Rebel Cork's Fighting Story 1916 - 21 E-Book

The Kerryman

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: The Fighting Stories
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 414

Beschreibung

Originally published by The Kerryman in 1947, this is one of the four titles in the Fighting Stories Series. It records the events of the War of Independence in the words of the people who fought it and those who wrote about it at the time. The book features reports on the Cork City Volunteers, the ambushes at Tureengarriffe, Clonbanin, Rathcoole, Tureen and many others, the murder of Tómas MacCurtain, the disastrous battle of Clonmult and the campaigns of the flying columns around the county from Mitchelstown to Blarney.With a selection of original pictures from the conflict and reports from both Kilmichael and Crossbarry, Rebel Cork's Fighting Story is a treasure trove of information and intriguing detail.

Leseprobe

REBEL CORK’S

Fighting Story 1916–21

Told By The Men Who Made It

With a Unique Pictorial Record of the Period

INTRODUCTION BY PETER HART SERIES EDITOR: BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR

MERCIER PRESS 3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd Blackrock, Cork, Ireland

www.mercierpress.iehttp://twitter.com/IrishPublisherhttp://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

Originally published by The Kerryman, 1947 This edition published by Mercier Press, 2009

© Preface: Brian Ó Conchubhair, 2009 © Introduction: Peter Hart, 2009 © Text: Mercier Press, 2009

ISBN: 978 1 85635 644 2 ePub ISBN: 978 1 78117 078 6 Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 079 3

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

CONTENTS

PREFACE (2009) BY BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION (2009) BY PETER HART

Why Cork?

Who were the IRA?

The IRA’s War

FOREWORD

THE CORK CITY VOLUNTEERS

RESCUE OF MACNEILUS FROM CORK JAIL

THE GREATNESS OF TOMÁS MACCURTAIN

ARREST AND MARTYRDOM OF TERENCE MACSWINEY

THE ATTACK ON BLARNEY POLICE BARRACKS

THE CAPTURE OF GENERAL LUCAS

THE SACKING OF CORK

THE KENTS AND THEIR FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

A PATRIOT PRIEST OF CORK CITY

MICK FITZGERALD, GALLANT SOLDIER OF FERMOY

SUCCESSFUL RAID ON MALLOW BARRACKS

CAUSED MUTINY IN LISTOWEL, SHOT IN CORK

THE AMBUSH AT TOUREEN

AUXILIARIES ANNIHILATED AT KILMICHAEL

THE BOYS OF KILMICHAEL

THE FIGHT AT BURGATIA HOUSE, ROSSCARBERY

THE MEN OF BARRY’S COLUMN

ROUT OF THE BRITISH AT CROSSBARRY

CHARLIE HURLEY’S WORK AND DEATH FOR IRELAND

IN MEMORIAM (TO CHARLIE HURLEY)

DESTRUCTION OF ROSSCARBERY POLICE BARRACKS

UPTON AMBUSH

THE HEROIC DEAD OF WEST CORK

NORTH CORK FROM 1915 TO THE TRUCE

Execution of Con Murphy

Successful Train Ambush

Tureengarriffe Ambush

Clonbanin Ambush

Rathcoole Ambush

In the Barony of Duhallow

Ballydrohane Ambush

Shooting of Charlie Reilly

The Capture of Seán Moylan

NIGHT OF MURDER AND ARSON IN FERMOY

NIGHT OF TERROR AT MALLOW RAILWAY STATION

THE EAST CORK BRIGADE IN ACTION

Capture of Carrigtwohill Police Barracks

Capture of Castlemartyr Police Barracks

Capture of Cloyne Police Barracks

Cameron Highlanders Attacked at Whiterock

Waiting for General Strickland

Column’s Escape from Trap without Casualty

Official Reprisals in Midleton

The Heroic Fight at Clonmult

East Cork Roads Mined

‘Shoot at Sight’

A Soldier’s Death

Last Letter of a Patriot

TERRIBLE ORDEAL OF AN EAST CORK FAMILY

CAMPAIGNING IN THE MITCHELSTOWN AREA

Mitchelstown Men in Battalion Flying Column

East Limerick Column

CUMANN NA MBAN IN REBEL CORK

PREFACE(2009)

AS WE APPROACH the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence/Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), interest among scholars and the general public in these historic events gathers unrelenting pace. Recent years have witnessed a slew of books, articles, documentaries and films, emerge at home and abroad all dealing with the events and controversies involved in the struggle for political independence in the period 1916–1922. While many of these projects have re-evaluated and challenged the standard nationalist narrative that dominated for so long, and indeed have contributed to a more nuanced and complex appreciation of the events in question, the absence of the famous Fighting Story series – initially published by The Kerryman newspaper and subsequently republished by Anvil Books – is a notable and regrettable absence. First published in Christmas and special editions of The Kerryman newspaper in the years before the Second World War, the articles subsequently appeared in four independent collections entitled Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Kerry’s Fighting Story, Limerick’s Fighting Story and Dublin’s Fighting Story between 1947–49. The choice of counties reflects the geographical intensity of the campaign as Dr Peter Hart explains in his new introduction to Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story: ‘The Munster IRA … was much more active than anywhere else except Longford, Roscommon and Dublin city.’ Marketed as authentic accounts and as ‘gripping episodes’ by ‘the men who made it’, the series was dramatically described as ‘more graphic than anything written of late war zones’, with ‘astonishing pictures’ and sold ‘at the very moderate price of two shillings’. Benefiting from The Kerryman’s wide distribution network and a competitive price, the books proved immediately popular at home and abroad, so much so that many, if not most, of the books were purchased by, and for, the Irish Diaspora. This competitive price resulted in part from the fact that ‘the producers were content to reduce their own profit and to produce the booklet at little above the mere cost of production’. Consequently, however, the volumes quickly disappeared from general circulation. Dr Ruán O’Donnell explains in the new introduction to Limerick’s Fighting Story, ‘The shelf life … was reduced by the poor production values they shared. This was a by-product of the stringent economies of their day when pricing, paper quality, binding and distribution costs had to be considered [which] rendered copies vulnerable to deterioration and unsuited to library utilisation.’

The books targeted not only the younger generation, who knew about those times by hearsay only, but also the older generation who ‘will recall vividly a memorable era and the men who made it’. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter notes in the new introduction to Dublin’s Fighting Story that these volumes answered the perceived need for Volunteers to record their stories in their own words, in addition to ensuring the proper education and appreciation of a new generation for their predecessors’ sacrifices. The narrative, he writes ‘captures the excitement and the immediacy of the Irish War of Independence and the belief that the leaders of the revolution did not urge people to take dangerous courses they were not themselves prepared to take’. These four books deserve reprinting, therefore, not only for the important factual information they contain, and the resource they offer scholars of various disciplines, but also because of the valuable window they open on the mentality of the period. As Professor J.J. Lee observes in the introduction to Kerry’s Fighting Story, for anyone ‘trying to reconstruct in very different times the historical reality of what it felt like at the time, there is no substitute for contemporary accounts, however many questions these accounts may raise. We know what was to come. Contemporaries did not.’ The insight these books offer on IRA organisation at local level suggest to Dr Peter Hart ‘why IRA units were so resilient under pressure, and how untrained, inexperienced men could be such formidable soldiers … Irish guerrillas fought alongside their brothers, cousins, school and teammates, and childhood friends – often in the very lanes, fields and streets where they had spent their lives together’. In addition these texts reveal the vital roles, both active and passive, women played in the struggle of Irish independence.

The establishment of Anvil Books in 1962 saw a reissuing of certain volumes, Cork and Limerick in particular. The link between The Kerryman and Anvil Books was Dan Nolan (1910–1989). Son of Thomas Nolan, and nephew of Daniel Nolan and Maurice Griffin, he was related to all three founders of The Kerryman newspaper that commenced publishing in 1904. His obituary in that newspaper describes how he ‘was only a nipper when he looked down the barrels of British guns as His Majesty’s soldiers tried to arrest the proprietors of The Kerryman for refusing to publish recruitment advertisements. And he saw the paper and its employees being harassed by the Black and Tans.’ On graduating from Castleknock College, he joined the paper’s staff in 1928 replacing his recently deceased uncle, Maurice Griffin. His father’s death in 1939 saw Dan Nolan become the paper’s managing director and his tenure would, in due course, see a marked improvement in its commercial performance: circulation increased and ultimately exceeded 40,000 copies per week, and advertisement revenue also increased significantly. Under his stewardship The Kerryman, according to Séamus McConville in an obituary in the paper, ‘became solidly established as the unchallenged leader in sales and stature among provincial newspapers’. Recognising his talent, the Provincial Newspaper Association elected him president in 1951. Among his projects were the Rose of Tralee Festival, Tralee Racecourse and Anvil Books. Founded in 1962 with Nolan and Rena Dardis as co-directors, Anvil Books established itself as the pre-eminent publisher of memoirs and accounts dealing with the Irish War of Independence. Indeed the first book published by Anvil Books was a 1962 reprint of Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story in a print run of 10,000 copies.

Conscious, no doubt, of the potential for controversy, the original foreword was careful not to present the Fighting Stories as ‘a detailed or chronological history of the fight for independence’, and acknowledged ‘that in the collection of data about such a period errors and omissions can easily occur and so they will welcome the help of readers who may be able to throw more light upon the various episodes related in the series. Such additional information will be incorporated into the second edition of the booklets which the present rate of orders would seem to indicate will be called for in the very near future.’ Subsequent editions of Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story and Limerick’s Fighting Story did appear in print with additional material as O’Donnell discusses in his enlightening introduction to Limerick’s Fighting Story, but the proposed Tipperary’s Fighting Story, as advertised in the Limerick volume with a suggested publication date of 1948 and a plea for relevant information or pictures, never materialised. This 2009 edition adheres to the original texts as first published by The Kerryman rather than the later editions by Anvil Books. A new preface, introduction and index frame the original texts that remain as first presented other than the silent correction of obvious typographical errors.

The preface to the final book, Dublin’s Fighting Story, concluded by noting that the publishers ‘would be satisfied if the series serves to preserve in the hearts of the younger generation that love of country and devotion to its interests which distinguished the men whose doings are related therein’. The overall story narrated in these four books is neither provincial nor insular, nor indeed limited to Ireland, but as Lee remarks in Kerry’s Fighting Story, it is rather ‘like that of kindred spirits elsewhere, at home and abroad, an example of the refusal of the human spirit to submit to arbitrary power’. The hasty and almost premature endings of several chapters may be attributed to the legacy of the Irish Civil War whose shadow constantly hovers at the edges, threatening to break into the narrative, and in fact does intrude in a few instances. Lee opines that writers avoided the Civil War as it ‘was still too divisive, still too harrowing, a nightmare to be recalled into public memory. Hence the somewhat abrupt ending of several chapters at a moment when hopes were still high and the horrors to come yet unimagined.’

Ireland at the start of the twenty-first century is a very different place than it was when these books were first published. Irish historiography has undergone no less a transformation and to bridge the gap four eminent historians have written new introductions that set the four Fighting Stories in the context of recent research and shifts in Irish historiography. Yet Lee’s assessment in reference to Kerry holds true for each of the four volumes: ‘Whatever would happen subsequently, and however perspectives would inevitably be affected by hindsight, for better and for worse, Kerry’s Fighting Story lays the foundation for all subsequent studies of these foundation years of an independent Irish state.’ As we move toward the centenary of 1916, the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Civil War, it is appropriate and fitting that these key texts be once again part of the public debate of those events and it is sincerely hoped that as Ruán O’Donnell states: ‘This new life of a classic of its genre will facilitate a fresh evaluation of its unique perspectives on the genesis of the modern Irish state.’

DR BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR SERIES EDITOR UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME EASTER 2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL not only to these scholars who penned the new introductions for their time and expertise, but also to the following who assisted in numerous ways: Beth Bland, Angela Carothers, Aedín Ní Bhroithe-Clements (Hesburgh Library), Rena Dardis, Ken Garcia, Dr Peter Hart, Alan Hayes, Dyann Mawhorr, Don and Patrica Nolan, Tara MacLeod, Seán Seosamh Ó Conchubhair, Professor Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Professor Nollaig Ó Muraile, Interlibrary Loans at the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, and Eoin Purcell, Wendy Logue and the staff at Mercier Press. Táim an-bhuíoch do gach éinne atá luaite thuas, m’athair ach go háirithe as a chuid foighne agus as a chuid saineolais a roinnt liom go fial agus do Thara uair amháin eile a d’fhulaing go foighneach agus an obair seo ar bun agam.

DR BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR

INTRODUCTION (2009)

IN THE YEARS before 1916, Cork saw a lot of political violence, but it was fighting between rival nationalist parties – ‘Mollies’ versus ‘All For Irelanders’ – not against the government. When a rebellion did take place, in 1916, Cork’s Easter Rising was confined to a single family and home, the Kents of Bawnard House. The year ended with a by-election in West Cork in December, more faction-fighting and a victory by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). With its leaders in jail and most of its arms surrendered, the story of the Irish Volunteers in the rebel city and county might well have ended there, in a crippling failure of organisation and nerve. But Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney are not remembered as the men who gave up without a shot while Dublin burned, and West Cork is not known to history as a hotbed of moderation. Instead, Cork emerged in the years after 1916 as the heartland of the republican revolution, and its Irish Republican Army (IRA) brigades gained a reputation as the most powerful and deadly guerrilla force in Ireland. So, what accounts for this extraordinary change? Who was the Cork IRA? What made them such an effective force? What sort of war did they fight? And what were the consequences of their violence?

WHY CORK?

BETWEEN THE EASTER Rising and 11 July 1921 Truce, over five hundred people were killed in Cork by bullets or bombs, and another five hundred-plus were wounded. These numbers make the county by far the most violent place in Ireland in this period. And, since the IRA was responsible for about 60 per cent of these casualties, Cork’s guerrillas were by a wide margin the most violent in Ireland, accounting for nearly one in three of all IRA victims. Bandon district alone – the Fallujah of the Irish resistance – produced over ten times as many casualties as the whole of County Antrim, and was well over a hundred times as violent per capita. Moreover, it was the boys of the whole of County Cork who did the fighting. Contrary to some local beliefs, the West Cork brigade was not much more successful than their comrades in Mid- or North Cork, or in the city, nor did they suffer more. Each brigade – and often each battalion – had its strong and weak points, victories and defeats. It was not just the boys of Cork, either. The Munster IRA as a whole was much more active than anywhere else except Longford, Roscommon and Dublin city. So to ask ‘why Cork?’ is also to ask: why Munster? One answer is that the Volunteers in the south started taking on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) much earlier than anywhere else. By the autumn of 1918 and the winter of 1919, militants throughout the province were gearing up for war. The famous Soloheadbeg ambush in Tipperary in January 1919 was just one episode in this process: as early as March 1918, the Eyeries RIC barracks was raided for arms, and in July 1918, the Ballyvourney Volunteers ambushed two constables, shooting one and beating the other senseless according to the police report. In other words, the south had a head start.

What also set Cork and its neighbours apart was that it wasn’t just armed Volunteers doing the fighting. They were also backed by an enthusiastic (and angry) popular movement. Through 1916, 1917, 1918 and 1919, policemen and soldiers in Munster faced far more confrontational crowds than elsewhere, and riots became commonplace. There were also fights between Irish Parliamentary Party supporters and the zealous young converts to Sinn Féin. Militancy was not just found in the ranks of the IRA, and not just among men either, as many Sinn Féiners and rioters were women. One of the first republicans to be arrested in Cork city was Teresa O’Donovan, who broke her umbrella over a policeman’s head in April 1917. Where did this militancy come from? In part, it drew on a heritage of struggle over rents and the ownership of land between farmers and landlords (backed by the government), particularly in the Land War and Plan of Campaign in the 1880s. This struggle had been the previous generation’s rebellion, and nowhere were these battles fought harder than in Cork. Also important in determining whether a community would produce strong IRA units was its support for patriotic education. If we map Christian Brothers’ schools and Irish classes taught in national schools across Ireland, we find that both were good predictors of revolutionary violence – and both were relatively plentiful in Cork.

WHO WERE THE IRA?

TO UNDERSTAND THE IRA, however, we must also ask who they were. All Cork Volunteers were men, almost all (at least 99 per cent) were Catholic and most were young (over three-quarters under thirty). They came from a broad range of backgrounds. About a third or so in units outside Cork city worked on farms, most as sons assisting their parents, the rest as labourers or servants. The majority had other trades and occupations, in offices, shops, mills, creameries, garages and elsewhere. Skilled apprentices and journeymen played a large role in the movement, just as they had with the Fenians fifty years before, and this was particularly true in the city. In general, IRA men tended to be better employed, more skilled and more upwardly mobile than both their peers and their fathers, and this lent a hard-working, self-improving, aspirational spirit to grass-roots republicanism. In this sense, they embodied the New Ireland they were fighting for.

As many as 20,000 men (out of a total population of nearly 400,000 people) may have joined the Cork IRA prior to the July 1921 Truce – or at least claimed to have done so afterwards. Many were purely nominal or very temporary members who at most attended a few drills during the 1918 conscription crisis. IRA records distinguished between these paper soldiers, ‘reliable’ men who would at least show up for company parades, and ‘active’ men who could be counted on for actual operations. Of the over one thousand men on the official rolls of the Bandon battalion, for example, fewer than five hundred were on the books in July 1919, of whom less than three hundred were deemed ‘active’. By the spring of 1921, at the height of the guerrilla war, only two hundred and thirty of these were even considered ‘reliable’. Some of this attrition was due to imprisonment or death, but the majority of inactivists just dropped out or faded away, at least until the Truce. They shouldn’t be branded cowardly or unpatriotic, though. Some – especially farmers’ sons – had to support a family and others had real moral objections to the kind of war the IRA was fighting. They hadn’t signed up to ambush policemen or raid people’s houses.

Why did they join? It wasn’t political or cultural indoctrination: for most young men the Volunteers was the first organisation they had joined. In fact, they often embraced the whole movement all at once, with Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League as part of the package. Nor were any new ideas required, as combative nationalism and suspicion of the British state were deeply ingrained parts of Irish political culture. Most veterans don’t seem to recall the decision to join as being all that memorable or difficult: it was the obvious thing to do at the time, in much the same way as young patriots all over Europe had flocked to their nation’s colours in 1914. For those who were committed to both the ends and the means of armed struggle, though, that commitment could assume an often mystical intensity, and the movement became a way of life. This quasi-religious identification with the cause often drew on the example of the Easter Rising, and on the experience of attending Requiem Masses for its martyrs in the summer of 1916. One such convert was Liam Lynch, at the time a hardware clerk in Fermoy. He saw the Kents of Bawnard House being brought as prisoners through the streets in May 1916, and thereafter dropped his allegiance to the Irish Parliamentary Party and many of his former friends, and fervently embraced republicanism. Never a natural leader or fighter, he made himself both by sheer force of will and ended up commanding the North Cork brigade, the 1st Southern Division, and ultimately the whole (anti-Treaty) IRA. Such people gave the movement its evangelical edge, but they weren’t typical. Perhaps the most important factor in determining who joined or who would fight was not what you believed but who you knew. Volunteer companies were self-created on local initiative and officers were elected. Inevitably, they were formed around already existing social networks, in workplaces, neighbourhoods, on sports teams and among friends and family. Strong bands of republican co-workers could be found in the Haulbowline shipyards, the Passage dockyards, the Clondulane and Blarney mills, and most numerously, in the new Ford tractor and car plant.

Neighbourhood and family were inextricably bound together. Of the members of the Macroom battalion who can be traced in the 1911 census, half had at least one brother in the same company, and much the same result can be found in other rural units. Even in Cork city, where young men were less likely to live with parents, well over a third of those whose names and exact addresses are known were family or next-door neighbours. In other words, people didn’t usually join the Volunteers as individuals, they joined as part of a tightly-knit group who already knew each other well. If you weren’t part of such an in-group, however, you probably found yourself on the fringes, or on the outside. This also helps explain why IRA units were so resilient under pressure, and how untrained, inexperienced men could be such formidable soldiers. Just as men in conventional armies might fight for their comrades rather than their country, Irish guerrillas fought alongside their brothers, cousins, school-and team-mates, and childhood friends – often in the very lanes, fields and streets where they had spent their lives together. For the most part, then, people didn’t join the Volunteers because they were radicals. They became radicalised (or republicanised) because they joined the Volunteers.

In 1917 and 1918, drilling, marching, attending meetings, electioneering, collecting money or flying the tri-colour were all potentially illegal activities, leading to numerous clashes with the police, arrests and imprisonment. This in turn led to prison protests, including hunger strikes, which often led in turn to early releases, a heightened sense of revolutionary momentum and further confrontations with the authorities. Young men were taken away from home, often for the first time, and brought together with other activists from all over the country. Many spent more than one stretch in prison: some were in and out three or four times before the Truce.

In many ways, going back to the months after the Easter Rising, the IRA as it emerged in 1919 and 1920 was forged in British and Irish prisons. Corkmen were to the fore in the greatest of the hunger strikes, in the spring of 1920 and again that autumn. The former, which lasted twenty-three days, ended in a stunning victory over Dublin Castle, as hundreds of men were released on parole, over a hundred of whom came from Cork. These were the backbone of the flying columns formed later that year: nine of the men at the Kilmichael ambush were veterans of this strike. The reorganised British administration would not be so weak again, however. When Cork Volunteers started a new protest in August, the government refused to give in. Mick Fitzgerald and Joseph Murphy and, most famously, Terence MacSwiney, died from starvation in October 1920 before the strike was called off, thereby saving the lives of the remaining protesters in Cork jail.

THE IRA’S WAR

THE IRISH VOLUNTEERS didn’t start out as an underground army and they weren’t designed to fight a revolutionary war. Their original purpose was defensive: to uphold the Irish claim to self-government and protect national rights against unionist (both British and Irish) belligerence and Liberal backsliding. This held true after the 1914 split over participation in the Great War, and it still remained the case after the Easter Rising, as many (most?) of the new recruits in 1917 and 1918 joined to protest British policy, to support Sinn Féin, and – perhaps most important of all – to avoid or resist conscription. The latter threat doubled the size of most units almost overnight: the Clonakilty company, for example, went from forty to one hundred and fifty members in the spring of 1918. The Volunteers were initially neither armed nor illegal, and most of their early campaigns were designed to confront restrictions on assembly and display and to attract publicity. New companies were still announcing their formation in the Cork Examiner as late as March 1918. When conscription did finally become an imminent threat, in April 1918, Volunteer planning envisioned a second rising, only this time on a truly national scale. In each parish and town, local companies would seize public buildings, block roads and rail lines, and attack local police barracks: quite the opposite of a clandestine guerrilla war. The prospect of such an onslaught terrified the RIC, forced the government to stay its hand and ultimately proved that the strategy of using the Volunteers as a deterrent, and as a tool for mobilising public opinion, was at least as effective as that of 1916-style open war. Nevertheless, war was what a militant minority within the Volunteers wanted, and many of them were organised as a secret revolutionary force, in the form of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The IRB had used the movement as its vehicle to launch the 1916 Easter Rising, and it too had reorganised, and was once again in a dominant position within the Volunteers by the end of 1918. The ‘IRA’ as it emerged in 1919 – a leaner, tougher, secret army – represented a kind of fusion between the two.

Of course, people didn’t need to belong to a secret society to be republicans or revolutionaries, and many who were, such as Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney, didn’t necessarily like the idea of a secret war. However, 1916 – both its triumphs and its embarrassments – helped produce an aggressive new mindset among a network of key activists. Weapons must never again be surrendered; the authorities must always be resisted; revolution was too important to be left to the politicians. British repression also had a radicalising impact, as people who faced truncheons and guns, or raids on their homes, or the prospect of prison, often lost initial scruples. The fear of conscription created a demand for arms, which led to widespread arms raids on private homes and on policemen and soldiers. As a result, between 1917 and 1919, the IRA shot thirteen policemen, seven soldiers and four civilians, while losing six dead and seven wounded themselves. Many of these casualties were unintended, the result of raids or ambushes gone wrong. The police also shot another twelve non-Volunteers, and beat up many, many others, mostly during riots (where IRA guns also began to appear in 1918 and 1919). It would be hard to say when a ‘war’ as such broke out in Cork, but one killing stands out: that of Constable Edward Bolger on Sunday 14 December, 1919, in the IRA stronghold of Kilbrittain. This was the first deliberate assassination of a policeman in the county, and it was a determined one: the gunmen shot him several times after he had fallen to make sure he was dead. Bolger had been a zealous enemy of the local Volunteers, seven of whom had been released from prison that Friday.

This is a book of ‘fighting stories’, and there were plenty of fights to follow in 1920 and 1921. Most people who were killed in Cork in those years, however, did not die in combat. A third were civilians: more than one hundred killed by the IRA, mostly as suspected spies or informers, and over fifty by the RIC (now including Black and Tans and Auxiliaries) and army, mostly as suspected rebels. In thirty-odd cases, we don’t know who killed them, and there are other people who just disappeared. Even when guerrillas, soldiers and policemen shot one another, it wasn’t usually a fight as such. If we define ‘combat’ as what happens when armed groups encounter one another, then most of the war’s combatants who died, did so unarmed, helpless or alone. In this regard, British forces were much more murderous than the IRA, as less than half of the nearly two hundred Volunteers casualties in 1920–21 occurred in battle. The rest were shot ‘attempting to escape’, ‘resisting arrest’ or the like. Through 1920, the IRA were far more chivalrous, and only one in four of their targets were gunned down like Constable Bolger. That summer and autumn were the heyday of the flying columns, culminating in the devastating ambush at Kilmichael in November 1920 that knocked a whole Auxiliary company out of action.

After Kilmichael came martial law, however, and a new British military offensive. The flying columns went from being the hunters to the hunted, and February 1921 brought Kilmichael in reverse: the destruction of the previously unbeatable East Cork column at Clonmult. Ambushes continued, but grew more dangerous and less successful, with fewer arms captured and fewer policemen and soldiers killed. In 1921, the IRA and British forces had exactly the same record when it came to killing each other outside combat, while violence as a whole continued to escalate. It was terror and counter-terror, tit-for-tat, with ordinary people bearing an increasing share of the suffering.

British officers would look back on the Truce of 11 July 1921 as a missed opportunity, claiming that they had the IRA on the run. This was not true. The secret army had regrouped after its winter setbacks and was capable of waging a long war yet. Nevertheless, the kind of war it was becoming was only a foretaste of what might have happened if no truce had been declared, as both sides intended to unleash violence far beyond anything previously employed. As it was, though, the IRA had survived intact and was able to re-emerge from the shadows more popular and powerful than ever, victorious in the eyes of their supporters. For a few months that summer, anything seemed possible and the Republic appeared to have been won.

DR PETER HART MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY NEWFOUNDLAND MARCH 2009

FOREWORD

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS ago a small body of men engaged in combat with the armed forces of an empire. Militarily they were weak. Their strength lay in their faith in their cause and in the unflinching support of a civilian population which refused to be cowed by threats or by violence.

For almost two years these men successfully maintained the unequal struggle and finally compelled their powerful adversary to seek a truce. The battles in which they fought were neither large nor spectacular: they were the little clashes of guerrilla warfare – the sudden meeting, the flash of guns, a getaway, or the long wait of an ambush, then the explosive action, and death or a successful decision. And the stake at issue was the destiny of an ancient people.

Before the war years imposed a restriction upon newsprint, as upon other commodities, The Kerryman, in its various Christmas and other special numbers, told much of the story of these men, the men of the flying columns, the active service units of the Irish Republican Army. It now gathers these stories into book form together with others hitherto unpublished.

All the stories in these Fighting Series booklets are either told by the men who took part in the actions described, or else they are written from the personal narrative of survivors. The booklets do not purport to be a detailed or chronological history of the fight for independence, but every effort has been made to obtain the fullest and most accurate information about the incidents described. The publishers are conscious, however, that in the collection of data about such a period errors and omissions can easily occur and so they will welcome the help of readers who may be able to throw more light upon the various episodes related in the series. Such additional information will be incorporated into the second edition of the booklets which the present rate of orders would seem to indicate will be called for in the very near future. It is also pointed out that Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story deals exclusively with events which took place inside the county boundary. It would require another volume to recount the part taken in the fight for freedom by Cork men operating in other sectors of the country.

The publishers believe that the younger generation who know about those times by hearsay only will find these survivors’ tales of the fight of absorbing interest, while to the older generation they will recall vividly a memorable era and the men who made it. In short, they feel that Fighting Story series, the story of the Anglo-Irish War county by county, is a series that will be welcomed by Irish people everywhere. For that reason, so that the booklets may have the widest possible circulation, they are being sold at a price within the reach of everyone. To sell these booklets, with their lavish collection of illustrations of unique historical interest, at the very moderate price of two shillings, the publishers were content to reduce their own profit and to produce the booklet at little above the mere cost of production. They will be satisfied if the series serves to preserve in the hearts of the younger generation that love of country and devotion to its interests which distinguished the men whose doings are related therein.

The Editor

THE CORK CITY VOLUNTEERS

by SHANDON

THE ORGANISATION AND activities of the Irish Volunteers and the IRA in Cork city were so intimately related to the general development of these bodies in the county that it is difficult to treat them separately. From the very earliest days of the movement the Cork leaders visualised and worked for the outspreading of the organisation to every part of the county. In this they were successful, and to this work they devoted much time and energy, so that when the final stages of the struggle were reached, Cork city was represented in Cork No. 1 brigade by two battalions, an active service unit operating in the city and a special intelligence section. These units operated as an integral part of the brigade and, except for the fact that brigade headquarters was in the city and that enemy disposition and tactics imposed the necessity for a different type of warfare, the city battalions were not very different to the other eight battalions in the brigade. There was close co-operation between city and county; the city battalions contributed their quota of men and arms to the brigade column when it was established. The position was very different to that in Dublin where the whole city area formed a brigade.

Pearse said in 1915 that there was nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation. The United Irishmen had failed in 1798, Emmet in 1803, the Young Irelanders in 1848 and the Fenians in 1867. But they had failed nobly and had left a tradition of armed resistance which appeared to be submerged and forgotten by the generation of which Pearse spoke. For the first time in the long history of our struggle for freedom a recognised Irish leader was prepared to accept on behalf of the nation, and as a final settlement of our claims, something far less than that complete separation from England which had been the historic claim of previous generations.

That a movement in the historic tradition for the achievement of freedom by force of arms emerged at all is due primarily to the unobtrusive existence in these dead years of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They believed that freedom could not be achieved or defended without the ability to vindicate it in arms, and they kept their purpose steadily in mind while they nursed their numerically weak organisation and waited for conditions which would make possible the development of a widespread physical force movement. The IRB was a secret oath-bound society, pledged to the achievement of an Irish Republic by force of arms. Though small in numbers it was selective, widespread and circumspect; it had men in many other organisations and its influence, though never open, was far greater than its numbers would appear to indicate. It watched, it advised through its members, but it took no active lead anywhere openly. The secret of its strength lay in the fact that in a time of confused vision and decadent leadership in national affairs it knew its own mind and it had a definite policy. The IRB had a small number in Cork city, and when the opportunity of arming Irishmen for national defence came in 1913, they took a leading and decisive part in the foundation of the Volunteers and in the development of their policy. The essential non-party basis of the movement was something entirely new and novel in the Ireland of that day. Cork, because of the bitter partisan rivalry between the Redmondite and O’Brienite factions, presented the Volunteer leaders with a problem more difficult of solution than the same one elsewhere, and it is a tribute to the patriotic and prudent leadership of men like Tomás MacCurtain, Terence MacSwiney and Seán O’Hegarty that their own higher conception of national service impressed itself on the general body and laid the firm foundations of the steadfast organisation that withstood the battle ordeal of the active years.

When the split came in 1914, Cork city had 2,000 men organised in two battalions. All except a handful – fewer than fifty – elected to follow Redmond, and the work of the previous ten months was in ruins. But, in striking contrast to their opponents, the minority had a clear-cut policy. They had faith in themselves and in their cause, and they set to work again undaunted. In time Cork came to see that they were right, and public opinion swung slowly back in their favour. In a year, so much progress had been made that the two city battalions were reorganised, weaker than before but steadily developing; control by company, battalion and brigade councils had been established in contrast to the committee system of earlier days, and a large hall had been taken over in Sheares Street.

The Cork men, like most of the rest of the country, were confused and misled by the number of contradictory orders in 1916, and their planned contribution to the insurrection did not materialise. It is a complicated story, all the facts of which have not yet been published. A subsequent inquiry absolved the Cork leaders from any blame. They were arrested and interned until the Christmas of 1916. The insurrection had brought a great awakening, an imperative call to the Irish people to rally again to the cause. Francis Ledwidge, writing his haunting elegy for Thomas MacDonagh in the mud and misery of a Flanders’ trench, is but one example of its wide appeal. When the leaders began to reorganise in 1917, a new spirit was stirring in the people, and amongst the Volunteers its keynote was a determination to renew the conflict which had gone down in fire and death in Dublin. In a loose but effective way in this and the following year the whole of nationalist Cork organised itself for the struggle. The Volunteers, Fianna Éireann, Cumann na mBan, Sinn Féin, the Prisoner’s Dependants’ fund and the National Aid Association provided scope for the activities of all, young and old, men and women. Leadership, by right and of necessity, was in the hands of the Volunteers, and with them the other bodies worked in close and generally amicable co-operation.

During 1917 organisation was steadily improved, public feeling hardened; there were frequent arrests and hunger strikes, and occasional clashes with armed police in the streets. Raids by police and military on halls and houses used by the various national organisations, and the forcible closing of the Volunteer Hall in Sheares Street by the military authorities, gave an indication of the reactions of the crown forces to the growing strength of republicanism. Public parades in uniform of the two city battalions were held in November and were followed by more arrests. The main efforts of the city battalions were concentrated on training and on procuring arms. A very successful raid, one of the first of its kind in Ireland, was carried out by the 1st battalion on the Cork grammar school, which was being used by the British military for training purposes. A number of rifles and some equipment were secured. In September, a Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant who attempted to hold up and question an armed Volunteer officer was fired on and wounded.

The year 1918 brought an intensification of the clashes between police and military and civilians in the streets. Rarely were Volunteers involved in these clashes; they were steadily and in a disciplined way perfecting their training and adding to their store of arms. Arms were purchased from soldiers or anywhere they could be procured, and there were a few cases of soldiers being disarmed. In November, a Cork Volunteer officer set a fine example to the whole force by his spirited action in defence of his arms in a police raid. Donncadh MacNeilus opened fire on the police who attempted to search his lodgings for arms, and a head constable was seriously wounded. After a fierce struggle with five other policemen, MacNeilus was overpowered and taken to Cork jail. His rescue from under the noses of the military guard in that fortress on 11 November created a sensation at the time. It was planned by the brigade staff and carried out brilliantly by men of the 1st and 2nd battalions. In 1918 also the brigade devised an elaborate and safe communications system by cyclist dispatch riders to every battalion headquarters in the county. Eight routes radiated from the city, one of them reaching to Castletownbere, and the first stages of all these routes were operated by officers and men of a special cyclist company attached to brigade headquarters. They had been drawn from the two city battalions.

During 1919 there took place considerable progress in training, an intensified effort to get arms, and the development of special services. Halls were no longer available for training, which consequently was carried out mainly in the country districts immediately outside the city most convenient to the various companies. It was a better type of training than could have been done indoors by way of close order drill and lectures, and, as every parade was open to the possibility of a raid by the enemy, the training developed alertness and a sense of the need for security measures.

The special services organised included, in addition to communications mentioned above, engineering, intelligence, signals, transport and medical.

The effort to get arms led to the planning of what would have been the largest operation undertaken by the city battalions up to that time if it had come off. An aerodrome in the course of construction for American forces at Ballyquirk, near Killeagh, eighteen miles from Cork, was guarded by a party of British troops. It was planned to raid it early in July and seize the arms. It was realised that the operation would probably involve fighting, and the 4th battalion, in whose area Ballyquirk was situated, had not sufficient arms to undertake the job single-handed. The two city battalions co-operated by sending out men and arms. The operation was under the control of Terence MacSwiney, brigade vice-commandant. The time of the attack had been set for midnight, and he and other city officers set out from the city in a car, taking with them all the available rifles in the city battalions. Other officers and men had gone ahead on bicycles. Unfortunately the car broke down, and MacSwiney and his party did not reach Ballyquirk until 4 a.m., by which time most of the city and local men had dispersed.

Towards the end of 1919, the demand for action was coming more and more insistently from the companies and battalions. There was a high standard of discipline, and sanction was sought from GHQ, first for the carrying out of simultaneous attacks on police patrols in the city, and later for attacks on police barracks. The proposal for the city operation was turned down flat by GHQ, although it could certainly have been carried out and would have netted the city battalions about a hundred .45 revolvers and a fair quantity of ammunition. It was only at the end the year, and after the brigade commandant, Tomás MacCurtain, had spent a considerable time in Dublin pressing it, that sanction was given for attacks on a limited number of police barracks.

Early in 1920 the active campaign became, in a limited way, a matter of GHQ policy. The brigade felt it could go ahead without referring every specific proposal for GHQ sanction, and the greatly increased activity of 1920 and 1921 was a reflection of the situation that operations were limited only by available arms and opportunities. There never was any shortage of men; the two city battalions could muster 2,000 men at this time; but it was of course impossible either to arm all of them or to utilise any substantial number of them in operations. The intelligence service had become well organised, and its activities resulted in the execution in February of the spy, Quinlisk, who had got some distance with his plan to betray Michael Collins. Attacks on police patrols became frequent. There were two in March, in one of which a policeman was killed. In May two policemen were killed and another wounded in an attack on the Lower Road. Evacuated Royal Irish Constabulary barracks and income tax offices were burned, sniping and bomb attacks were maintained on the occupied barracks and military cars, motor-cycles and mails were seized.

The murder by the crown forces of the brigade commandant, Tomás MacCurtain, in March, was a severe blow, but it steeled the determination of every Volunteer to destroy or drive out forever the ruthless instruments of that foul policy. Terence MacSwiney became commandant, Seán O’Hegarty vice-commandant and Dan Donovan O/C 1st battalion. Mick Murphy was O/C 2nd battalion. In June the two city battalions were turned out in strength to co-operate with the 6th battalion in the attack on Blarney Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. In July King Street Royal Irish Constabulary barracks was attacked and destroyed in daylight, and in August city men carried out an ambush on military lorries at White’s Cross, near the city. In July, also, Divisional Commissioner Smyth, who had shortly before made his infamous proposals to the Royal Irish Constabulary at Listowel, was shot dead in the County Club. In the following month DI Swanzy, who had been in charge of the police district in which Tomás MacCurtain was murdered, and who had been hurriedly and secretly transferred after it, was traced to Lisburn and there executed by men from the city battalions. In October Terence MacSwiney died on hunger strike in Brixton. At the end of the previous month an attempt had been made to capture General Strickland, commanding the British 6th division with headquarters at Cork, but the attempt failed. It was intended to hold him as hostage for MacSwiney. A very tense atmosphere had developed in the city; attacks on crown forces were almost continuous, both in daylight and during curfew hours. Three British intelligence officers were captured and shot at Waterfall, near the city; a number of civilians organised into a spy ring by the British military authorities were executed. In December, the 1st battalion carried out an attack on two lorries of Auxiliaries at Dillon’s Cross and, on the same night, these forces, assisted by the military, fired and destroyed the centre of the city.