The soldier never came. Another of my father’s yarns.
But years later I find out that Eamonn was telling a version of a truth.
A man had been killed on our street, shot dead close to the Keane family home. He was killed by an IRA unit that included a family friend with whom my grandmother and her brother had soldiered. The war had been sweeping across the hills and fields around my grandparents’ town of Listowel for nearly two years when District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old married man, an Irish Catholic from County Galway, was shot dead. He was the son of a farmer, the same stock as my grandmother Hannah’s people, and he left a widow and three young children behind. Yet his name was never mentioned. There is no monument to his memory, even though at the time of the killing he was the most powerful man in the locality and it was one of the most talked about events in the area’s recent history.
There are many other uncommemorated deaths and events in the journey that forms this book. It is the story of why my own people were willing to kill, and of how people and nations live with the blood that follows deeds – a story that, in one country or another, I have been trying to tell for the last thirty years but not, until now, in my own place. It has been a journey in search of unwilling ghosts. My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick left no diaries, letters or tape-recorded interviews. What I have are the few confidences shared with their family, some personal files from the military archives, the accounts of comrades in arms, the official histories and contemporary press reports, and my own memories of those rebels of my blood and of the place that made them.
I have tried to avoid yielding to my own collection of biases; however, a story of family such as this cannot be free of the writer’s personal shading. When writing of the Civil War I am acutely conscious that I come from a family that took the pro-Treaty side and, later, became stalwarts of the political organization founded by Michael Collins and his comrades. But I have tried to describe the vicious cycle of violence in north Kerry as it happened at the time and as it was experienced by the people of my past, doing so, as much as possible, without the benefit of hindsight, and without acquiescing to the justifications offered by either side. This book does not set out to be an academic history of the period, or a forensic account of every military encounter or killing in north Kerry. Others have done this with great skill. This is a memoir written about everyday Irish people who found themselves caught up on both sides in the great national drama that followed the rebellion of 1916. It is not a narrative which all historians of the period are sure to agree with, or indeed which other members of my family will necessarily endorse: every one of them will see the past through their own experiences and memories. The one bias to which I will readily admit is a loathing of war and of all who celebrate the killing of their fellow men and women. The good soldier shows humility in the remembrance of horror.
I have reached an age where I find myself constantly looking back in the direction of my forebears, seeking to understand myself, and my preoccupations, through the stories of their lives. It is only with the coming of peace on the island of Ireland that I have felt able to interrogate my family past with the sense of perspective that the dead deserve. It felt too close while blood was being daily spilled in the north. ‘We return to the lives of those who have gone before us,’ wrote the novelist Colum McCann. ‘Until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.’16 Home is where all my journeys of war begin and end.
* On 30 January 1972, soldiers from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, killing thirteen unarmed people. On 2 February angry crowds marched on the British embassy in Dublin and set it alight. In the events that became known as ‘Bloody Friday’ the IRA carried out multiple bombings in central Belfast on 21 July 1972. The attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured more than one hundred.
1
‘It is not,’ he urged, ‘by weak inaction that great empires are held together; there must be the struggle of brave men in arms; might is right with those who are at the summit of power.’
Tacitus, The Annals, AD 109
‘The freedom of Ireland depends in the long run not upon the play of politics, nor international dealings, but upon the will of the Irish people to be free.’
An t-Óglach, Dublin, 29 October 1918
I
It was a January morning of low grey skies. On Dublin’s Sackville Street crowds stood in fidgeting silence – street boys, daily paper hawkers, beggars and pickpockets, the old women from the Moore Street market, all gawking at the solemn faces marching up the left flank of the broad thoroughfare. With the cortège out of sight, they turned and went back to that other life of small trades and smaller change. They would have known that this policeman’s death was bigger than the usual run. Half the police and army top brass in Ireland seemed to be there: first came the bands with their sombre music, bands from the Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Immediately behind them came General Tudor, the most senior British security official in Ireland, along with a phalanx of senior police and military officers. The coffin lay on a gun carriage and was flanked by Auxiliaries marching with rifles reversed. A newspaper reported that some Auxies had taken the hats off men who failed to bare their heads in respect as the cortège passed.
He had been killed down the country, in Kerry, but he came from County Galway in the west. His RIC comrades followed in slow procession beside and behind. The constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary were marching out of history and towards oblivion behind a coffin draped in the Union flag: colours that would vanish from these streets in less than two years. But the marching men could not foresee the end of empire in Ireland. The British imperium stretched from the Pitcairn Islands across the Pacific and the Bay of Bengal, across the Hindu Kush to Delhi, across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Palestine, through the Strait of Gibraltar until it reached this embattled western frontier, these streets of Dublin, capital of Britain’s first colony. The funeral marchers knew of the unravelling in the wider world. Some would have had brothers and cousins still fighting the small wars of peace that erupted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Great War was over. But the Bolsheviks were fighting to save their revolution. Churchill had dispatched an expeditionary force to Russia to bolster anti-Communist ‘White’ forces, in the vicious civil war. As a child I remember seeing a photograph of a soldier, Sergeant Jamesie Harris of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, crouching in the snow. He was the father of my mother’s best friend, Breda, and went to ‘fight back the Red menace and collect the shillin’ a day’.1 The Great War irrevocably changed Breda’s father. The man in the picture has a wanderlust, perpetually seeking a camaraderie impossible to find in the tenements of Charlemont Street where as many as nine people lived in a single room. More practically the Dublin of escalating guerrilla war was a risky place for an ex-serviceman, unless he was going to offer his services to the Republicans. As long as Jamesie Harris’s fellow soldiers were being shot at and grenaded by the IRA, marching across the snows of Russia seemed much the better option.
At the Paris peace talks in 1919 the Irish delegation had been ignored, as had Vietnam, represented by Ho Chi Minh, and T. E. Lawrence with the Arabian commission, who quickly discovered the worth of promises made during war. The treaties of Versailles and Sèvres merely rearranged imperialism. Out with the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans and in with the Italians, the Japanese and, greatest and youngest of the looming giants, the United States, a behemoth that oscillated between isolationism and the logic of its expansive energy. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was being devoured by Britain, France and Greece until Turkish nationalism, in the form of Kemal Atatürk, halted their advance. Great armies clashed on the plains of Asia Minor and in the coastal cities of the Aegean. Smoke swirled over