My great-grandfather was lucky to have retired from the RIC by the time a choice had to be made about what kind of country he was willing to fight for. In his last years, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, there was a growing campaign to isolate policemen and their families from the communities in which they lived. The boycott chant he heard in Cork now echoed across rural communities. In 1897 the Gaelic Athletic Association, which attracted hundreds of thousands of young men to the sports of hurling and Gaelic football, banned police and soldiers from membership. Retired policemen faced discrimination in jobs controlled by nationalist town and county councils. When the War of Independence escalated the boycott extended to undertakers who were warned not to transport the bodies of dead policemen back to their home districts.
After the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, many policemen became conflicted about their role. The outbreak of guerrilla war in 1919 put the RIC directly in the firing line of the IRA. The first victims of the IRA were Irish policemen: eighteen were killed before the end of the year. By the middle of the following year more than fifty were resigning every week to avoid the violence. Policemen and their families were directly boycotted. Hundreds of remote police barracks were closed because they could not be defended. Scores of others were burned down.
Tobias O’Sullivan was the sergeant in charge of Athea barracks in County Limerick when it was closed in early 1920 and the police redeployed to more easily defended locations. The village was about eight miles from Listowel where he would be posted the following year. But first he was sent to the County Limerick town of Kilmallock which had a strong barracks in the heart of the town. Twenty years into his police career, O’Sullivan was determined not to be intimidated by the IRA. His resolve hardened in the face of the escalating campaign which branded men like him as traitors. An IRA poster in Cork in March 1920 was explicit in its threat: ‘Whereas the spies and traitors known as the Royal Irish Constabulary are holding this country for the enemy … we do hereby proclaim said spies and traitors, and do hereby solemnly warn prospective recruits that they join the RIC at their own peril. All nations are agreed as to the fate of traitors. It is the sanction of God and man.’23 Some police cooperated with the IRA. The flow of information from inside police barracks, and from the British administration’s headquarters at Dublin Castle, was instrumental in the IRA’s successful targeting of spies and informers. Others looked the other way when confronted with information about IRA operations.
Yet the majority remained loyal. This was partly to do with tradition and discipline, and also the power of the status quo. Every previous rebellion in Irish history had been suppressed and life had always returned to a version of normal. To men like Tobias O’Sullivan the gunmen presented a vision of chaos, threatening the destruction of the more ordered world that had emerged from the anguish of the great Famine and the struggle for land. Late nineteenth-century British governments had been reformist. In the words of Irish chief secretary Gerald Balfour, they set about ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’. Still Home Rule within the empire was now promised, a perilous pledge given the obduracy of Ulster Unionists, but a distinct probability in some form in the early years of the twentieth century.
An Ireland run by the armed separatists would probably have horrified O’Sullivan. The British Empire had been shaken by the Great War but in 1920 nothing indicated that it was on the cusp of irreversible decline. Tobias O’Sullivan must have felt he was on the right side of history. His wife May went with him, into the heart of a war she knew could claim her husband’s life at any moment. When they married Ireland was already restive. But nobody then anticipated that revolution was looming. May’s family had experienced eviction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, migrating south from County Fermanagh after their first dispossession. They lived on a small, poor farm in Aughagower in County Mayo, around thirty miles from the O’Sullivan homestead. Tobias may have met her at a country fair or when he went into John Gibbons’ grocery shop in Westport where she worked as an assistant. Nearly seventeen years older, Tobias was handsome and would have radiated calm authority. They married in February 1915 with the world at war and Ireland slipping towards revolution.
* The rebellion was inspired by the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and led by the United Irishmen, many of them Protestants, who wanted to sever Ireland’s connection with Britain. As many as thirty thousand people are believed to have died before the rebellion collapsed after a brutal campaign of government repression. What began, in part, as rebellion to create an Ireland free of sectarian division ended in massacre and deepened alienation between Catholic and Protestant.
* The Fenians enjoyed military victories over mixed Canadian and British forces until the arrival of colonial reinforcements prompted them to return to the United States. The final death toll from the campaign was an estimated thirty-two Canadians, one British soldier and six Fenians.
* The Irish National Land League was founded in 1879 to campaign for the rights of tenant farmers. It evolved into the biggest mass movement since the campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Act of Union led by Daniel O’Connell. The confrontation with landlords and the government became known as the Land War. Its leaders were Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. It is widely credited with effecting major social change in rural Ireland.
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Come all ye loyal heroes wherever you may be
Don’t hire with any master till you know what your work will be
For you must rise up early from the clear daylight till dawn
Or else you won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn …
My shoes they are well worn now, and my socks are getting thin
And my heart is always trembling for fear they might let in
My heart is always trembling from the clear daylight till dawn
I’m afraid I won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn
Anonymous ballad, nineteenth century
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I walk the land in late October. I am coming down past Ballydonoghue church where my grandmother Hannah was baptised and married, where her father and mother were baptised, married and buried, where her brother Mick hid from the Tans, and where my people still farm and course their greyhounds and cheer Kerry’s Gaelic football team. The wind is in from the Atlantic and growing stronger as the sun sets on Tralee Bay. It is forty years and more since I last walked these lanes. It has been too long. After my parents’ marriage fell apart the trips to Kerry became fewer, and when I did come it was to see my cousins in the town. I keep close to the hedgerow to avoid the gusts. At the end of the hill I turn right towards Lisselton cemetery, which my grandmother would pass on her way to school early in the twentieth century. As the lane curves around towards the graveyard there is a small patch of ground on which lumps of rough-hewn stone are scattered. They are small, each less than the size of a football. There is a sign that reads: ‘Don’t pray for us/ no sins we knew/ But for our parents/ they’ll pray for you.’
This is the Ceallurach, the burial ground of the unbaptised children of the Famine. In Hannah Purtill’s time there was no sign here to mark the land. They didn’t need one. Everybody knew. My grandmother went to school when there were still living survivors of the disaster. Even then, when people sought every patch of ground to work, the little field was left to become overgrown: outside the burial rites of the church but sacred in its own forbidding, heartbreaking way. Nobody would ever use the land.
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