Kerry under the callous Black and Tans
The everyday brutality of the Black and Tans and the Civil War in Kerry is examined by Fergal Keane in searing, personal fashion
Wounds: A Memoir of War & Love Fergal Keane William Collins (Imprint of HarperCollins) €22.10 ★★★★★
There is an account of executioners and a condemned man saying the Rosary together on the side of a Kerry road on a beautiful summer’s evening in Fergal Keane’s new book that haunted me for days after reading it. James Kane, a fisheries inspector and former Royal Irish Constabulary man in Listowel was accused by the IRA of informing in June 1921. Con Brosnan, who was to become a famous Kerry footballer, was selected as one of the IRA execution team. Another IRA man, Brian O’Grady, described the civility that preceded the savagery. Kane asked for his will to be delivered to his family and that he be killed as near to home in Listowel as possible. O’Grady gave Kane his word and at midnight they walked across the fields towards the main road to Listowel.
‘It was a glorious night in early June – like one stolen from the tropics. The larks were singing all night and northern sky was aglow with light from the Aurora Borealis,’ said O’Grady.
Then Kane wrote a letter to his children and O’Grady handed him his personal rosary. Kane and the six IRA men knelt and said a decade of the Rosary. The IRA men rose and Kane remained kneeling, as Keane writes, ‘eking’ out his final minutes of life. Kane was then shot dead and a ‘spies beware’ sign was fastened to his coat.
This spellbindingly awful passage is one of many terrible events recounted in Fergal Keane’s book Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Much of my spare time is reading military history, yet it is only when I read of such savagery among my own people that it becomes intensely thought provoking.
It is the local and personal nature of the events that Keane chronicles here that make Wounds such a captivating read. Keane is the BBC’s most distinguished war correspondent and he is an author of many books, primarily about war. Here he amalgams his knowledge of war with a partial history of his Listowel-based family. Though Keane grew up primarily in Dublin and Cork, he spent much time in his father’s home town of Listowel. There, as a child he overheard his grandmother Hannah Purtill and others give tantalising glimpses of their memories of the War of Independence against the British and the subsequent internecine Civil War.
Hannah Purtill was a teenager when insurrection gripped Kerry in the early Twenties. Keane says this ‘solid young countrywoman’ with ‘raven hair tucked under a scarf’ smuggled weapons and messages for the IRA. She would feign friendliness to the RIC and the troops.
In her work as a drapers’ assistant Hannah would be ‘smiling at the police and the military so they wouldn’t suspect she was part of a machine devoted to their destruction’. However, as the war progressed and the British became more desperate the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries arrived. The Tans’ brutal deeds, though committed nearly a hundred years ago, are evocative because they have passed down through the oral history of so many Irish families. The Keanes were no different. Fergal’s actor father Eamon (brother of playwright John B Keane), immersed in stories of their atrocities, said the Tans were ‘murderers, cut-throats and rapists in the long inglorious line of Elizabeth I’s pillagers’. Hannah Purtill, who witnessed them in action, in what Keane says was one of her rare comments about the war, said the Tans were ‘bad hoors’ who ‘treated us like peasants’. In Listowel the Tans fell out not only with the ordinary people but
the regular police and army too. Keane, as a renowned war reporter brings the multifaceted analysis of a conflict that you expect. He quotes Horace Todman, a teenage bugler with the South Wales Borders. He says the Tans were ‘really hated by the local people [and] our own people didn’t like them’.
Keane doesn’t just recount what the Tans did, but asks why they did these things. I attended Keane’s book launch in Hodges Figgis last month. There he participated in a talk compered by former RTÉ political correspondent David Davin Power.
If you are familiar with some of Fergal Keane’s TV documentary work, like the monumental 2011 The Story of Ireland, you will know his melodious voice is rather special. So if you can get to one of his regular talks (there is one at the Belfast International Arts Festival, October 10) do. It will enhance your enjoyment of his books, and your understanding of conflict.
On Dawson Street in Hodges Figgis that evening he explained that in 25 years covering war he had come across only a handful of ‘psychopaths’. What ‘keeps him awake at night’ is that most of the genocidal killers he came across, in Rwanda or Yugoslavia, were ordinary men. You and I are capable of the worst of crimes if hurled into war.
With this perspective he can bring some understanding as he writes of that most hated of historical pariahs – the Black and Tans.
Brigadier John Rymer-Jones, writes Keane, was a veteran of the Western Front and ‘conceded it was a mistake sending men who had been immersed in the horror of the trenches straight into a war of ambush among civilians.’ ‘I think the trouble is that when you have had a war like that,’ he later reflected, ‘you should avoid if at all possible putting those same people into a position where they are being attacked by Sinn Féiners... or IRA. If you have been through a long war…you take it as an insult if people are attacking you.’ But whatever military discipline the Tans had maintained on the Western Front had disappeared by the time they had reached the West of Ireland. And that can only be fully explained by sanction of their actions in London. Keane recounts that the reprisals become official British government policy in January 1921.
Keane writes of an event in 1920 Abbeyfeale, South Limerick, near the Kerry border where the District Inspector of the RIC tried to intervene as the Tans and Auxiliaries tortured an 18year-old boy in the town square. The RIC man was so intimidated by the Tans that he had to call for military enforcements.
The military arrived and told the Tans and Auxiliaries to hand over the young Michael Collins (no relation of the general soon to be assassinated at Béal na Bláth).
The young man’s brother and local IRA leader James Collins gives what Keane describes as an ‘extraordinary testimony, revealing not just the scale of the brutality meted out to civilians, but the tension that could erupt between different forces of the Crown’.
James describes the Tans tying Michael by his legs to the back of a lorry – they dragged him for six miles.
‘The military halted and again remonstrated with the Auxiliaries and Tans. By this time he was unconscious. His head and body were battered and bruised. At last, they untied him and threw him into a dyke and left him for dead.’
Michael lived and James too saw out the war and, after joining the Irregulars for the Civil War, was elected a Fianna Fáil TD for Limerick.
I took the short walk from Leinster House to the Dawson Street launch of Wounds with the current Fianna Fáil TD for Limerick County Niall Collins and we listened to Keane together, along with Fine Gael TDs and senators.
Niall is the grandson of James Collins.
We are never far from our glorious but complicated history.