Higgins has just bravely made the first of many hard choices

PRESIDENT Higgins will not be attending the centenary commemoration of the Soloheadbeg Ambush next Sunday.

This courageous act of good authority is just the first of many such fine judgments he must make over the next four years.

Because on the President’s shoulders, in the absence of any widespread faith in religious or political leaders, falls the principal burden of safeguarding what he calls “ethical memory”.

In practice, ethical memory means that President Higgins will be the principal public person speaking about the constant moral challenge posed by the centenaries of the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. And no better man to do so.

The Soloheadbeg Ambush of January 21, 1919, posed him with an immediate problem, given the brutal circumstances and the fact that the ambush took place without any declaration of hostilities by the first Dail, meeting that same day.

Nitpicking armchair warriors claim Dail Eireann gave a retrospective sanction to the killing of two RIC constables.

As against that is the actual human reality of what happened on the lonely road to Soloheadbeg Quarry, 100 years ago.

Two Roman Catholic members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were escorting a horse-drawn cart with two drivers, carrying gelignite from Tipperary Military Barracks to Soloheadbeg Quarry three miles away.

RIC Constable Patrick O’Connell, aged 30, was from Coachford, Co Cork. Constable James McDonnell, aged 50, was a widower with five children, from Belmullet, Co Mayo.

As far as they were concerned they were not at war and we can be sure they carried their carbines, as was customary, slung casually for comfort.

They were suddenly confronted by an armed IRA group led by Seamus Robinson and including two other later legendary Old IRA icons, Sean Treacy and Dan Breen, all of the equally legendary Third Tipperary Brigade.

What happened then is not clear as the two traumatised cart drivers did not testify, whether from trauma or intimidation.

Breen later boasted the RIC men were shot deliberately to start the war and that he wished there had been six more to shoot.

Seamus Robinson, more acceptably, claimed the constables had put their carbines up and he had no choice but to shoot.

Given that both RIC men would have been in shock — neither fired a shot — we can reasonably assume the armed IRA gang could have easily taken them prisoner.

But, like Tom Barry at Kilmichael, Breen wanted blood. So whether they resisted, or not, he meant to kill the two RIC men. Which is why Soloheadbeg poses the President — and us — with a moral choice.

We can consider these two corpses on the road as dehumanised members of the RIC or we can consider them as human beings.

Let’s look at the body of Constable McDonnell, the widower with five children.

Robinson, Breen and Treacy would all have known McDonnell was a widower, and, if killed, would leave a family of five orphans behind, to be raised by relations.

The IRA still shot him down like a dog. So I have no hesitation in calling the Soloheadbeg “Ambush” not an ambush but an atrocity, murder most foul.

Today it seems acceptable to some Tipperary people to celebrate the ambush in a way that avoids any moral judgment on the killings.

On YouTube is a chilling re-enactment by local schoolchildren. Two boys play the RIC men lying dead on the road. Breen is portrayed as a hero.

The people of Tipperary at the time seemed to have softer hearts. Many years ago I found a small book called an An Irish Doctor Remembers, by Dr John Dowling, the local dispensary doctor and a devout Catholic.

Dr Dowling recalls the murders at Soloheadbeg with a personal revulsion which he recalls was widely shared in Tipperary town.

He writes as follows: “The occurrence caused a very painful sensation in the town where both men, one of whom was a widower and the father of a family, had been popular.”

President Higgins clearly felt the circumstances of the attack at Soloheadbeg were such as to warrant him not attending any commemoration.

He will be called on to make many such fine discriminations over the next four years.

He must honour the Old IRA who risked their lives to establish what eventually became the Irish Republic.

He must also honour innocent victims of the IRA such as West Cork Protestants.

Coming from a socialist tradition, he may even recall that Black and Tans were unemployed workers and that many Auxiliaries had been traumatised by World War I.

Luckily, we chose as President a man born to bear these burdens. By birth, political education and personal wisdom, President Higgins is best fitted for the trying task.

Like me, he has a proud family history of active participation in the national struggle — although I no longer believe the IRA war was necessary.

Like me, he has also lived long enough to see two IRA campaigns — that of the 1950s and the long war of the Provisional IRA.

Accordingly, he will be anxious not to fuel atavistic feelings, nor raise the tribal demons which lie dormant in every nation, but will try responsibly to balance history with reconciliation.

Sadly that sense of responsibility is not shared widely, judging by the juvenile nature of many academic contributions which seem shorn of any moral sense of how the Irish past is continually mined for propaganda by the Recurring IRA.

Lacking leadership from public intellectuals, it falls on the President, on our behalf, to make moral discriminations; between a murder and an ambush, between the killings of proven spies and the wrongful murder of Protestant civilians as spies.

Many Irish academic historians fought a long rearguard action against admitting there was a sectarian aspect to the IRA campaign in West Cork and Cork City — a position from which they have only recently retreated, thanks largely to the work of local historian Cal Hyland of Rosscarbery.

Even if the Dail had sanctioned the execution of spies, it certainly did not sanction such cruelties as the murder of Mrs Bridget Noble in West Cork for alleged spying.

A one-size-fits-all system of ethics cannot shine light on grey areas between legitimate armed conflict and actions which border on atrocity.

Commandant Sean Murphy in his forensic account of Tom Barry’s ambush at Kilmichael established that unarmed Auxiliaries who surrendered were killed.

In contrast, Sean MacEoin, who ambushed a party of Auxiliaries at Clonfin, accepted their surrender, bandaged the wounded and sent them safely back to barracks.

Now who would envy President Higgins trying to find an ethical path through such complex battlefields?

‘Luckily our President is a man supremely fitted for the challenges posed by the centenaries’