FORGET NOT THE BOYS OF KILMICHAEL!
By
Manus
O’Riordan
[ Note: The following
commemorative article by this “grandson of
Ballingeary” was first published in the
“Northern Star”, March 2001.
It set out to challenge the revisionist
attacks on “The Boys of Kilmichael” that had
once again surfaced the previous November, on
the 80th anniversary of that
momentous ambush in this neighbourhood of ours
that was of such critical importance to the War
of
Phil Kelleher of
Macroom, Co. Cork, a top- class rugby player due
to be selected as an Irish international, was
aged 23 when shot in the back by two IRA gunmen
on the night of October 31, 1920.
He had served with distinction as a
Captain in
Kilmichael Ambush in The Irish Times
The
arguments concerning the Kilmichael ambush of
November 28, 1920, for which Barry was indeed
both fully responsible and directly involved,
have raged fast and furious, and those of an
earlier controversy were brought together by the
Aubane Historical Society in Millstreet and
published as a pamphlet entitled “Kilmichael –
The False Surrender”.
Sleeping
dogs, however, did not lie still for very long.
Four days later, the “Irish Times” of
December 2 saw a two pronged counter-offensive
launched against Barry’s character – the first
in the form of a TV review by Eamon Delaney and
the second by Kevin Myers, safely back in his
“Irishman’s Diary” spot, and apoplectic that it
had been occupied for even a day by the likes of
Ó Cuanacháin.
Delaney-Myers evoked (or, should I say,
provoked) a reply from myself on December 5,
which a fortnight later had still not seen the
light of day.
I continued to pressurise the “Irish
Times” with the argument that while they might
sometimes publish letters critical of Myers’
style, they were carefully censoring any
correspondence that highlighted how Myers
persistently got his facts wrong.
I pointed out that this would be the
third such letter from myself that they were
suppressing.
On this occasion the pressure worked and
the letter was finally published on St.
Stephen’s Day 2000, three weeks after
submission, although missed by many because of
the Christmas holidays.
In that
letter I argued:
In his
review of the Léargas documentary on the
Kilmichael ambush (December 2) Eamon Delaney
charges that Tom Barry derisively said of the
dead Auxiliaries: “We threw them their money and
their brandy hip flasks”.
Lest such an attributed quotation should
now enter the history books and leave Barry
damned for gratuitously abusing the corpses of
his enemies, it is necessary to set the record
straight.
Barry in fact took active measures to
safeguard the corpses for subsequent
identification and Christian burial.
His actual words recorded in the
documentary were: “We took their arms, took
their ammunition, took their notes, notebooks.
We left them their money and their brandy
flasks and we pulled them away from the lorries
– the dead bodies - and we set fire to their two
lorries”.
In the
same issue (December 2) Kevin Myers objects to
Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin’s use of words in saying
(November 28) that
the totally uninvolved civilian Séamus Ó
Liatháin was “murdered in cold blood” but that
the Auxie storm-trooper Cecil Guthrie was
“executed”.
Yet in what Myers refers to as “Peter
Hart’s outstanding study” Guthrie is also
described as “executed”.
What Hart nonetheless fails to mention is
that in one of the reference works which he
himself cites, Father Pat Twohig’s “Green Tears
for Hecuba”, Guthrie was identified as the
actual Auxie who had murdered Ó Liatháin in
Ballymakeera.
Myers
proceeds to re-echo Hart’s incorrect claim that
Ó Liatháin was “the only person killed by the
Macroom Auxiliaries before Kilmichael”.
They were in fact in the process of
establishing a reign of terror over what they
regarded as the untermenschen of the West Cork
Gaeltacht.
(Note:
“Untermenschen”, literally “less than men”, was
the term used by the German Nazis to describe
those whom they regarded as “lesser breeds”, the
indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe whose
countries they had invaded and occupied). Sunday
after Sunday the Auxies systematically descended
on Ballingeary at Mass-time in order to corral
and abuse the villagers as they emerged from
worship.
And in a “shoot-to-kill” mission on
By way of
contrast with the vendetta pursued against
Barry’s reputation, the Gaeltacht Volunteer
leader Micheál Ó Súilleabháin was one IRA
commander about whom Hart could not find a bad
word to say.
He referred to Ó Súilleabháin’s annoyance
at having to cancel his own plans to attack
“He was
not armed.
It was a pity, for it was a remarkable
fact that even a shot or two exchanged with
these warriors disturbed their aim unduly. A few
weeks later these marauding Auxiliaries were
trapped at Kilmichael, a few miles to the south
of our area.
Seventeen of them were killed”.
Indeed
they were, and the course of the War of
Independence was altered
Auxies –
Marauding or Diciplined
So much
for my reply to the “Irish Times” attacks. On
November 26, both Eoghan Harris in the “Sunday
Times” and John A. Murphy in the “Sunday
Independent” had also previewed the TV
documentary at length under their respective
headings of “Kilmichael Gives up its Secrets”
and “Bloody
Fable of Kilmichael’s Dead”.
Harris went out of his way to pay homage
to “Peter Hart in his classic book ‘The IRA and
its Enemies’ “.
But then he appeared to pull back
somewhat from such a wholehearted commitment: “I
do not fully accept Hart’s version”.
Harris nonetheless presented the
marauding Auxies of Macroom as being guilty of
no more than going on “a routine patrol” through
Kilmichael. He went on to lay great emphasis on
the fact that they were “mostly junior officers
in their twenties” who had an OBE, three
Military Crosses and a distinguished Flying
Medal between them from the First World War and
were now serving in
“My
account does not depict the Auxiliary Officers –
as Cork Republican folklore does – as faceless
digits who got their just deserts.
If that were true, the comrades of the
dead men would have taken a savage revenge. Far
from doing so, the Auxiliaries around Macroom
remained disciplined”.
No
revenge? Within a fortnight of Kilmichael, on
( During
the course of that night they effectively
murdered an elderly
Jewish lady who had come to
Harris’s
own modified version of Peter Hart went as
follows:
“Barry
was determined to take no prisoners so as to
build a personal legend … At no stage of my life
did I believe in the fake surrender.
I believe that Barry used a wounded
Auxiliary’s dying shot to coerce his shocked men
into murdering the survivors – and did most of
the dirty work himself … Professor John A.
Murphy, a local man who has heard the folklore,
does not swallow the story (of the fake
surrender) either”.
John A.
Murphy And Bishop Buckley
The
problem for Harris, however, is that it is not
at all clear any longer what it is that Murphy
believes on the matter. Previewing the TV
documentary to be shown two nights later, Harris
prepared his loyal readership for disappointment
in the Professor:
“Murphy
and Dr. Buckley, The Roman Catholic Bishop of
Inchigeela’s own Bishop Buckley, of course,
proved to be as much an irritant to the “Irish
Times” as he was to Harris.
Eamon Delaney snidely commented:
“At the
end, Bishop Buckley, a ‘local man’, said that
‘The Boys of Kilmichael’ was a great song: ‘I’d
sing it for you, only I’ve no great
voice’
No Bishop, please don’t.
I’m sure you’ve got other things to be
doing”.
And in
the same issue Myers opined:
“Now what
happened in Kilmichael – whatever it was –
should not be the subject of pride, or
boastfulness, or vainglorious satisfaction, and
least of all song … It is an obscenity to carol
joyfully at such things, as does the song with
which the (Ó Cuanacháin) diary began”.
The
double think here is quite amazing.
Which Bishops are to be told by the
“Irish Times” what songs they should or should
not sing?
Just like any other subject he touches,
Myers is also dogmatically opinionated on
questions of Church music – whether Catholic or
Protestant.
Yet he has never once addressed the
subject- matter of one of the most powerful
Anglican hymns sung by both the
‘The
Boys of Kilmichael’
“Whenever
they sang ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’ (which they
rarely did because they found its braggadocio
unpleasant and because in any case their
nationalist repertoire was too wide and rich)
they used the more genteel punch-line about ‘the
boys of the column’ making ‘a clean sweep of
them all’.
However, the no-holds-barred reality of
the encounter is more truthfully and more
terribly depicted in the vulgarly robust
version: ‘the Irish Republican Army made s**t of
the whole f***ing lot’.”
But at
this point Murphy went a step too far.
Perhaps a crudity-for-its-own sake
version has now become more popular.
But in my own parents’ generation, not to
mind Barry’s , such use in company of the “f”
word would not have been tolerated.
Indeed, in the wider Republican movement
nationalist arguments were advanced in an
attempt to hold such words at bay by referring
to them as “British army language”.
Barry would not have countenanced such a
performance for a minute.
As a 12 year old boy in September 1961 I
was privileged to participate in an extensive
tour of Kilmichael, Crossbarry and other
Murphy
became even more schizophrenic when referring to
Hart’s arguments:
“The
‘false surrender’ incident has been much
disputed, most recently in a detailed analysis
by historian Peter Hart in his admirable book,
‘The IRA and Its Enemies’…”
Dr.
Jeremiah Kelleher
Having
expressed such admiration for Hart and gone on
to nit-pick Barry’s accounts, Murphy then
proceeded to sit on the fence.
His most coherent contribution as
Harris’s “local man” was to recall the role of
his family GP, the Macroom coroner Dr. Jeremiah
Kelleher.
He did indeed testify to the personal
integrity of that Catholic loyalist:
“Kelleher
had been personally affected in the course of
the Troubles when his son, a RIC Officer, had
been shot dead by the IRA … Though he made no
secret of his anti-nationalist views, it is said
that he won the respect of his enemies for
unfailingly answering the call of duty in
tending confidentially to wounded volunteers.”
In
highlighting how it had been Kelleher who had
conducted the autopsy on the bodies of the dead
Auxies, Murphy went on:
“His
bristling integrity commands respect for his
Kilmichael evidence.
While not corroborating the wilder
British charges of ‘hideous mutilation’, the
doctor testified that the Auxies had been
riddled with bullets, three had been shot at
point-blank range, several had been shot after
death, and another’s head had been smashed
open”.
But all
that this was evidence of was the ferocity of
the battle, and told us nothing about the
circumstances of surrender, whether false or
true.
In the end Murphy climbed back up on the
fence concerning that particular issue:
“No Room
For Sentimentality……..”
“There is
no room for Thomas Davis parlour-sentimentality
in guerrilla warfare, any more than there is for
the Queensberry Rules or the Geneva Convention.
That is why the ‘false surrender’
controversy is irrelevant … At Kilmichael, Tom
Barry’s guerrillas did what guerrillas do”.
But the
controversy is not at all irrelevant since it
constituted a central thesis of what Murphy
himself referred to as Hart’s “admirable book”.
Harris was obviously quite annoyed that
Murphy’s backsliding on that issue had gone
further than his own.
Even less palatable was the fact that in
both the TV documentary and his own newspaper
article Murphy made it clear that the Kilmichael
ambush took place in the context of a War of
Independence being waged in the face of
Britain’s bloody denial of the right of
national self-determination.
As Murphy put it:
“There
were many factors at work during the
Winter/Spring of 1920-21 which must be
considered in explaining the radical change in
British offers to nationalist
Harris
exited with a rather different conclusion,
having berated both Murphy and Bishop Buckley
for not dancing on Barry’s grave:
“Let
me leave you with a question.
After the ambush at Clonfin on
Mouth Of
The Glen 1918
Such an
example of caring for the enemy wounded had not,
however, been the prerogative of Mac Eoin’s
Longford.
It had also been practised as a matter of
principle in
“The book
is nothing else than the people’s mind.
One might almost say the mind of this
rock-built, meagre, sparsely populated terrain –
the mind of the Gaeltacht … It tells us of a
small enough band of young men – the writer
himself was hardly out of his teens – from
Coolea, Ballyvourney, Kilnamartyra, Inchigeela,
Ballingeary who did not wait to be attacked.
Usually they went out to find the enemy”.
And how
they engaged with that enemy in their first
ambush was described by Ó Súilleabháin thus:
“Dan Mac
Sweeney and Liam Twomey presented their
revolvers.
Their opponent reached for his rifle
which lay on the seat inside him.
As he grasped it a bullet scarred his
neck deeply.
He fell from his seat and lay bleeding on
the road … Johnny Lynch’s opponent still clung
to his rifle.
He shouted for mercy, and said he was a
married man with a wife and family depending on
him; yet he would not relinquish the rifle.
Johnny, for a reasonable time, had taken
him as easily as he possibly could.
He had risked life and liberty to spare
him, even after hearing him boast of how the
(Crown forces’) machine-gun had frightened the
people at Coolea.
Now he had to treat him roughly, and when
Johnny straightened himself up holding the
captured rifle, the RIC man lay on the ground
bruised and vanquished … The man scarred by the
bullet said nothing.
Indeed it was a matter of regret with the
Volunteers who knew him, and especially with
Johnny who had experience of his courtesy during
a raid on his house, that he should have been
hurt.
They rejoiced when they learned that his
wound was not serious”.
Ó
Súilleabháin’s instincts were to be no less
chivalrous to British Army opponents.
Two years later he led the ambush and
capture of two heavily-armed military lorries
outside Ballingeary on
Ballingeary Lorries
“The
order to surrender was not in this case complied
with.
Throwing themselves flat, they took the
best cover available around and under the lorry.
A volley from the lads tore splinters
from the woodwork over their heads and rattled
on the ironwork.
That helped them to decide otherwise.
A white flag was raised on a rifle …
Always, when Tommy was reasonable, we gave him
the benefit of the doubt.
The Tommies from Keimaneigh were now
brought over, and the thirteen were taken to a
nearby disused house.
A fire was lighted, kettles were boiled
and tea was made for them. After the tea, which
they much appreciated, three men marched them,
two deep, down the road through the village.
Showing them the road to Macroom, they
told them that they were free to go in that
direction”.
Events in
Ballyvourney
The
following month, at the Slippery Rock ambush on
Within a
few weeks, however, the character of warfare in
the area dramatically altered, and it was
“From
within came a fusillade of rifle shots. Liam
Hegarty, whether hit or not, managed to cross a
low bank which served as the road fence on his
side.
Then turning left he travelled in its
small shelter for a short distance before he
fell.
The other Volunteers and the children all
escaped injury.
However, a young man, Michael Lynch,
lived a few hundred yards down the road to
Macroom.
Hearing the shooting he ran on to the
roadway.
He was mortally wounded by a rifle
bullet. Whether
the killers in the lorry aimed at him or not is
not certain.
But it is certain that one of the
miscreants crossed the fence and shot Liam
Hegarty again as he lay wounded”.
Ó
Súilleabháin’s book, like many another that
could give the lie to Hart, is long out of
print.
His summation of this critical turning
point is as follows:
“What was
the motive for this killing?
The enemy did not mention any, but we
came to the conclusion that it must have been a
reprisal for recent attacks on them.
The last action had taken place less than
three weeks previously, at the Slippery Rock.
Here one officer and ten men, fully
armed, had been opposed to a fewer number of the
IRA, only two of whom were armed with rifles.
The British soldiers had been invited to
surrender before fire was opened on them.
The officer in charge had been killed and
four men wounded, but there had been no
unnecessary shooting … We had taken them as
easily as we could possibly have done, and had
helped the wounded to the best of our ability.
The treacherous killing of an unarmed IRA
man and a civilian, and the attempted massacre
of others, including children, was not far off
the Cromwell standard.
Whether the motive was just a vengeful
one, or calculated to inspire terror, its result
fell very short of the mark.
At that time the people of Ballyvourney,
and indeed of all our area, would not yield an
inch to tyranny or terror”.
“Bandage”
Test
In spite
of such murders and a further one in his own
area of West Cork, none other than Tom Barry
himself was also passing Harris’s “bandage” test
with flying colours, in the hope that such
murders would be the exception that proved the
rule.
In “Guerrilla Days in
“Five of
the enemy were dead, including Captain Dickson,
four were wounded and six unhurt, except for
shock … Not one of the IRA was hit.
The members of the Column helped to make
the wounded
To no
avail.
“The next
shooting, the cold-blooded and deliberate murder
of a civilian, took place in the village of
Ballymakeera on the evening of November 1, 1920
… The Auxies from Macroom, in the twilight,
appeared in the village.
One of their number entered a house,
called out a married man named Jim Lehane
(Séamus Ó Liatháin), a man who would not hurt a
fly, and taking him across the road, shot him
dead.
Nine days later we lost Christy Lucey
(Críostóir Ó Luasa) at Túirín Dubh, Ballingeary
… He was not armed … A few weeks later these
marauding Auxiliaries were trapped at Kilmichael
… “.
So much
for Hart’s false claim that “their first and
only victim before Kilmichael was James Lehane”.
Britain had indeed altered the character
of warfare prior to Kilmichael but Kilmichael in
turn altered the course of the war itself.
And Ó Súilleabháin, who had all of the
noble attributes that Harris would seek to
personify in Mac Eoin, exulted in Barry’s
victory.
Moreover, Harris’s attempt to canonise
Mac Eoin in order to demonise Barry is a
non-starter.
For there can be little doubt that the
Flying Column Commander leader in Mac Eoin
himself would also have led him to exult in his
fellow-Commander’s victory.
Harris’s
portrait of Seán
Mac Eoin as a plaster saint was a smart
alec stunt that carefully avoided any serious
examination of the man’s own fighting record.
But why, when he damned Barry for
Kilmichael, did Harris make no mention at all of
Dr. Kelleher, the Macroom coroner who had
performed the autopsy on the Auxies’ corpses,
and still less of his RIC son Phil whose
Military Cross from the First World War was at
least as significant as those listed by Harris
in respect of the dead Auxies?
The
problem for Harris is that Tom Barry was in no
way responsible for the shooting of Phil
Kelleher, nor for the follow-up killings of the
two young Protestants charged with informing.
That was the responsibility of quite a
different Flying Column Commander – Harris’s own
momentary hero, no less.
For District Inspector Kelleher had been
shot far from his native Macroom, in the bar of
the Granard, Co. Longford hotel where he had
taken up residence, the Greville Arms of Michael
Collin’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan.
In “Green Tears for Hecuba”, Pat Twohig
puts it thus:
“Kelleher
had been ‘unguarded’ in his remarks about the
IRA in the wrong place, General Seán Mac Eoin’s
home ground”.
With
Kitty Kiernan herself serving in the bar,
Kelleher had been drinking sherry and talking
about the fine inexpensive wine to be got in
France.
Kitty had made her excuses to go upstairs
and the piano started playing.
Whereupon two men came to the door and
shot Kelleher in the back.
He immediately fell to the floor in a
pool of blood.
And in Seán Mac Eoin’s own memoirs, “With
the IRA in the Fight for Freedom”, he dismissed
Kelleher as “a young ex-army officer who was
given orders to take action against the IRA and
clean up the area”.
To borrow
the language of what John A. Murphy said of
Barry at Kilmichael, we might therefore
conclude:
“At
Granard, Seán Mac Eoin’s guerrillas did what
guerrillas do”.
And the attempt by
assorted revisionist scribes to denigrate the
Kilmichael ambush, which struck such a mortal
blow against the most powerful Empire in the
world, is seen to be incapable of withstanding
the light of day.