But in the counties of Ireland murder spat back. It roamed Dublin, tracking secret agents and killing them where they slept, smashed into sleeping tenements, coiled in ambush on remote bog roads, ran up the stairs of redbrick Georgian houses in tree-lined suburbs, leaped in flames through the roofs of Anglo-Irish mansions, and always vanished into the sullen, unrevealing faces of the crowd. And murder also wore the uniforms of the British military, Black and Tans, Auxiliaries, regular policemen, and secret agents who dispensed with the law. Yeats captured the mood of the time:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror …10
The police and army filed into Glasnevin cemetery to lay their dead comrade to rest. District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan was an Irish Catholic and a supporter of Home Rule within the British Empire, the path pursued by the majority of Irish nationalists until the upheaval produced by the rebellion of 1916. O’Sullivan would be buried in the same vast graveyard as nationalist heroes like Parnell, Daniel O’Connell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The following year, Michael Collins, the leader of the war that claimed the policeman’s life, would be buried here too, shot dead by his former comrades in arms. It was here, six years previously, that Patrick Pearse had delivered the graveside oration for his Fenian friend, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse’s pledge that ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’ would become the rallying cry for the Revolution to come.
The forces of the Crown stood to attention. Behind them was a group of around a hundred or more mourners. As the Pathé news cameras roll a young boy, a street urchin possibly, suddenly darts forward to pluck something from the ground, just behind the Auxiliaries. What has he found? A dropped coin perhaps. Nobody pays him any attention. And he vanishes out of shot.
Tobias O’Sullivan is buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church. At the grave a woman stands in a mourning veil with two small boys dressed in black coats and caps. These are Bernard and John, the dead policeman’s sons. The woman is Mary, his widow, known to her family and friends as May, and she and some others are briefly seen looking away from the grave. That is because Tobias O’Sullivan’s daughter, his youngest child, Sara, aged two, is crying, hidden behind the row of larger figures at the grave’s edge, and being taken care of by another family member. The two boys look as if they are in a trance. The gravediggers, two young men in shirtsleeves, stare at the boys. They are in fact young policemen, because the gravediggers are on strike. The film is from the era before sound. But we can imagine the graveside murmur. The stifled cries as earth is piled upon earth. A newspaper reported on ‘pathetic scenes at the graveside, the widow and her two young sons weeping pitifully as the police buglers played the Last Post’.11 Tobias O’Sullivan is buried as an Irish policeman under the British Empire and as such is destined to be officially ‘unremembered’ in a newly independent Irish state. The only memorials for men like O’Sullivan will exist in quiet homes – a photograph or keepsake on the mantelpiece beside a votive candle; the bloodstained tunic he was wearing when he was shot, kept in a private place until his widow has died and eventually it vanishes. These Irishmen who killed and were killed by other Irishmen in the War of Independence are not commemorated or publicly mourned.
An old IRA man who fought in north Kerry remarked wistfully of the War of Independence: ‘We didn’t handle them properly for their brothers were in the IRA. In August 1920, the RIC were beating up the [Black and] Tans … we should have been able to pull the RIC our way if we had worked it properly.’12 The RIC was disbanded after independence. But the wounds of death were not forgotten. Not by those who loved the dead. Or by those who killed them. Tobias O’Sullivan was shot on Church Street in Listowel, near the house where my father grew up. He died at the hands of my grandmother’s comrades in the IRA. Hannah never spoke to me of his death or indeed of her comrades who died at the hands of the police and army. But decades after the killing, the shade of District Inspector O’Sullivan lingered in the hidden memories of Church Street. The dead have a way of coming back, if they ever went away at all.
II
The day I donned my first uniform was one of the happiest in my life, and I felt that Dublin belonged to me as I swaggered down Grafton Street with my black cane stick, gloves neatly under my shoulder strap and my whistle chain across my breast.13
Constable Jeremiah Mee
Tobias O’Sullivan stood at around six foot two and was sturdy with wavy dark hair and a thick moustache. A photograph of him in the last year of his life shows him gazing at the camera with a dogged expression. He came from the same Catholic faith as his assassins, and a similar rural background. But he had chosen to defend the existing order and for this his compatriots were ready to kill him.
His family traced their roots to the Gaelic lordship of O’Sullivan Beare, who had fought the English until he was forced into exile in 1603 and was murdered fifteen years later, apparently by an English spy, as he left mass in Madrid. The family believed their ancestors had retreated north-west with O’Sullivan Beare after the battle of Kinsale in County Cork in 1602, when the forces of Elizabeth I defeated a combined Irish and Spanish force, presaging the death of the Gaelic order and the triumph of colonial power. According to family lore, the O’Sullivans fought on and were present at Aughrim in County Galway when their leader Donal Cam O’Sullivan defeated a larger English-led army in January 1603. These were the stories of resilience and hardiness that were told to the young Tobias O’Sullivan. He grew up in this Irish-speaking district believing he had inherited the blood of warriors.
Tobias was born on 14 May 1877 in Doorus, a long narrow peninsula that reaches into Lough Corrib, a place of forbidding beauty where high mountains loom over lake and fields. He was the seventh of nine children whose mother died in childbirth when Tobias was just four years old. The O’Sullivans occupied a two-storey farmhouse on the lakeshore where the family owned boats for fishing and grazed sheep on twenty-six acres, a solid holding in those days. But Tobias’s father had known great hardship. He was seven years old when the potato crop failed and the Famine followed. Tobias would have heard stories of the catastrophe.
‘The very dogs which had lost their masters or were driven from their homes became roving denizens of this district,’ reported an English land surveyor at the time; they ‘lived on the unburied or partially buried corpses of their late owners and others, and there was no help for it, as all were prostrate alike, the territory so extensive, and the people so secluded and unknown’.14
In fact Tobias’s own grandfather, Patrick O’Sullivan, died of cholera during the Famine after going to help a shepherd who worked for him while the man lay dying. When he became ill himself he sent word back not to fetch him, conscious that he could infect others of his family. The O’Sullivans buried him on Inchagoill, a sacred island on Lough Corrib. At the height of the Famine the area also saw a concerted effort to convert Catholics to Protestantism, with considerable sectarian animosity between elements of the two churches. The evictions that accompanied the Famine, and escalated in its aftermath, deepened the alienation. As late as November 1875, ten families were forced off the land near Oughterard, around twenty miles from the O’Sullivans; among them was an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack on hearing that he was to be made homeless. When the RIC were called in to enforce the eviction one officer had hot coals poured down his back. Thirty men and women were injured by a subsequent police bayonet charge. By 1880 meetings of the Land League in the area were drawing crowds of more than five thousand people to the slogan ‘land for the landless