Ballymacandy: The Story of a Kerry Ambush

By Owen O'Shea

On 1 June 1921, at the height of Ireland’s War of Independence, a cycling patrol of members of the RIC was ambushed by members of the IRA at Ballymacandy, County Kerry. After an hour of fighting, four police officers lay dead and another died a day later. Ballymacandy tells their story, and that of those who led the attack against them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: May 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785373893

Owen O'Shea

Owen O'Shea, from Milltown, Co. Kerry, is Communications Officer with Kerry County Council. A former Labour Party press officer and election candidate, he was journalist with Kerry's Eye and Radio Kerry. He is the author of Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry& Political Dynasties (O'Brien Press, 2011), and A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium (Merrion Press, 2018), and Ballymacandy: The Story of a Kerry Ambush (Merrion Press, 2021).

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BALLYMACANDY

THE STORY OF A KERRY AMBUSH

Owen O’Shea, from Milltown, Co. Kerry, is a historian and author of several books on history and politics in his native county. A former press adviser to the Labour Party and a journalist for many years, he is the author of Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry’s Political Dynasties (2011) and co-author of A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium (Merrion Press, 2018). He was co-editor of a history of Kerry and the Easter Rising in 2016. O’Shea currently works as Media, Communications and Customer Relations Officer with Kerry County Council and is an Irish Research Council-funded PhD student at University College Dublin, researching electioneering and politics in Kerry in the decade after the Civil War.

BALLYMACANDY

THE STORY OF A KERRY AMBUSH

OWEN O’SHEA

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First published in 2021 by

Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Owen O’Shea, 2021

9781785373879 (Paper)

9781785373886 (Kindle)

9781785373893 (Epub)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Typeset in Minion Pro 11/16 pt

Front cover: Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary at Milltown Barracks in 1914.

Back cover: Members of the Milltown Volunteers, c.1918.

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

CONTENTS

Foreword: Dr Mary McAuliffe

Preface

Prologue – Salve Regina

1. ‘A rough and dangerous task’

2. ‘We were nearly stone mad … half crazy’

3. ‘Take up the cudgel … to remedy this unfortunate village’

4. ‘Fairyland’

5. ‘Our state gets worse’

6. ‘The Hut’

7. ‘We rode on … carrying our revolvers in our hands’

8. ‘He would not turn off his road for any Shinner’

9. ‘Blood was slowly trickling from his left ear’

10. ‘Guilty of wilful murder’

11. ‘This ambush ought not to have occurred’

12. ‘What Dev did in Boland’s Mills, Jack Flynn did at Ballymacandy’

13. ‘Honesty is the best of policy’

Postscript – ‘They are the fellows that put us here’

Appendix I: List of participants in the Ballymacandy Ambush, 1 June 1921

Appendix II: Members of Milltown District Council of Cumann na mBan, July 1921

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

FOREWORD

In this welcome addition to the many books produced on the revolutionary period since this Decade of Centenaries began in 2012, Owen O’Shea takes a close look at one of many ambushes that occurred in Kerry during the War of Independence, 1919–21. Local studies, which uncover forgotten or marginalised details of contexts, personalities and events of this period, have become an important part of the processes of memory. Many studies have overlooked the local in favour of sweeping national narratives. While many incidents like the Ballymacandy Ambush lay half-remembered in local memories and oral history, the availability of digitised military pension applications and Bureau of Military History witness statements from the Irish Military Archives, as well as access to multiple other sources, allows researchers to dig deep, find the voices and reconstruct the immediate as well as the broad contexts for events.

O’Shea uses the eyewitness accounts of two young Milltown schoolboys, who, curious about the sounds of gunfire heard from the classroom on a blistering hot day in June 1921, ran towards those sounds rather than away from them, so setting the stage for this local history. The sight they came upon, dead bodies strewn on the road and a woman nearby, keening, was a scene never to be forgotten by either. However, in many ways the ambush at Ballymacandy was forgotten, at least in the mainstream and national narratives of trauma, war and violence. Now with greater access to archives, especially through the pension applications of members of the IRA and the women’s association, Cumann na mBan, and with a deep knowledge of and connection to the area, O’Shea provides us with a masterful, detailed reconstruction of the context and detail of what happened that fateful day.

Five members of the Crown Forces were killed at Ballymacandy on 1 June 1921 by members of the 6th Battalion of the Kerry No.2 Brigade and the Active Service Unit (ASU) of the No.1 Brigade. O’Shea frames what happened here in the context of ongoing events in Kerry from the outbreak of violence post-1916, beginning with the first raid on an RIC barracks by Kerry Volunteers at Gortatlea on 13 April 1918. Irish Volunteer companies had been in place in Kerry from 1914, as had branches of Cumann na mBan. The Easter Rising had its own particular impact on Kerry, with the first deaths of 1916 happening at Ballykissane pier when Irish Volunteers, Con Keating, Daniel Sheehan and Charlie Monahan, drowned while on active service. Most famously, the German ship the Aud failed to deliver its cargo of arms – destined for use in the uprising – to the Kerry Volunteers and senior revolutionary leader Roger Casement, who was arrested near Banna on 21 April 1916.

O’Shea unpacks the complicated stories of Kerry, especially mid-Kerry, in the War of Independence. The boycott of the RIC, the arrival of the Black and Tans, the increasing numbers of young men and women joining the IRA and Cumann na mBan respectively, created a tense and volatile situation. By late 1920 parts of Kerry were only under a semblance of control by the Crown Forces, and ambushes of the RIC at Hillville in October 1920, in which two constables were killed, and soon after at Kilderry, led to vicious Crown Force reprisals in Milltown and Killorglin. By the time of the ambush at Ballymacandy the pressure on the RIC was immense, and the guerrilla warfare conducted by Flying Columns with the assistance of Cumann na mBan was taking its toll.

In setting the scene for the Ballymacandy Ambush, O’Shea brings to life the men and women who were involved, on both sides. What stands out in this study are the parallel lives of RIC Sergeant James Collery and IRA leader Dan Mulvihill. By 1921 Collery was stationed in Killorgin RIC Barracks with a mixed force of RIC and Black and Tans, and Mulvihill was a senior member of the 6th Battalion of the Kerry No. 2 Brigade, IRA. The trajectories of their lives would bring the two men to a dramatic and violent encounter at Ballymacandy.

O’Shea evokes the complex political and societal relationships of people in the local communities in mid-Kerry in 1920–21. From active members of the IRA and Cumann na mBan, to local constables of the RIC, and members of the hated Black and Tans, to civilians – Protestant and Catholic, landowners and tenants, town-dwellers and rural inhabitants, all were caught up in and impacted by the conflict. He details the conflicted and uneasy position of the local Protestant landowners, the involvement of so many young men and women in militant republicanism, and the impossibility of policing communities during a guerrilla war when the civilian population was increasingly resistant to British rule and law. He also details the terror visited on communities by those forces of the Crown in official and unofficial reprisal attacks as well as the self-policing by republicans of their ‘own’ people – often violently, including the violence meted out to young women for ‘company keeping’ with members of the RIC or military.

What O’ Shea has expertly produced here – using all available sources, from archive material and contemporary newspaper reports to eyewitness accounts – is a deep analysis of the social, political and revolutionary histories of his own community, centred round the impact of a single War of Independence ambush. Micro-histories such as these are vital to building up the layers of a broader narrative of the revolutionary period. Without understanding what motivated Dan Mulvihill and his sisters (who joined Cumann na mBan) and the other men and women of Kerry’s revolutionary generation to take up the fight for Irish freedom, or why that fight led to Sergeant James Collery’s violent death on a road in mid-Kerry in the summer of 1921, we cannot fully understand and acknowledge the histories, impacts and legacies of our revolutionary times. This is a fascinating and necessary story.

Dr Mary McAuliffe,

Assistant Professor in Gender Studies,

University College Dublin

PREFACE

As a student of politics, I often came across the famous Tip O’Neill quote that all politics is local. As a student of history, I often thought the same adage could be applied to that subject: all history is local too. The War of Independence of a century ago is, in many ways, a combination or varied tapestry of local histories, the sum of many parts. The ambushes, the burnings, the assaults, the shootings, the executions, the reprisals, the informing, the paranoia and the subterfuge, which played out in all their horror at a local level, combined to create and inform the wider national narrative of the Irish revolution.

As a child, I grew up listening to sporadic mentions of the ambush of the Black and Tans just a quarter of a mile from where I was born. The site of the ambush – and the subject of this book – is just a few fields away from where I grew up. Ballymacandy, however, meant little else to me as a child other than a place where my grand-aunt Nora and her husband Denis Murphy lived and which we often visited. As the centenary of the ambush approached, however, Ballymacandy took on a whole new meaning for me and I was determined to find out more about what happened there a century ago.

In approaching the subject, I was astonished that the deaths of five men on the road between Milltown and Castlemaine on 1 June 1921, just weeks before the War of Independence came to an end, was barely mentioned in histories of the period. It was often a mere footnote to accounts of the revolution in Kerry, despite the number of deaths and the scale of the involvement of IRA, Cumann na mBan and Fianna Éireann members from across mid-Kerry. Maybe the five men who died were considered just another of the statistics amid the thousand-plus people who died in Ireland as a result of the conflict in the first six months of 1921. And maybe those who led the attack were considered just another insignificant group of the many thousands of rebels who took up arms against the Crown Forces in these tumultuous years.

Further investigation showed that some of the information in the public domain was inconsistent and incorrect. I quickly discovered that, despite repeated references to the deaths of five Black and Tans, not all of those who died were ‘Tans’ at all. James Collery, the father of nine children who lived in my home village of Milltown, was as Irish as the men who killed him: but nowhere was there any mention of who he was, where he came from and how and why he died. Moreover, Collery’s assailants and those who fired upon the police patrol were mentioned in anecdotes and local folk memory but their stories had never been adequately documented before.

In my approach to researching the ambush, I made a conscientious effort to tell both sides of the story, to present the accounts of the protagonists and eyewitnesses, allowing readers to consider what happened and develop their own interpretations and understandings of events one hundred years on. I quickly realised, however, that the history of the War of Independence is not just about ‘both sides’. This tumultuous and traumatic period in the history of our country and the community I grew up in has many ‘sides’ – the perspective of the IRA gunmen, the RIC constables, the Black and Tans, the ordinary civilians in the villages of Milltown and Castlemaine, the women of Cumann na mBan who carried and hid guns, the priest who prayed into the ears of the dying, the woman widowed by the ambush, the IRA’s informer within the police, the schoolboys who watched as bloodied remains were loaded onto carts and the doctor accused of neglecting a dying man.

Throughout my research, I was struck by the generosity and enthusiasm of the descendants of the people who feature on these pages. Remarkably, many descendants admitted that they did not know the extent of the involvement of their loved ones in these events and are only now learning about what their ancestors did at this momentous time in our history. There was, however, a combination of gratitude and pride that someone was willing to tell their story. Boxes of medals were produced from cupboards, pictures taken down from mantelpieces, handwritten letters retrieved from shoeboxes. But there was also a constant and enduring refrain: ‘They didn’t really talk about what happened.’

Thankfully, long after many of those who participated in these events passed from this world, their accounts in the Bureau of Military History and the Military Archives are being published and made available to students, historians and the relatives of those involved. So too, through police records in the British Archives, do we get an insight into the lives and activities of the members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans. Reading and deciphering these accounts and forensically weaving together the complexities of those stories has been a revelation and a thrill.

The accounts elucidated here have, I hope, greatly helped to address the ‘knowledge deficit’ in relation to the War of Independence, which historian Charles Townshend wrote about twenty years ago. He added, however, that even at this remove ‘objectivity may still be more difficult to achieve’.¹ Perhaps objectivity is impossible; even if, in recent years, the War of Independence has ‘loosened its grip on the Irish psyche’.² Diarmaid Ferriter has noted that we now know more about this turbulent period in our history, ‘but that does not mean we can easily achieve an untangling of its knotted legacy or rise above the emotion it still generates’.³

Trying forever to reach some utopian objectivity should not, however, be a barrier to discussing, probing, learning, writing about and documenting our important and precious collective history. A century on, I hope that this account of what happened on the roads and in the fields near my homeplace, and this telling of an important and traumatic moment in the history of my community, that of County Kerry and of the country, gives a voice to the men and women who were involved and who witnessed these turbulent events and lived through such historic and pivotal times. I hope that it offers a story that deserves and requires to be told in all its tangled, complicated and emotive manifestations.

PROLOGUE – SALVE REGINA

Brother Paulinus stepped onto the rostrum and hushed the classroom. The last half hour of the schoolday for the senior boys at the Monastery School in Milltown was usually set aside for singing. It was Wednesday, 1 June 1921 and the boys on the second floor of the school adjacent to the Church of the Sacred Heart had their minds on their usual carefree post-school antics as the clock ticked towards four. It was ‘another listless, enervating day of scorching heat’ typical of many during what was a long, warm summer of 1921. ¹ Brother Paulinus was a member of the large community of Presentation Brothers who were resident in Milltown at the time. In 1841 the Presentation Sisters – who had established a presence in Milltown just a few years earlier – and the local parish priest, Fr Batt O’Connor, had invited the Brothers, whose order was founded by Edmund Ignatius Rice, to establish a school to educate the boys of the parish. ² Like so many religious orders in Ireland at the time, the Presentation Brothers filled a void in the delivery of education and provided a wide range of social services that were not otherwise available. By the early 1860s the Brothers’ school in Milltown has developed a strong educational reputation and had been dubbed ‘The Little Academy’. ³ By 1921, the school had 130 boys on its roll.

A native Irish speaker from the Coolea area of west Cork and a staunch supporter of the Irish cultural movement which prevailed at the time, Brother Paulinus was instrumental in organising Irish plays, recitations and other sociocultural events in the 1920s with the support of local school principals like James Lambe of Callinafercy National School and Denis Healy of Rockfield National School.⁴ In his approach to the teaching of singing, and as a steadfast nationalist, Brother Paulinus ‘had long put aside the stereotyped melodies that were at the period part and parcel of the school curriculum under the English Educational system’ and favoured ballads with a more republican bent.⁵ His favourite anthems included ‘O’Donnell Abú’, ‘The Green Flag’ and ‘The Men of the West’. With the War of Independence or the so-called ‘Tan War’ raging in mid-Kerry and around Ireland, and as the Irish Republican Army took their guerrilla warfare campaign against the Crown Forces towards its climax, the Presentation monk was inclined to sing such songs with an added gusto. His pupils, according to one of them, ‘always gave full vent to their vocal cords in the stirring strains of those grand martial airs’.⁶ ‘And again, boys,’ he implored:

I give you the gallant old West, boys,

Where rallied our bravest and best

When Ireland lay broken and bleeding;

Hurrah for the men of the West!

As the singing concluded, Brother Paulinus led the class in the daily ritual of praying The Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and finally, to complete the songs and psalms, the best of Latin intonations were invoked for the Salve Regina:

Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae,

vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae,

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes

in hac lacrimarum valle …

A few lines into the prayer, the first gunshots resounded from about a mile away. Despite the ongoing war and occasional outbreaks of violence in the locality, the sound of shooting was relatively rare in the Milltown area, which had been largely spared the worst excesses of the recent combat. Schoolboy Denis Sugrue later recounted:

Through the open windows … came the sounds of rifle fire from the direction of the Castlemaine road. There was a whisper among the lads that it must be an ambush, for some of them had seen the cycling patrol of police going towards Tralee that morning, on their way to school. There was a rush for the door, but Brother Paulinus kept us in our places until the firing had died away. He then ordered us to go home as quickly as we could.⁷

When the gunfire had ended, many of the boys ran to their homes but curiosity got the better of two of the schoolboys, Denis Sugrue and his friend Thomas ‘Totty’ O’Sullivan. Fear of what might await them or the warnings of Brother Paulinus were not going