A summer of bloodshed
SIMON BROUDER EXAMINES THE SUMMER OF 1920, WHEN THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE EXPLODED INTO BLOODY VIOLENCE IN THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES OF KERRY
WHEN the staff of Slattery’s Creamery at Deelis in Camp arrived to work on Friday April 16, 1920, they walked into history. No doubt expecting another typical day the men were instead confronted with a gruesome and bloody scene when they arrived to the creamery yard to find the bullet-riddled body of RIC man Paddy Foley.
Two days prior, Foley was seized by the IRA as he left a hotel in Annascaul and his killing, a day later, was one of the first and most brutal carried out by the Kerry IRA during the War of Independence.
Foley’s end was brutal. After an interrogation and court martial by members of the Camp Company of the IRA, he was brought to the creamery yard, where he was blindfolded and executed with his hands tied behind his back.
The locally reared RIC man – who had been sent home to spy on the IRA – was shot 26 times, and when his shredded corpse was found, the blood literally flowed though the creamery yard.
While attacks on RIC men and barracks had become increasingly common by then, the brutal execution of Foley marked a bloody turning point in the IRA’s campaign in Kerry.
A few weeks earlier, on March 16, Cornelius Kelly, the caretaker of the tiny courthouse in Caherdaniel, had become the first fatality of the war in Kerry when he was shot after disturbing a group of volunteers who were stealing police bicycles.
While Cornelius Kelly’s killing was not premeditated, Foley’s was anything but and serves as a prime example of how the IRA would deal with and use spies and informers throughout the war.
To provide some background, Paddy Foley, one of a large family, was reared by his aunt and uncle on their farm near Annascaul.
The young man had been due to inherit the farm when his childless aunt and uncle passed, but the outbreak of World War One changed everything for Foley.
He ran away to Tralee, where he lied about his age and joined the Munster Fusiliers.
He was dispatched to the front lines in France, where he was eventually captured by the Germans and spent four years as a prisoner of war.
By January 1920, he had returned to Ireland and joined the RIC. Stationed in Galway, his superiors were keen to infiltrate the IRA in Kerry, and Foley was recruited to go home and ingratiate himself with the local rebels.
His mission was doomed from the outset.
On arriving in Tralee by train, Foley made the short trip to his cousin’s home on Nelson Street (now Ashe Street) where he arrived unexpectedly and asked to stay for a few days before he made his way home.
As he prepared for his incursion, Foley was completely unaware this his cousin Tadhg Kennedy – whom he had been quizzing about the volunteers in Annascaul – was the IRA’s intelligence chief in Kerry.
Kennedy – who had been told the his cousin was a regular visitor to the RIC barracks in Tralee – repeatedly tried to get his cousin to clear out and go home, but Foley persisted.
Kennedy travelled with Foley by train to Annascaul in mid April; a few days later, Foley’s fate was sealed. Kennedy – a close fired and confident of Michael Collins – had built up a network of high-ranking RIC informers, and they soon returned to him with information about his first cousin’s activities.
Not long after Foley arrived in west Kerry, the RIC District Inspector in
Dingle, Bernard O’Connor, handed over notebooks that Foley had given him at the RIC station in Dingle.
The notebooks provided “the names of every IRA officer in the district and every prominent Sinn Féiner,” including many of Foley’s own cousins, Kennedy later said.
The notebook was Foley’s death sentence, and Kennedy passed it on to Commandant Paddy Cahill, another cousin of Foley’s. “It was a very painful situation for Cahill and myself,” Kennedy said.
Within days Foley was seized coming out of Moriarty’s Hotel. He was taken to Glenmare School, where he was court-martialed, found guilty of spying and sentenced to death.
Fr Edmond Walsh, a local Franciscan priest, was called to give Foley his last rites, and the RIC spy was taken to the creamery yard, where he met his brutal end.
The gruesome killing made the front pages internationally, featuring in newspapers like the New York Tribune, New York Evening World and the Washington Herald.
Foley’s killing marked the start of a bloody chapter in Kerry’s history