Political Killings in Cork, 1921–1922

SECOND EDITION

GERARD MURPHY

Gill & Macmillan

Dedicated to the memory of Eugene Turpin (1926–2006)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

On its publication in 2010 The Year of Disappearances was the subject of significant controversy. This is not surprising given that the War of Independence period, though 90 years in the past, is still a contentious subject and there are many people both inside and outside of academic circles with strong views on how this period of Irish history is portrayed and interpreted. Much of the criticism directed at the book thus far was either of a peripheral or semantic nature and had little bearing on the main contents of the book—at least not in the eyes of reasonable persons reading it. However, history is a collaborative process and proceeds by a process of correction. I have, therefore, in this edition corrected any errors in the text that have been brought to my attention since the book was first published. I have also, insofar as I could, addressed various issues raised by providing additional information which I had not included in the first edition. Since the book originally went to print I have uncovered new material that I hope helps to clarify some issues which, due to pressure of deadlines, I was not able to include at the time.

Gerard Murphy

14 April 2011

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

In the autumn of 2003 I submitted a novel to several Irish publishers. The book, which detailed the operation of a sort of killing field operated by the IRA on the outskirts of Cork during the War of Independence, was well received, yet did not find a publisher. However, one well-respected publisher called me up and asked to meet with me. ‘Surely,’ she said, after she had established that the story was true in its essentials, ‘you don’t expect to get away with this?’ By this she meant that, though she liked the novel, it was none the less a work of fiction and would lead to as many questions as it would answers. ‘Was it true that the IRA was rounding up teenagers on the streets of Cork in 1921 and executing them as spies?’ When I said that, as far as I could establish, it was true, she said I had little choice but to write a non-fiction account of these events.

This entailed a lot of further research—the novel had been based on the version of events left by old Cork IRA men who had lived into the 1960s and 70s. I had no independent verification of these events at the time. The result of this search is what is to be found within the covers of this book. It does not claim to be the last word on these events. It is rather a summary of the evidence for the secret killings that took place in Cork city during the years of the revolution, not just during the War of Independence but right through the Civil War. It is the best I could do with what I uncovered, and some conclusions may turn out to be incorrect when more evidence becomes available. It is at best a theory or, rather, a series of interrelated theories. These may be refuted by future scholars. If so, good luck to them.

This is a dark part of Irish history and it has suited various interests to keep quiet about it for the best part of a century. However, all the events described here took place, some of them in the area in which I myself was brought up. What is less certain is the precise motivation behind many of the killings. History at a microscopic level is always a lot more complex than it might appear on superficial examination. War, even a war as limited and circumscribed as the Irish revolution, is an environment in which men (and occasionally women) are capable of doing almost anything. Hate is something that cannot be measured and is often unfathomable to those of us who are lucky enough to live in times and environments that are free of conflict. It is therefore difficult and probably unfair to judge what people did in times when extreme behaviour was the order of the day. War is a phenomenon from which very few protagonists emerge smelling of roses. None the less, whether we like it or not, to write history is in effect to sit in judgment on the past. History is not a chemical that can be assayed in a lab; it is made of human failure and pettiness, just as it can sometimes be made of the most extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice and bravery.

There were many times during the writing of this book when I felt that it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie—often in this instance in their anonymous and unmarked graves. There will be people who will be unhappy with this book because it opens up some of the deep divisions inherent in this as in any society. For people in conflict situations do things for all kinds of complex motivations. There is only one reason for publishing a book like this one: it is what happened; these are the facts, even if the truth is a much more elusive quarry than what can be reconstructed from mere facts. It was a very difficult book to write mainly because it suited everybody concerned to either lie about what happened, or cover it all up.

The reality is that during the early 1920s scores of people—at least 50 and probably many more—went missing in Cork city and the surrounding areas, executed by the IRA for various ‘crimes against the Republic’. In most of these cases their families were never to receive any information as to the fate of their loved ones. In many instances the families themselves colluded in the silence out of fear because to do otherwise would bring the ultimate sanction on other family members, as indeed sometimes happened. These killings were in most cases forgotten about eventually because in order to live in the new order of the Free State it was best to say nothing about the past and bury it along with the dead. Even the nascent state colluded in this silence since it was often less than helpful, for reasons of respectability and not ‘wanting to let the side down’, when relatives wrote concerning what had happened to the victims. ‘And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been.’ (Ecclesiasticus) This is the story of a few of them.

‘We buried the bodies in Carroll’s Bogs. Every spy who was shot in Cork was buried so that nothing was known about them. They just disappeared.’

MICK MURPHY O/C 2ND BATTALION, CORK NO I BRIGADE, IRA

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Epigraph

Part I

Chapter 1: The Mysterious Death of George Tilson

Chapter 2: The Story of Sing Sing

Chapter 3: The War in Cork

Chapter 4: The Political Landscape

Chapter 5: Martin Corry’s Ireland

Chapter 6: Help Comes from an Unexpected Source

Chapter 7: Knockraha was the Place for Spies

Part II

Chapter 8: The Dead of the Rea—Truth or Exaggeration?

Chapter 9: A City of Spies

Chapter 10: How Intelligent was British Intelligence?

Chapter 11: IRA Intelligence in Cork

Chapter 12: Love in a City of Intrigue

Chapter 13: Who Were the Spies?

Part III

Chapter 14: The Myth of the Anti-Sinn Féin League

Chapter 15: The Real Anti-Sinn Féin League

Chapter 16: The November Abductions

Chapter 17: Yet Another Spy Circle

Part IV

Chapter 18: The Cork YMCA

Chapter 19: On the Run

Chapter 20: The Deaths of James and Fred Blemens

Chapter 21: Death of an Organist

Chapter 22: A Sorrower Writes

Chapter 23: Some Undercover Connections

Part V

Chapter 24: A Tale of Two Spies

Chapter 25: Through the Eye of a Needle

Chapter 26: A Compendium of Victimhood

Chapter 27: Dumping Stores

Chapter 28: Another Missing Teenager

Part VI

Chapter 29: Sgt Major Mackintosh and Michael Williams

Chapter 30: Missing Soldiers

Chapter 31: A Murderous Postscript

Part VII

Chapter 32: The Disappearance of Edward Parsons

Chapter 33: The Story of the Roycrofts

Chapter 34: The Hornibrooks Revisited

Chapter 35: The Dunmanway Murders—a Reassessment

Chapter 36: Porte of Cork

Chapter 37: He Knows Us All Well

Chapter 38: The Shooting of William Goff Beale

Chapter 39: A Boulogne Mystery

Chapter 40: Old Friends and Older Enemies

Part VIII

Chapter 41: The Many Gangs of General Tudor

Chapter 42: The Cork ‘Murder Gang’

Chapter 43: Warren Peacocke

Chapter 44: Clerical Errors

Part IX

Chapter 45: Life in Protestant Cork, 1922

Chapter 46: The Year of Disappearances

Chapter 47: Weekly Surveys

Chapter 48: Beware the Ides of March

Chapter 49: A Time for Revenge

Chapter 50: St Patrick’s Day Parade

Chapter 51: The Missing Masons

Chapter 52: Reactions and Responsibilities

Chapter 53: Claims and Counter-Claims

Part X

Chapter 54: ‘Prepare for Execution’

Chapter 55: On Active Service

Chapter 56: A Private Band of Avengers

Chapter 57: Saying Goodbye to the House

Chapter 58: With God on our Side

Appendices

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Appendix V

Appendix VI

Appendix VII

Appendix VIII

Appendix IX

Appendix X

Appendix XI

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

Chapter 1

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GEORGE TILSON

On 19 February 1921, as the mail train from Fishguard pulled into Paddington, a man called Fred Jones, an electrician employed by the Great Western Railway Company, was surprised to find one of the toilet doors locked. He heard groans coming from inside and then he heard a thud as if someone had fallen. When the door was finally forced open, he found a dying man slumped against the toilet. There was blood all over the floor. The man’s throat had been cut. He was still alive, though unable to speak. He pointed towards his coat pocket, indicating to Jones to take out what was inside. In the pocket Fred Jones found a note that read: ‘I have been shadowed all the way from Cork, but they shall not get me.’ The man was taken to St Mary’s Hospital where he died without making a statement.¹

The man’s name was George Frederick Tilson, a 36-year-old pawnbroker from Cork and, though there was a suggestion that he had been murdered, the inquest into his death found that he had slit his own throat and the reason was stated in the envelope in his pocket: ‘not to be done in by them’. For ‘them’, the men who he believed had followed him from Cork, were members of the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA, though there is no evidence that they had actually done so.

Tilson had received a threatening letter a few days earlier warning him that his life was in danger and he was ‘going to be next’. The letter was written in capitals in pencil and was unsigned. As a result he decided to leave immediately to stay with friends in the south of England. As his brother saw him off from the Cork docks on the Friday evening, he gave ‘the impression that he was being pursued’ and was terrified of what he called ‘the overshadowing danger’.

Such was his terror of the men who were then in the process of waging war to wrest political control of Ireland from Britain that he would rather take his own life than fall into their hands, even though at that point he was probably safe from whatever punishment he believed the IRA might have had in store for him. A police sergeant who arrived on the scene asked Tilson if he had done the deed himself. Tilson nodded. When the policeman suggested that he had been very foolish, Tilson ‘shook his head in a negative manner’. He also shook his head to indicate that he was not a member of the RIC. It is assumed by many people acquainted with the case that Tilson had been a British agent and that he was on the run from IRA retribution. Yet he denied that too. His own brother Richard Tilson, a former Cork Nationalist politician and JP,² cross-examined Jones at the coroner’s inquest a week later. He said his brother was a man of private means and had taken no part in local politics.

‘You are certain he did not make a statement to the effect that he was a secret service agent?’

‘Perfectly certain.’

The second witness, a time-keeper in the railway, also said in reply to the coroner that the dying man did not say anything to him about being in the secret service. The coroner concluded that he was quite sure the dead man had no connection with police work of any kind, ‘nor apparently had he any connection with political matters’. The jury returned a verdict of ‘suicide, whilst temporarily insane, as the result of receiving the letter’. Curiously, the Cork Examiner account of the inquest also carried a retraction, headed:

UNFOUNDED STATEMENT

In our issue of Monday, a paragraph was quoted from the London Star which read the deceased had said he was a secret service agent. If such a statement had been made by the unfortunate gentleman, it would of course be regarded as a delusion, but it is evident from the above report that in point of fact he made no such statement.³

Writing years later, several IRA survivors of the conflict claimed that Tilson was a member of a group calling itself the Anti-Sinn Féin League, a shadowy civilian counter-revolutionary organisation consisting of a cabal of loyalist businessmen in Cork city who, the IRA men claimed, were dedicated to retaining the British link and were employed by the British military establishment to gather information on IRA personnel and operations. The notion that such an organisation existed runs through the accounts of many Cork IRA men. Tilson, so the theory goes, was one of six members of this organisation to die, though the only one to die by his own hand; the others were either executed or assassinated by the IRA. As a result of the assassination campaign, in this version of events, the ‘League’ was frightened into silence and the IRA had won a major victory against one of its most serious enemies. Tilson was supposedly the last of this group to be targeted.

While this all appears perfectly plausible, it is not quite the full story. For a start, Tilson’s brother was a Home Rule politician, not a Unionist, and was all his life a very popular figure in Cork. George Tilson died by his own hand largely because he was mentally unstable. There was no question that he was terrified and that he had received a threatening letter; he may even have been some sort of ‘spy’. But he was not a member of a loyalist cabal of counter-revolutionaries dedicated to reversing the Irish revolution, for the simple reason that there is no firm evidence that such a cabal actually existed.⁴ Yet the accounts left by up to a dozen members of the Old IRA subsequently claim that such an organisation did exist. One of the aims of this book is to look at this thorny question and to show where the notion of a so-called loyalist ‘spy circle’ came from. This is of more than academic interest because it led to dozens of deaths as members of this society were pursued across the county of Cork and in many cases shot dead in cold blood with little more than suspicion acting as ‘evidence’. It is a story of some complexity and takes in what has since been called the intelligence war or the ‘dirty war’ fought between the IRA and a variety of British forces in Cork city and surrounding areas. It can justifiably be called one of the murkiest aspects of Irish history. It has largely been neglected until recently and it is a topic that many people in Cork do not want to talk about almost a hundred years later.

Chapter 2

If you travel the main Cork-Dublin road heading north out of Cork city and you look to your right as you approach the village of Watergrasshill, you will see a broad stretch of upland consisting mostly of pine forest and unreclaimed moorland. This area, lying between the parishes of Knockraha and Watergrasshill of around five or six square miles and around 700 ft above sea level, is known locally as the Rea. It looks like any other hillside, isolated, lonely, a piece of high marginal land with small farms and low bungalows cosying up to its rather bleak forest-covered brow. Once a broad upland bog or moorland, the land is now a forest managed by Coillte and is covered with dense Nordic pine.

But this is no ordinary hill and if you go for a Sunday walk along the many forest pathways signposted on the roadside lay-bys on the road between Watergrasshill and Leamlara, nobody will tell you that this otherwise benign piece of public walkway was once the scene where death was meted out on an almost nightly basis. For the Rea, less than ten miles from Cork city and therefore the nearest piece of isolated land to the city, was the killing field where the Cork IRA No. 1 Brigade carried out most of its executions during the Irish War of Independence and the period immediately afterwards. This is the burial ground for at least 20 and perhaps as many as 30 victims of that conflict. Yet virtually nobody under the age of 50 living in the locality knows anything about this now. To them it is just a hill, a place to take the dog for a walk and, for a brief period in the late 1990s, a focus of protest groups as locals tried to block plans by Cork County Council to site a municipal dump there. What very few people realise now is that in the 1920s this was a dumping ground of an entirely different kind.

This was not because it was a secret. Many of the older people knew about it, including my father, though he rarely mentioned these events. It was just that for two generations most people were reluctant to talk about it. And then because it was never mentioned, it just got forgotten about. It is not the only such secret burial ground in County Cork: many bogs throughout the county contain victims of the period, but this is one of the most important, at least in the vicinity of the city.

My father’s generation—he was born in 1924—was half-afraid of the generation that came before them, the sometimes brave and sometimes savage men who had fought against the British Empire to secure political autonomy for the southern two-thirds of Ireland. The older men, the revolutionary generation, cast a long shadow over political life and discourse that was still palpable well into the 1960s. Their word was law, not only in the normally accepted sense of that term but also in the political and judicial sense. For politics, both national and local, was still dominated by the denizens of what has come to be called ‘the struggle for freedom’. When John F. Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963 and addressed the Dáil, what is striking about the television footage of his speech is the youthfulness and energy of the US president compared to the Muppet-like doze of his ageing audience. Many members of both sides of the Dáil and the Seanad were at that time in their sixties or early seventies. My generation was born, though we did not see it like that at the time, into a gerontocracy. And this was a gerontocracy that liked to guard its secrets. For, though many people knew about them and had heard the rumours, the killings in the Rea and elsewhere were carried out quietly. Only a small number of people knew of them even as they were going on in the 1920s.

It was in the summer of 1994 that I stumbled on the story of the Rea and how it operated. Very quickly I realised that this was one of the grimmest and most neglected untold stories of the period. It was obvious that if what I had been told could be substantiated, it would be a significant unwritten episode of the national struggle. If it were true, and I was initially extremely sceptical that it was, then something bigger was going on here than mere local history.

Yet it was a local historian called Eugene Turpin who told me about it. Eugene, a highly intelligent and engaging man with an interest in everything from the history of machinery to the history of the GAA, the IRA and the Blueshirts, told me this extraordinary tale. But I was quickly able to corroborate from other local sources most of what he told me.

‘I presume you’ve heard about Sing Sing,’ he said to me one evening in his kitchen in the spectacularly dull and damp summer of 1994, taking a manuscript about the size of a small masters thesis down off the shelf.

‘Sing Sing?’

I had never heard of it, outside of the American prison of that name. The essence of what Eugene Turpin had to say was that the IRA ran a sort of killing field in the bogs north of Knockraha, where prisoners taken by the Cork No. 1 Brigade in the city and surrounding areas were executed. Prior to execution the prisoners were held in an underground vault in a local cemetery at Kilquane, a mile outside the village. The vault with grim Irish humour became known as Sing Sing. If Turpin’s story was to be believed, up to 35 individuals were executed in the Rea, north of Kilquane, which lies in the heart of east Cork between the villages of Knockraha, Watergrasshill and Leamlara.

Not only was he able to tell me what had gone on there, but ‘the thesis’ contained documentary evidence of a lot of the killings of prisoners in the area. This was a monograph written in the 1970s, a Macra na Feirme project entitled Foras Feasa na Paróiste,¹ a history of the parish of Knockraha’s role in the War of Independence compiled while most of the survivors were still alive. It had been written by a Knockraha man, Jim Fitzgerald.

The intention of the book was to give a detailed picture of Knockraha’s role in the War of Independence. One of the more interesting details was that there were two bomb factories in the parish, where local IRA men made iron casings for hand grenades. Some of these grenades can now be seen in the Cork County Museum in Fitzgerald’s Park. However, the bulk of the book, which in its original version ran to over 90 pages of dense two-column script, is taken up with the holding and execution of prisoners. The essence of the story was that the Cork No. 1 Brigade used the vault in Kilquane graveyard outside Knockraha as a prison for holding people before taking them up to the Rea for execution. The operation of this prison is given in great detail.

My first reaction to this was one of disbelief. Could executions on this scale have been going on only a few miles from where I was reared? Could I have spent nearly 40 years in the area and have been blissfully unaware that death was dealt out on such a scale in such a small area? Where was this in the history I had been taught, the catalogue of struggle against ‘the British oppressor’ that had been drummed into us from the very first day at primary school, the centuries of grief that our ‘noble’ nation had to suffer before ‘freedom’ was finally achieved? (In the 1960s we were the most noble nation on earth.) Every morning of my young life I could see the Rea across the valley from our house. It formed the south-eastern horizon of my childhood world, where the sun rose every morning. It was seven or eight miles away but it was still within the universe of my childhood. I had never thought of it as anything other than a hill. My mother had been born to the south and east of it and had cycled across the Rea every Sunday of her childhood in the years immediately after the conflict. It was inconceivable that a few years before my mother routinely cycled that lonely road, it was host to a far more grisly form of traffic.

Yet here was an account detailing the execution of dozens of prisoners,² as seen from the viewpoint of the men who were involved in the executions and burial of the bodies. These prisoners were a mixture of British soldiers, Black and Tans and civilian ‘spies’, only three of whom are mentioned by name. Martin Corry, the local IRA captain and later well-known Fianna Fáil TD, who was Jim Fitzgerald’s main source, claimed the real number was 35. Fitzgerald went to considerable lengths in the 1970s to corroborate Corry’s account of events by talking to other survivors of the time on both sides of the political divide. (His taped interviews with Martin Corry, containing much of the same detail, are now in the possession of the Cork Military Museum.) He was lucky to have gathered his material when he did, while most of the survivors of E Company (4th Battalion, 1st Cork Brigade) were still alive, for by the time I got interested in it some 20 years later, they were all dead. He said he only wrote down what he managed to confirm from more than one source. It was difficult, even for a sceptic like me, to argue with such an approach.

One Sunday in September 1994 Eugene Turpin showed me the vault. It was an underground mausoleum of solid stone right in the middle of the graveyard and had been used apparently for holding dead bodies during the days of the body snatchers. It was about 12 to 15 feet long with an arched roof and a creaking rusted iron door and was about 6 feet high at its highest point. The first time I was shown it, it was covered in briars and scrub and hidden behind a crumbling tomb, almost invisible unless you knew where to look for it. The vault has since been opened up to the public and there is now a plaque near by commemorating its use in the War of Independence. It is a grim cave-like structure, though it looked much worse before it was cleaned out, as no doubt it did in 1920. It is still possible to see the holes in the iron door made by Ned Maloney, the local blacksmith and so-called ‘Governor of Sing Sing’, who drilled the holes so that the prisoners inside could breathe.

There was only one problem. I had no corroborating evidence that any of this stood up in the broader historical context. If these stories were true, then there would have to have been a lot of disappeared persons from the vicinity of Cork, both military, police and civilians. Evidence of this seemed, initially at least, to be difficult to find.

And there were other problems with it from a historical point of view. Despite a 12-month period when I read every published book and article connected with the War of Independence in Cork, I did not come across a single reference to Sing Sing or to the execution of prisoners in Knockraha. Looking through the newspapers of the time revealed only a picture of general chaos. Such was the mayhem that prevailed, that finding anything connected with these disappearances seemed futile. Either a lot was going on that went unreported in the press, or Corry’s account of his ‘war’ was a gross exaggeration.

As I began to look into the history of the period, all kinds of contradictions began to appear which had the effect of throwing me into years of hopeless confusion. It was in that confusion that I gradually began to untangle the secret operations of the IRA and the various branches of British intelligence as they operated in Cork at the time. It turned out that many of the facts could, with considerable effort, be unearthed. Those facts told of a ‘dirty’ war, of espionage and counter-espionage, of terror and counter-terror, of episodes so well covered up that no historian had been able to write about them. Here was a tale waiting to be told. It was not a pleasant story and had either been ignored or buried by nationalist historians for two generations. It was time for the first of my many trips to, and contact with, archives and museums all over Britain and Ireland. It gradually began to dawn on me that the truth of the time had never been told; that the received history we had all been taught in school had been full of evasions and even lies. It was not a happy place to be, but I felt if I stayed at it long enough, I might finally dig out the facts as they happened. What I did not realise then was that it would take me the best part of a decade to do so.

Chapter 3

From 1919 the Irish Volunteers, the immediate forerunner of the IRA, were organised into three brigades in Cork. The Cork No. 1 Brigade covered the centre of the county and stretched from Youghal in the east to the Kerry border. Including Cork city and several major towns, it was the biggest brigade in the country. It was organised and led initially by Tomás MacCurtain, then by Terence MacSwiney and finally by Seán O’Hegarty. North of this lay the Cork No. 2 Brigade which covered north Cork and was commanded by Liam Lynch. Finally we have what is probably the best-known of all the IRA units of the war, the west Cork Brigade, otherwise known as the Cork No. 3 Brigade, led for most of the conflict by the Hales brothers of Ballinadee outside Kinsale, though its flying column was led from the autumn of 1920 onwards by Tom Barry. Knockraha and Sing Sing were in the area controlled by the Cork No. 1 Brigade.

The ‘war’, if it can properly be called a war, can be divided into three phases. The first phase ran from late 1919 to the early summer of 1920 and consisted largely of assassinations of RIC men by the IRA. Ireland did not so much ‘descend’ into violence as it was nudged. As early as 1917, when the city battalion raided the Cork Grammar School in order to snatch the rifles of the Officer Training Corps (one of only three in Ireland where putative officers for the British Army received their first taste of military training), Mick Murphy, later to gain the reputation as one of the most ruthless of the guerrilla leaders in the city, remembered Roibeárd Lankford, who led the raid, ordering his men that ‘in the case of such an eventuality [possible opposition], we were not to hesitate to shoot’.¹ Lankford, who had been sworn into the IRB only months earlier by Michael Collins,² was itching, like Dan Breen some two years later, for the shooting to start.

The second phase, which began to emerge in the summer of 1920, was what has come to be called the Tan War. The British government, reluctant to allow its army to become involved in what it tried to persuade itself was a domestic matter, decided to unleash a police war on the IRA. The RIC, which had to date borne the brunt of IRA actions, began to lose significant numbers through early resignations. Lloyd George decided to reverse the decline by recruiting ex-soldiers to fill its ranks. These were to become the notorious Black and Tans who were to terrorise the population for the next year. The Black and Tans were themselves augmented in the latter half of 1920 by the Auxiliaries, ex-officers recruited into a separate force for a similar purpose, and were to prove to be one of the worst embarrassments in British political history. Not only did they fail to quell the IRA, they caused moderate opinion in Britain and elsewhere to clamour for a settlement. The Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries are a disgraceful chapter in the history of modern democracy; their tactics would not have been out of place among the SS or the Blackshirts of ten years later. However, their excesses have been more than adequately dealt with elsewhere. But they managed to conjure up the political miracle of making the IRA, which in 1919 had received considerable odium for its policy of assassinating policemen, look respectable. The combined militias of the ‘new’ RIC inadvertently contributed as much to the cause of Irish freedom as did many brigades of the IRA.

The final phase of the conflict took place from the beginning of 1921 to the Truce of 11 July of that year. In Munster this period was marked by Martial Law and the conflict had become a ‘war’ in the normally accepted meaning of the term. The Martial Law Area (MLA) was now under the control of the British Army, and the RIC and its various militias became subservient to the army. The war in this period was overshadowed by backroom rumours of a settlement, though on the military front the army was successful enough against the IRA for senior officers almost universally to complain that victory had been snatched from their grasp by the Truce. However, this was almost certainly an illusion as it seriously underestimated the IRA’s capacity for survival. The last six months of the conflict were by far the most violent, with both sides shooting civilians and carrying out unspeakable deeds on a daily basis. Death swaggered on the streets of Cork in the first six months of 1921 and no one was immune. While the army limited the excesses of the Tans and the Auxiliaries—the random shootings of civilians by British forces which occurred almost on a nightly basis in the last months of 1920 were greatly reduced with the introduction of the MLA—a military cordon was thrown over the city; all bridges and major intersections were constantly manned; and searches were the order of the day. At the same time, remaining indoors was the order of the night, while undercover army and RIC patrols in Ford cars raided suspect houses and IRA men and others were bombed into oblivion or shot ‘while trying to escape’.

The attrition rate—that is to say the number of casualties inflicted and suffered per head of population—did not differ significantly among the three brigades. However, the war was pursued quite differently in each of the three brigade areas. This was partly due to the character of the individual leaderships and partly due to how the British forces fought back in each area.

The fight was cleanest in north Cork, if any war can be described as clean. Liam Lynch and Seán Moylan, who succeeded him, endeavoured wherever possible to fight within the rules of war. Captured prisoners had their wounds bandaged and British soldiers and indeed RIC men rounded up in ambushes were often allowed to walk back to their barracks after attacks. This was to save Moylan’s life when in May 1921 he was captured by British forces and would have been shot out of hand had not one of his captors remembered his gallant treatment of prisoners in earlier attacks.³ Only in the last months before the Truce were prisoners shot, and this was as a result of betrayals by captured British troops of IRA positions; by my estimation only seven civilians were shot as spies by the north Cork Brigade during the Anglo-Irish conflict.

At the other end of the scale was the west Cork Brigade, where the campaign was fought with particular brutality. While it is easy to castigate the likes of Tom Barry at this remove in time and focus on particularly brutal episodes like Kilmichael, the main reason why west Cork descended into savagery was that the other side fought back ruthlessly from the very start. While in north Cork the British Army was almost integrated into the society, having huge barracks and camps in Fermoy, Kilworth, Buttevant, Mallow and Ballyvonaire,⁴ and the RIC were ‘not tough’,⁵ in west Cork individual RIC officers such as Sgt Mulvey and Sgt Hussey, and indeed the Essex Regiment when they arrived in the spring of 1920, were particularly assiduous in pursuing known republicans. The methods employed both by the RIC and the army were particularly savage with midnight raids on the homes of known suspects and prisoners being savagely beaten to extract information. While the forces of the Crown drifted sleepily into the conflict in north Cork, apart from the sacking of Mallow and Fermoy in the wake of IRA attacks, they were a lot more savage in west Cork.⁶

In west Cork guerrilla warfare was mutual and reached spectacular depths of depravity: undercover RIC men dressed as farmers flogged suspects with wire until they passed out. While the Essex Regiment stationed at Bandon and Kinsale get most of the blame for the brutality of the British Army, it appears that it was the undercover activities of the RIC and the Intelligence department, led by Major Percival, that carried out most of the torture and shootings. Even a cursory perusal of the newspapers of the time and documents such as those gathered by Flor Crowley⁷ give many examples of the violent treatment meted out to suspects in west Cork. Any suspected IRA man, even if he had never been on a route march, was liable to get such a beating that it is no wonder quite a number of them gave away the names of their comrades. Some were themselves shot as informers as a result, though surely the term ‘informer’ is not quite right for an unfortunate who may have had his nails pulled out or who was flogged to the point of collapse to extract information. The killing and burial of such ‘informers’ by the IRA says much about the nature of the conflict west of Bandon. The recent description of west Cork as the Gaza Strip⁸ of the Anglo-Irish War is not without its justification. Tom Hales, commandant of the brigade, was savagely brutalised himself. In the same month in 1921 that a column of north Corkmen ambushed a British Army convoy at Labbeecallee outside Fermoy, where one soldier was killed and the others allowed to walk back to barracks, Tom Barry and his men opened fire on a group of soldiers playing football near the barracks in Bandon.

But it is the Cork No. 1 Brigade that is the subject of this book and in terms of the known statistics of brutality and counter-brutality the perception is that it lies somewhere between the other two, being neither as cleanly fought as the war in north Cork nor as vicious as the conflict west of Bandon. There are other significant differences: while north and west Cork were led by men who at the time kept to the political shadows, Cork One, as it came to be called, was led by two very public figures. Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney were major political figures in Cork city, being senior members of Sinn Féin as well as successive O/Cs of the brigade. They were both also successive Lord Mayors of Cork and were to become the great Cork martyrs to the Irish cause.

Another difference is that, while the fighting units of the 2nd and 3rd Brigades were led by men who displayed significant military competence, the 1st Brigade found itself on several occasions at the receiving end of severe military setbacks at the hands of British forces, suggesting that there was more leakage of information from within the ranks than there was in north and west Cork. Also, 1st Brigade guerrilla leaders displayed a lot of carelessness and outright incompetence on several occasions.

The Volunteer movement had been set up in Cork in 1913. After the split with the National Volunteers, it was to keep operating, that is to say, drilling, marching and attempting to arm itself, with increasing membership up to 1916. The Easter Rising found the Cork Volunteers ready to fight in the hills west of Macroom, but in the confusion and countermanding orders between the IRB and the Volunteer command in Easter week not a shot was fired. However, 112 Cork Volunteers were rounded up and interned in 1916.⁹

The fallout of the debacle of the attempted rising in Cork was that it radicalised the leadership. People like MacSwiney and MacCurtain were racked with guilt at the failure of Cork to ‘rise’ in 1916. And so they were determined that if conflict was to break out again, the Cork Volunteers were not going to be found wanting. This was compounded by the humiliating climbdown mediated by the Catholic Bishop of Cork, Dr Cohalan, and local politicians when the Cork Volunteers handed in their weapons in the belief that they would not be confiscated by the military. Since this was exactly what happened and the guns were passed on to the army, the Cork IRA was even more determined to fight when the opportunity arose again and became deeply suspicious of Nationalist politicians. And so began the running feud with Bishop Cohalan which was to lead to the bishop in late 1920 excommunicating IRA members guilty of murder.

During 1919 there were only a few sporadic shootings of RIC men and soldiers in the county. It was only at the start of 1920 that the conflict began to gather momentum. On the night of 20 March 1920, probably as a result of the killing of a Constable Murtagh of the RIC in the streets of Cork some hours earlier, the Sinn Féin Mayor and O/C of the brigade Tomás MacCurtain was shot dead in his home by RIC men with soot-blackened faces. MacCurtain, who had been a charismatic leader and very popular in Cork, had been commiserating with Murtagh’s widow only hours before the assassination. The IRA held District Inspector Swanzy of the RIC responsible for the murder and he himself was in turn assassinated by Cork IRA men in Lisburn, Co. Antrim, the following August.¹⁰

MacCurtain was succeeded as Lord Mayor and also as O/C of the brigade by Terence MacSwiney, a well-known nationalist playwright. It was MacSwiney, so local lore has it, who decreed that the vault in the graveyard at Kilquane be used as a prison by the IRA. MacSwiney was a more intellectual and ascetic man than MacCurtain, and when he was arrested by the British Army in August 1920 and found guilty of having in his possession a cipher key for decoding RIC messages, he immediately went on hunger strike.

The hunger strike had been a weapon used by many IRA prisoners before MacSwiney. It led to a series of acquittals and climbdowns by the British government and several waves of IRA men were released as a result of the moral pressure inherent in such strikes. But by the time MacSwiney began his strike, the government was not going to back down. And neither was MacSwiney. He died on 25 October after 72 days on hunger strike. His death attracted world attention to the conflict in Ireland and was probably more instrumental than any military successes or otherwise in ultimately persuading the British government that force could no longer be effective in trying to quell unrest in Ireland. The moral force of MacSwiney’s martyrdom was felt anywhere in the world that people read newspapers.

MacSwiney was then replaced as commander of Cork No. 1 by Seán O’Hegarty. O’Hegarty, a 40-year-old Fenian of the old school, had been the IRB ‘centre’ for Cork for many years and as a result had a long history of intimidation and enforced exile imposed on him by the authorities. He was very much a backroom operative and had been restive during the command of MacCurtain and MacSwiney, being in favour of more direct action than they were. A resident of Douglas Road in Cork—he worked as a storekeeper in the local workhouse—he had the reputation of having a fearsome intelligence and being utterly ruthless in everything he did. He has recently been painted as something of a fanatical figure, the éminence grise of the revolution.¹¹ But it is difficult to judge him as he left very little in the way of personal papers or documentary evidence of his actions or his decisions. Certainly the IRA battalions under his control were ruthless, but that may be due partly to circumstances and partly to some of the men under his command. A fierce ascetic and atheist, O’Hegarty mistrusted Michael Collins and hated Richard Mulcahy, a feeling that appears to have been mutual. His relationship with MacCurtain and MacSwiney had never been easy. The leaders of the Cork Volunteers were too moderate for O’Hegarty and he had his own view of what the IRB should be about.

From his ascension to the leadership of the brigade on the capture of Terence MacSwiney in the summer of 1920 right to the outbreak of Civil War nearly two years later, O’Hegarty was the undisputed leader in Cork city and governed his fiefdom with no small amount of cunning and savagery. He also operated under a habitual cloak of secrecy. It is doubtful, even in the 12 months after the Truce when he was virtual dictator of the ‘republic of Cork’, that he would even have been recognised in the street. No photographs of him as a young man exist and he was not photographed until many years later. He had a sharp, rapier wit, his faithful deputy and right-hand man Florrie O’Donoghue wrote of him. He had a tongue that flayed, according to the much younger Ernie O’Malley. A ‘surly gob’ was what Richard Mulcahy called him.

If MacCurtain and MacSwiney were public figures, then O’Hegarty was the opposite. For two years he was probably the most significant republican leader outside of Collins and Mulcahy in charge of the biggest IRA unit in the country. Yet he is almost a forgotten figure. The main reason for this is that he shunned the limelight, perhaps out of habit; after all, he had spent over 20 years as a Fenian outlaw. He refused to take sides during the Civil War, being republican by inclination and thus anti-Treaty, while on the other hand as a member of the Collins-led IRB and a pragmatist, he recognised that Ireland had got as good a deal as it could expect in the circumstances. Thus the Civil War grieved him immensely and it has to be said to his credit that he made many efforts to bring the two sides together. He was notoriously reclusive and lived the last decades of his life in Gretta Garbo-like seclusion in a south Cork suburb. He drifted into the background after the Civil War but was held in the highest regard by Cork republicans until his death in 1963.¹²

Martial Law had been introduced into Munster on 5 January 1921 and was to run until the Truce of 11 July. While there were very few major operational successes on the part of the IRA in Cork city and the surrounding area during the first half of 1921, the period was marked by a descent into unprecedented savagery: the shooting of civilian ‘spies and informers’, the execution of military prisoners and the burning of loyalist houses in response to the ‘official’ reprisals by British forces, a euphemism for the destruction of property in the vicinity of IRA operations.

Most of the events described in this book took place in those final six months of the conflict and they prove that, when it comes to brutality, the Irish can mete it out as well as anybody else. What youthful Volunteer after allowing a group of Cameron Highlanders disarmed in east Cork in the summer of 1920 to cycle back to their barracks could envisage that in under a year he might be asked to execute 15-year-old boys? What idealistic young patriot could imagine, while on a route march to Blarney on a Sunday morning in the autumn of 1919, that a year and a half later he would pick up four unarmed young soldiers who had gone out to buy sweets in view of the impending Truce, when all IRA units had been informed of the ceasefire, take them to a field in Togher, shoot them and leave their bodies, in the sad rigour of death, to be found the next morning? For once shooting begins, a conflict can only intensify, and both sides find themselves in ever-widening cycles of degradation until one side or the other calls a halt.

The Anglo-Irish conflict of 1919–1921 was a very minor war in relative terms, as the memoirs of serving British officers attest. A ‘side-show in Southern Ireland’ is a term often used—a small war, but utterly vicious. I was once told that the worst peace is better than the best war. Ireland could be described as one of the ‘better wars’ in that casualty numbers on all sides were comparatively low. But for all that it was a squalid little conflict and very few emerge from it with their reputations enhanced. But some did, Seán Moylan and Liam Lynch among them, as well as minor players like the unnamed RIC man, a noted high-jumper, who recognised Connie Neenan, a senior IRA activist in the city, at a roadblock in Cork but waved him through, or the Auxiliary who told an IRA prisoner in west Cork to feign illness to avoid being summarily executed in his cell.¹³ In this story there are many tales of gallantry interspersed with the violence. But humanity is capable of great savagery as well as gallantry.

Chapter 4

The political landscape of north-east Cork from the late 1920s to the 1970s was dominated by Martin J. Corry. Corry was a Fianna Fáil TD from 1927 to 1969 and usually topped the polls as well as being the longest-serving member of Cork County Council. In the late 1960s he was a small, benign-looking old man in a soft felt hat who knocked on doors surrounded by supporters canvassing for votes in the run-up to general elections.¹ He was a colourful character, popular even with his political opponents, and was seen as a ‘great man to get things done’. It is said that when he emerged from the county council offices there would be queues around the corner of people waiting to ask political favours of him. If you wanted your road tarred or an outside toilet installed or a sewerage system put in place for a terrace of cottages then, as all my neighbours put it, ‘Martin was your man.’

Corry was also an unreconstructed republican of the old school and was frequently in the wars with Fianna Fáil and with de Valera.² On several occasions he threatened to leave the party when he felt they were not ‘Republican’ enough on various issues. He was noted for his pronouncements in the Dáil and for his extreme anti-British views. In a debate on exporting food to Britain in 1942, Corry remarked on British food shortages that ‘they have no more rabbits to get and now they are on the crows. I would not like to see too many crows going out to feed them. I think the crows are too good for them.’ On Northern Ireland he suggested that ‘I am personally in favour of storing up sufficient poison gas, so that when you get the wind in the right direction you can start at the border and let it travel.’ This could all be dismissed as bombast were it not for the fact that, if Jim Fitzgerald was correct, when Corry got the opportunity, he killed as many ‘Britishers’ of various types as he could get his hands on. All the evidence suggested that his public utterances were backed up with private deeds.³