orders of Roman Catholics, who … expect to have the Protestants exterminated out of this kingdom before the year 1825’.20 (#litres_trial_promo) An agent working for Reverend Stoughton was battered with stones, stabbed to death and then had his ears and nose cut off and placed on public display by his attackers.21 (#litres_trial_promo) The Rockites, like the Whiteboys before them, were suppressed with customary brutality while O’Connell succeeded in diverting the mass of the rural poor into peaceful campaigning. When the Bill for emancipation was voted into effect on 13 April 1829, the people of Ballydonoghue could look up and cheer the flaming bonfire of triumph on top of Cnoc an ?ir. Five years later they gathered for the opening of their new church, a stone building that spoke of permanence and where the Purtills still observe the rites of their faith. The campaign for religious freedom awakened people to the power of their numbers. But the hunger and the structural injustices of rural life ensured that violence would come again. Tithes remained a bane of local life and when they prompted an outbreak of agrarian violence a decade later the Stoughtons were targeted. In January 1833 the Morning Chronicle recorded that a bailiff working for the Reverend Anthony Stoughton and his brother Colonel Stoughton of Listowel was murdered by being ‘struck on the back of the head with a stone and received about twenty bayonet wounds’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) On another occasion a horse belonging to the brothers was cut in two. The so called ‘Tithe War’ witnessed a familiar ritual of midnight raids but also the politics of highly organised intimidation, not just aimed at the clergy but against those who agreed to pay their tithes. State retribution was harsh, with instances of troops shooting on protesting crowds. But the conflict marked the beginning of the end of the Church of Ireland as the established church and in 1838 the government acted to transfer responsibility for the upkeep of Anglican clerics to the landlords.* (#ulink_a36dd26b-1c9b-504f-b409-02b930308e0c) Poverty is not a necessary precondition for civil strife, but mix it with memories of dispossession, in a system based on the supremacy of a minority, and the emergence of groups such as the Whiteboys, and others in years to come, seems utterly logical. They were men and women with nothing to lose and the raw courage of youth. They did not fight for a nation state, or the republican ideals of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. They fought for the ground beneath their feet. * (#ulink_3b2acfc6-57c2-5fba-9a34-ed7b1e3bfb85) The final phase in the decline of Church of Ireland power came with the Irish Church Act of 1869 which did away with the payment of tithes and replaced them with a life annuity. 3 My Dark Fathers (#ulink_bfb58a22-a978-5fcc-a4b8-9a5e07450977) My Dark Fathers lived the intolerable day Committed always to the night of wrong, Stiffened at the hearthstone, the woman lay, Perished feet nailed to her man’s breastbone. Grim houses beckoned in the swelling gloom Of Munster fields where the Atlantic night Fettered the child within the pit of doom, And everywhere a going down of light. Brendan Kennelly, ‘My Dark Fathers’, 19621 (#litres_trial_promo) I The Earl was well pleased with his welcome. The gentry had assembled, as had the local clergy, including the formidable Father Jeremiah Mahony, parish priest of St Mary’s, who delivered a vote of thanks to his Protestant counterpart, Reverend Edward Denny, ‘for his dignified conduct on this, and every other occasion, when called on’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) The occasion was a welcome party for the new Earl of Listowel, William Hare, and the language was indicative of something more than the ritual flattery reserved for visits of the mighty. The priest had reason to welcome the Earl, who had been a supporter of Catholic emancipation and provided land for the new Catholic church on the square directly opposite the Protestant St John’s. His liberalism on religion put him at odds with several powerful fellow landowners in the area. The formal address urged the Earl to make his visits ‘frequent and prolonged’ and sought his ‘protection and tutelage’ for ‘a grateful tenantry’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) At that moment, seated behind the ivy-clad walls of the Listowel Arms Hotel, among the smiles and handshakes of the men of property, within yards of the Protestant church and its new, taller-spired Catholic counterpart, the Earl might have hoped for a tranquil residence. But beyond the Feale bridge on either side of the road towards Limerick, by the Tarbert road and the road to Ballydonoghue, in every field in north Kerry where potatoes were planted, a catastrophe was taking root. They were used to hunger. Seven Irish famines of varying extremes had struck since the middle of the eighteenth century. Outside the rapidly industrialising north-east the country was mired in poverty with average income half that of the rest of the United Kingdom. The rural population had grown rapidly, encouraged by the nourishment provided by the widespread cultivation of the potato, and the growing trend to marry young. In the twenty years before the Famine the number of people subsisting in the area increased by nearly two thousand souls. By the summer of 1839, two years after the new Lord Listowel was welcomed to the town, there were warnings of crisis. At a public meeting in Listowel, the gentry and the clergy (Protestant and Catholic) and prominent townspeople heard reports of the ‘increasing difficulties of the labouring classes of this district from the enormous prices which the commonest provisions have reached; agricultural labour, about the only source of employment, has now already terminated’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) The meeting noted ominously that the potato crop of the previous harvest had failed. Public works schemes to alleviate the distress of the poor were already under way and 4,000 people each day received rations of oatmeal. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray passed through Listowel in the same year and saw a town that ‘lies very prettily on a river … [but] it has, on a more intimate acquaintance, by no means the prosperous appearance which a first glance gives it’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) The writer, at best a condescending witness to Irish travails, went on to record the poverty of the scene, the numerous beggars (their number undoubtedly swollen by the growing hunger in the countryside), the appearance of ‘the usual crowd of idlers round the car: the epileptic idiot holding piteously out his empty tin snuff-box; the brutal idiot, in an old soldier’s coat, proffering his money-box and grinning and clattering the single halfpenny it contained; the old man with no eyelids, calling upon you in the name of the Lord; the woman with a child at her hideous, wrinkled breast; the children without number’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) The following year the Kerry Evening Post recorded the failure of the potato crop in the north of the county. A landowner near Ballydonoghue noted in his journal: ‘we were concerned to hear many complain of a dry rot appearing more extensively than hitherto … The farmers are very apprehensive of it.’7 (#litres_trial_promo) In early February the first of the destitute were admitted to the workhouse in Listowel. The Purtills and their neighbours watched as a vast withering engulfed the fields of north Kerry in the late summer of 1845. The land agent, William Trench, gave a vivid account of his first encounter with the blight: The leaves of the potatoes on many fields I passed were quite withered, and a strange stench, such as I had never smelt before, but which became a well-known feature in ‘the blight’ for years after, filled the atmosphere adjoining each field of potatoes. The crop of all crops, on which they depended for food, had suddenly melted away, and no adequate arrangements had been made to meet this calamity, the extent of which was so sudden and so terrible that no one had appreciated it in time, and thus thousands perished almost without an effort to save themselves.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Soon the smell of the rotting crop was thick around Ballydonoghue. It would be followed soon enough by the smell of corpses. The newspapers of Kerry and Cork provide us with a picture of deepening distress over the Famine years. There was relief, but never enough. Concern by some landlords, but indifference and cruelty from others. In August 1846 the correspondent of the Cork Examiner reported that the potato crop ‘was not partially but totally destroyed in the neighbourhood of Listowel … the common cholera has set in there without a particle of doubt’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) By autumn desperation had given way to rage. In November a crowd of up to six thousand came to Listowel ‘shouting out “Bread or Blood” and proceeded in the greatest state of excitement to attack the Workhouse … with the intention of forcibly helping themselves to whatever provisions they might find within the building.’10 (#litres_trial_promo) They were stopped by the intervention of a popular priest. North Kerry was devastated. The Tralee Evening News of 16 February 1847 described how: ‘Fever and dysentery prevail here to a frightening extent.’ The ‘bloody flux’ reduced its victims to hopelessly defecating shadows who squatted and lurched in roads, lanes, fields, market squares, on the seashore and riverside, reduced by the mayhem of disease, covered in their own waste, uncared for, and, when they died, often left unburied. ‘Men women and children [are] thrown into the graves without a coffin,’ reported the Kerry Examiner, ‘no inquests inquire as to how they came by their death, as hunger has hardened the hearts of the people. Those who survive cannot long remain so – the naked wife and children staring them in the face – their bones penetrating through the skin.’11 (#litres_trial_promo) A parish historian recorded the deaths of eighty people in 1847, nearly half of whom were buried without coffins.* (#ulink_cf0d13a1-e851-5f97-8b44-1aaedb1213ff) Kerry had the second-highest rate of recorded deaths from dysentery during the Famine. Starvation and disease would take the lives of around 18,000 people in just a single decade. Rural labourer in Famine era (Sean Sexton Collection) Thousands fled, emigrating to Britain and further afield. Taking ship to escape poverty was an established feature of life in the area and the expanding frontiers of North America offered opportunity. Garret and Mary Galvin from Listowel arrived in Canada with only meagre belongings but within a few years were farming thirty-six acres in Ontario, with twelve cattle, two horses, seventeen pigs and forty sheep. That was in 1826. Two decades later conditions were unrecognisably worse: the government logs of passengers do not even list their names. A few entries picked from the records of the year 1851, hint at the great migration: 18 July: twenty-eight from Listowel make the crossing to Quebec on the ship Jeannie Johnstone. 29 August: sixty-five from Listowel board for Canada on the ship Clio. 26 September: thirteen from Listowel sail on the John Francis …12 (#litres_trial_promo) Passengers were often selected by their landlords, being of no further economic use on the land, or by the guardians of the workhouses, and sent away to North America with just the price of their fare. At Quebec the immigrants disembarked at Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence archipelago. Five thousand were buried there, the majority killed by typhus. A priest who went on board the arriving ships left an account of desolation: Two to three hundred sick might be found in one ship, attacked by typhoid fever and dysentery, most lying on the refuse that had accumulated under them during the voyage; beside the sick and the dying were spread out the corpses that had not yet been buried at sea. On the decks a layer of muck had formed so thick that footprints were noticeable in it. To all this add the bad quality of the water, the scarcity of food and you will conceive but feebly of the sufferings that people endured during the long and hard trip. Sickness and death made terrible inroads on them. On some ships almost a third of the passengers died. The crew members themselves were often in such bad shape that they could hardly man the ship.13 (#litres_trial_promo) A report from the government in Quebec noted that those ‘sent out by their landlords were chiefly large helpless families, and in many instances widows and their children’ and that they ‘were generally very scantily supplied … The condition of many of the emigrants, I need not inform you, was deplorable.’14 (#litres_trial_promo) A priest gave the last rites to the dying. ‘I have not taken off my surplice today,’ wrote Father Bernard McGauran, ‘they are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals. We buried 28 yesterday, 28 today, and now (two hours past midnight) there are 30 dead whom we will bury tomorrow. I have not gone to bed for five nights.’15 (#litres_trial_promo) The Listowel passengers on the ship Clio were told to expect a sum of money from the Listowel Union on arrival. Nothing was sent and they were left ‘entirely without means’. The colonial government moved them on to where they might find work. In the same period Scots Highlanders were also being shipped out by their landlords. A Colonel Gordon sent his entire tenantry – 1,400 people from the islands of Barra and Uist – to Canada. But to those Irish who were forced into migration, and to those left behind, what mattered was their particular circumstance. Even if they had been aware of the sufferings inflicted on the Scottish and English poor it would not have ameliorated their sense of loss, or the accumulation of grievance that the Famine caused. Nor would it have disposed them to think more highly of the government and the landlords. The wider context is everything until it is nothing at all. My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick and their friends were brought up with stories of the Famine as passed on by their grandparents. Moss Keane from Ballygrennan outside Listowel recalled his grandfather’s memories: ‘The families used to get sick and die. The fever was so bad in the end they used to bury the people by throwing their mud houses down on them; then they were buried. The English could relieve them if they wished … Many a person was found dead on the roadside with grass on their mouths.’16 (#litres_trial_promo) As always the spirit world was invoked in memory of the dead. People told of meeting them along the road. They were in the ground but walking still. One story relates how a prosperous landowner came to gloat at a starving old woman. She was so ashamed of her plight that she boiled stones in the pot and pretended they were potatoes. ‘But when the time came, she found flowery bursting spuds in the pot.’17 (#litres_trial_promo) Another tells of a great fiddler from the locality who was buried in a mass grave and whose music could still be heard on certain nights. I found out that there had indeed been such a man, a famous dancing master who died of exposure in Listowel Workhouse.* (#ulink_615082d1-3f4c-5955-978f-8ccfd89fc1d6) I met a woman walking past Ballydonoghue church one evening who turned out to be a family friend of the Purtills. Nora Mulvihill was born and reared here and came from a line that went back to the nineteenth century. Nora was middle-aged with grown-up children, and most evenings she walked the local roads to keep fit. Drive the roads of rural Ireland any evening and weather and you will see women like her, heads down and arms swinging. She knew the land and its stories. We drove to Gale cemetery where the dead of the Famine from Ballydonoghue were buried. ‘Do you know about the doctors that were here?’ she asked. I assumed she meant the medics who visited the workhouse during the disease epidemics. But no, Nora had another story. I would leave without knowing how to interpret what I was told. Maybe it was just a story, like so many of the others told over the generations by the old people, a story with some truth maybe or none, or maybe entirely true. But it was a story that lasted. ‘There was a house above in Coolard where there were doctors,’ Nora told me. ‘I don’t know who they were or what they were doing there, whether it was the one family or whatever. But at any rate they lived there through the hunger. At the time there was a lot of dead bodies lying around the place. People were falling on the roads. So the doctors sent their servants out to bring in bodies to them and they had a room upstairs in the house where they did experiments. When they were finished with them a man would come with a cart and take the corpses to the graveyard here.’ The man was known locally as ‘Jack the Dead’. A local historian, John D. Pierse, found an account of a ‘Dr Raymond [who] used to buy bodies for a couple of shillings from the local people … he’d come at the diseased part of the body and examine it … they used to do that wholesale.’18 (#litres_trial_promo) The county archives showed that Dr Samuel Raymond was living in this area in 1843, on the eve of the Famine, and was still serving as a magistrate in 1862. It may have been that he was carrying out sample autopsies on behalf of the government. But in the memory of the place he is a ghoulish exploiter to whom the bodies of the dead were mere biological material. The stories offered the poor a promise that their suffering would be remembered, if not by individual names, then at least the manner of their death, a series of accusing fingers pointing out of the past at the English, the landlords, the big Catholic farmers who had food on their tables every night … at the whole army of their ‘betters’. The Listowel Workhouse was the repository of the doomed. Those who ended up in this cramped, disease-ridden barracks had lost all hope of survival on the outside. A doctor treating smallpox sufferers found that ‘three or four fever patients are placed in beds that are unusually small’. He witnessed two children die soon after arriving ‘probably being caused by the cold to which such children were exposed to on account of being brought in so long a distance’.19 (#litres_trial_promo) The doctor found the body of a newborn baby in the latrines. A record for the 22 March 1851 documented the deaths of sixty-six people in the workhouse, of whom forty-nine were under the age of fifteen. Out of this misery grew an ambitious scheme. A report at the height of the Famine quoted the Listowel Workhouse master as saying ‘the education of the female children appears to be very much neglected … very few could even read very imperfectly. Only one or two make any attempt at writing.’20 (#litres_trial_promo) The remedy to illiteracy and the prospect of death from starvation or disease was to pack thirty-seven girls off to Australia. They were among 4,000 Irish girls selected to find new lives in the colonies. Most ended up marrying miners or farmers in the outback. In the great departures that followed the Famine, some of my own Purtill relatives took ship for America, settling in Kentucky and New York, and bringing with them a memory of loss to be handed to the coming generations. Their children would learn that as many as half a million people were evicted from their homes during the Famine; that the government failed the starving when it might, through swifter action, have saved hundreds of thousands; they learnt that the poor were damned by the incompetence of ministers and by their rigid ideological beliefs, the conviction that the market was God; that the poor should learn a lesson about the ‘moral hazard’ of their own fecklessness; that too much charity would weaken the paupers’ determination to help themselves – and that all of this was part of God’s plan. It was not genocide in the manner I have known it. Genocide takes a plan for extermination with a defined course set at the outset. But it was a moral crime of staggering proportions. The Famine changed the world around the Purtills. But they survived. How? Were they tougher than others? I will never know. There is only one narrative of the Famine when I am growing up. This is of English infamy, the clearances and evictions and the workhouse. But it is not the whole story. The story of survival and its psychological costs is not told: how some of the bigger Catholic farmers also evicted tenants, how the vanishing of the labouring class created the room for bigger farms, and how the Famine set in train the destruction of the landlord system. Hunger begets desperation, begets fierce survival strategies, and these beget shame which begets silence. I find myself going back to Brendan Kennelly’s ‘My Dark Fathers’. I do so because I believe there are parts of history only the poets can convey, the deeper emotional scars that form themselves into ways of seeing things that inhabit later generations. Brendan told me he had written the poem after attending a wedding in north Kerry. A boy was called upon to sing. He had a beautiful voice but was painfully shy. So he turned to face the wall and in this way was able to perform. Kennelly was transfixed. He saw in that moment the shame of survival that had stalked his ancestors and mine. Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay Unknown, and could not understand The giant grief that trampled night and day, The awful absence moping through the land. Upon the headland, the encroaching sea Left sand that hardened after tides of Spring, No dancing feet disturbed its symmetry And those who loved good music ceased to sing. Since every moment of the clock Accumulates to form a final name, Since I am come of Kerry clay and rock, I celebrate the darkness and the shame That could compel a man to turn his face Against the wall, withdrawn from light so strong And undeceiving, spancelled in a place Of unapplauding hands and broken song.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Writing twenty years after the Famine, the lawyer and essayist William O’Connor Morris visited Kerry and found that ‘the memory of the Famine, which disturbed society rudely in this county … has left considerable traces of bitterness’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) There is an entry in the diary of the landlord Sir John Benn Walsh which recalls a dinner held by the workhouse guardians. It is towards the end of the Famine. Benn Walsh is shocked to find that there are ‘three Catholic priests and a party with them who refused to rise when the Queens health was drunk and a cry was raised of “long live the French Republic” … this little toast shows all the disloyalty in the hearts of those people’.23 (#litres_trial_promo) The bitterness curdled across the Atlantic into the Irish ghettos of America’s east coast, where hatred of England grew into a revolutionary political force that would return to Ireland, reaching back to the eighteenth century for its defining theme: only total separation from England could cure the ills of Ireland. The lives of the Purtills were transformed in the decades after the Famine but not through armed struggle in a quest for national sovereignty. It was the campaign for land that showed the Purtills and their like what it meant to win. II The Landlord and his agent wrote Davitt from his cell For selfishness and cruelty They have no parallel And the one thing they’re entitled to these idle thoroughbreds Is a one-way ticket out of here third class to Holyhead. Andy Irvine, Forgotten Hero, 1989 Tenant farmers like Edmund Purtill had few guaranteed rights before the land campaign of the late nineteenth century. Although the rate of evictions had declined considerably, they endured in the collective memory. Joseph O’Connor lived six miles outside Listowel on the lands of Lord Listowel and described his family’s eviction at Christmas time in 1863: They came on small Christmas Day [6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany] in January 1863, bailiffs, peelers an’ soldiers, an’ had us out on the cold bog before dawn. They burned down the houses for fear we’d go back into them when their backs were turned and took my father and the other grown up men to the Workhouse in Listowel with them. They did that ‘out of charity’ they said because Lady Listowel wouldn’t sleep the night, if the poor creatures were left homeless on the mountain. They left me and my brother Patsy to look after ourselves. We slept out with the hares, a couple o’ nights, eatin’ swedes that had ice in the heart o’ them an’ then we parted. He went east an’ I went west towards Tralee. I must ha’ been a sight, after walkin’ twenty miles on my bare feet an’ an empty belly.24 (#litres_trial_promo) Cast into destitution by the landlord, Joseph turned to the only means of lawful survival open to him and joined up with the very Crown forces that had turned out his family. In his early teens, O’Connor became a soldier with Her Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. The British Army saved him from starvation. But these were the last years of the old landlordism. Sixteen years after the O’Connors were driven onto the roads of north Kerry, the rest of rural Ireland was gripped by an agrarian revolution that, for the most part, eschewed the gun in favour of civil defiance. By the time the Land League was formed in 1879 the whole edifice was ready to topple. The Famine had wiped out the rents on which many landlords depended. Rates became impossible to pay. Bankruptcy stalked the landed gentry. ‘An Irish estate is like a sponge,’ wrote one lord, ‘and an Irish landlord is never as rich as when he is rid of his property.’25 (#litres_trial_promo) Gladstone had already begun the process of strengthening tenants’ rights in 1870. Reform created its own momentum. The Land League would take care of the rest. Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were second only to Michael Collins in my father’s pantheon of greats. It was Parnell, Eamonn said, who gave people back their dignity. Parnell and Davitt were very different men, in temperament and background. Parnell was a Protestant landowner, liberal and nationalist, a brilliant political tactician and leader of the Irish Party at Westminster. His fellow MPs knew him as a man of ‘iron resolution … impenetrable reserve [with] … a volcanic energy and also a ruthless determination’.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Michael Davitt was the child of an evicted family from County Mayo, brought up in the north of England where he went into the mills as a child labourer, losing his arm at the age of eleven in an industrial accident. Davitt began his political life in the Fenians and in 1870 was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for treason. He was twenty-four years old at the time and endured a harsh regime as a political prisoner. Yet Davitt emerged from jail convinced that violence would never achieve a complete revolution. In this he foreshadowed by a century the experience of the IRA prisoners in the Maze prison. Davitt became an internationalist in prison, seeing the Irish farm labourer as part of the worldwide struggle of the oppressed. Passionate, approachable, he provided the organisational genius of the Land League. My father occasionally spoke of him, but always the doomed glamour of Parnell, Pearse and Collins shut out the light. Yet Michael Davitt did more than anybody to change the lives of my forebears. I only came to appreciate him in later life – this internationalist and socialist and campaigning foreign correspondent, who made the journey from revolutionary violence to a true people’s politics. In later life, as a journalist, he revealed the horror of the anti-Semitic pogrom at Kishinev in the tsarist empire in 1903. He arrived in Kishinev ‘a striking figure with a black beard, armless sleeve, and trilby hat’, and set about interviewing the survivors and witnesses.27 (#litres_trial_promo) His journalism seethed with righteous indignation but was always supported by a meticulous attention to the facts. Davitt came across a house where a young girl had been raped and murdered: ‘The entire place littered with fragments of the furniture, glass, feathers, a scene of the most complete wreckage possible. It was in the inner room (in carpenters shed) where … the young girl of 12 was outraged and literally torn asunder … the shrieks of the girl were heard by the terrified crowd in the shed for a short while and then all was silent.’28 (#litres_trial_promo) His reporting created an international outcry. He also went to South Africa as a correspondent during the Boer War, where he felt conflicting emotions as he encountered British prisoners of war: ‘[I felt] a personal sympathy towards them as prisoners; a political feeling that the enemy of Ireland and of nationality was humiliated before me and that I stood in one of the few places in the world in which the power of England was weak, helpless and despised.’29 (#litres_trial_promo) In Ireland, Davitt had started the Land League campaign with the alluring slogan: ‘The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’. Huge meetings were held across the country during the late nineteenth century in support of what became known as ‘the Three Fs’: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. Predictably the agitation brought a return of violent customs in the north Kerry countryside. The targets were not only the old Protestant landlord class. Rural Ireland now had a large body of Catholic bigger, or ‘strong’, farmers, who became targets of the League. At the height of the land agitation, in the crucial years 1879–85, the colonial government was forced to install a permanent military garrison in Listowel. A bad landlord, a greedy big farmer, might expect retribution in the form of boycott, or a visit from ‘Captain Moonlight’ or the Moonlighters – agrarian raiders who hocked cattle and burned hay barns. Catholics who rented land from others who were evicted or who paid rent in defiance of a boycott were frequent targets. The French writer Paschal Grousset met a man in north Kerry in 1887 whose ears had been mutilated and whose cattle had had their tails docked. The man’s crime was to have accepted work on a boycotted farm. ‘Let a farmer, small or great, decline to enter the organisation,’ wrote Grousset: or check it by paying rent to the landlord without the reduction agreed to by the tenantry … or commit any other serious offence against the law of the land war, he is boycotted. That is to say he will no longer be able to sell his goods, to buy the necessities of life; to have his horses shod, corn milled, or even exchange a word with a living soul within a radius of fifteen to twenty miles of his house. His servants are tampered with and induced to leave him, his tradespeople shut their doors in his face, his neighbours compelled to cut him … people come and play football in his oat fields, his potatoes are rooted out: his fish or cattle poisoned; his game destroyed.’30 (#litres_trial_promo) And if he refused to accede to the threats? Grousett put it starkly: ‘Then his business is settled. Someday or other, he will receive a bullet in his arm, if not in his head.’31 (#litres_trial_promo) Another man, who had shaken the hand of a hated landlord, was forced to wear a black glove on that hand. A seventy-two-year-old writ-server had his left ear sliced off. The land agent S. M. Hussey was forced out of the area after his home was destroyed by dynamite in 1884. There were sixteen people in the house at the time. Miraculously no one was hurt. ‘To show how matters stood,’ he wrote, ‘one of my daughters reminds me that I gave her a very neat revolver as a present, and whenever she came back from school she always slept with it under her pillow.’32 (#litres_trial_promo) Hussey aroused particular loathing because of a rent rise intended to pay for a ?100,000 mansion for one of his landlord clients, and the burning down of several evicted tenants’ houses. The land agent for Lord Listowel, Paul Sweetnam, evicted the O’Connell family at Finuge for non-payment of rent, as a contemporary report described.* (#ulink_f04da745-acbd-5d67-9ab8-a99182f7ff03) ‘When Mr O’Connell came on the scene the eviction was almost completed … He had no place to shelter himself or his family. He came into town and asked the agent for a night’s lodging in the home from which he was evicted. The agent refused.’33 (#litres_trial_promo) The bigger Catholic farmers watched the violence with alarm. The attackers were nearly always the ‘men of no property’, the rural underclass made up of the sons of small farmers or farm labourers. The land campaigners promised them a stake in the soil they worked. Land would be redistributed. By the beginning of 1880 worsening agricultural prices and poor weather reduced many of the peasantry in the area to destitution. The horror of famine loomed once more. A letter from the organisers of hunger relief in Ballybunion, about five miles from the Purtills, described how the ‘surging crowds of deserving and naked poor who throng the streets every day seeking relief show unmistakably that dire distress prevails in the locality and that unless immediate relief be given and held on for some time there can be no alternative but the blackest Famine … the state of our poor is hourly verging on absolute destitution and the condition of the poor children attending our schools deplorable’.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Once more a network of secret groups sprang up across the countryside to mete out the people’s justice. Informers were despised. A parallel system of justice with its own courts was set up to adjudicate on land disputes. Ominously, in parts of north Kerry the Royal Irish Constabulary were increasingly identified as the landlord’s enforcers. ‘They have thrown the whole thing on the police,’ a report noted, ‘who for the past six months have acted more in the capacity of herds[men] than policemen and the result is the men are becoming completely worn out, disgusted in their duty and demoralised.’35 (#litres_trial_promo) The hour of the night raiders was back. The Moonlighters roamed the country in disguise. They raided to exact retribution and to arm themselves with seized guns. The Catholic farmer John Curtin, a senior local figure in the Land League, was murdered in l885 in south Kerry. One of the attackers was shot during the raid and Curtin’s daughters gave evidence that led to the conviction of some of the Moonlighters. As a consequence, the family was damned. They were booed and jeered when they drove on the local roads. All their servants left. An old man who had herded their cattle for thirty years was too afraid to remain. When they went to mass ‘a derisive cheer was raised by six or eight shameless girls … believing that the police won’t interfere with them’.36 (#litres_trial_promo) The parish priest ‘never uttered a word in condemnation’. They were again assailed outside the church. The priest, Father Patrick O’Connor, explained that on a previous raid Curtin had surrendered a gun and ‘that if he had given up a gun they would not have hurt a hair on his head’.37 (#litres_trial_promo) The following week the daughters were accompanied by twenty-five policemen and a representative of the Land League. But the presence of the man from the League made no difference. Stones were thrown. When he tried to address the crowd he was shouted down and afterwards said he owed his life to the police. A group of women ripped out the Curtin family pew and destroyed it in the church grounds. Curtin’s widow could neither sell nor leave. The sale was boycotted. Any prospective buyer was threatened with death. ‘I cannot live here in peace but they won’t let me go,’ she wrote. But the mother of one of the convicted men showed no compassion. ‘As long as I am alive and my children and their children live, we will try to root the Curtins out of the land.’38 (#litres_trial_promo) The words have an obliterative violence, as if she were speaking of the destruction of weeds. The Nationalist MP John O’Connor sounded a note of hopelessness when he remarked that if the Curtin family was to be protected from the annoyances, to which he regretted they had been subjected, ‘it would have to be by other means than public denunciations of outrages’.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Not for the last time in Irish history, political condemnations would mean nothing. After eighteen months of hostility the Curtins sold their farm for half of its value and left the area. Nobody, not the police, not the gentry, not the government, could change the minds of their neighbours. Near to Ballydonoghue, sixty-year-old John Foran was murdered in 1888 for renting the farm of an evicted man. The teenage Bertha Creagh, whose father acted as solicitor for several landlords, saw his killers planning their attack as she went for a walk. ‘I remarked on their evident seriousness to my brother,’ she wrote. Foran was a successful farmer and had gone to Tralee to hire extra help. When on his way home with his labourers and fourteen-year-old son, an assassin appeared out of the woods at a bend in the road and ‘fired from a six-chambered revolver, and lodged bullets in succession in Fohran’s [sic] body … the terrified boy, having waited to lay his dying father on the grass at the roadside, drove on to Listowel’.40 (#litres_trial_promo) The murdered man was a survivor of the Famine and a contemporary account describes him as ‘being brave even to rashness – that the people of his district had a wholesome dread of himself and his shillelagh’.41 (#litres_trial_promo) He had also endured four years of harassment – with police protection that had only recently been withdrawn at the time of the murder. The investigation followed a familiar pattern. There were arrests and court hearings but nobody was convicted. The witnesses kept to the law of silence. In the time of my grandparents, the IRA would draw on those old traditions of silence and communal solidarity. The Land League was denounced and Parnell and Davitt accused of fomenting violence. The League leaders knew how rural Ireland worked. Violence was not a surprise to them. Davitt condemned the murders but stressed the responsibility of history. ‘The condition and treatment of the poorer tenantry of Ireland have not been, and could not be, humanly speaking, free from the crime which injustice begets everywhere,’ he declared. ‘For that violence which has taken the form of retaliatory chastisement for acknowledged merciless wrong, I make no apology on the part of the victims of Irish landlordism. For me to do so would be to indict Nature for having implanted within us the instinct of self-defence.’42 (#litres_trial_promo) With tough anti-coercion laws, and a gradual resolution of the land issues, violence abated. The Land War wound down. Parnell led a new campaign for Home Rule before he was destroyed by scandal. Davitt went off to become a journalist and then took a seat in the House of Commons. He dreamed of nationalising the land of Ireland but misunderstood entirely the character of rural Ireland. Only the land a man held for himself offered any security. By 1914, seventy-five per cent of Irish tenants were in a position to buy the land which they rented. They were assisted by British government loans. Labourers were helped by the building of cottages, each on an acre of land. The Purtills bought their own land. In time the sons of the family would move out and buy their own farms. When my cousin Vincent Purtill sold his 400-acre farm and retired he felt agitated. Without the land who was he and where was he? Eventually the stress got the best of him. He went and bought a small farm of twenty-four acres. ‘I need only walk out the door and I am walking on my land. I do it every day,’ he said. By the early years of the twentieth century, Listowel seemed at peace. Violence was present but contained. It flared occasionally and just as quickly fell away. Tenant farmers used the law to challenge landlords. One case from the Ballydonoghue area in March 1895 shows how dramatically rural life had changed. George Sandes, a descendant of Cromwellian planters, was one of the most powerful landowners in the area. The town of Newtownsandes, about five miles from the Purtills, was named after his family. During the Land War, Sandes was such an unpopular figure that locals attempted to rename the town after one of the Land League leaders. He was a resident magistrate during those years But in the new rural world forged by Parnell and Davitt, Sandes was no longer free to evict at will. When a farmer went to court to challenge his eviction Sandes lost and was ordered to pay damages. Constitutional politics were again on the march and Home Rule was promised. My great-grandfather, Edmund Purtill, was listed as donating 1 shilling and sixpence to the cause of the Irish Party at Westminster. Enclosing a cheque for ?32 from the parish, the Very Reverend John Molyneaux assured the party treasurer in London that there was not ‘in any parish in the South of Ireland a people more willing and anxious to generously support any movement which has for its object the interests of religion, and the happiness and prosperity of the people’.43 (#litres_trial_promo) It may have been that Edmund Purtill harboured more radical sympathies and was donating money out of a desire to please the parish priest. But it is more likely that he believed Home Rule within the British Empire was the surest guarantee of stability. The Purtills were still poor but they had a stake in the land. At that point in history, directly on the turn of the century, the majority of Irish Catholics took the same view. The area returned Home Rule MPs at successive elections. The Catholic hierarchy and most of the priests preached cooperation with the government. Nothing in the immediate circumstances of my grandmother’s childhood would have made her or her brothers likely converts to revolution. But there was a desire for change brewing in Ballydonoghue and across Ireland and Europe. The times were about to be disturbed by restless nationalisms that would usher in the end of the age of empire, from the Danube to the River Feale, and make rebels of my forebears. * (#ulink_e6045f52-f5a5-5fda-ac30-5ff2717a6ca1) The local historian John D. Pierse has published figures showing a fall of 481 in the number of residents in the district in the years 1841–1851 – nearly 22 per cent of the population. * (#ulink_b5fd7f4f-57cf-5fec-ac17-1a266c5e926a) The writer Catherine E. Foley, an expert on Irish dancing tradition, unearthed the death certificate of ‘Muirin’ in her research on the effects of the Famine on the music and dance culture of the rural poor. She describes him as being fifty-five at the time of his death. ‘Step dancing was seen as a skill to be mastered,’ she writes, ‘a skill that showed individuals had control and mastery over their minds and bodies.’ See Catherine E. Foley, Cultural Memory, Step Dancing, Representation and Performance: An Examination of Tearmann and The Great Famine, in Traditiones (Llubljana 2015). * (#ulink_c0930863-b2bb-5af5-a197-7bdfcd28d6fa) Sweetnam came from a Protestant farming background in west Cork. He was an unpopular figure with many in the locality because of his work instigating prosecutions for non-payment of rent for Lord Listowel, and newspapers recorded instances where men who tried to intimidate him ended up in court. In 1899, long after the Land War ended, he appeared in court seeking to evict a Mary Brennan from a caretaker’s house on Lord Listowel’s lands. He would also appear dramatically in the story of District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan. 4 Revolution (#ulink_f3af097b-0328-523d-acb2-301783a5afbb) Soldiers are we whose lives are pledged to Ireland … Peadar Kearney, The Soldier’s Song, 1907 I To approach a man near his home where his wife and young children are waiting for him, to fire enough bullets into his head and chest to make sure he is dead, and to do this when you have never killed before, and to live with this for fifty years and more and never speak of it: how does a man, a man like you, live with this? Others in Ireland will tell war stories. They will boast of their exploits. Not you. There will be annual parades to attend. You will become part of the national myth of origin that cries out for heroic deeds. But you are remembered as a modest, decent man. Con Brosnan: hero of the good clean fight against the evil of the Black and Tans. But you know how it really was. It is all there in memory, whenever war comes back: his face down in the space between the cart and the footpath, the blood thickening in the gutter, the children crying. You were brave in the Revolution and a man of peace when it was needed after the Civil War. You were well loved by your own people. For you the act of killing was no lightly taken enterprise. It stays locked inside you for nearly thirty years until the men from the Bureau of Military History came calling.* (#litres_trial_promo) What you told them was true: you were following orders that came all the way from headquarters in Dublin. But what was the story you told yourself down the years? You were good friends with my uncle Mick Purtill and his sister Hannah. You lived in a neighbouring village, shared the hardship of the Tan war with them, fought on the same side in the Civil War, and after that war you once threatened to shoot a man who had cursed the name of Mick Purtill. ‘The Purtills and Brosnans were fierce close’ was how your son put it.1 (#litres_trial_promo) A neighbour of yours, the poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice, told me that every day you went to church to pray for the souls of the men you killed. The District Inspector will not be the only killing in which you play a part. It reminded me of something a friend of mine, a Special Forces soldier, a man who killed at close quarters, told me once. He would never let his son join the army, he said. ‘I would never want him to see the things I keep locked up in my head.’ Cornelius – ‘Con’ – Brosnan and Mick Purtill were members of the Irish Volunteers. My grandmother would join the women’s wing, Cumann na mBan, which had been founded in 1914. I believe Hannah was nineteen when she joined; Con Brosnan was the same age when he joined up in 1917. Con Brosnan, revolutionary and footballing legend (Brosnan Family) Like the Purtills, Con had grown up on a small farm, supplemented by the income from a public house in Newtownsandes, now called Moyvane – the ‘small, sleepy straggle of a village about seven miles from Listowel in north Kerry, and off the main road’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet his ancestral background was more complex. On his mother’s side there were business links to the landed gentry of north Kerry. His grandfather, M. J. Nolan, had been a Justice of the Peace and an agent for a protestant landowner. He was shot at during the agrarian disturbances of the late nineteenth century. To get there from Ballydonoghue I drove the long, straight small roads across the plain. I saw the smallness of the killing zone and how the flat terrain with its sparse woodland offered no decisive advantage to guerrillas. I imagine how I would read this land as a war correspondent; the habit is ingrained in me now, a perverse filter through which topography is measured for the cover it provides and the menace it conceals. There are no steep mountains, plunging valleys; there are no acres of trees or dense scrubland that come up to the roadside for mile after mile. I think of the long drives I have made through ambush zones around the world, my mouth dry and stomach knotted knowing the killers could be as close as the high grass brushing the side of the car. Once in Rwanda I saw them, armed with AK 47s, standing in the middle of the road, surprised by us as we came around the corner of a jungle track. There was a split second when they might have turned on us but they ran into the bush, the element of surprise lost. We turned around and went back, survivors by the grace of chance. So often in armed convoys in guerrilla territory I have strained to see who might be hiding in the passing treelines, or to hear the first shot that would signal an ambush; I have spent fruitless hours calculating whether it was safest to travel in the front, middle or end of a convoy. With enough ambushers and a mine in the road the chances of escape are pretty small, as good friends of mine have found out in Africa, the Balkans and Iraq. Here in north Kerry there was a lot of hiding in plain sight for the men of the IRA. It was in the homes of the people that they found their hiding places, and in barns and dugouts meticulously camouflaged under turf and ricks of hay. The Brosnan family pub sits in the middle of the town, on a corner beside the road that runs down the gradually levelling land towards Listowel. Con’s son Gerry still lives here and his grandson is a farmer nearby. The flags of the Kerry football team and the Irish Republic hang from stands on the pub’s gable wall. The colonial name of Newtownsandes has been erased. Today the village is called Moyvane – from the Irish for the ‘middle plain’. In his deposition to the military historians, Con Brosnan still referred to it as Newtownsandes. He was born there in 1900 and went to the local national school and then to secondary in Listowel. His schooling ended when he was sixteen, the summer after the Easter Rising. There was no one reason why Hannah and Mick and Con Brosnan took up arms against the British Empire. Youth was part of it, as was the extraordinary moment in world history when they came of age. They lived in one of those periods when history had slipped its bonds. The impossible became imaginable and then possible and they saw a chance of belonging to something larger than themselves. Events propelled them forward until they became agents of change themselves. It was part politics of the moment and in part the resurrection of long-buried sentiment ignited by the Easter Rising and the events that followed. By 1913 a branch of the Irish Volunteers had been set up in Listowel. The Volunteer movement was a broad coalition that included militant separatists as well as constitutional nationalists devoted to Home Rule. A nationalist private army on such a scale might never have existed but for a dramatic escalation in tensions in Ulster. By 1910 the dream for which my great-grandfather Edmund Purtill had contributed his shillings seemed to be coming to fruition. The Irish Party held the balance of power in Westminster and Home Rule was the price of their support for the government.* (#litres_trial_promo) The possibility of nationalist advancement provoked a furious reaction from northern unionists whose response was to threaten civil war. They were encouraged by the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law. His words are worth remembering, coming as they did from the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. In July 1912 he told a rally at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’. This was no rush of blood to the head. A year later, on 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, Bonar Law again threatened treason when he told Ulster Protestants: ‘Whatever steps you may feel compelled to take, whether they are constitutional, or whether in the long run they are unconstitutional, you have the whole Unionist Party, under my leadership, behind you.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) The Tory leader knew he was adding fuel to the growing fire. Anti-Home Rule agitation had a bloody history. When the first Home Rule bill was introduced in 1886 around fifty people were killed in Belfast, hundreds injured and scores of homes burned. In addition, Bonar Law and the government were well aware that the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1912, were arming and drilling to fight Home Rule. I doubt that my relatives in Ballydonoghue thought much about the north before then. It was far away on a long train journey or by miles of bad roads. But the rise of the Ulster Volunteers electrified separatists in the south. They watched the British state do nothing to stop the import of weapons by the UVF. If the Ulster Protestants could have a militia to fight Home Rule the Irish nationalists should have an equal right to defend it. The formation of the Irish Volunteers in late 1913 created a second private army on the island. That December, in Listowel, the first meeting of the Irish Volunteers heard Mr J. J. McKenna, a local merchant, urge the locals to follow the example set by the Unionist leader, Edward Carson: ‘He has been going around so far preaching what some called sedition,’ said McKenna. ‘At all events he had been preaching the rights of the people of the North to defend what he called their rights, but whether they were rights or whether they were wrongs, he was urging on them to defend them in the way that God intended.’4 (#litres_trial_promo) Another speaker said the Irish Volunteers wanted ‘no informers … no cads or cadgers [but] true, manly men’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Afterwards men and boys queued to place their right hand on the barrel of a gun and swear allegiance. From the outset the Irish Volunteers meant different things to different factions. The Home Rulers led by Parnell’s successor John Redmond wanted a force ready to defend the new devolved government when it came into being and hoped the drilling and marching would take some of the steam out of more militant nationalists. But the militants were ahead of him and gradually infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Republican Brotherhood – the IRB – sought complete independence rather than Home Rule within the empire.* (#litres_trial_promo) Separatist ideas in culture and sport had been growing since the end of the previous century. In the rural areas like north Kerry the appeal to ‘de-Anglicise Ireland’ provoked a strong response. Music, dancing and language lessons sponsored by the Gaelic League became popular.* (#litres_trial_promo) Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/fergal-keane/wounds-a-memoir-of-war-and-love/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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