* The local historian John D. Pierse has published figures showing a fall of 481 in the number of residents in the district in the years 1841–1851 – nearly 22 per cent of the population.
* The writer Catherine E. Foley, an expert on Irish dancing tradition, unearthed the death certificate of ‘Muirin’ in her research on the effects of the Famine on the music and dance culture of the rural poor. She describes him as being fifty-five at the time of his death. ‘Step dancing was seen as a skill to be mastered,’ she writes, ‘a skill that showed individuals had control and mastery over their minds and bodies.’ See Catherine E. Foley, Cultural Memory, Step Dancing, Representation and Performance: An Examination of Tearmann and The Great Famine, in Traditiones (Llubljana 2015).
* Sweetnam came from a Protestant farming background in west Cork. He was an unpopular figure with many in the locality because of his work instigating prosecutions for non-payment of rent for Lord Listowel, and newspapers recorded instances where men who tried to intimidate him ended up in court. In 1899, long after the Land War ended, he appeared in court seeking to evict a Mary Brennan from a caretaker’s house on Lord Listowel’s lands. He would also appear dramatically in the story of District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan.
4
Soldiers are we whose lives are pledged to Ireland …
Peadar Kearney, The Soldier’s Song, 1907
I
To approach a man near his home where his wife and young children are waiting for him, to fire enough bullets into his head and chest to make sure he is dead, and to do this when you have never killed before, and to live with this for fifty years and more and never speak of it: how does a man, a man like you, live with this? Others in Ireland will tell war stories. They will boast of their exploits. Not you. There will be annual parades to attend. You will become part of the national myth of origin that cries out for heroic deeds. But you are remembered as a modest, decent man.
Con Brosnan: hero of the good clean fight against the evil of the Black and Tans. But you know how it really was. It is all there in memory, whenever war comes back: his face down in the space between the cart and the footpath, the blood thickening in the gutter, the children crying. You were brave in the Revolution and a man of peace when it was needed after the Civil War. You were well loved by your own people. For you the act of killing was no lightly taken enterprise. It stays locked inside you for nearly thirty years until the men from the Bureau of Military History came calling.* What you told them was true: you were following orders that came all the way from headquarters in Dublin. But what was the story you told yourself down the years? You were good friends with my uncle Mick Purtill and his sister Hannah. You lived in a neighbouring village, shared the hardship of the Tan war with them, fought on the same side in the Civil War, and after that war you once threatened to shoot a man who had cursed the name of Mick Purtill. ‘The Purtills and Brosnans were fierce close’ was how your son put it.1
A neighbour of yours, the poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice, told me that every day you went to church to pray for the souls of the men you killed. The District Inspector will not be the only killing in which you play a part. It reminded me of something a friend of mine, a Special Forces soldier, a man who killed at close quarters, told me once. He would never let his son join the army, he said. ‘I would never want him to see the things I keep locked up in my head.’
Cornelius – ‘Con’ – Brosnan and Mick Purtill were members of the Irish Volunteers. My grandmother would join the women’s wing, Cumann na mBan, which had been founded in 1914. I believe Hannah was nineteen when she joined; Con Brosnan was the same age when he joined up in 1917.
Con Brosnan, revolutionary and footballing legend (Brosnan Family)
Like the Purtills, Con had grown up on a small farm, supplemented by the income from a public house in Newtownsandes, now called Moyvane – the ‘small, sleepy straggle of a village about seven miles from Listowel in north Kerry, and off the main road’.2 Yet his ancestral background was more complex. On his mother’s side there were business links to the landed gentry of north Kerry. His grandfather, M. J. Nolan, had been a Justice of the Peace and an agent for a protestant landowner. He was shot at during the agrarian disturbances of the late nineteenth century. To get there from Ballydonoghue I drove the long, straight small roads across the plain. I saw the smallness of the killing zone and how the flat terrain with its sparse woodland offered no decisive advantage to guerrillas. I imagine how I would read this land as a war correspondent; the habit is ingrained in me now, a perverse filter through which topography is measured for the cover it provides and the menace it conceals.
There are no steep mountains, plunging valleys; there are no acres of trees or dense scrubland that come up to the roadside for mile after mile. I think of the long drives I have made through ambush zones around the world, my mouth dry and stomach knotted knowing the killers could be as close as the high grass brushing the side of the car. Once in Rwanda I saw them, armed with AK 47s, standing in the middle of the road, surprised by us as we came around the corner of a jungle track. There was a split second when they might have turned on us but they ran into the bush, the element of surprise lost. We turned around and went back, survivors by the grace of chance. So often in armed convoys in guerrilla territory I have strained to see who might be hiding in the passing treelines, or to hear the first shot that would signal an ambush; I have spent fruitless hours calculating whether it was safest to travel in the front, middle or end of a convoy. With enough ambushers and a mine in the road the chances of escape are pretty small, as good friends of mine have found out in Africa, the Balkans and Iraq. Here in north Kerry there was a lot of hiding in plain sight for the men of the IRA. It was in the homes of the people that they found their hiding places, and in barns and dugouts meticulously camouflaged under turf and ricks of hay.
The Brosnan family pub sits in the middle of the town, on a corner beside the road that runs down the gradually levelling land towards Listowel. Con’s son Gerry still lives here and his grandson is a farmer nearby. The flags of the Kerry football team and the Irish Republic hang from stands on the pub’s gable wall. The colonial name of Newtownsandes has been erased. Today the village is called Moyvane – from the Irish for the ‘middle plain’. In his deposition to the military historians, Con Brosnan still referred to it as Newtownsandes. He was born there in 1900 and went to the local national school and then to secondary in Listowel. His schooling ended when he was sixteen, the summer after the Easter Rising.
There was no one reason why Hannah and Mick and Con Brosnan took up arms against the British Empire. Youth was part of it, as was the extraordinary moment in world history when they came of age. They lived in one of those periods when history had slipped its bonds. The impossible became imaginable and then possible and they saw a chance of belonging to something larger than themselves. Events propelled them forward until they became agents of change themselves. It was part politics of the moment and in part the resurrection of long-buried sentiment ignited by the Easter Rising and the events that followed. By 1913 a branch of the Irish Volunteers had been set up in Listowel. The Volunteer movement was a broad