IN LATE DECEMBER 1956, Noel Kavanagh brought together the Teeling Column, including Ó Brádaigh’s section and Charlie Murphy, who was down from Dublin. Bases had been established, and the column spent the nights of December 28th and December 29th in the field, planning their next move. Kavanagh decided to attack the RUC barracks in Derrylin in South Fermanagh. It would be a return visit; the smaller column had attacked the barracks on December 14th. With the addition of Ó Brádaigh’s section, Kavanagh hoped that the barracks could be destroyed.
On Sunday night, December 30th, Kavanagh arranged for a local IRA unit to block the roads into Derrylin, which would slow down RUC reinforcements. The column traveled on foot into the village and split into two groups, a cover party and an assault team. Ó Brádaigh, who was in charge of the cover party, had a Bren light machine gun. The volunteers with him were armed with Lee-Enfield rifles captured from the British Army in the raid on Armagh military barracks in June 1954. Kavanagh was in charge of the assault team. Seven RUC men were inside the barracks.
The barracks sat on ground about five feet higher than the road that fronted it. Along its sides and in back were trees and thick vegetation. The cover party set up on a grass margin of the road and took cover behind the trees growing through a boundary fence between the road and the barracks. The assault team crept up to the barracks. At about 10:20 in the evening, the RUC men were sitting around the fire listening to the Radio Éireann news bulletin when Ó Brádaigh’s group opened fire, shooting through the windows and front door. Constable John Scally was hit in the back in the first burst of fire. He suddenly stood up and fell to the floor, groaning. Shots poured into the door and windows of the station as RUC men ran to help Scally or get up the stairs to see what was going on.
There was a brief lull, and the IRA called for those inside to surrender. The RUC men responded by returning fire through the second-floor windows. In front of the boundary fence was a shallow furrow filled with water. The return fire hit the water, which splashed Ó Brádaigh on the forehead. It was his first time under fire and his immediate thought was, “That bastard’s shooting at me!” He and the rest of the cover party kept firing; the shooting waxed and waned as volunteers moved about, reloaded, and fired.
Kavanagh and Pat McGirl (no relation to John Joe McGirl) placed a homemade mine-a sack filled with gelignite-against the door of the barracks. While McGirl prepared the fuse, Kavanagh ran on and shot out the front light with his Thompson machine gun. He then heard the radio room above him. One of the constables, Cecil Ferguson, was calling for help. Kavanagh tossed a grenade through the second-story window and went back for another mine. The grenade went off, destroying the radio and blowing debris back out the window. The cover party continued firing. Kavanagh arrived with a second mine as McGirl lit the fuse of the first. He dumped the mine and ran as the first one went off, blowing in the door and demolishing the stairs. Ferguson, who was returning fire through a second-floor window, was knocked to the floor. Rubble from the ceiling fell in on him. As the RUC men recovered from the blast there was another lull, and again the IRA called for those inside to surrender.
Kavanagh was considering a frontal assault into the barracks when the RUC started firing again. Realizing that reinforcements were probably on the way, Charlie Murphy recommended that they withdraw. It had been twenty minutes of intense battle. Volunteers were tiring and it showed; their fire had slowed and was less organized. Kavanagh ordered the column back together and as two groups they took off along either side of the road. They had not gone far when an RUC Land Rover with its lights off appeared. They considered an ambush but instead allowed it to pass unmolested.
Behind them they left a wrecked police station. An RUC officer later overestimated that forty IRA volunteers were involved in the attack. Broken glass and debris were scattered inside and outside of the building Walls were pitted with bullet holes. Broken planks and twisted iron were in front; piping and wiring hung from the roof. A first-floor ceiling “dangled to the floor.” The second floor was a mess. A priest was called for Constable Scally, who was taken by ambulance to Fermanagh County Hospital in Enniskillen. He died en route from shock and bleeding. An autopsy showed that bullet fragments had severed his spinal cord and lacerated his spleen. He had been engaged to be married.
After the RUC Land Rover had passed, the column moved south toward their County Fermanagh base near the border. As they made their way into the hills at the foot of Slieve Rushen Mountain, they saw warning flares going off in the sky. Because they had withdrawn quickly, they were safely beyond the British Army and RUC cordon. Several men were tired, and Murphy wanted to stop and rest. Kavanagh pressed on, and the column spread out. Snow began to fall and it got colder. The mountain’s iron ore deposits rendered their compasses useless and they got lost and wandered about. They were cold and exhausted, and someone produced a bottle of Advocaat, a liqueur. Ó Brádaigh, true to his Pioneer Badge, had always been an abstainer, but he was persuaded to take a few drinks for medicinal purposes. They went straight to his head and he felt he was walking on air, to the amusement of his comrades. Finally getting their bearings, the group made their way up and over Slieve Rushen, missing their base and ending up in the Ballyconnell district of County Cavan. As they came down the mountain, they could see Gardai behind them on the mountainside, searching for them. Kavanagh, exhausted, was left in a friendly house. The column split into groups and sought refuge in other houses in the general area. It was a hit-or-miss proposition, and several volunteers were lucky and escaped arrest. Kavanagh, who was not so lucky, was arrested. So were Ó Brádaigh and his group.
Rainsoaked and covered with dust, Ó Brádaigh and five others ducked into a house in the tiny village of Clinty, about a mile from Ballyconnell. Gardai surrounded the house, saw the men inside, and entered through the back door. When a superintendent asked who was in charge, Ó Brádaigh said that he was and instructed the others to provide only their names and addresses. They had dumped their weapons and were unarmed, but Ó Brádaigh had a haversack that contained ammunition, a practice genade, and a copy of Cronin’s Notes on Guerrilla Wafare. They were put into police cars and taken to Ballyconnell police station. On the way, he quietly tossed the ammunition out of the car’s window, but the police spotted this, retrieved the ammunition, and then went through the haversack.
It was in the house that they learned of Constable Scally’s death. The civil and religious authorities, north and south, viewed the killing as murder. At the coroner’s inquest on the death, an RUC Inspector stated that the attack had achieved nothing and that it personified, quoting Robert Burns, “Man’s inhumanity to man.” Ó Brádaigh and his fellow volunteers had a different view. Scally was a victim in a war of national liberation. It was nothing personal against Scally; Ó Brádaigh, after thinking that a “bastard" (later identified as Constable Ferguson) was trying to shoot him, immediately recognized that the man had every right to shoot back. The IRA were soldiers fighting against British colonial interests in Ireland; Scally, as a uniformed and armed member of the state’s militarized police, directly supported those interests. As soldiers, they knew that eventually they would kill someone, just as some of them might be killed. It was what they had been training for. It was never clear who fired the fatal shot (the Bren and the rifles used the same ammunition), and the raiders collectively shared responsibility. In 1991, Joe Jackson interviewed Ó Brádaigh for the magazine Hot Press. Jackson asked Ó Brádaigh if he knew who fired the shot that hit Scally. Ó Brádaigh replied, “I’d say everyone who took part in the attack shared responsibility, not just the man who shot the bullet. It can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.” Scally was the first fatality of the campaign.
At the police station, Ó Brádaigh requested that his initial interview, with Garda Superintendent Kelly, be in Irish. Instead, the relevant section of the Offenses Against the State Act was read to him in English. He put his fingers to his ears. Kelly then used Irish to ask him to account for his activities. Replying in Irish, he refused to answer. According to Ó Brádaigh, Kelly took him into a separate room and asked for the whereabouts of other members of the column. He offered to bring them in off the mountain and, in the rain and sleet, have them driven home. He also offered to drop charges related to the items in the haversack if Ó Brádaigh provided information on the IRA volunteers still at large. Ó Brádaigh refused. A Special Branch inspector, Philip McMahon, arrived and also spoke to him privately, asking him to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of the column.