The Disappeared: Forced Disappearances in Ireland 1798-1998

By Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

The spectre of ‘The Disappeared’, those abducted by the IRA, secretly executed and their bodies buried in bogs, lakes and woodlands, has overshadowed the debate around the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland for the last two decades.

This book, the first of its kind, uncovers the extent to which ‘forced disappearances’ were part of the violent political conflicts that blighted Ireland for 200 years. Succeeding where attempts by the PSNI, journalists, and other historians had failed, Ó Ruairc’s research led to the identification and recovery of a British soldier killed by the IRA. He reveals in this book the location of several other bodies that remain to be exhumed.

The Disappeared cuts through the exaggeration and myth that pervade the popular history of the Irish struggle for freedom. The author examines the role of leading Irish politicians in these killings and challenges the commonly held belief that the Provisional IRA disappeared more victims than the ‘Good Old-IRA’ of the War of Independence.

Behind each disappearance there is a face, a life story, and a family left searching for answers. Ó Ruairc deftly incorporates this human element, paying tribute to those who were disappeared on both sides of the conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781785375033

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, originally from Co. Clare, lives in Co. Cork and works for the OPW. He has published extensively on the revolution in Ireland, most notably 'Revolution: A Photographic History of Revolutionary Ireland 1913–23'.

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The Disappeared

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc is originally from County Clare and has a BA in Archaeology from University College Dublin and a PhD in history from the University of Limerick. He has written extensively on the 1916 Rising, War of Independence and Civil War and is the author of numerous articles and six books, including Blood on the Banner: The Republican Struggle in Clare 1913–1923, Revolution: A Photographic History of Revolutionary Ireland 1913–1923 and Truce: Murder, Myth and the Last Days of the Irish War of Independence. Ó Ruairc has been researching the ‘disappeared’ for more than a decade. In 2018 his research led to the recovery of the remains of Private George Duff Chalmers, a British soldier who had been secretly executed by the IRA in 1921.

The Disappeared

FORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN

IRELAND 1798–1998

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

First published in 2024 by

Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, 2024

978 1 78537 502 6 (Paper)

978 1 78537 503 3 (Ebook)

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 11/15 pt

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy.

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Do Mhaidhc agus do Thomás, mo mhic, tá

súil agam go mbeidh saol fhada slán agaibh in

Éireann atá soar agus soar óna léithéid.

Is mór í an fhírinne agus buafaidh sí.

[The truth is great and will prevail.]

Irish language proverb

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 ‘Who fears to speak of ’98?’

2 The North King Street Massacre

3 Disappeared by British Forces

4 Spies and Informers

5 Women

6 Protestant Loyalists

7 Identifiers

8 Former Members of the Crown Forces

9 ‘Tramps’

10 ‘Deserters’

11 British Army Officers

12 The Royal Irish Constabulary

13 Knockraha

14 Other Cases

15 The Truce Period

16 Civil War and Interwar Years

17 The Troubles

Conclusion

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

IN 1998 A MAJORITY OF people in Ireland, both north and south of the border, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Belfast Agreement, a peace deal which effectively ended the thirty-year-long political conflict in Northern Ireland. The newly created Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) was tasked with recovering the bodies of sixteen victims of ‘the Troubles’ who had been ‘disappeared’ by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) between 1972 and 1985 and whose bodies were still missing.

The phenomenon of what International Human Rights Law terms ‘forced disappearances’ has been documented worldwide for decades. The practice involves executing enemy combatants, political opponents or civilians, and hiding their bodies for a political or military purpose. Usually this is done by secretly burying the victims in remote or inaccessible locations, although in examples like the North King Street Massacre, where the killers had little time to conceal their crime, these locations were sometimes easily discoverable. Alternatively, the bodies may be destroyed by fire or occasionally by submerging them in lakes, rivers or at sea. Perhaps the most famous example of this practice was the disappearance of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. During the Spanish Civil War over 140,000 people were disappeared, while six million Jews as well as communists, socialists, trade unionists, homosexuals, Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the physically disabled and mentally impaired suffered a similar fate during the Third Reich. The Indonesian government’s anti-communist purges in the 1960s saw a million political opponents disappear, and during the 1970s, in Chile, over 1,000 people were disappeared by Augusto Pinochet’s regime. Between 1960 and 1994 an estimated 2,000 people were disappeared as a result of political conflict in South Africa. More recently, Amnesty International estimates that 75,000 people have been victims of forced disappearances during the Syrian Civil War.¹

The number of disappearances perpetrated by the Provisional IRA is minuscule by comparison, yet disappearances related to the conflict in Northern Ireland have continually attracted significant global media interest. For example, Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland about the disappearance of Jean McConville was awarded the 2019 Orwell Prize, garnered international acclaim and made headlines worldwide. This was followed in 2023 by the filming of a ten-part drama series about the killing of Jean McConville to be screened on Disney+. Today the legacy of those disappeared in Northern Ireland still forms part of the political commentary and discourse in relation to the electoral prospects of the Sinn Féin party, who were the political wing of the Provisional IRA.

Less well known, however, is that the Provisional IRA’s forerunners – the IRA of the 1920s, whose members are held up by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the traditional ruling parties in southern Ireland, as the founding fathers of the modern Irish state – also disappeared people they executed. Indeed, the first body found after the signing of the Belfast Agreement was not someone from the Troubles, but that of Patrick Joyce. In 1998 Joyce’s remains were recovered from a bog in the Galway Gaeltacht by An Garda Síochána, where his body had been hidden since he was shot for being an informer by the so-called ‘good-old IRA’ in 1920. In fact, far more people were disappeared during the three years of the Irish War of Independence than during the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland. As BBC journalist Fergal Keane put it:

We were not encouraged to ask the obvious contemporary question: What did the violence of our own past have to do with what we saw nightly on our televisions [between 1969 and 1998]? What made the violence of my grandparent’s time right and the violence of the Provos wrong? Why was Michael Collins a freedom fighter and Gerry Adams [called] a terrorist? Interrogating these questions did not suit the agenda of the governments that ruled Ireland in the years of modern IRA violence … Both our main political parties had been founded by men who put bullets into the heads of informers, policemen and soldiers.²

Still less well-known is that the phenomenon of forced disappearances in Ireland did not begin in the 1920s. Previous generations of Irish republican radicals, beginning with the United Irishmen in the 1790s, employed the same methods, when executing alleged spies, informers or captured British soldiers, that were later adopted by the IRA in the 1920s and the Provisional IRA in the 1970s. Nor was the phenomenon restricted to Irish republicans – over the last two centuries, British troops have been responsible for the forced disappearances of republican rebels and Irish civilians. Furthermore, British soldiers and members of Britain’s colonial police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), have been guilty not just of disappearing republicans, but also of mutilating their bodies. There are numerous instances where British troops executed republicans and used their body parts as grim personal souvenirs or trophies, publicly displayed as evidence of British military prowess and supposed racial superiority.

It should also be noted that the largest number of people disappeared in twentieth-century Ireland were not adult victims of paramilitaries or political conflict. An estimated 9,000 children died in both Catholic- and Protestant-run ‘Mother and Baby Homes’, which operated with both British and Irish state support. Amongst the largest mass graves in Ireland are those associated with religious institutions, including the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, where approximately 800 children were buried in unmarked graves or simply dumped in an underground chamber used as a septic tank. However, while those who disappeared as a result of institutional abuse perpetrated by religious institutions acting with state support are equally deserving of recovery as those who died as a result of political violence, that is beyond the scope of this book. What the reader will find here is a brief overview of the origins of this practice in Irish political conflict and the first record of all those who are known, at the time of writing, to have been disappeared as a result of political conflict in twentieth-century Ireland.

1

‘Who fears to speak of ’98?’

IN OCTOBER 1791 THE SOCIETY of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast by a group of political radicals led by William Drennan, Thomas Russell and Theobald Wolfe Tone. Inspired by the successful revolutions in America and France, the United Irishmen were founded in line with Wolfe Tone’s ambition:

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-ending source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country … To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish all memory of all past dissension and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter [Presbyterian] …

The United Irishmen were quickly declared illegal by the British authorities and forced underground, but this did not stop them from plotting revolution against the Crown with the aim of setting up an independent Irish republic. However, the movement was ultimately a victim of its own success – its rapid growth and popularity meant that it was easily penetrated by spies and informers in the pay of Dublin Castle, the seat of the British government in Ireland.¹

When the activities of these agents led to the mass arrests of republican activists, the United Irishmen took swift and brutal action to try to nullify the threats posed by these spies. In 1791 a Protestant schoolmaster, his wife and his brother-in-law in County Armagh had their tongues cut out because they were suspected of being informers. In 1795 Fr Michael Philips, a Catholic priest, was assassinated in Belfast, to where he had fled after being exposed as a British spy in Roscommon.² William McCormack, a Dublin Castle agent, was dragged from his Wicklow home in August 1795 by several hundred republicans who had discovered that he planned to give evidence against them in court. McCormack’s captors cut off his nose and ears before killing him, decapitating his corpse and hacking off its limbs.³ There can be little doubt that such macabre deeds were intended as public acts designed to intimidate others who might be willing to give information to the British Crown forces.

In addition, the United Irishmen carried out a number of forced disappearances, killing suspected spies and hiding their bodies. There were various motivations for such disappearances, the most obvious being to hide evidence and make the investigation of the killing, as well as the prosecution of those responsible for it, far more difficult. The abduction of an informer also allowed for an element of doubt as to their fate, and while there was any prospect that the missing person was still alive and therefore in danger, the British forces were less likely to carry out reprisals. Finally, an additional benefit, from the perspective of the republicans, was that the mysterious disappearance of a suspected spy was likely to spread panic and fear amongst others who were acting as British agents, forcing them to flee or, at least, halt their activities.

One of the most notorious of the informers to infiltrate republican circles, John Newell of Downpatrick, joined the United Irishmen in 1796 and used his knowledge to act as an ‘identifier’ for the British Army. His younger brother recalled that Newell was ‘in the practice of going through the town of Belfast disguised as a light horseman, his face blackened and accompanied by a guard of soldiers, pointing out certain individuals who have in consequence been immediately apprehended and put in prison …’⁴ In 1797 Newell testified before a secret committee of the Irish House of Commons, giving information about the United Irish network in Ulster. Over 200 men were imprisoned using Newell’s evidence, for which he was paid £2,000. Newell then published a ‘tell-all’ book boasting about his life as a ‘celebrated informer’ and, unsurprisingly, he was captured by the United Irishmen, shot dead and secretly buried at Templepatrick, Country Antrim.⁵

Another informer, Richard Harper, was en route from his home in Saintfield, County Down, to Belfast to give information against several local republicans when he was intercepted by United Irishmen. Harper was executed and secretly buried near a bridge on the Saintfield to Belfast road.⁶ Patrick Murphy, a weaver who had enlisted in the South Cork Militia, was abducted from his home; a week later his body was found buried at Knockadoon Strand, near Youghal in Cork.⁷ In Antrim, a schoolteacher named McClure from Ballynure joined the United Irishmen and soon after came under suspicion of being a British agent. He was lured to an isolated house on Ballyboley Mountain and executed. Five decades later his skeletal remains were discovered in a shallow grave by local turf-cutters.⁸ A farmer named Butler from Culaduff, County Donegal, who worked as an informer for the yeomanry, was executed by the United Irishmen at McSheffrie’s Bridge and his body disposed of in the river below.⁹ In Wexford, the bodies of four loyalists – Nathaniel Croshew and his three sons – were discovered buried in a gravel pit near Davidstown several months after they had been disappeared by United Irishmen.¹⁰ A number of similar disappearances occurred in Kilkenny, where the bodies of loyalist informers were discovered by the British authorities near Castlecomer.¹¹

When the United Irishmen launched their insurrection in the summer of 1798, they began disappearing captured British soldiers as well as civilian informers. In June 1798, two British soldiers who had been searching houses near Clonakilty in Cork were killed by local rebels. The soldiers’ bodies were buried in a field, still known locally as ‘The Soldiers’ Grave’.¹² On the Offaly–Kildare border, a yeoman called at a house near the village of Bracknagh seeking a drink of water. The occupants were republican sympathisers, and one of them stabbed him to death. The yeoman was buried at a crossroads and his skeleton was only discovered in the 1940s, during roadworks.¹³ Another lone yeoman was killed near Ferns, County Wexford, by members of the Nolan family, who buried his body in a bog.¹⁴ At Rathcoole, County Dublin, the United Irishmen executed William Phillips, a member of the yeoman cavalry. Phillips’ body was later discovered in a shallow grave in the Dublin Mountains.¹⁵

At Rednagh Bridge in County Wicklow, United Irish rebels ambushed and defeated a small party of British soldiers. Amongst the casualties was Anthony King, a soldier of African descent who served with the ‘Ancient Britons’. King, a drummer in the regiment, had been involved in flogging United Irish prisoners and was singled out for execution after capture. The rebel’s leader, Joseph Holt, recalled that King ‘took more piking than five white men’. King’s body was hidden in a hedgerow that was known thereafter as ‘Drummer’s Corner’. The body of another British soldier, William Inman, was found buried in a shallow grave in the same area.¹⁶

According to local oral tradition, Sergeant Thomas Honam was also executed and buried at Drummer’s Corner. Honam, better known as ‘Tom the Devil’, was a sergeant in the North Cork Militia, which was notorious for the brutality with which it suppressed the 1798 rebellion. The militia was primarily led by Protestant–Loyalist officers who belonged to the rabidly sectarian Orange Order, while the ordinary ranks of the unit were comprised of fervently loyal ‘Castle Catholics’. The ‘North Corks’ had a well-deserved reputation for perpetrating atrocities and abusing rebel prisoners, with Honam, in particular, delighting in devising and testing new methods of torture. He was credited with inventing ‘pitch capping’, a torture whereby a prisoner suspected of being a United Irishman had their hair cropped short and their scalp rubbed with a mixture of tar and gunpowder, which was then set alight, causing horrific burns to the unfortunate victim.

A local woman Mary O’Toole, recalled that her father told her about Honam’s last resting place:

I asked him – ‘what is the meaning of calling the road beyond the Drummer’s Corner?’ … ‘Here’s the place says he that we planted Tom the Devil and the Drummer of the North Corks [sic; Ancient Britons] in the year of ’98 … Tom the Devil is buried there and they’d rather have him down than twenty other soldiers … Local people would not go the road by night but Tom the Devil would meet them, but no, he never got loose – he’s there still!’¹⁷

There are numerous other instances of informers, loyalists and British soldiers who were disappeared during the 1798 rebellion recorded in popular histories and local folklore. Many of these stories appear to record actual events. Other accounts are more problematic and may be exaggerated, apocryphal or simply fantasy and should be treated with caution. One example is the folklore surrounding Edward Hempenstall, a lieutenant in the British Army. Hempenstall was over 6 foot 2 inches tall and was reputed to have a penchant for executing republicans by using a noose thrown over his shoulder, thus earning him the moniker ‘The Walking Gallows’.¹⁸ Local folklore suggests that Hempenstall’s reign of terror was ended after he was killed by rebels in Wicklow and buried in secret.¹⁹ However, contemporary accounts suggest that Hempenstall died of natural causes in Dublin in 1804.²⁰

Estimates of the number killed in the 1798 rebellion vary between 30,000 and 70,000.²¹ The consensus is that the majority of these were republicans, or civilians suspected of supporting them, killed by British Crown forces. Large numbers of United Irishmen were executed after being taken prisoner. Consequently, there are numerous mass grave sites throughout Ireland associated with the rebellion. Perhaps the best known is the Croppies Acre, adjacent to Collins Barracks in Dublin, thought to be the burial place of hundreds of republicans executed in 1798. A similar site is the Croppy Hole at Clonakilty, Cork, where the bodies of republican combatants killed in the Battle of the Big Cross were buried, along with those of prisoners executed afterwards.²² Captured republicans massacred by the Yeomanry after the Battle of Antrim are believed to be buried in sand beds known as the ‘Moaning Sands’, named for the cries of wounded prisoners supposedly buried alive there.²³ According to local oral history, republican insurgents who retreated after the Battle of Kilcumney in Kilkenny were massacred while they slept and buried nearby. In August 1937 a dozen skeletons, believed to be the remains of slain rebels, were discovered at O’Neill’s sandpit in Kilgreany.²⁴

There are numerous ‘croppy graves’ throughout Ireland, named after members of the United Irishmen who cropped their hair short as was the fashion in revolutionary France at the time. Although there is little doubt that most are genuine unmarked burial sites, classifying them as the graves of the disappeared is problematic. Victims of forced disappearances are those abducted or taken prisoner, executed in secret and disposed of covertly, to hide evidence of the killing. This is usually done with the aim of avoiding prosecution, preventing reprisals, spreading a sense of terror or insecurity or, alternatively, inflicting suffering on the victim’s family and friends by preventing a funeral. Key to all of this is secrecy. Although there are hundreds, if not thousands, of ‘croppy graves’ throughout Ireland, their occupants were probably hastily buried in unmarked graves for practical rather than political reasons.

At the time, few soldiers killed in battle received formal burials, and those who did were usually officers from the aristocracy whose families could afford the expense of recovering a body. Soldiers killed in battle were usually cleared from the battlefield by paid civilians, who rolled their bodies into pits large enough to hold thirty or forty corpses. There was little respect for dead soldiers, whose bones were ground down by farmers as fertiliser and whose teeth were collected to make dentures for commercial profit.²⁵ With such a lack of reverence shown to British soldiers who died fighting for ‘King and Country’, it is unsurprising that even less respect was shown to Irish republicans. An estimated 1,000 republican combatants were killed during the Battle of Arklow in June 1798. One eyewitness, Mary Byrne, recalled, ‘Dead bodies lay on the road and the pigs tearing them like anything, all blood from their mouths and flies. The bodies were thrown on the Ferrybank sands and the farmers took them for manure.’²⁶

The sorting of ‘croppy graves’ containing those who died in battle from the graves of the disappeared is further complicated by the legal tradition during the rebellion in Ireland that held landowners responsible for the burial of those killed on their lands.²⁷ Such burials were apparently commonplace, and while their locations have been preserved in local oral tradition, the identities of those killed and the circumstances of their deaths have in most cases been long forgotten.

During the 1798 rebellion, British Crown forces rarely made any secret of the numerous executions they carried out. On the contrary, such killings were usually celebrated, with captured rebels hanged in public executions. Throughout Ireland it was common for the bodies of executed republicans to be beheaded after death and their heads displayed on pikes as a warning to other rebels.²⁸ Occasionally members of the British forces mutilated the corpses of rebels, particularly those of priests. Although Presbyterian ministers were far more likely to take up arms against the British Crown than their Catholic counterparts, with the Catholic Church being staunchly opposed to the rebellion, a handful of priests did break ranks and rally to the rebel cause. Up to a fifth of the Presbyterian clergy actively supported the United Irishmen.²⁹

The few Catholic priests who joined the United Irishmen appear to have been targeted for retribution by members of the British Crown forces. Fr John Murphy was executed by hanging after being captured at Tullow, County Carlow, on 2 July 1798. His body was destroyed by burning it in a tar barrel.³⁰ Members of the Yeomanry destroyed the body of Fr Michael Murphy, who was killed at the Battle of Arklow, by throwing it into a burning house.³¹ A third Catholic priest, Fr Mogue Kearns, captured in Clonbullogue, County Offaly, was beheaded by members of the Yeomanry. Kearn’s head was kept as a grim souvenir by their captain. The axe allegedly used to behead him was also kept as a macabre keepsake and was stored in an ornate chest at Edenderry Orange Lodge.³² The fact that each of these cases involves the mutilation or desecration of the bodies of Catholic priests by members of the Yeomanry, whose units were known to recruit Protestant loyalists and members of the Orange Order, suggests there was a sectarian motivation for destroying their bodies.

British soldiers carrying out such executions were not likely to suffer reprisals. Furthermore, troops guilty of extrajudicial killings, even those who massacred civilians, were unlikely to be held to account by their senior officers. By comparison with the republican insurgents, there is little evidence that the British Crown forces regularly disappeared captured republicans during the era of the 1798 rebellion. British troops could operate openly, with no fear of official sanction and had little need for secrecy. Nonetheless, there are a few references that appear to indicate that rebels were disappeared by the British Crown forces in 1798.

United Irish leader Patrick Grant from Wicklow was suspected of involvement in an ambush of members of the Yeomanry at Glenmalure. After his capture and execution, Grant’s corpse was beheaded and thrown into the sea. This apparently was a common method used by British Crown forces to dispose of the bodies of republican prisoners; indeed, the number of bodies became so great that local fishermen threatened to go on strike unless the bodies were disposed of elsewhere.³³ At Glenmalure, two Wexford rebels, the Kavanagh brothers, were captured and summarily executed by members of the Yeomanry and buried in a field. A shoemaker named Keogh, who lived near Coolkenno, County Wicklow, was also taken from his home and executed by the local Yeomanry, who buried his body in a pit at the rear of his home.³⁴

As with accounts of informers or British troops being disappeared by republicans in 1798, records of British troops killing rebels in forced disappearances must be treated with caution. Contemporary accounts were prone to exaggeration and often heavily propagandised. Furthermore, some folklore and oral history accounts of the 1798 rebellion – particularly those relating to ‘croppy graves’ – appear to have no factual basis. The Barley Field, adjacent to the site of the Battle of Vinegar Hill, was reputedly the burial site for hundreds of republicans killed in the battle or summarily executed after capture. Yet, when two housing estates were built there in the 1970s, no human remains were found.³⁵

Possibly the best example of this are stories relating to the grave of ‘the unknown pikeman’ at Hanlonstown, County Meath. According to local folklore, a rebel was buried on a farm owned by the Lightholder family after the Battle of Knightstown in July 1798. During the twentieth century, the skeleton was allegedly temporarily uncovered during works on the farm with a broken British Army bayonet still lodged in its ribs. In 2003, the five-year-long state celebrations of the United Irishmen’s rebellions were due to come to a close following the bicentenary of Robert Emmet’s rebellion with the re-interment of this ‘unknown pikeman’. Plans were put in place for the rebel’s skeleton to be exhumed and reburied in a purpose-built tomb as a national hero – the ‘unknown soldier’ of the 1798 rebellion.³⁶ However, plans for this elaborate ceremony turned to farce when an archaeological excavation found no human remains at the supposed grave site.³⁷

Despite the lack of reliable records, the practice of forced disappearances was undoubtedly relatively commonplace during the 1798 rebellion. It seems likely, particularly given the very large number of fatalities which occurred, that the majority of those who were disappeared as a result of political violence in Irish history were killed at that time. However, with the end of the United Irishmen’s campaign, following the death of Emmet, the practice seems largely to have abated for the rest of the nineteenth century, probably as there was no need for it to continue. Although the Young Irelanders and the Irish Republican Brotherhood launched a series of short-lived republican insurrections in the nineteenth century, none of those were of a long-enough duration to involve forced disappearances. The few documented disappearances of alleged informers during the nineteenth century, such as the killing of Dr Patrick Cronin by Clan na Gael in Chicago and the execution of an alleged informer named Nestle at Ballycomoyle, County Westmeath, by The Invincibles, appear to have been isolated incidents that did not form part of a larger campaign of forced disappearances.³⁸ It was not until the twentieth century that this practice would again come to the fore, and it is then that the best-documented instances of forced disappearances in Ireland, and those easiest to separate from exaggerated or entirely fictional accounts, come to light.

2

The North King Street Massacre

POPULAR OPINION IN IRELAND, BRITAIN and internationally associates forced disappearances in twentieth-century Ireland exclusively with militant Irish republicanism – in particular with the Provisional IRA in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, with their precursor the ‘Old IRA’ of the 1920s. However, the first and largest forced disappearance to occur in twentieth-century Ireland was perpetrated by the British Army, when, in April 1916, seventeen unarmed civilians were massacred at North King Street in Dublin by the South Staffordshire Regiment in reprisal for the deaths of their comrades during the 1916 Rising. Six of these victims were forcibly disappeared by their killers, who buried their bodies in a failed attempt to hide the atrocity.

North King Street was the largest massacre of civilians by the British Army in modern Irish history. In scale it outstripped the slaughter of civilians shot dead at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park in 1920, the shooting of local residents during the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 and the massacre of civil rights protesters during Derry’s Bloody Sunday in 1972. Yet the British government has never acknowledged the full role of British soldiers in perpetrating the North King Street Massacre, and the Irish government has never commemorated the innocent civilians killed.

The precursor to the massacre came on Monday, 24 April 1916, when Irish republicans launched an armed uprising in Dublin that aimed to overthrow British rule and establish an independent Irish republic. The General Post Office on Sackville Street was commandeered as the rebel headquarters, and other large buildings and strategic points in the city were also seized and barricaded. The republican insurgents initially held the advantage, so on the third day of the Rising thousands of British soldiers stationed in England were rerouted to Dublin to crush the insurrection. Amongst the redeployed British Army units was the 6th Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment, which had been based at St Albans in Hertfordshire. After disembarking at Dún Laoghaire, the South Staffordshires advanced slowly northwards through the Dublin suburbs without meeting any resistance. They skirted around the rebel stronghold at Boland’s Mills and advanced to the city centre where they were quartered at the Linenhall Street Barracks.

Memorial card for Thomas and Christy Hickey, two of the sixteen civilians killed by British soldiers during the North King Street Massacre in 1916.

On Friday, 28 April, the South Staffordshires were ordered to advance on the republican garrison in the Four Courts via North King Street, a cobbled street lined with red-brick Georgian tenement buildings. The thoroughfare housed a few small business premises, but the majority of the buildings were the family homes of working-class labourers and artisans. Living conditions in many of them were squalid – thirty-three people lived in one cramped tenement at No. 116. The strategic value of the street was that it lay halfway between the Royal Barracks to the west and the republican headquarters in Sackville Street to the east.

At the beginning of the Rising, republican insurgents from Commandant Edward Daly’s command in the Four Courts had barricaded the maze of streets and laneways that intersected with North King Street. A number of buildings in the area were occupied by republican snipers, but the main republican defensive strategy was centred around holding one key position – an abandoned shop at the junction of Church Street and North King Street. Control of this position, dubbed ‘Reilly’s Fort’ by the insurgents, allowed the republicans to challenge any advance by British troops.

As the Rising entered its final phase and other rebel garrisons were either being evacuated or surrendered to the British Army, the republicans at Reilly’s Fort still held control of the North King Street area. At 10 a.m. that Friday morning, a platoon of the South Staffordshires under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Taylor was ordered to capture the district and clear it of any rebel outposts. The defenders put up such a dogged resistance that it took the British troops until 2 p.m. the following day to advance 150 yards along North King Street. One British soldier later recalled:

North King Street was strongly held … in such mean and compact streets the barricade system of the rebels was indeed formidable. The successful storming of a barricade achieved nothing more than to drive its defenders into the houses … and they were able to repeat their resistance further along the street. In North King Street the rebels had situated themselves as to be able to inflict the maximum casualties on the English troops with minimum loss to themselves.¹

The soldiers of the South Staffordshires were ordered to fix bayonets and charge the first barricade they encountered. This attack was a disastrous failure and several of the attackers were killed, with the others forced to retreat. Frank Shouldice, one of the republican snipers defending the area, recalled: ‘One by one we knocked them all over. It was a terrible slaughter …’ Another republican concluded that ‘some English officer lost his head and sent those lads out to their deaths’.² In response to this unexpectedly dogged resistance, Brigadier General William Lowe, the commander of the British Army in Dublin, issued an order that ‘No hesitation is to be shown in dealing with these rebels; by their actions they have placed themselves outside the law and they are not to be made prisoners.’³ Eventually, after two days of intense fighting, the arrival of an armoured car finally allowed the South Staffordshires to take control of North King Street.

The operation had come at a heavy cost, with fourteen members of the regiment killed and a further thirty-two wounded. When the British soldiers entered North King Street, they began forcing their way into the homes of local residents searching for republican combatants. Some of the South Staffordshires were so enraged by the deaths of their comrades that they took revenge by killing the civilians they encountered during these searches.

Amongst the first victims were members of the Hickey family who ran a butcher’s shop at No. 168 North King Street. Thomas Hickey was described by his wife, Teresa, as having been ‘a great Britisher’ – i.e. an ardent pro-British loyalist.⁴ Thomas and his 15-year-old son Christopher were taken prisoner by the South Staffordshires, along with a neighbour, Peter Connolly, a furniture dealer and father of eight. All three were taken to a vacant house at No. 170 North King Street, where they were executed by their captors, who stabbed them with bayonets before shooting them.⁵

Kate Kelly, a local woman who worked for Thomas Hickey, witnessed his abduction:

On Friday evening Mr. Hickey and Mr. Connolly were sitting together in the street outside. As the military rushed up about 6.45 pm on Friday night Mr. Hickey and Mr. Connolly ran into the house for safety … Both Mrs. Carroll and I heard poor Christy pleading for his father’s life. ‘Oh please don’t kill father.’ The shots rang out and I shouted, ‘Oh my God’ and, overcome with horror, I threw myself on my knees and began to pray.⁶

Two doors further up the street, at No. 172, Ellen Walsh heard a frenzied pounding and shouting at her door. When she opened the door, thirty members of the South Staffordshire Regiment forced their way inside shouting, ‘Are there any men inside this house?’ The soldiers dragged Ellen’s husband, John, and their neighbour, Michael Hughes, out of view and killed them. Anne Fennel, who lived at No. 174, saw British soldiers raid her home and take away two of her neighbours, Michael Nunan and George Ennis. Both men were then shot. Nunan died instantly, but Ennis managed to crawl back to his home to beg Fennel for help before dying.⁷

The random killing of civilians by the South Staffordshires continued on Saturday morning. James Moore was shot dead as he stood in the doorway of his home on Little Britain Street. Edward Dunne was killed in his home at No. 91 North King Street.⁸ John Biernes, a 50-year-old father of five who worked as a drayman at Monk’s Bakery, was shot dead on Coleraine Street. William O’Neill, a 16-year-old boy, was the next victim shot without warning. He died five minutes later, his last words being, ‘Oh Mother, Mother …’⁹

In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, republicans including Máire Comerford, who had been in Dublin during the Rising, found their attempts to highlight the North King Street Massacre frustrated by Irish loyalists:

Some of the women I spoke with on the streets of Dublin during the Rising had first-hand information about events in North King Street when British troops killed civilians in their homes and in some cases buried the bodies in the cellars. I spoke about this British atrocity when I arrived back in Wexford. … I set off a scene in Main Street Gorey when I talked about the people who had been murdered by British troops. There was absolute fury when I mentioned this. … Lady Errington, wife of a former British envoy at the Vatican started to shriek ‘The rebels should all be hanged – shooting is too good for them!’ … These people were not accustomed to have the British blamed ever – or for anything.¹⁰

The full extent of the massacre did not emerge until two weeks later, when the bodies of six civilians who had been disappeared by the soldiers of the South Staffordshire Regiment were discovered. A barman working in O’Rourke’s Public House at No. 177 North King Street noticed that there was a ‘heavy smell’ in the beer cellar. When he went to investigate, he found bloodstains on the barrels stored there and that the cellar floor beneath them was disturbed. When the floor was dug up, the bodies of Patrick Bealen, a 30-year-old barman who had worked at the pub, and James Healy, a 44-year-old labourer, were discovered.

Mary O’Rourke, the pub landlady, testified at the coroner’s inquest into Bealen and Healy’s deaths that British soldiers from the South Staffordshire Regiment had raided the pub and taken her, her 13-year-old son and Bealen prisoner. O’Rourke stated that a soldier brought Bealen away for questioning and he never returned. When his body was eventually found, his wounds showed that he had died after being shot six times. Rosanna Knowles, who lived at No. 173 North King Street, claimed that she had met a soldier who admitted to killing Bealen:

He said that he had brought the prisoner downstairs in Mrs O’Rourke’s and that the man [Bealen] had given him his penknife and his ring. He produced the penknife but had lost the ring. He said that he had not the heart to shoot him straight and they [the South Staffordshires] told him [Bealen] to go up the stairs and they let bang at him from the foot of the stairs.¹¹

A more likely scenario is that the soldier and his comrades robbed Bealen of his possessions, killed him and confessed to Knowles whilst drunk on liquor looted from the pub.

Healy’s wife had last seen him alive after the ceasefire that ended the Rising on Saturday, 29 April. Healy, thinking that the killing was over, left his home to go to his workplace at the Jameson Distillery and was never seen alive again. It appears that Healy was detained by British soldiers as he walked to work and brought to the cellar of O’Rourke’s Pub, where he was beaten to death.¹²

A further grim discovery was made by local residents at the rear of the Louth Dairy at 27 North King Street where the bodies of four men – Patrick J. Lawless, James McCartney, James Finnegan and Patrick Hoey – were unearthed. All four had been employees of the dairy and were found with wounds to the head and throat. The locals who found the bodies stated that the dead men had all been stripped of their personal possessions – suggesting that they had been robbed by their captors before being executed.¹³

The massacre made front-page headlines in the Irish media with the Sunday Independent, a publication known for its hostility to Irish republicanism, declaring: ‘Startling list … 14 casualties in King Street shot in one morning.’ The newspaper’s report of the massacre ended by stating: ‘It is known that none of the victims was in any way associated with the Sinn Féin rebels and no traces of arms or ammunition were found.’¹⁴

Members of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) pressed the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, for an inquiry into the massacre. He refused their request, arguing that the investigation conducted by the British Army was sufficient and that having read the report he was satisfied that ‘it is impossible to bring home any responsibility to any particular person or body of persons’.¹⁵ Despite Asquith’s confidence in the military investigation, the British Army’s internal inquiry into the North King Street Massacre was a complete whitewash. Immediately after the Rising, the South Staffordshire Regiment had been transferred to Straffan in Kildare. The army invited relatives of the victims and other witnesses from North King Street to an identity parade there to identify the soldiers alleged to have been involved in the massacre. That these witnesses were unable to pick out any of the guilty parties from the line-up was hardly surprising, however, because, unbeknownst to them, the members of the unit responsible for the massacre had been transferred to another barracks as soon as the identity parade was organised and so were not present to be identified.¹⁶

Colonel Maconchy, who presided over the British Army inquiry, stated that the South Staffordshire Regiment was ‘a quiet and respectable body of men’ and ruled that no soldier should be singled out for investigation.¹⁷ General Maxwell, the commander of the British Army in Ireland, stated that the massacre of civilians at North King Street was ‘absolutely unavoidable in such a business as this’ and claimed ‘responsibility for their deaths rests with those resisting His Majesty’s troops in the execution of their duty … Under the circumstances the troops as a whole behaved with the greatest of restraint … A revolt of this kind could not be suppressed with velvet glove methods.’ Although the British Army refused to identify any of the officers and soldiers involved in the North King Street Massacre, it was, nonetheless, undeniable that members