Michael O’Meara NT sentenced to death in Knockadea NS - executed New Year’s Eve 1920
Local ‘Tine Ghríosa’ Mitchelstown (Curragorm) poet, Joe Chamberlain (1925-2010), in his poem ‘Neath the Hill of Knockadea’ wrote: ‘The old school stood sentinel O’ er Mo laige’ s Plain Where, in learning we were grounded, For the world’ s rough terrain! Indeed, the terrain was rough here a century ago and Knockadea NS did not just stand ‘sentinel’ but it too played its part in events that occurred during Ireland’s fight for freedom!
As we are in the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ just now and as we endure the present ‘ Covid-19 pandemic’, it’s worth remembering just how tough life also was, a century ago, for our people!
A little over a hundred years ago, in 1920, a full-time ‘Flying Column’ was organised by the Volunteers in East Limerick. A Patrick Meehan joined the column shortly after its formation. He was from Hospital, County Limerick, having been born there in 1897. Patrick, in later life, went on to become a member of An Garda Síochána, eventually becoming a Garda Sergeant in Carndonagh, County Donegal. In 1918 he had joined the Volunteers and was so effective as a Volunteer, that he was quickly to become captain of the Hospital Company.
While most of the time, in the early days, the Volunteers concentrated on training, they also operated as guards for the Sinn Féin Arbitration Courts, then operating around the country, replacing the British system of justice (or injustice). Litigants were persuaded to take their cases to these courts and in most cases, were satisfied to abide by the decisions reached.
That court duty gave Patrick Meehan great insight into the court system and its operation. When the Galtee ‘ Flying Column’ was organised with full-time recruits, Patrick was enlisted. At that time, it had between 30 to 40 full-time hand-picked men, all armed with rifles. The column was under the command of Donnchadh Ó hAnnagáin (Hannigan) from Anglesborough.
However, in November 1920, Patrick Meehan got instructions to return to Hospital from his Flying Column/ASU (Active Service Unit) duties and arrest a national school teacher named Michael O’Meara NT, against whom there was very strong evidence that he was giving information to the British forces. Patrick, with his familiarity with the Sinn Féin court system and its investigative procedures, was seen as the ideal volunteer for the job.
It was a difficult case for Patrick Meehan and the IRA to deal with, as the man involved, Michael O’Meara NT (b. 1878) was a trained national teacher who had developed a serious drink problem. Michael O’Meara NT was from a fine respectable family. His father Michael was a hardworking agricultural labourer and lived with his wife Nóra, in Knockainey. However, their bright young teaching son Michael, was becoming a problem and had lost his permanent teaching job, having been dismissed from Knockainey N.S. for his excessive social drinking and his inappropriate lifestyle, considered unacceptable for a man in his position!
At a loose end, for a period, and in dire straits, when WW1 broke out in 1914, Michael O’Meara NT saw the conflict as a ‘godsend’! He was a married man, who was very financially stressed and seized onto the opportunity, to again gain a steady income, by taking the ‘King’s Shilling’ and joining the British army. Michael, in better times, before drink took over his life, had married a 19-yearold girl, Florence Millea, from Hospital town on February 12, 1903 and they went on to have eight children together by the time of his death.
When Michael O’Meara NT lost his teaching post, the family was, in fact, destitute and faced homelessness. Fortunately, Michael was very lucky, or perhaps unlucky! His mother-in-law, Lizzie Millea, took the family into her already crowded home in Kenmare Terrace, just out the Knockainey road from Hospital town. Lizzie, however, was already at her wits-end, as her other daughter Mary Agnes, had married an RIC policeman, John Joe Whelan, and they too had no house of their own and were already living with her!
With three families in the one small two-storey house, Michael O’Meara saw enlisting in the army as a solution to his plight. However, despite manpower shortages at that time, in the army, his reputation for drink must have gone ahead of him, as the recruiting sergeant, resisted initially, before eventually enlisting him on 4 March 1915, when the ‘Separation Allowance’ money was increased. To advance his chances of enlisting, Michael had made himself ten years younger by saying he was born in 1887, instead of 1878!
That saw Michael leave the bedlam at home, to face bedlam of a different type, fighting in France! But it did provide him with the added bonus that his wife would receive a ‘Separation Allowance’ that would keep the family at home going, while he was away fighting, and no doubt, drinking!
‘NEW’ MILITARY FRIENDS
Fortunately, or again unfortunately, Michael’s army career was to be shortened, despite having dodged many bullets, during a long three-year and two months career in it. He was demobilised and sent home from the army, on health grounds, which, in his case, was a polite way of saying that he was seen more as a liability than a help! His superiors discharged him on May 4, 1918 and returned him home with a group of badly wounded soldiers.
To expedite his departure, his superiors even gave Michael a sick certificate, stating that his VDH (Valvular Disease of the Heart) had been ‘aggravated’ by his service (leaving out his drink addiction), something which entitled Michael to a small pension!
However, when he returned to Hospital, he no longer had a permanent teaching post to go to, and worse still, while in the army, he seems to have developed an even greater dependency on alcohol, as happened to so many other soldiers who had enlisted at the time.
Michael made himself available as a substitute teacher but that didn’t work out either and, in any case, the few days of work and the pay he received was not adequate to support a family of eight children and a wife, given his extreme drinking habits! Drinking heavily and to get away, I suppose, from the crowded terrace house, on the Knockainey road, Michael spent most of his days in the pubs around Hospital.
When the ‘War of Independence’ broke out, a detachment of British troops was located to Hospital in August 1920 and Michael saw a new way of earning a ‘few extra bob’! Michael became quite friendly with the new detachment of troops and he ended up spending much of his time in their company. His friendship had developed almost accidently, as many in the military, and the ‘Tans’, were also good drinkers themselves!
Michael’s personality weakness was quickly identified by the military authorities. They zoomed in on him and before long, Michael found that he was being dropped hints that his earnings could be greatly supplemented, if he was willing to use his local knowledge, to aid his ‘new’ military friends.
Sadly, Michael succumbed to the temptation. He also had, of course, a lot in common with his ‘new friends’, as he was a former British army soldier himself. Michael was assured that he wouldn’t have to even dirty his hands while ‘working’ in his new position! All they asked him to do was to sit in and tour around with the military patrols, so they wouldn’t go astray when travelling the local roads and multiplicity of Irish boreens! Michael accepted with gratitude, seeing it as just another job!
At the heart of O’Meara’s problems, was his desire for drink and he probably was not really ‘evil’ at heart! It was this desire for drink that had lost him his secure pensionable job in the first place, and had led him then to joining the British army, only to lose that career as well. He probably, mistakenly, saw his new role as an extension of his former army career, not realising that he was now, not facing Germans, but his own fellow countrymen.
In any case, in his newly adopted role, Michael found himself involved in guiding his newly found friends out on raids, acting as it were, as their ‘Sat-Nav’. When out on raiding missions, with the RIC and military, they had him dressed up like one of themselves, in disguise. His role was purely ‘as a guide’ and there is no solid evidence (that I know of) that he carried out any spying activities on their behalf.
It was Michael’s drinking with the military and the ‘Black and Tans’, in addition to going out on raids with them, that was to lead to his eventual undoing. These activities were more in the role of a ‘collaborator’ rather than that of a ‘spy’, but either way his activities were sufficient to condemn him. Evidence from the Hospital area states that he had been seen getting out of ‘Black and Tan’ tender vehicles, late at night after raids, on numerous occasions. Kilfinane Volunteer, Dan F O’Shaughnessy, said the following about Michael O’Meara NT, in 1954, in a written witness statement:
“He was a National Teacher and a married man who lived in the village of Hospital and taught at Knockainey National School. Being a teacher, he was a man of a certain standard of education and on that account, one can have little sympathy for him. However, apart from that, he was a constant drunkard and would sell his soul for drink and consequently, became the companion of the soldiers and the ‘Tans’.
As far as information went, he had none to give them, but he went out with the Crown forces into the country at night, dressed in an R.I.C. overcoat. He was with them on raids on several farmers’ houses and that action is said to have sealed his doom.”
1920 was a ‘hot’ year for the Volunteers and they were not going to tolerate any ‘loose cannon’, putting the lives of their members at risk! Michael O’Meara was warned many times but he was not deterred. The lure of easy money and the free supply of alcohol was too great!
KIDNAPPED FROM KENMARE TERRACE
Alarmed at O’Meara’s continuing activities, the Volunteers decided to act, as I mentioned above, and ordered Volunteer Patrick Meehan to swing into action. With a strong garrison of R.I.C. and military in the town of Hospital, Volunteer Patrick Meehan set about his work of kidnapping O’Meara, but he had to operate very covertly as O’Meara lived so close to Hospital town, just out the Knockainey Road. Hospital town was, in reality, a military garrison stronghold just then.