Brotherhood and Brutality: Seán Mac Eoin and the Irish Civil War, 1922-3

A continuation of: Shadows and Substance: Seán Mac Eoin and the Slide into Civil War, 1922

The Beginning

Sligo burned…or, at least, that was the idea.

Since early in 1922, like many other towns in Ireland, it had played host to two armed and hostile factions, each claiming the mantle of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). One supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and by extension the Free State born from that agreement, with the other adamantly opposed to both. It was an impossible situation, one that could not last indefinitely, as proved in June 1922, when simmering passions finally boiled over into outright violence in Dublin.

Crowds watch the attack on the Four Courts, Dublin, July 1922

Sligo took its time in following the capital’s example. The pro-Treaty IRA, already in possession of the Sligo Prison and Courthouse, moved to commandeer a garage on the 28^th June, placing themselves directly opposite their anti-Treaty counterparts in the Police Barracks, over which a flag emblazoned with the words I.R. Rebels, 1916 fluttered. Both parties then busied themselves in fortifying their claimed strongholds, such as in the coils of barbed wire looped outside the courthouse, while several families on that street hurriedly left their homes to stay with friends in other parts of town that would hopefully be less in the firing line.

Sligo Courthouse, used as a base by pro-Treaty forces at the start of the Civil War

Two days passed and each side had yet to make a move. Though menace hung heavily in the air, there were people, reported the Sligo Independent, who could not help but be drawn by the novelty of being in the middle of a not-yet-warzone:

From about 7:30 pm in the evening crowds began to gather in the vicinity of the Courthouse and Barracks to watch operations and remained until almost midnight. The tension was even greater than the previous evening, and it was commonly reported that the [anti-Treaty] Executive Forces had got a few hours’ notice to leave the barracks.

Seán Mac Eoin

That the Anti-Treatyites did the following morning, the same day that Major-General Seán Mac Eoin returned to take charge of the pro-Treaty forces in Sligo. He had been on honeymoon in neighbouring Donegal when news of the outbreak in Dublin came through, recalling him to his command post. Mac Eoin arrived in time to find the Police Barracks ablaze, its anti-Treaty garrison having pulled out in the early hours of the morning before torching it and the adjoining Recreation Hall in a ‘scorched earth’ tactic. Civilians who tried to reach the Town Hall where the firehose was kept were turned back at gunpoint by those same arsonists.

Mac Eoin was not so easily deterred. He marched to the Town Hall, a squad of his soldiers in tow, and came back with the firehose in hand. Seeing that the Barracks and Recreation Hall, both burning fiercely, were beyond help, Mac Eoin instead turned the water on their surroundings.

It took three hours for the Barracks to burn, during which a number of bombs carelessly left behind were heard exploding. By the time the flames died down, the two buildings were ruined shells, but the rest of Sligo was safe, from the fire at least. Mac Eoin, along with some local men, earned praise from the Sligo Independent “for their fearless work” in firefighting.[1]

Opening Moves

There just remained the other kind of fighting to be done, of which much was promised. After all, the Anti-Treatyites had only quit one base and not the war, withdrawing instead to either the countryside or to Sligo Military Barracks in the appropriately named Barrack Street. Despite the arson and the drama, blood had yet to be spilled, unlike in Dublin, although Sligo could hardly be described as peaceful either.

Sligo town and bridge

Determined to maintain the initiative, Mac Eoin stationed his soldiers around the town, where they stopped and searched a number of motorcars, and detained in the Courthouse a number of youths known to hold Republican views, although most of these were soon released. When a Ford van carrying three men drove from the Military Barracks to a garage in Bridge Street, Mac Eoin rushed to the scene. The vehicle occupants were demanding free fuel from the garage owner when Mac Eoin arrived to hold them up with a revolver until his subordinates came to remove the three miscreants to the prison.

The streets were by then occupied only by armed men from either faction, all civilians having the sense this time to remain indoors. The Anti-Treatyites did not remain in the Military Barracks for long, evacuating it on the midnight of the 30^th June. As with the Police Barracks, they left nothing for the opposition, having sprinkled the interior with petrol before setting it alight. The fires ate hungrily until only bare walls were left standing amidst smoking ashes.

IRA men standing in a doorway

The Anti-Treatyites, said to be numbering several hundred, next moved to the Drumcliffe district, leaving their opponents to patrol the streets of Sligo. Several arrests were made, including one by Mac Eoin personally, according to the Sligo Independent:

At about 6 o’clock in the evening, a Republican policeman named Jack Pilkington, of Abbey Street (brother of Com.Gen. [Liam] Pilkington, Irregular forces) was arrested by Major-General McKeon in Bridge Street, and it is alleged that some ammunition was found in his possession. He was conveyed to the Jail, but was released in a couple of hours time.[2]

Calton Younger

Others who had likewise been picked up continued to be detained, so it seems that Jack Pilkington was not taken to be a great threat. A more dramatic depiction of the encounter between him and Mac Eoin was narrated years later by Calton Younger, in which Mac Eoin, in fact, had had a narrow escape. As Younger profusely thanked Mac Eoin in his acknowledgements, it can be assumed that it was he who relayed to the historian how he had been standing by while Sergeant Ingram did his best in starting the engine of their recalcitrant motorcar. As the nub of the conflict had shifted out of Sligo, the town seemed secure enough for the Major-General to take his leave and head eastwards to Athlone, where his responsibilities as GOC (General Officer Commanding) Western Division awaited.[3]

But Sligo still had a surprise to offer, when a shriek from a woman to his right alerted Mac Eoin to Pilkington sneaking up on him with his revolver aimed. Pilkington – referred to by Younger only as “a young man, a brother of a Republican leader” – had time to squeeze off a shot, the bullet grazing the forehead of his quarry, before the other man sprang at him. Mac Eoin heard the click of the revolver’s hammer as Pilkington attempted a second time but either the gun was empty or jammed – and then Mac Eoin was on his would-be assassin, seizing first the revolver, which he threw to the ground, and then the two grenades Pilkington had on him.

Seán Mac Eoin, glowering from a window, 1922

A strong man, as befitting a former blacksmith, Mac Eoin took Pilkington by the scruff of the neck in one hand and his trousers’ seat in the other, and tossed him into the river. And that was that. Sergeant Ingram finally got the car going, and Mac Eoin climbed on board, along with his bride, Alice, Captain Louis Connolly and the Rev. Patrick Higgins of Ballintogher. With Ingram at the wheel, the party began the drive to Athlone.

Whichever version of events is more plausible – the Sligo Independent’s or Younger’s – is a question left to the reader.

Road Trip

Alice Mac Eoin (née Cooney) in bridal gown, 1922

The car had only made two miles out of Sligo before becoming the target of shots in a roadside ambush. Mac Eoin and Captain Connolly leapt out, pistols drawn, an act more daring than prudent – after all, driving on out of harm’s reach would have been the safer option. Incredibly, this display was enough for a cease-and-desist order to be called from amongst the ambushers, either due to Mac Eoin being recognised or, as speculated by Younger, because a woman was seen to be in the car.

Exerting the same ‘take charge’ attitude shown in Sligo, Mac Eoin called the enemy officer over, followed with another demand, this time to surrender, which Gilmartin – as named in Younger’s book – obligingly did. With this easy victory, Mac Eoin let Gilmartin and his men go. No harm, no foul, after all, and, besides, he probably did not have space in his car for prisoners.

Similarly submissive were the three passengers in another car encountered further on. They claimed to be in the same army as Mac Eoin, as supported by their green uniforms, but when an unyielding Mac Eoin told them, all the same, he could not leave soldiers of his to their own devices, the trio confessed that they were Anti-Treatyites. Mac Eoin ordered them out of their car and to surrender their guns, which they did meekly. They were equally acquiescent when Mac Eoin next told them to get back onboard, turn their motorcar around and drive ahead of his own.

A road-block was next. When Mac Eoin instructed his commandeered advance guard to clear it, the other men uncharacteristically refused. Suspecting that this was more due to fear than defiance, a hint at the possibility that the barrier was mined, Mac Eoin decided to go back the way he had come and chance another route, after first disabling the other vehicle and leaving the trio stranded.

As the party of four neared Athlone, more obstacles appeared, this time in the form of tree-trunks laid across the road at Glassan. Whoever responsible had been careless enough to leave their bicycles – about twenty, in number – propped up against a wall. Mac Eoin was about to wreck them until Alice urged her husband against further delays. Since it was already past midnight, Mac Eoin drove to a nearby friend’s house to spend the night. In the morning, he issued word to a unit of his in Ballymahon to remove the offending trunks.

“There he learned how much he owed to his wife’s fatigue, or perhaps to her intuition, the previous night,” explained Younger:

The bicycles belonged not to the Republicans who had felled the trees but to a party of his own troops who had begun to clear the road and who had taken cover when McEoin’s [alternative spelling] car approached. Had McEoin begun to break up the bicycles, the clearing party, uncertain of the identity of the people in the car, would have taken them for Republicans. McEoin would have found himself ambushed by his own men.

Compounding the dramatic irony and tragic potential, narrowly unrealised, was how the Pro-Treatyites had been led by Mac Eoin’s brother. The fratricide of the Civil War had almost become literal.[4]

Civil War combatants preparing an ambush

Holding Out

In Athlone, Mac Eoin found an island of relative calm amidst the chaos, the town having “been immune so far from the horrors of the conflict,” according to the Westmeath Independent. The newspaper attributed this privileged state:

…to the precautions taken by the troops stationed at the Custume and Adamson Castle Barracks. Soldiers from those barracks are mounted on guards on all the local bridges, and on the roads verging on the town, night and day. Pedestrians after a certain hour at night are challenged and questioned. Provided their answers are satisfactory they are allowed to pass on. All motorists are held up, their cars searched, and the occupants questioned.

Athlone had also benefitted from not having to share itself with more than one army at the start, unlike Sligo. Outside the town was a very different scenario, however. On the 5^th July, the day after Mac Eoin reached Athlone, a pro-Treaty patrol – from the newly christened ‘National Army’ – was moving between Moate and Ferbane in a Lancia car and a Ford when they were fired upon. By the time the troops fended off their assailants, 20-year old John Blaney had been shot in the head and slain.

As a local man, whose family lived on Wolfe Tone Terrace, his death was keenly felt by many:

The sad scenes witnessed at the bier in the morgue…were most affecting. The bereaved father, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends gathered round with tear-dimmed eyes, mourning the loss of their affectionate son and brother. With them the utmost sympathy is felt by the citizens of Athlone, irrespective of creed or class, in the terrible affliction.

That was not to be the only skirmish that day. Later in the evening, people were alarmed when a lorry hurtled into Athlone on three wheels, the fourth having been punctured, and with its engine close to overheating. When it reached Custume Barracks, the driver and his passenger, both covered in blood, practically fell out and had to be taken at once to the military hospital. The news they brought back was urgent: their ten-man squad had left Longford for Athlone when an ambush stopped them at Tang.

Free State patrol in a car

While the other eight stayed behind, Harry McDermott, wounded in the face and hands, and Campbell, bleeding from a bullet to the abdomen – their ages being nineteen and eighteen respectively – drove the lorry at punishing speed to Athlone for reinforcements. By the time these arrived on the scene at Tang, Brigadier-General Dinnegan had also been severely wounded. One week into the war and the casualties were rising, bit by steady bit.

The Soldier’s Song

Those who thought that the day had seen enough drama were proven wrong when the crack of rifles and machine-gun rattles were heard from the direction of Cornamaddy at 7:30 pm, loud enough to rouse a relief force from Custume Barracks, led by Mac Eoin in his motorcar:

To all appearances a big battle was in progress, and rumours were current as to heavy casualties. The firing continued to range in intensity for half an hour. Crowds of people assembled along the side-walks from the Ballymahon Road to Custume Barracks, awaiting news from the seat of war.

Contrary to rumour, no losses had been suffered by the time the troops returned to Athlone, jubilantly singing The Soldier’s Song through the streets, with the cheers of onlookers as a chorus. Despite this triumphalism, the facts remained that the IRA – that name permitted to the Anti-Treatyites at least – had been bold enough to spring another attack – on a Red Cross lorry and a military truck at a crossroads in  Cornamaddy – and escape without harm, despite searches in the nearby woods and bog by the National Army. Athlone was seeming less like an oasis of peace and more as a besieged fortress, its populace hemmed in and the rest of the area vulnerable.

Athlone Bridge

“People living in the outlying districts are in a state of terror only equalled by that experienced during the Black-and-Tan regime,” reported the Westmeath Independent, one of the few sources of information at hand for an area otherwise cut off from the media:

We are reliably informed that parties of armed men visit the farmhouses nightly and take out the young men at the point of the rifle or revolver and force them to fell trees and trench the roads.[5]

Michael Kilroy

Whether Athlone or elsewhere, “the Free State were very frightened of us,” remembered Michael Kilroy, the commander of the Mayo IRA. Once his troops had swept the opposition out of Mayo – an easy enough feat to perform, he was sure – Kilroy would lead them on to Athlone, where “I heard that MacEoin was boasting how impregnable his barracks was there. Petrol in cans up a ladder would take it, we thought.”[6]

Perhaps it is little wonder then, as Con Moloney surveyed the national picture from the current IRA headquarters in Limerick, the Adjutant-General of the anti-Treaty forces did not rate Mac Eoin’s position a strong one. “We expect to capture a few small posts in his area within the next week. We will keep him busy in any event,” Moloney wrote in a report on the 9^th July. He went so far as to speculate on how committed the enemy general really was to the contest: “It is possible that we may be able to keep McKeown [alternative spelling] neutral. In any case he is now entirely on the defensive.”[7]

High Expectations

In defence of Kilroy’s and Moloney’s retrospectively hubristic assessments, from where they stood, the war was all but won. Counties in the Irish North-East “are practically in our hands,” according to Moloney, “except for a few posts in the Roscommon area and McKeown’s troops in Sligo.” The National Army was not doing much better in the Third Southern Division (Offaly, Laois and North Tipperary) either, where:

We occupy Birr Barracks and another two posts. McKeown advanced on one of these posts, but was forced to return again to Athlone. F.S. [Free State] forces in his area are cut off from each other by Road, Rail and Wire and will not be able to attack here until Kilkenny and Thurles are removed.

With much of Munster also in Republican hands, “generally speaking, we are having the best of the matter, and things are settling down to real business. I expect we will control say from the Shannon to Carlow in a day or two.”[8]

The Anti-Treatyites were confident enough to attempt an assassination on Mac Eoin – if not neutral, he could at least be dead. Some IRA officers in Mayo who had sided with the Treaty were held prisoner in a house, with the expectation that Mac Eoin would come to their aid. Preparations were made for his arrival by the ambush team, who mined the road and took up position in a wood opposite a rocky peak of slate that would hopefully ricochet their bullets back into the kill-zone.[9]

IRA Flying Column

Which was all for naught as Mac Eoin never appeared and alive he remained. In a quirk of fate, one of the ambushers-to-be, Broddie Malone, was later a captive in Custume Barracks in Athlone, supervised by the man Malone had targeted. If Mac Eoin knew, then there were no hard feelings, for, according to Malone, “MacEoin was decent to me and to the men.”[10]

But that lay in the future. Writing on the 13^th July, four days after his first optimistic analysis, Moloney announced more good news for the IRA and bad progress on Mac Eoin’s part: “Athlone attempted to march on one of our posts in 3^rd Southern area, but were forced to return again to base.”[11]

IRA men posing with Thompson machine-guns

Speaking to Younger, Mac Eoin made no mention of either of these two setbacks in the Third Southern areas. He did, on the other hand, lament a failed attempt on IRA-held Collooney, Co. Sligo, as initially reported by the Irish Times:

On Monday evening [10^th July] a strong force of National troops arrived in Sligo and subsequently left for the Collooney area. Firing began at about 11 o’clock, and continued until the late hour on Tuesday morning. It is anticipated that the next few days will see the end of the struggle.[12]

As it turned out, the engagement did not last the second day, as the Pro-Treatyites fell back prematurely, seemingly due to a confusion over orders – assuming it was an honest mistake and not a dishonest one as Mac Eoin suspected: “Whether it was the typists who carried out the operation orders, or who it was, I don’t know.” Though not present, Mac Eoin darkly hinted to Younger that the reason for the defeat was not so much the opposition without as the traitor within: “At this stage, some of our forces and some of our staff were not loyal.”

Mac Eoin, Younger noted, “seems glad that he does not know who among those he trusted let him down.”[13]

Anti-Treaty newslett

Regardless, the anti-Treaty stronghold in Collooney remained a nut in need of cracking. If treachery had indeed been the cause of the initial failure, then Mac Eoin avoided a repeat by the ruse of taking his one hundred and twenty soldiers on the evening train from Athlone to Dublin, ostensibly for training, and then switching at Mullingar for the line to Longford, Boyle and finally Sligo town. By 6 o’clock on the morning of Saturday, the 15^th July, they had reached the outskirts of Collooney, meeting up with an allied detachment under Colonel Anthony Lawlor.

National Army troops on the march

Lawlor’s men covered the northern road into Collooney, while Mac Eoin took charge of the south side. The Major-General sent two messages: the first to the town’s Catholic priest and Protestant minister to lead their congregations to safety, and then an ultimatum to the enemy garrison, calling on them to surrender. When a volley of shots gave a wordless answer, the battle for Collooney was on.[14]

The Battle of Collooney

MUTINEERS’ BRIEF STAND

The following official bulletin was issued by G.H.Q., Irish Army, at 3:45 pm on Saturday [15^th July 1922]:

“Collooney, a stronghold of the Irregulars in the West, has been taken by our troops, after four hours’ fighting. Seventy prisoners, with arms and ammunition and a store of explosives, were captured.”

Our Boyle Correspondent says that the National troops, who were commanded by Major-General McKeon, were equipped with machine guns and artillery. The Irregulars at Collooney numbered about 400, and they put up a strong resistance. Four snipers in the tower of the Protestant church kept up the firing until the shells from an 18-pounder made the position untenable.[15]

(Irish Times, 17^th July 1922)

Things did not go quite so smoothly as this article might suggest, and Mac Eoin was to describe to Younger a much more rough-and-tumble affair. The aforementioned 18-pounder, which had seen action less than a month earlier against the Four Courts in Dublin, was positioned in a sawmill when the enemy machine-gun nest in the church tower identified it as an immediate target. A bullet scored a groove over the scalp of a surprised Sergeant Kenagh, narrowly avoiding worse.

Free State artillery in the midst of street combat

As Kenagh ducked behind the shield of his artillery piece and scanned the surroundings for the perpetrators, Mac Eoin:

…showed him and [Kenagh] levelled the gun at the tower. The first shell went straight through a window in the belfry and exploded. Every bell rang and the whole of the top of the tower was blown up into the air, sandbags, machine-guns, Irregulars and all, and it landed and got jammed in its usual place as if nothing had happened.

Colonel Lawlor tried to follow up this stroke of good shooting with a bayonet-charge on the IRA position – except that none of his soldiers would do so. It was left to Mac Eoin to lead the assault by his own ‘men’ – to use the term loosely as none were over eighteen years of age – jumping over the church wall and into the graveyard, to find “sixteen fellows, with rifles and all, lying on the flat of their backs. Not only did they put their hands up, but they put their feet up too,” Mac Eoin triumphantly told to Younger.

Collooney, Co. Sligo (today)

A Soldier and Statesman

The prisoners were moved to the rear, and the push into Collooney resumed. As before, as he had always done, Mac Eoin led from the front – no Douglas Haig, he – even if such boldness almost came at a fatal price:

I was standing at a hall door when a machine-gun opened up on me and it cut the track of myself in the hall door and cut my tunic and coat to ribbons. A young soldier from Killaloe saw where the machine-gun was placed and he jumped out into the street, went down on one knee and fired, wounding the gunner.

The struggle took the better part of the day, with shots continuing to be heard throughout the night, but the town was officially Mac Eoin’s by morning when the anti-Treaty commander, Frank O’Beirne, and twenty-two of his subordinates surrendered in a house by the train station. Also in Mac Eoin’s possession, and equally appreciated, were a number of salmon that had been left to boil in a huge iron pot:

During the fighting the fire had gone out and the water had already boiled away. And here the salmon was – beautifully cooked and still piping hot – enough for us all and the sweetest meal I ever touched in my life.[16]

Collooney was added to the tally of Free State gains elsewhere in Ireland that week: Dundalk and a fort on Inch Island, Lough Suilly, Co. Donegal, as part of a determined drive by the beleaguered Pro-Treatyites to regain the initiative. But neither of the others impressed the Special Correspondent of the Irish Times as much as the Sligo win: “Except in the West, where General McKeon has won a distinct and important victory at Collooney, there has been no engagement which ranks above the dignity of a skirmish.”[17]

National Army recruitment poster

Republican dispatches speculated no further about Mac Eoin’s dedication. Returning to Athlone, he was, in addition to being feted as a conquering hero, presented with a bank draft of £279 by Father Crowe on behalf of the townspeople. It was an overdue wedding present, explained the padre, but also a mark of appreciation from those who:

…regard you not only as a great soldier, but as a great statesman and a man with a clear political outlook; one who is prepared to be the protector of the people, and who has urged that the army should be the guardians and not the dictators of the civil population.[18]

A cult of personality had its benefits in regard to morale. “To flatter you a little sir, but it is the truth, the boys are saying ‘Up McKeon and into it,” so Mac Eoin was informed by Lawlor in a dispatch from the Claremorris warzone in November 1922. “By-the-way the hospital is called ‘Hospital McKeon.’”[19]

While taking Lawlor’s self-confessed brownnosing into account, Mac Eoin’s enemies also acknowledged this adulation, even if they had cause to resent it. Arrested by the Free State, Michael O’Donoghue was taken to Longford town for detention in its barracks. As it was fair day, there were large crowds of people about, some of whom noticed the anti-Treaty POW being marched through their midst. O’Donoghue found himself surrounded by the sticks and cudgels of a jeering, inebriated mob, much to his terror.

“Sean McKeon, the local hero, had gone Free State and, being the military idol of the midlands, anyone hostile to him, that is any “Irregular”, was regarded as anathema,” O’Donoghue explained in his reminiscences, a touch sourly.[20]

Taking Stock

Despite all the bullets spent in Collooney, no fatalities were inflicted on either side but, of injuries, there were plenty, some of whom were taken to Athlone Military Hospital. Convalescents included a man caught in an accidental explosion in Sligo, suffering wounds to the face as well as his hands, both of which had been amputated, though at least his eyesight – previously feared lost – was recovering. The brush with death by another soldier, from when a bullet struck beneath his heart, merited Mac Eoin’s bedside congratulations.

Free State soldiers receiving medical treatment (colourised photograph)

Such gestures did not go unappreciated. A visiting journalist who accompanied Mac Eoin noticed how:

The General, who visits all his wounded soldiers each day, displayed a fatherly interest in their condition. He chatted freely and gaily with the patients, whose faces lit up with smiles at his approach.[21]

A more sombre paying of respects was in Longford, where Mac Eoin attended the funeral of Lieutenant Patrick Callaghan, killed in an earlier engagement near Collooney. Callaghan had served under Mac Eoin as part of their IRA Flying Column, taking part in clashes against British forces at Granard and Ballinalee in November 1920, as well as the capture of the Arva and Ballymahon police barracks.[22]

“Commandant Callaghan is said to have been Major-General McKeon’s right hand man in his mobile column,” noted the Sligo Independent, “and was carrying a revolver and holster which had belonged to one of the Black-and-Tans.”[23]

The suggestion that Callaghan had been in command at the time of his death, and thus in a way responsible for it, was enough for Mac Eoin to write to his Chief of Staff, Richard Mulcahy, on the 26^th July 1922, full of outrage on the deceased’s behalf:

I knew Callaghan RIP and the statement contained in the letter in question was a deliberate lie. He was not in charge of the men, as the O/C of the Division was there and most likely he was in charge. Even if Callaghan was in charge it would not be his first time to be in charge in an ambush and come out successfully.

Richard Mulcahy

The author of this offending rumour was unknown, though Mac Eoin guessed it was “one of those who envy the success of the National Troops and is doing his best to cause disturbance by circulating infamously slanderous information.” Another record defended was Mac Eoin’s own, which suggested that not all of the news coming into the capital from the West was complimentary. “I am not going into the question but believe me that there is no laxity of descipline [sic] among the troops in my command,” he told Mulcahy tartly.[24]

Even Michael Collins was not spared his pen. The pair had been the best of friends during the prior conflict: when Mac Eoin was caught by the British authorities and sentenced to death, Collins had spared no effort in his rescue. Civil war had sundered old relationships and now it was putting even the remainder under pressure.

Michael Collins

“These bills have been accruing for months and you may remember when you were here last they were giving me considerable trouble and there has been no improvement since,” Mac Eoin wrote to Collins, now his Commander-in-Chief, on the 22^nd August 1922. Custume Barracks had debts waiting to be honoured since March, and Mac Eoin, public darling he may have been, was not naïve enough to think that the vendors of Athlone could be kept waiting indefinitely. “These will require an immediate improvement or we will be in as bad favour with the people as the Irregulars – perhaps worse.”[25]

‘A Ladder of Rifles’

As Collins was shot and killed in an ambush the same day, he might have already been dead by the time Mac Eoin sent his complaint to him. However strained their last communications to each other, Mac Eoin attended the funeral, walking behind the tricoloured-draped coffin at the heart of the procession through Dublin. “Big, forceful, and prematurely grey,” was how one reporter described him. Also showing the weight of grief and war was Mulcahy, who had big shoes to fill as the new Commander-in-Chief, “a frail figure, with drawn, tense features and downcast gaze.”[26]

The funeral procession of Michael Collins in Dublin, August 1922

But affairs of state wait for no man, and both Mac Eoin and Mulcahy had plenty to attend to, civilian as well as military, in the opening of the Provisional Parliament on the 9^th September, in Leinster House, Dublin. The two generals forewent their uniforms, Mulcahy appearing in “his old brown homespun”, according to a journalistic eyewitness, while a plain-garbed Mac Eoin “looked as if he had just stepped out of Conduit street.” After the start of the session, there was little else to be done or said, save the constant interjections by Laurence Ginnell, the one anti-Treaty representative present, as well as the only attendee who refused to sign the rolls. Instead, the TD for Longford-Westmeath repeatedly and loudly demanded to know if the assembly before him was truly Dáil Éireann or a partition parliament.[27]

Laurence Ginnell, looking as displeased as ever

Ginnell was finally ejected. Not many seemed sad to see him go, with “Sean MacEoin being the only Free Stater to get up and shake hands with him before he was put out,” recalled his wife, Alice Ginnell.[28]

Mac Eoin was not quite so magnanimous later that month in the Dáil, on the 28^th September. Dr Patrick McCartan, the TD for Monaghan, moved for an immediate truce in the war, to last no less than fourteen days. With the choice before the Government now to either negotiate with the enemy or exterminate them, McCartan believed that peace should be given one more chance. Give the irregulars a ladder to climb down on, he urged.

Patrick McCartan

McCartan’s proposal attracted some support in the chamber but also opposition, notably from Mac Eoin who, having just returned after two weeks of hard campaigning on the other side of the country, was in a no-nonsense mood. No one in Ireland was no more inclined than he towards such a ladder, he told the Dáil, if he thought it would accomplish anything. But a similar offer had recently been made to him for three days of ceasefire in the West, except this pause in the fighting was intended on the part of the Anti-Treatyites to allow a shipment of arms to reach Sligo. Had that gunrunning attempt succeeded, then the irregulars would have been in a position to not so much negotiate terms as dictate them. That would be their ladder.

“A ladder of rifles,” interjected Denis J. Gorey, the TD for Carlow-Kilkenny.

‘All the devilments imaginable’

Mac Eoin had been equally hard-nosed earlier that day in the Dáil, this time as part of the debate over the establishment of Military Courts for war prisoners, with the powers to impose terms of penal servitude…or even the death penalty. Amendments to have detainees treated as POWs, with the rights and recognition that came with this status, or to have the courts chaired by legal professionals, were defeated by the Government representatives, who were determined not to allow even beaten subversives an extra inch.

Putting Military Courts under civilian oversight would be giving authority with one hand and withdrawing it in the next, Mac Eoin warned. Practically curling his lip as he addressed the chamber:

Personally speaking, he did not think that there was necessity for any legal advisor – (laughter) – because all the legal advisors he knew they could compare with some of the members of the House – (laughter) – they play acted with words and phrases, and were up to all the devilments imaginable. (laughter). When they came down to hard realities, there was not one gram of common sense in all their knowledge.

In contrast:

An army officer quite appreciated the position of those who fought in arms against him. Although he had been in arms against the officer, yet they were of the same way of thinking, and the officer appreciated the position and would act justly and could have sympathy with, and appreciation of, the man’s position. Such an officer should be made President of the Court, and not the legal advisor.

This lofty statement did not quite convince Thomas Johnson. The Labour Party leader voiced his doubts as to whether even Major-General Mac Eoin, a man Johnson praised as being second to none in ensuring the subordination of military authority to the civil one, would keep a cool head when deciding the fate of his enemies. Had Mac Eoin not publicly stated months ago, at the inquest into the slaying of George Adamson in Athlone in April 1922, that he would have shot dead the guilty party if he could?

“That is one of the things we want to try to guard against,” Johnson declared.

Thomas Johnson

That was different, Mac Eoin replied. He did not deny voicing his intent to kill or the intent itself, only that there had been no other recourse at the time. Now there was, in the form of the Military Courts, the implication being that he would have no need to act illegally if he had the state to do so legally instead.[29]

And this was from the man previously lauded as a model of chivalry. The preceding fortnight had evidently done much to harden Mac Eoin but, then, nothing about it had been easy. Despite early wins in the first few months of the Civil War, the Free State remained in a position of weakness, or so it felt to Mac Eoin when reporting his woes to Mulcahy on the 4^th September 1922.

The money shortages he had complained about to Collins had not abated, leading to his “men waiting for supplies which were promised for Friday last, but have not yet arrived.” Mutiny was increasingly a danger, to the extent that an outpost in Leitrim, “Dromahaire has been lost this morning – as far as I can learn handed over to the enemy.” The loyalty of National Army that Mac Eoin had defended before was no longer something even he could take for granted, leading him to urge Mulcahy to “do something about pay for Regulars at once.”[30]

Free State soldiers

Pressing Back the Forces of Disorder

If he was looking for sympathy, then Mac Eoin had turned to the wrong man. “I fear very much that you are being let down in your area,” Mulcahy wrote to Mac Eoin in a cutting but not untypical-for-him letter:

Personally, I cannot sense that there is any solid administration or organisation over the area pressing back the forces of disorder. I am afraid that I begin to find this, namely, that the people of the area feel that no impression at all is being made on the situation, and that they are beginning to whisper to themselves that they have no confidence in ‘Sean McKeon.’[31]

The main danger, as Mulcahy saw it, was that their troops were spread too thinly about their freshly won gains, sitting exposed in small bases and left “at the mercy of any small band of Irregulars with a ‘punch’ in them.” Instead, Mulcahy wanted these outliers pulled back, regrouped and retrained – his strategy for the next few weeks counted on it, as he instructed Mac Eoin: “You will understand that it is absolutely necessary to have at our disposal central force enough to allow elasticity in our plans.”[32]

National Army outpost, of the type Mulcahy was so concerned about

The costs of this was the abandonment of civilians to the rapaciousness of hungry IRA bands and garden-variety criminals, the fear of which prompted a solicitor in Roscommon to urge Mac Eoin, on behalf of the great and the good of society, “the priests, bankers and the townspeople of Elphin”, not to remove his soldiers as planned. The response – “he was told that…they would have to stand up with a good show of civic spirit against any robbers” – was unlikely to have been overly reassuring.[33]

So Mac Eoin relayed to Mulcahy. The Major-General was evidently sympathetic to their plight, much to Mulcahy’s frustration at what he saw as his subordinate’s foot-dragging:

I am sorry that you allowed yourself to give in in any way on the point of your removal, because it opens the way for further representation when you come to move them now in a few days.

Delays would do no good, Mulcahy warned, for his mind was made up:

You must set yourself absolutely to have everything prepared for the systematic putting into operation of the scheme on and from 22^nd [August]. I give into you as far as that date, in view of the fact that you probably have committed yourself to it, but we must go straight ahead with our own work immediately and there should be no further postponement.[34]

The pair would never enjoy a harmonious working relationship, but worked together they did all the same, enough, by early September, for Mac Eoin to have the manpower available for a renewed push in Sligo, which had remained contested despite his previous win at Collooney. This second wind came not a moment too soon, for the Anti-Treatyites were undertaking a surge of their own. Several Free State posts had been attacked, and though most held out, Ballina did not.

Military post during the Civil War

Mac Eoin dispatched Lawlor to retake the town, which the latter accomplished with minimal effort as the IRA occupiers had already abandoned their prize, in keeping with the hit-and-run tactics they favoured. Lawlor was presumably expecting a similarly easy time on his journey through the Ox Mountains to Tobercurry, where Mac Eoin was waiting with the rest of their army. If so, then it was a bad miscalculation.

The Ox Mountains, Co. Sligo

“The road made a series of s-bends round low, bumpy hills. We had a number of vehicles and we couldn’t see more than one car’s length in front of us,” Lawlor recalled to Younger. “They ambushed us, got us badly. Colonel Joe Ring was with us, a great old fighter, and I said for him to take one side of the road and I’d take the other.”[35]

Taking Sligo

TROOPS AMBUSHED –

COMMANDER AND DRIVER KILLED

Joe Ring

News reached Boyle on Thursday evening [14^th September] that Commandant Ring and the driver of an armoured car have been killed in an ambush at Bonniconlon, on their way to Tobercurry, on Thursday morning by a big party of Irregulars. It is also reported (but not confirmed) that General Lawlor, commanding the troops in that area, is wounded…The death of Commandant Ring…is greatly regretted all over the country.

It was learned from official quarters last night that Major-General McKeon was not with the party of troops which was ambushed.[36]

 (Irish Times, 16^th September 1922)

Mac Eoin was present, however, to pass judgement on the ten Anti-Treatyites taken prisoner in the effort to fend off the ambush. After Lawlor and his surviving party made it to Tobercurry, they brought their catches to Mac Eoin, who “ordered a court-martial and they were sentenced to death, the whole lot,” according to Mac Eoin in Younger’s book.

Tobercurry, Co. Sligo (old photo)

That did not sit right with some in the town, either out of the personal connections with the condemned or general humanity. An appeal for clemency was made to Mac Eoin, much to his annoyance: “I told them they’d had none for Joe Ring and those fellows on the road, so it was hard for one to expect me to have it. Then I say, ‘Very well. Here they are for you. Take them yourselves and be accountable for them.’”

Mac Eoin may have been misremembering things somewhat, for the Military Courts had not yet been formed and, without them, he had no authority to sentence anyone to death. Not that he would have carried out the penalty anyway, for, as he assured Younger: “I had no intention of shooting them.”[37]

Either way, there was still a war to fight and the West to pacify:

CAPTURES IN SLIGO –

BIG ENCIRCLING MOVEMENT

Troops under the command of Major-General McKeon and Brigadier-General Lawlor are carrying out a successful series of operations on a large scale, with Sligo as a base.

On Monday morning [18^th September] national troops advanced on the irregular headquarters at Rahelly…The irregulars hurriedly vacated Rahelly House, leaving behind them beds, bedding, and cars and bicycles. They retreated to a wood, which was later shelled by an 18-pounder gun. Sniping continued until night set in, and all the time the encircling movement was being carried out, and the area in which the irregulars and their armoured car now are appears to be completely cut.[38]

(Irish Times, 20^th September 1922)

The armoured car in question was the Ballinalee, named after Mac Eoin’s hometown in Longford in an affectionate gesture that became ruefully ironic when the vehicle fell into IRA hands and turned against its former users. And a formidable weapon it could be: Mac Eoin’s strategy to divide his forces into columns and sweep them through the north of Sligo and Leitrim, buttressed by motorcars and field guns, was halted in its tracks when the soldiers under Mac Eoin’s direct command reached Drumcliffe Bridge, a day after they set forth from Sligo town to the sound of a whistle blown by Mac Eoin.

The other side of the bridge had been demolished, with the metal bulk of the Ballinalee waiting menacingly by. Against this, Mac Eoin had an armoured car of his own and an 18-pounder, though the original nine shells of the latter had been reduced to three by that time. Whether the trio would be enough remained an open question when the Ballinalee withdrew, giving Mac Eoin the pleasant surprise of an uncontested crossing.[39]

Breaking the Resistance

That more or less set the tone for the rest of the fortnight: the Anti-Treatyites would appear to block the way and exchange shots before backing away, allowing the National Army a gradual, but nonetheless steady, advance, enough for it to be reported as such:

RESISTANCE BROKEN –

SEARCHING FOR BODIES IN SLIGO

The operations of the troops in the Sligo-Leitrim area, which had begun a week ago under the direction of Major-General McKeon and Commandant-General Lawlor, continue. The back of the irregulars’ resistance in that sector is now completely broken, and the troops are mainly occupied in searching for dead and wounded in the mountains, and endeavouring to round up isolated parties of irregulars.[40]

(Irish Times, 25^th September 1922)

One of those picked up was a lad who, Mac Eoin guessed from the way he was out of breath, had been running dispatches. After three or four rounds of ammunition was found on him, the youth confessed his belonging to the other side. All he asked was to see his mother and sister before being taken away; his sibling, he explained, being due to leave the next day for Australia. Mac Eoin agreed to this and escorted his charge to a nearby thatched cottage, where the mother and sister begged the Major-General to let their kinsman go. She would see that her son stayed at home and out of trouble from now on, the mother promised.

Deciding to take a chance, and perhaps moved by the plight of a woman who would otherwise be left on her own, Mac Eoin acceded. “When you got that kind of assurance it was usually honoured,” he explained to Younger. “Anyway, I found that this was much better than taking prisoners.”[41]

There were, of course, other ways of avoiding the burden of captives:

FIGHT IN THE MOUNTAINS

PROMINENT LEADERS DEAD

Heavy fighting developed during the push of the national troops in the mountains near Sligo on Wednesday [20^th September], and many casualties were caused among the irregulars, some of the most prominent leaders being among the dead.

A fierce engagement took place on Wednesday afternoon near Ballintrillick.

It is stated that troops came upon a large party of men, who were engaged in the preparation of an ambush. Both parties were armed with rifles and machine guns, and an engagement immediately developed. The irregulars endeavoured to fight their way back to the hills, when they came in contact with another body of troops. It was here that most of the casualties occurred, and that some prisoners were taken.[42]

(Irish Times, 22^nd September 1922)

“That was the end of the war in Sligo,” a phlegmatic Mac Eoin said at the conclusion of Younger’s chapter on this episode. “They had their funerals three days later and after that we had none and neither did they.”

The way he told it, the dead men were the crew of the Ballinalee, which had been sighted on a road by Benbulbin Mountain. Finding the path blocked on both ends, the Anti-Treatyites abandoned their transport and headed uphill, the only escape route left to them – or so they thought, for another group of Pro-Treatyites had been sent from the other side of Benbulbin to cut off such an attempt. Though Mac Eoin was not present, he believed that “when the crew of the armoured car appeared over the crest, my men opened fire and killed them all…which was in accordance with my orders.”

Benbulbin Mountain, Co. Sligo

While this falls short of the contemporary reportage of the deaths as part of a ‘fierce engagement’, Mac Eoin was untroubled and unfazed about what he depicted as just another act of war, no less legitimate than the countless others conducted: “We had had most of the funerals up till then and I felt that when they were under arms and on the alert they couldn’t complain if they were shot at.”

Lawlor, who had been coordinating ground manoeuvres in the area, was less judgemental but also vague – evasive, a cynic might think – in his own version of events to Younger: “I sent my men up the mountain and what happened then no one knows.” Except, presumably, the soldiers involved, but Lawlor did not seem in any great hurry to ask them.[43]

On Trial

That Mac Eoin felt the need to justify the deaths alone might raise the brows of his readers, if only by the merest fraction. Other accounts would emerge to portray Benbulbin as not quite the open-and-shut case of Mac Eoin’s narrative. If the pro-Treaty general had a sympathetic ear in Younger, then his enemies could find a like-minded historian of their own.

“There was a Free State round-up, personally conducted by MacEoin. All the back of [Brian] MacNeill’s head was blown away which would show that he ran for it,” Tom Carney told Ernie O’Malley during an interview in 1950, twenty-eight years later. “[Harry] Benson was found at the bottom of a ravine after a few days had passed by, and he had several bayonet wounds in him.”[44]

The six dead men found on Benbulbin

Carney was not a witness – otherwise he probably would have not lived to tell the tale – and he had his own reason for disliking Mac Eoin (as described further), but other accounts would flesh out this alternative take on the one initially reported. One document, now in the Bureau of Military History Contemporary Documents, outlined how four of the IRA ‘prominent leaders’ – Brigadier Seamus Devins, Adjutant Brian MacNeill, Lieutenant Patrick Carroll and Joseph Banks – were caught off-guard by Free State soldiers in the guise of allies. After being disarmed and identified, the four were shot dead, despite the reservations of some of their captors. Two more Anti-Treatyites, Harry Benson and Thomas Langan, were entrapped by the same ploy elsewhere and likewise killed, a bayonet being used for posthumous mutilation.

Of the six victims, Brian MacNeill is particularly notable in that his father, Eoin, was not just on the other side of the Treaty divide but a Cabinet Minister in the Provisional Government, no less. More than ninety years later, in 2013, Brian’s nephew, Michael McDowell – who had had a high-profile political career of his own – presented a documentary on the deed, A Lost Son.

Michael McDowell presenting ‘A Lost Son’, 2013

“Sifting through the military reports, McDowell unravels a web of duplicity. He persuasively argues that there was a cover-up by senior officers, who lied and fabricated evidence to conceal a premediated atrocity,” according to one reviewer. “McDowell concludes that the killers were acting on the orders of Seán MacEoin…In a humiliating blow to MacEoin’s prestige, Brian MacNeill’s IRA unit had previously captured an armoured car [the Ballinalee] in what was the likely motive for the atrocity.”[45]

Even Younger seemed to sense something was amiss and perhaps sought to mollify any unease on the part of his readers with an anecdote about Mac Eoin tracking down a watch that had been robbed from one of the bodies on Benbulbin and delivering it to the deceased’s widow. Whether the Major-General actually ordered the massacre is another matter, with speculation about wounded pride as a motive being just that – speculation. It is not as if other prisoners had not been taken alive during the Sligo campaign, and even his antagonists described Mac Eoin on other occasions as displaying the same mercy, or at least sense of fairness, that had prompted him to famously spare the helpless Auxiliaries after the Clonfin Ambush in February 1921.[46]

Tony Lawlor (from An t-Óglách, 21st April 1923 (Vol. 1, No. 5)

One IRA combatant at Collooney, Broddie Malone – the same who had earlier tried to assassinate Mac Eoin – believed that Lawlor had wanted to use artillery to blast the cottage Malone and his comrades were sheltering in, only for Mac Eoin, who knew them from before, to countermand him and spare their lives. Captured instead, Malone and some other Anti-Treatyites were put to a roadside trial. A National Army sergeant accused the ‘defendants’ of gunning down the late Lieutenant Callaghan while he had had his hands up in surrender, but another Free State soldier testified that Callaghan had died fighting behind a machine-gun. Overseeing the proceedings as an impromptu judge, Mac Eoin allowed the charges to be dropped.[47]

And then there was Robert Briscoe when Mac Eoin chanced upon him stepping out onto a Dublin street. To Briscoe, his foe presented:

A grand burly figure of a man he was, magnificently attired in a new green uniform with red and white service stripes, gold stars on his shoulders, and a shiny Sam Browne belt in the holster of which was a great, ugly .45 revolver with a bright green lanyard.

As Mac Eoin reached for this weapon, Briscoe make a calculation, turned and walked the other way, trusting in his adversary’s well-known code of honour. The gamble paid off. “Briscoe, you bastard,” he heard Mac Eoin roar after him. “You know I wouldn’t shoot a man in the back!”

Robert Briscoe

Years later, Briscoe would make a point of thanking Mac Eoin whenever they met. “The greatest mistake I ever made,” was Mac Eoin’s response, with a shake of his head.[48]

The Man in Charge

Ernie O’Malley

Not every portrayal is quite so benign, however, and stories of Good Mac Eoin sit uneasily next to those of Bad Mac Eoin. When Ernie O’Malley, as Acting Assistant Chief of Staff to the IRA, asked, on the 30^th October 1922, for names of pro-Treaty officers “who have ill-treated prisoners, or who have acted on the murder gangs” in order to know who was to be “shot at sight”, he added in his dispatch that Mac Eoin and Lawlor were to be included to the list.[49]

Tom Carney had a personal encounter with this dark side of Mac Eoin’s while held inside the old British barracks in Longford. He was retiring to bed when three uniformed men, each in a state of inebriation, entered the storage-room being used for detainment. Mac Eoin was one of them:

They walked down. MacEoin was threatening the prisoners with revolvers in their backs and bombs and they said what they wouldn’t do to the prisoners if they tried to escape. Mac[Eoin] was very drunk and he said, ‘Hello, you don’t know me now. Do you remember the man in charge?’ But it passed off for he didn’t do anything.[50]

Noel Browne

Other guests of the government were not so lucky. Noel Browne would recall from his childhood in Athlone “seeing row after row of tricoloured-covered coffins, side by side. To me they were just so many colourful outsize parcels, in a great room in some building.” The sight made so little impression on young Browne that his older self would think it a missed opportunity to not display the bodies, in all their grisly horror, to better deter impressionable minds from repeating the mistakes of the previous generation.

By the time Browne met Mac Eoin, both were Ministers in the Inter-Party Government of 1948-51, with the former general, then in his 50s, appearing to Browne as “a gentle, peaceful man.” When their Taoiseach was going through a particularly difficult time, Mac Eoin “was his usual pleasant reassuring self in his attempt to comfort [John A.] Costello.” His wartime exploits in two conflicts were no secret but, according to Browne:

It was generally believed by the public that in spite of being a soldier, with the soldier’s awful job of daily learning how to kill other men more cleverly, MacEoin…neither wanted to kill, nor be killed.

When discussing his painful memories of that turbulent period, Mac Eoin told Browne, with whom he had struck up a rapport, that he would have preferred to turn his efforts to stopping the Civil War, not fighting it.[51]

Seán Mac Eoin in later years

Which, of course, was not quite how it played out. Browne was perhaps taking his fellow Minister’s genial demeanour and worthy words a little too much at face value: as GOC Western Division, Mac Eoin was in charge of the five executions at 8 am, on the 20^th January 1923, that filled the coffins young Browne beheld. One of the deceased was a local man, the other four from Galway, and the charges against them were unauthorised possession of arms and ammunitions.

In this, Mac Eoin could claim to be only following procedure. Six other death sentences were carried out elsewhere in the country that morning: four in Tralee and two in Limerick, all for the same offences. His thoughts on this matter are unrecorded but, then, the court-martials and their resultant executions were policies Mac Eoin had pushed for in the Dáil. His argument then had been for legally sanctioned killings as an outlet for feelings otherwise to be satisfied by extrajudicial murders.[52]

Civil War execution by firing-squad (staged)

Mac Eoin’s own behaviour, however, would indicate that one did not necessarily preclude the other.

A Bad Shot

Tom Maguire

Among the detainees held in the Custume Barracks of Athlone were two senior IRA officers, Michael Kilroy and Tom Maguire, as noted by O’Malley on the 14^th January 1923. Though O’Malley was by then himself a captive, he was able to smuggle a letter out of Mountjoy Prison to his Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch. Both Kilroy and Maguire were in danger of being put before a firing-squad, but there was apparently resistance within the Free State authorities to do so, or so O’Malley heard: “I think the enemy are pressing [Seán] McKeown to try them, but I could not vouch for this.”[53]

Kilroy would confirm Mac Eoin’s efforts on his behalf. The fortunes of war had turned drastically since the time Kilroy anticipated the burning of Custume Barracks down around Mac Eoin. After he was brought to that same building, badly wounded from a bullet to the back and under threat of more to his front:

We were to be executed at the time of the Bagenal arrests, and MacEoin made a special journey to Dublin to save me and he said to me, ‘I don’t know the result but I did my best.’

As Kilroy lived to tell his tale, it can be surmised that Mac Eoin’s best was good enough. Kilroy was recounting this to O’Malley in the 1950s, in one of the interviews the latter conducted with former IRA combatants. Right after Kilroy said this, he revealed a very different aspect of his saviour, involving the misfortune of a fellow inmate, Patrick ‘Patch’ Mulrennan, in October 1922:

Mulrennan was shot sitting beside Paddy Hegarty in Athlone. Lawlor fired a few shots at him, then Lawlor and MacEoin were going around making a sport of the prisoners, hitting them with sticks. MacEoin would say when Lawlor fired, ‘You missed him.’[54]

Casually inflicted misery seems to have been a feature of Custume Barracks, enough for another of its unwilling residents, Johnny Grealy, to consider Mountjoy a palace in comparison. Along with the limited food, if it could be called as such, “MacEoin wouldn’t allow the fellows back into the huts once they got out for exercise so they had to walk the compound even in the rain from 10 or 11 until the evening and then we were closed into the huts again,” Grealy said in his own interview.

As for the case of Mulrennan, while Kilroy did not include the results of his shooting, Grealy was able to provide a fuller picture:

Patch Mulrennan raised a window and went in to boil water one day. Someone shouted at him that MacEoin and Tony Lawlor had come in. Lawlor fired as Patch was coming out the window. ‘You missed,’ said MacEoin.

‘Well, I won’t miss this time,’ said Tony Lawlor, and he fired again and Patch died there and then. [55]

Here, Mulrennan’s death is instantaneous. In Tony Heavey’s version, Mulrennan survived long enough for his wound to become infected, fatally so. The details provided by Heavey differ to Grealy’s, but the main point is the same:

Tony Lawlor and MacEoin arrived in the compound. Mulrennan…was sitting down hammering a ring on the floor outside the door…Some fellows, who were in the room, cleared out when they saw MacEoin and Tony Lawlor. MacEoin said something to Tony Lawlor, and Lawlor fired at Mulrennan. MacEoin is alleged to have said, ‘That was a bad shot,’ and Lawlor said, ‘I won’t miss this time,’ and he hit Mulrennan in the thigh. It was neglected, the wound, and he died.[56]

“You’re a bad shot, Tony” – that line, or its latest variant, would be repeated in the Dáil in February 1928, almost six years later, by Dr P.J. O’Dowd, the Roscommon TD for the Anti-Treatyites in their current political guise of Fianna Fáil. O’Dowd was raising the subject as part of his financial appeal for Mary Mulrennan, the deceased’s mother, though the chance to rake the government over the Civil War coals as well was probably too tempting to pass up.

Desmond Fitzgerald

While O’Dowd named Lawlor as the shooter, he refrained from doing so to Mac Eoin, referring to him only as “Colonel Lawlor’s senior officer.” Mac Eoin – by then Quartermaster-General of the National Army – was not present to defend himself or his subordinate, leaving representatives from his party to receive the charge. Due to an escape attempt earlier that day, argued the Minister of Defence, Desmond Fitzgerald, prisoners had been ordered to stay out of certain buildings. The shots fired had been at those who were where they should not have been.

Besides, added Fitzgerald, there was a certain matter of a war being on at the time. Whether these are reasons enough is a question left to the reader.[57]

References

[1] Sligo Independent, 08/07/1922

[2] Ibid

[3] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp. 10, 357

[4] Ibid, pp. 357-9

[5] Westmeath Independent, 08/07/1922

[6] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014), p. 66

[7] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), pp. 43-4

[8] Ibid, p. 43

[9] O’Malley, The Men Will Talk to Me, p. 197

[10] Ibid, p. 225

[11] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 52

[12] Irish Times, 13/07/1922

[13] Younger, p. 363

[14] Ibid, pp. 363-3

[15] Irish Times, 17/07/1922

[16] Younger, pp. 364-6

[17] Irish Times, 17/07/1922

[18] Longford Leader, 22/07/1922

[19] Richard Mulcahy Papers, University College Dublin Archives, P7/B/75, p. 10

[20] O’Donoghue, Michael V. (BMH / WS 1741, Part II), p. 189

[21] Longford Leader, 18/07/1922

[22] Ibid, 22/07/1922

[23] Sligo Independent, 15/07/1922

[24] Mulcahy Papers, P7/B/73, p. 162

[25] Ibid, P7/B/22, p. 11

[26] Irish Times, 29/08/1922

[27] Ibid, 11/09/1922

[28] Ginnell, Alice (BMH / WS 982), p. 65

[29] Irish Times, 29/09/1922

[30] Mulcahy Papers, P7/B/73, p. 55

[31] Ibid, P7/B/74, pp. 102-3

[32] Ibid, P7/B/73, pp. 80-1

[33] Ibid, p. 58

[34] Ibid, pp. 80-1

[35] Younger, pp. 463-4

[36] Irish Times, 16/09/1922

[37] Younger, pp. 464-5

[38] Irish Times, 20/09/1922

[39] Younger, pp. 466-7

[40] Irish Times, 25/09/1922

[41] Younger, p. 469

[42] Irish Times, 22/09/1922

[43] Younger, pp. 469-71

[44] O’Malley, The Men Will Talk to Me, p. 328

[45] McConway, Philip. ‘TV Eye: A Lost Son’, History Ireland (Volume 21, Issue 2 [March/April 2013)

[46] Younger, pp. 470-1

[47] O’Malley, The Men Will Talk to Me, p. 200

[48] Briscoe, Robert and Hatch, Alden. For the Life of Me (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959), pp. 172-3

[49] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 309

[50] O’Malley, The Men Will Talk to Me, p. 325

[51] Browne, Noel. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2007), pp. 6, 130

[52] Westmeath Examiner, 27/01/1923

[53] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 356

[54] O’Malley, The Men Will Talk to Me, p. 69

[55] Ibid, pp. 296-7

[56] Ibid, pp. 147-8

[57] Irish Times, 01/03/1928

Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Times

Longford Leader

Sligo Independent

Westmeath Examiner

Westmeath Independent

Books

Briscoe, Robert and Hatch, Alden. For the Life of Me (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959)

Browne, Noel. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2007)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1982)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Ginnell, Alice, WS 982

O’Donoghue, Michael V., WS 1741

University College Dublin Archives

Richard Mulcahy Papers

Online Source

McConway, Philip. ‘TV Eye: A Lost Son’, History Ireland (Volume 21, Issue 2 [March/April 2013)

Hanging by a Thread: Seán Mac Eoin and the Trial of his Life, 1921 (Part II)

A continuation of: Caught by a Whisker: Seán Mac Eoin and the Fight for his Life, 1921 (Part I)

The full details about what happened at Mountjoy Prison are very difficult to get. However, piecing together the scraps of information which people in the neighbourhood and people in touch with the prison staff are able to provide, it is possible to reconstruct a story of the sensational occurrence.

(Sunday Independent, 15^th May 1921)

A Rescue Launched

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) now had possession of the coveted transport. John McCaffrey and four other Volunteers climbed on board the armoured car and drove down the North Circular Road to pick up Joe Leonard and Emmet Dalton. As seasoned combatants, the pair would be spearheading the rescue of Seán Mac Eoin under the guise of British officers who had come to Mountjoy to transfer the prisoner. It was a daring performance, one which both men were suited for in their own separate ways, as Leonard described.

British Army armoured car in Dublin

Other than the khaki uniforms they wore and the military vehicle bringing them:

Emmet, having served as an officer in the British Army knew how to serve a prisoner removal order to the authorities, and I had served six months in Mountjoy Prison and had stood-to for the escape of twenty prisoners over the wall [in March 1919], and so knew the prison fairly well, and besides Emmet’s second uniform fitted me to perfection.

If Mac Eoin was in the Governor’s office as intended, then his liberators would be spared having to search for him. The final touch to the script was the IRA party who would present themselves at the prison entrance as soon as the metal-plated motor was inside with the intent of bamboozling the sentries into reopening.

Emmet Dalton

Dalton waved some official-looking papers at the iron gates, which yawned opened to receive them, closing behind with a clang. Two more gates parted in succession before the car, whose driver manoeuvred in a wide turn once across the inside yard until it was facing back to where it came. With a small advance, the car was ‘carelessly’ blocking the inner two gates from closing, leaving only the front one shut.

If onlookers thought this unusual or suspicious, they made no protest as two men in British uniforms strode over to the Governor’s office in a perfect imitation of Important People With Important Things To Do. All was proceeding like clockwork…until, instead of Governor Charles Munro alone at his desk, Leonard and Dalton found him with seven of his aides and the door closing behind them. Was this a trap? Had they been rumbled?

Except Munro was polite enough:

…receiving us very nicely until he mentioned that he must ring up the Castle for confirmation of the order to remove McKeon [alternative spelling]. I sprang up for the telephone and smashed it while Dalton held the staff at bay and then began tying the staff up with the hope of securing the master keys, when a cannonade of shots met our ears.

Something had definitely gone wrong. With nothing left to be done, Leonard and Dalton beat a hasty retreat from the office to the outside steps of the jail…and into bedlam.[1]

Mountjoy Prison

A Rescue Aborted

The other five men had been waiting with the car, expecting Leonard and Dalton to return with Mac Eoin between them, and for the second team outside to help distract the sentries on the wicket gate next to the main one.

“However, things did not work out according to plan,” recalled John McCaffrey:

…because the next thing I observed (having at this stage put my head outside the turret) was one of our two men producing revolvers and holding up the warders at the main gate.

Tom Kehoe

Seeing this commotion, a British soldier called on the visitors to halt. At the same time, he raised his rifle and fired, narrowly missing Tom Keogh, one of the other IRA men who had been standing beside the vehicle:

As he was getting ready to fire again Tom Keogh very slowly and deliberately pulled out his revolver and shot the sentry. He immediately stepped over, picked up the sentry’s rifle which had fallen to the ground and threw it on to the back of the car. He then climbed into the car.

More gunshots were coming down from a prison lookout post. Caffrey struggled to return fire with the machine-gun mounted on the top of the armoured car but could not raise it sufficiently high. It was then that Leonard and Dalton reappeared and not a moment too soon; even without Mac Eoin, it was time to go – that is, if they could manage even that.[2]

With more Tommies bearing on them, Leonard picked up the rifle from the downed soldier and:

…ordered the British military back, and on their refusal to obey, knelt down and threatened to fire on them – they seeing an officer kneeling in the firing position, broke and retired to their quarters, but the Police advanced from another position.

Joe Leonard

Leonard and Dalton leapt on board their ride and roared at the driver to step on it. The car drove through the front entrance, now ajar thanks to the team outside who were supposed to rush the gates as a diversion – and had done so perhaps a little too well, for the guards had drawn their guns and opened fire, wounding one assailant, attracting the attention of the rest of the prison, and forcing Leonard and Dalton to withdraw from the Governor’s office.[3]

Leaving No Stone Unturned

All things considered, it was miraculous that the IRA team escaped at all – but Mac Eoin remained under lock and key. He had arranged for an interview in the Governor’s chamber, where his rescuers were to find him, but a relief force of Auxiliaries had come earlier that morning. Procedure dictated that the inmates be confined to their cells for the newcomers to inspect for identification purposes. Mac Eoin’s protests about his impending interview were to no avail, and it was left for him to ruminate on another missed chance and for others to ask what that had been all about.[4]

“The object of this exploit, it is believed,” read the Irish Times, “was to release an important political prisoner.”[5]

Michael Noyk

Even after that failure, with the trial date drawing near, Michael Collins did not lose hope of an armed intervention, all the while preparing the legal defence – which, under the circumstances, would be very much a last-ditch effort. In this, he was assisted by Michael Noyk, a long-time legal advisor for the revolutionary movement. Charles Wyse-Powers would defend Mac Eoin in court, as per Noyk’s recommendation, but, when he took ill, Noyk arranged for Charles Bewley to take up the duty instead.[6]

The Mullingar IRA Brigade, meanwhile, was granted a chance to redeem itself. Mac Eoin’s arrest at Mullingar Railway Station could have been avoided if the local Volunteers had intervened as ordered – but there was no point crying over a lost opportunity when another presented itself. Since Mac Eoin’s prosecution hinged on witnesses, the simple solution was to kill them before they could step foot inside the courtroom.

The various Auxiliaries, Black-and-Tan and other policemen from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who had seen Mac Eoin in action, and earmarked to testify to that effect, were to pass through the Mullingar area to Dublin, so the tip-off went. Armed with an assortment of rifles, shotguns and revolvers, around fifty or sixty men from the Brigade mustered at Griffinstown, near Kinnegad, hiding behind the roadside fence or in some nearby ruins.

IRA Flying Column

That the turnout was as large as it was by Westmeath standards, and overseen by their Brigade O/C, showed that the Mullingar IRA was at last taking things seriously – until undone by their habitual incompetence when the mine laid on the route detonated prematurely, blowing a massive hole in the road as well as their chances, for surely the incoming convoy had heard. The would-be ambushers hastily withdrew, closing yet another window of opportunity for Mac Eoin – not that they need have bothered, for the information the Brigade had received was wrong, and the witnesses were coming by a different way, through Meath, by-passing Mullingar altogether.[7]

Insurgents elsewhere were feeling the strain. In Mac Eoin’s home county of Longford, “from the time Seán was arrested we did not seem to have the same ‘luck’ in our operations and the enemies [sic] morale had gone up,” recalled his brother, James. “They had become increasingly bold now, and were putting the pressure on very severely since they had got Seán behind the ‘bars’.” The loss of its commander had left the Longford Flying Column floundering, with no one able or willing to fill his shoes.[8]

Michael Collins

With a few weeks left to go, and options rapidly running out, Collins showed Noyk a plan of Dublin City Hall, where the court-martial was to take place, and asked if he could use his access to Mac Eoin, as part of his legal counsel, to smuggle in guns for him. When the time came, an armed Mac Eoin would be assisted in breaking out by Dublin IRA men posted at hand.

While he understood how important rescuing his friend was to Collins, Noyk had to point out that the likely security on the day – from armed guards in the court to machine-gun posts on the roofs outside – made escape a slim possibility. Always willing to temper emotion with logic, Collins conceded on that and dropped the idea. When Noyk saw Mac Eoin brought to the dock on the 14^th June 1921, cuffed and flanked by burly policemen who stayed by his side throughout the proceedings, he knew he had made the right call in dissuading any further breakout efforts.[9]

The view from the front steps of Dublin City Hall, where Mac Eoin’s trial was held, looking down Parliament Street

‘Feloniously, Wilfully and of Malice Aforethought’

The charge sheet was duly read out to the assembled court:

The Accused, John Joseph McKeon…a civilian, is charged with committing a crime within the meaning of Regulation 67 of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Regulations, that is to say, murder, in that he…on 7^th January 1921, feloniously, wilfully and of malice aforethought did kill and murder District Inspector [DI] Thomas McGrath.

When asked how he pleaded, Mac Eoin’s response went beyond a simple ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, as he made clear to refute the claim that he was a mere civilian:

As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army, I have committed no break either of national law or international law. I admit no offence and I plead not guilty.[10]

The case for the prosecution relied on two points of evidence: RIC witnesses who placed Mac Eoin at the scene of the crime and as its perpetrator, and his alleged confession when arrested in Mullingar. The first of the former, Sergeant Ryan, had been stationed in Ballinalee, Co Longford, at the time, and whose duties included accompanying DI McGrath and four other uniformed colleagues as they approached a lone house in the countryside on the 7^th January 1921.

Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary

As guided by the Counsel for the Prosecution, Ryan described how he was walking directly behind McGrath as the DI led the way:

Q: What happened?

A: When the Officer [McGrath] turned to step into the doorway, this man, John McKeon, flashed and shot him down in the gutter. He put out his hand like that [witness gestures] and shot him down. I had a full view of him.

Q: You saw the accused come to the doorway and present his revolver or automatic pistol and fire a shot?

A: Yes.

Q: About how far away would you be from the accused when he fired?

A: I would be about three feet from him,

Q: With the District Inspector between you and this man?

A: Yes.

Q: Have you ever seen this man before? I do not want you to tell us anything about where you saw him.

A: Yes, I had.

Q: Did you know this man by sight?

A: Yes, I knew the man well by sight.

Q: Is that the man, the accused there, who fired the shot?

A: Yes, that is the man.

Q: Have you any doubt about it?

A: No, no doubt at all.

Q: He fired one shot, you say, at the Inspector?

A: Yes.

Q: Was that all?

A: Yes.

Q: What happened to the Inspector?

A: He fell down dead in the gutter in my opinion; he never moved. He fell down on his face.[11]

A Dying Confession?

The second buttress in the prosecution’s case was the confession, as related by another police witness who had been present in Mullingar on the 2^nd March:

Mullingar Garda Station, formerly the RIC barracks where Seán Mac Eoin was taken after capture

Q: Tell us what happened after he was recaptured?

A: He was then taken into the Police Station and he asked for a priest and a doctor.

Q: Where was he wounded?

A: He was wounded in the breast.

Q: By a rifle shot?

A: By a rifle shot. He was taken in to the Police Station and he asked for a priest and a doctor, and they were brought and attended to him immediately.

Q: Did the doctor attend to him?

A: Yes, the doctor attended to him.

Q:  Did he dress the wounds?

A: Yes, he dressed the wounds.

Q: Did the priest see him?

A: He did. He then made the following statement to me and to all the other police who were present, but I took it down as I was the sergeant.

Q: He made a voluntary statement to you, then?

A: Yes, after the priest and the doctor had gone. Of course, he was apparently in a dying condition at the time.

Q: While the priest and the doctor were there, nothing happened?

A: No.

Q: It was not until after they had left that he made a statement?

A: That is so.

Q: Was he in bed?

A: No, he was sitting on a form near the window. He was then apparently in a dying condition.

Q: Tell us a little more about that.

A: He was very pale.

Q: Did he speak distinctly?

A: He spoke distinctly but in a weak voice.

Q: When the priest and the doctor had gone, did he say anything to you or to anybody who was there?

A: He said: “I shot DI McGrath.”[12]

‘Trust in God…’

A cynic might wonder why a man, dying or otherwise, would admit to a hanging offence in earshot of his mortal enemies and only after other witnesses had left. In any case, Mac Eoin and his legal allies had no delusions as to the odds of acquittal. While a capable lawyer, Bewley was hamstrung by how, as Noyk observed:

There was very little to defend in one sense. The only possible defence was that the night was dark and as there was a lot of indiscriminate shooting by the RIC themselves, one of their bullets might have hit Inspector McGrath who was in charge of the party.

However, when a prejudiced courtmartial, as in all the other cases, was functioning there was no possibility of that defence being successful though Mr Bewley made the most of what he could in that direction.[13]

Charles Bewley

Mac Eoin likewise acknowledged that Bewley did his best, even in what the former called a “queer, one-sided trial.” After all, the only witnesses Bewley could call to counteract the official version of McGrath’s death were Mac Eoin’s IRA comrades, who were hardly likely to enter a British court of law unless in chains. Though Bewley succeeded in pointing out discrepancies in the witness testimonies, “it was all talk, talk, talk, talk, and with one obvious result,” that being the inevitable pronouncement of death.

All that was left for Mac Eoin to do was go down fighting – one way or another.

The prosecution rested its case. Papers were shuffled and a few whispered words exchanged about the chamber. Bewley asked permission for his client to address the court, as well as the courtesy of his handcuffs being removed. Both requests were granted and Mac Eoin, after rubbing the stiffness out of his wrists as best he could, discreetly took out of his pocket one of the two slips of card, torn from a cigarette packet.

On each was written a different phrase. If Mac Eoin had been fatalistic upon his arrest – “I know I am for a firing-squad, anyway,” he was reported to have said – now he resorted to a gambler’s toss of the coin. Should the card he drew be the one that read ‘Trust in God, go ahead and do your best!’, then he would seize the revolver off the policeman beside him, firing in one hand while using the other arm to hold his captive as a human-shield.

All the while, Mac Eoin would somehow endeavour to reach the window, through which he would leap to freedom…that is, if he could avoid a broken leg from the thirty feet drop. And make it past the loops of barbed-wire across the outside steps. And not get cut down by a bullet at any point in the process. He would at least have the assistance of Collins’ rescue team, armed and ready in the Royal Exchange Hotel on Parliament Street, opposite Dublin City Hall – contrary to what Noyk believed, Collins was keeping that option open – but Mac Eoin did not rate his odds of success very highly at all.[14]

He might have had a better chance than he thought. Almost three decades later, Mac Eoin made the acquaintance of Noël Browne as part of the Inter-Party Government of 1948-1951. To Browne, his fellow Cabinet Minister was a “gentle peaceful man”, his warrior days long behind him – until Mac Eoin gave a practical demonstration on how to disarm someone by pinning Browne’s hand behind his back. Despite the twenty-two years’ difference between them, the younger Browne was helpless to break out.[15]

Seán Mac Eoin in later years

In any case, Mac Eoin drew the card with the words ‘Trust in God, have patience and wait!’ That was fate’s signal that he should accept things for the moment and stay put.[16]

‘…Have Patience and Wait’

Seán Mac Eoin

But, if he would have to endure proceedings stoically, then there was no reason to do so passively. “The closing stage of the trial before Court Martial in Dublin yesterday of John Joseph McKeon of Ballinalee,” reported the Evening Herald on the 15^th June 1921, “was marked by a remarkable speech by the accused from the dock.” The first draft had been smuggled out beforehand by Noyk and handed to Collins, who made some slight amendments before Noyk passed it back to his client on the morning of the trial. Otherwise, the words Mac Eoin delivered were his own.[17]

“Officers and gentlemen of the court-martial,” he began:

When you opened this court-martial this morning, I told you I was an officer of the Irish Republican Army and that, as such, claimed treatment as an officer. But, gentlemen, you are here to try me, not as an officer, but as a murderer. Why? Just because I took up arms in defence of my native land? The defence of one’s native land has ever been a privilege to the people of all nations.

As such, as a soldier, he had always abided by the rules of war, including fair treatment of all prisoners he had taken, some of whom would testify to the truth of that. In contrast had been the treatment meted out to him in Mullingar, when his captors had beaten him with rifle-butts.

I have no reason to disparage them in any way or to say anything that is not true, but they did that. I will not say that they did it according to their orders and I will not say that they did it without orders…I was called a murderer in the Day Room of the Barracks. Anyone can understand easily that when I went into the Day Room there was a hubbub – “McKeon the murderer is in.” Yes, but I say: “McKeon the man was in.”

When Mac Eoin had found himself cornered by Crown forces in a cottage in Ballinalee on the 7^th January 1921, five months ago, his intent had not been to kill DI McGrath, at least not specifically. Since there were two elderly ladies with him inside, Mac Eoin had had no wish to stand his ground and bring the war to them; instead, he charged out to meet his foes head-on, regardless of the numbers arrayed against him:

Fire was opened by both sides simultaneously. After the first exchange, I noticed that the officer [McGrath] had fallen and that his men were running away down the road. But I wish to emphasis that I fired at enemy forces, not at any particular individual.

McGrath, he explained, “had simply fallen in the fight” as a casualty of combat. It was an explanation, not an excuse. He was no murderer, as the people of Longford and his comrades-in-arms well knew, and he praised both, the former group for their confidence in him, and the latter for gallantry and loyalty, even in the face of overwhelming odds. As for his audience:

From you, I crave no mercy and no favour. I am an officer of the Irish Army and I merely claim the same right at your hands as you would have receive at mine had the fortunes of war reversed the positions. If you do not give me that right, and if you execute me instead, then there is one request that I make. It is that you give my dead body to my relatives so that my remains may be laid to rest amongst my own people.

At this, the speech came to its end. Back went on the handcuffs, and it was left to Bewley to step back in for the rest of his dogged defence.[18]

Clonfin Recollections

Strictly speaking, what Bewley introduced next was not evidence of his client’s innocence; if anything, they confirmed his military activities against Crown rule in Ireland – not that Mac Eoin had denied them. Bewley admitted as such, explaining that the witnesses he now called were as character references for the accused. It was an unorthodox approach, and even more so because the witnesses in question had been on the receiving end of the Clonfin Ambush, which Mac Eoin had led as the IRA Longford Flying Column commander, on the 2^nd February 1921.[19]

IRA Flying Column

And yet, as men like Cadet Smith took the stand, it was apparent that there was some truth to Mac Eoin’s claim to have followed battlefield decorum:

Bewley: Were you in the first or second lorry at the time of this ambush?

Smith: In the second.

Bewley: You saw the first lorry blown up in front of you?

Smith: I saw the mine go up.

Bewley:  And then your lorry was stopped?

Smith: Yes.

Bewley: Was fire then opened upon you?

Smith: Yes.

Bewley: After putting up a fight for some considerable time, I understand you surrendered?

Smith: Yes.

RIC patrol on Crossley Tenders

Bewley: Before you surrendered, did you hear him call on you to surrender or anything of that sort?

Smith: Several people called on us to surrender.

Bewley: There was no ill-treatment of any of you after the surrender?

Smith: No.

Bewley: After the surrender and you had been disarmed, did you speak to McKeon?

Smith: I spoke to McKeon. First of all, he shook hands with me and told me we had put up a good fight. After that, he left me and I went up to him again after a time and asked if I could go and get some water for some of our men who were wounded. He gave me permission to go and said he would send one of his men with us and I went with another cadet and got the water.

Bewley: Did you see any attempts at violence at any of your party?

Smith: We saw one of the men on the other side of the road hit Cadet Maddock across the face and also make a statement that he wanted to shoot us but McKeon stopped him.

Bewley: After a while, did you see McKeon doing anything for any of your wounded?

Smith: He attempted to help DI Taylor to bandage his wounds but he did not have time because the police arrived.

Bewley: He left because your reinforcements were coming up?

Smith: That is correct.

Bewley: Do you know whether he made any arrangements about your taking one of your lorries to go away in?

Smith: Yes, he said that we could have one of our lorries to take the dead and wounded away in and also that he would send a doctor along to us.

Wreckage of a British military vehicle at Kilmichael, Co, Cork, November 1920

The next witness, Cadet T.J. Wilford, corroborated Smith’s testimony, as part of which he recounted an exchange between the defendant and another of the Auxiliaries at Clonfin that day, called Keeble:

I heard [Keeble] say “Now you have killed three or four of our fellows and wounded several of them, are you going to take our lives as well?”, and McKeon said “No, I am going to let you go, and get your wounded away as best you can.

Perhaps it was just as well that the Mullingar Volunteers had failed to kill the witnesses. All that was left was the summing up of the respective counsels, though there was a brief diversion into theology when the Judge Advocate brought up how Mac Eoin had supposedly uttered an act of contrition into the ear of the fallen McGrath:

Judge: You will probably think that [from] the evidence that the District Inspector was dead before he could have done that is true. However, it may be what is a little difficult to understand is why this whispered act of contrition was necessary if the accused was engaged in an act of legitimate warfare as is alleged in this case.

Bewley: The act of contrition has a rather different signification.

Judge: I may be wrong. I am not a member of the Roman Catholic Church and I entirely withdraw it.

Bewley: If I might state it to the Court very shortly, an act of contrition is a sentiment of contrition for all the sins of his past life which a dying man would naturally wish to express personally, and if the dying man appears to be so weak that he would not be able to express it, any Catholic would consider it his duty to repeat the act of contrition into his ear, and if the  District Inspector assented to it, it would be the same as if he himself had expressed it.

Judge: You mean the accused is in this case saying something to the District Inspector which he thinks the District Inspector would himself have liked to express?

Bewley: Yes.

Judge: I entirely withdraw what I said.[20]

‘The Big Four’

Eamonn Duggan

Not withdrawn was the inevitable penalty for murder, as DI McGrath’s death remained as per British law, and Mac Eoin was duly sentenced to death. The day after, he was transferred to the condemned row in Mountjoy. Seeing Arthur Griffith, Michael Staines and Eamonn Duggan in the exercise-grounds outside his window, he threw out to them the paper notification of his sentence, folded up in a match-box, for them to retrieve.[21]

With word getting around of his impending fate, Mac Eoin could enjoy at least a certain celebrity as a member of the ‘Big Four’, whose cells adjoined each other’s. One half of the quartet, Mac Eoin and John Donnelly, were under sentence of death, while the other pair, Frank Carty and Christie Carberry, had had the distinction of lengthy jail terms bestowed on them.

Frank Carty

Donnelly’s trial had been two days before Mac Eoin’s for his part in an ambush on Brunswick Street, Dublin, during which he received four bullets and required two operations to survive. While in the prison yard together, Mac Eoin confided in Donnelly the latest scheme to get them out; when one had failed, another was grown, like the heads of the legendary Hydra. This time it was by the IRA engineers, tasked by an unabating Collins with tunnelling along the canal side of Mountjoy and into the yard. Complications arose, however, thwarting escape yet again, and though Mac Eoin assured Donnelly that other plans were in the Collins pipeline, the sand in the hourglass for both of the condemned was fast running down.

With nothing else to do, Mac Eoin:

…told me on exercise that one of the Chief Wardens, Mr Breslin, had smuggled in two revolvers, one for Mac Eoin and one for me, and on the morning that we were to be executed, we were to die fighting sooner than be hanged. We were just getting transferred to the condemned cells when the Truce [of 11^th July 1921] came in.[22]

Even with hostilities at a halt, Mac Eoin was not out of the fire quite yet. As a prequel to the peace talks in London, it was decreed that all elected representatives of Dáil Éireann who were under lock and key – totalling thirty-five TDs, scattered about in institutions like Mountjoy, Dundalk, Shrewsbury and Dartmoor Prisons, Ballykinlar and Curragh Camps, and Spike Island – be released in time to attend a Dáil session on the 16^th August 1921.

The men behind the wire at Ballykinlar Internment Camp

Not that anything in Ireland was ever quite so simple, for, in a pronouncement from Dublin Castle on the 6^th August:

His Majesty’s Government have decided that one member, J.J. McKeon, who has been convicted of murder, cannot be released.

What with all the ambushes, assassinations and gunplay dominating the headlines and history books, it is easy to forget that the War of Independence was as much a political as military one. Mac Eoin was TD for the Longford-Westmeath seat, a standing he had probably not given much thought to – the 16^th August was to be the first opening of the Dáil in a long, long while – but which reared up as one of utmost importance now.

In response to the caveat:

It was officially stated last night [7^th August 1921] on behalf of Dáil Éireann that there can be no meeting of Dáil Éireann until Commandant J.J. McKeon is released. It was added that the refusal to release him appears to indicate a desire on the part of the English Government to terminate the truce.

Further pronounced was how, unless Mac Eoin was freed within the next forty-eight hours, the Truce would indeed be considered null and void. Just when Mac Eoin, and Ireland as a whole, had been granted a respite, circumstances were conspiring to steal even that. With no Truce, the war would be resumed, and Mac Eoin’s sentence carried out, barring one of Collins’ attempts at playing Scarlet Pimpernel finally succeeding in the eleventh hour.[23]

Wit and Wisdom

David Lloyd George

Mac Eoin’s fate had already been of intense interest to figures on both sides of the Anglo-Irish divide, such as Frank Heming, Assistant Secretary to the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s office. According to a conversation with Mac Eoin in the Irish Embassy in London, in the very different time of 1938, Heming had already saved Mac Eoin’s before, in June 1921, when he was first scheduled to be hanged.

Recognising the spanner that Mac Eoin’s death would throw in the burgeoning peace talks, Heming went so far as to enter 10 Downing Street unannounced, to the back-garden, where David Lloyd George was trying to relax with his grandchild. More politics was the last thing a peevish Prime Minister wanted to spend his rare break discussing, but Heming persisted, so he recounted to Mac Eoin:

Mr Heming told me he was explaining in detail what he considered would be the reactions to my execution when at this point the grandchild caught the Prime Minister’s hand  and said, “Granddaddy! Come and play!”, to which he replied, “I cannot play now. I have to decide whether a man will live or die”, and that the child replied, “Let him live, Granddaddy! And come on and play!”; then Lloyd George turned to him, Heming, and said, “There is your answer! Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings comes the decision.”[24]

That is, if Lloyd George really allowed young children to decide state policy. A more hard-nosed analysis was provided by General Nevil Macready, commander of the British Army in Ireland, however little he liked the posting, loathing as he did the country and its convoluted ways. To him, the insurgency of the past three years had been nothing more than “an orgy of murder”, with culpability firmly on rebel shoulders.

Alfred Cope

Nonetheless, Macready kept himself objective when Alfred Cope, Assistant Under-Secretary for Ireland, came to seek his views on the Irish threats to refuse any further peace overtures should Mac Eoin not be freed. Why Mac Eoin should have been singled out in the first place, Macready did not know, putting it down to “some inscrutable reason” – one could imagine his eyes rolling to the heavens as he wrote this in his memoirs – of his civilian overseers in Westminster. In any case, he told Cope he would not protest Mac Eoin’s release, seeing it as a political rather than military responsibility. He repeated this answer when asked again, this time officially by his government.

Privately, Macready rather liked Mac Eoin, in so much as he liked anything Irish, having chatted with him a few times while the latter was recuperating in the King George V Military Hospital from the bullet-wound received in Mullingar. Mac Eoin was one of the few IRA men Macready had met possessive of a sense of humour, a distinction he shared with Collins. Hibernian humour was a subject on which Macready had much to say. “Although the Irish as a race are devoid of humour,” he advised, “it is essential to the peace of mind of anyone who has dealings with them.”

Sir Nevil Macready

The exception to the rule, Mac Eoin “struck me as a more cheery individual than most of his fellows,” who tended to be of a “fanatical, bitter cast of countenance,” as Macready found them.[25]

Mac Eoin’s wit was on display during a visit in Mountjoy by Canon Markey, a priest from back home in Longford. To the padre’s blasé assurances that everything would be alright, Mac Eoin retorted that he had never known of anyone dropped with a rope around their neck and being the better for it. But Canon Markey was a man of boundless faith, and repeated to the Doubting Thomas before him that Mac Eoin would indeed be fine.[26]

The Final Lap

And he was.

Finally released as demanded and advised, Mac Eoin was awarded a hero’s welcome in his native Longford, the first time he had been back since his fateful departure for Dublin in February 1921, six months ago. Over a hundred people were present on the 11^th August 1921, at his reception in St Mel’s College, Longford town. More crowds waited at Ballinalee as Mac Eoin drove there the following day to his home, accompanied by his mother and sister in the car, passing bonfires that lit up the morning darkness.

Statue of Seán Mac Eoin in Ballinalee, Co. Longford

Yet more multitudes pressed to watch as he travelled next to Bunlahy, Granard, Clonfin and then back to Ballinalee, in what “can only be described as a triumphal march,” according to the Irish Independent, during which Mac Eoin was often obliged:

…to descend from his motor to return the hearty welcome given him. Old women knelt down on bended knees as if in reverence to the great hero, whilst old men and children approached him with tear-dimmed eyes.[27]

Similarly appreciative were his fellow TDs and comrades-in-arms at the opening of Dáil Éireann in the Mansion House, Dublin, on the 16^th August 1921. When his turn came to stand and take the oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, it prompted a burst of applause. In his début as a political figure, Mac Eoin looked different to what many had been expecting of the famed guerrilla warrior but, then, so did many others, such as a boyish Collins and a delicate-seeming Richard Mulcahy.[28]

The Dáil meeting inside the Mansion House, Dublin

All three had previously attended another, more low-key meeting, one for the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. A long-time initiate in the secret fraternity, Mac Eoin was now elevated to its ruling council, as part of which he was directed by Collins, its president, to propose the election of Éamon de Valera for another presidency, that of the Irish Republic, at a parliamentary session on the 26^th August 1921. Though the ironic hindsight – given the schism between Mac Eoin and de Valera to come, centred around the issue of a very different type of oath of allegiance – would border on ridiculous, it was a great honour for Mac Eoin, and Collins clearly had big plans for the man on whose behalf he had spent so much time and effort.[29]

But it was not all business between the pair. As Mac Eoin told Brian Farrell in an interview for Radio Telefis Éireann, many years later, on the 24^th August 1962:

Brian Farrell

Farrell: [Collins] had the reputation in his play hours of being a very boisterous man. Did you ever have any contact with this apart from your initial contact?

Mac Eoin: Only once, the day I was released. When I met him at Vaughan’s Hotel he jumped from the top of the steps outside the hotel down on top of me and flattened me on Parnell Square. That was the affectionate way he had of greeting me.

Farrell: This sort of big boisterousness.

Mac Eoin: Yes, it was a loveable way.[30]

Michael Collins (third from left) posing with others, including Seán Mac Eoin (far right) in Free State army uniform

To be continued in: Shadows and Substance: Seán Mac Eoin and the Slide into Civil War, 1922

References

[1] Leonard, Joe (BMH / WS 547), pp. 16-9

[2] Caffrey, John Anthony (BMH / WS 569), p. 9

[3] Leonard, p. 19

[4] Mac Eoin, Seán (BMH / WS 1716, Part II), pp. 205-6

[5] Irish Times, 16/05/1921

[6] Noyk, Michael (BMH / WS 707), p. 82

[7] Flynn, Bartholomew (BMH / WS 1552), pp. 10-1

[8] McKeon, James (BMH / WS 436), p. 21

[9] Noyk, pp. 85-6

[10] Mac Eoin, Part I, p. 34

[11] Ibid, pp. 42-3

[12] Ibid, pp. 67-8

[13] Noyk, p. 85

[14] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 208-11

[15] Browne, Noël. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1986), p. 6

[16] Mac Eoin, Part II, p. 211

[17] Evening Herald, 15/06/1921 ; Noyk, p. 86

[18] Mac Eoin, Part I, pp. 109-11

[19] Ibid, p. 115

[20] Ibid, pp. 121-5

[21] Ibid, Part II, p. 212

[22] Donnelly, John (BMH / WS 626), pp. 4-5

[23] Irish Times, 08/09/1921

[24] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 215-6

[25] Macready, Nevil. Annals of an Active Life, Vol. II (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1924]), pp. 584-6, 604

[26] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 217-8

[27] Irish Independent, 13/08/1921

[28] Irish Times, 17/08/1921

[29] Ibid, 27/08/1921 ; Mac Eoin, Part II, p. 220

[30] University College Dublin Archives, Seán Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1852

Bibliography

Books

Browne, Noël. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986)

Macready, Nevil. Annals of an Active Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1924])

Newspapers

Evening Herald

Irish / Sunday Independent

Irish Times

Bureau of Military History Statements

Caffrey, John Anthony, WS 569

Donnelly, John, WS 626

Flynn, Bartholomew, WS 1552

Leonard, Joe, WS 547

Mac Eoin, Seán, WS 1716

McKeon, James, WS 436

Noyk, Michael, WS 707

University College Dublin Archives

Seán Mac Eoin Papers

Caught by a Whisker: Seán Mac Eoin and the Fight for his Life, 1921 (Part I)

The Ride Back

Seán Mac Eoin

It was with a stroke of luck that the two passengers found an empty train carriage as the space and privacy allowed them to store their parcel on the luggage rack. The package was not one they would otherwise have treated so casually, given how it was full of ammunition. With that, the pair settled down to a leisurely return journey from Dublin to Co. Longford, where both of them – Seán Mac Eoin and James Brady – were active members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).[1]

It was on IRA business that Mac Eoin had visited Dublin, in response to the mailed orders of Cathal Brugha, the Minister for Defence for the underground rebel government. Mac Eoin was somewhat surprised – the Minister did not usually contact others directly – and not wholly thrilled at the summons, given how he was a hunted man, wanted by the British authorities in connection with a number of ambushes that he had led as O/C of the Longford IRA flying column.

In addition, there was the murder charge concerning a police officer, cut down by gunfire while investigating a house Mac Eoin and some others were in. If caught, he would almost certainly be executed. But Mac Eoin was a soldier, and soldiers follow orders, so he journeyed to the big city in the last week of February 1921, accompanied by Brady, who had served as a driver in one of the column’s ambushes.

IRA Flying Column

Following the directions he had been given, Mac Eoin went alone to the candle factory on Bachelor’s Walk that served as Brugha’s headquarters. The Minister got briskly down to business, cross-examining his guest on his military progress for the past year. Brugha was a thorough interrogator but Mac Eoin had taken the precaution of bringing a diary – the handwriting artfully indecipherable to all but himself – and was able to answer each of the questions posed to him.

Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin (today)

This took some time. When Brugha was finally done, he moved to the next item on his agenda. As Mac Eoin recalled:

He told me that his reason for asking me so many searching questions was a big one, that he wanted to take me away from the Longford work, and give me a far more difficult job – in London. How would I like that?

Choosing his words carefully, Mac Eoin replied that he would do whatever instructed. Liking or disliking was not a factor. Brugha appeared satisfied at this and proceeded to inform him that he was to undertake the most important mission so far in their war against Britain.[2]

Mission to London

Cathal Brugha

This was nothing less than the assassination of the entire British Cabinet. Fighting the Crown forces on Irish soil was all very well, Brugha explained, but would not in itself save Ireland. For every foe slain could simply be replaced, with the campaign of murder and arson continued in Ireland, and the people of Britain none the wiser about the crimes committed in their name.

Striking at the heart of the Westminster Establishment, well, that would be a very different matter, one which the British public would have no choice but to sit up and take notice of. Mac Eoin was thus to lead the selected team to London, with each member allocated the name of the Government Minister he was to execute. Logistics would be left to Mac Eoin to handle – that is, if he accepted.

Brugha stared at Mac Eoin straight in the eye, waiting for the ‘yay or ‘nay’, leaving the other man distinctly uncomfortable; not so much with the morality of the operation – if it was legitimate to kill the invader of your country, surely it was equally just to do so to the one who sent him in the first place – but the practicalities.

After a minute of silence with which to muster his thoughts, Mac Eoin:

…explained that I thought I was not the man to lead such a party…Did he realise that I was only a plain, simple country lad, inexperienced and untraveled, who had never been beyond Dublin, and, even in Dublin, would be a poor leader of a mission.

Not at all, Brugha brusquely reassured him in his not-very-reassuring manner. Mac Eoin was just the man for the job – which, by the way, was to start on Wednesday, in two days’ time.

This startled Mac Eoin into further protest. There were duties of his back in Longford that would need to be settled, he said. Though Brugha initially resisted sparing Mac Eoin any further time, he at last relented: Mac Eoin could head off to London on the Friday instead. The pair shook hands, sealing the deal, upon which Mac Eoin took his leave to seek the rest of the IRA leadership in Dublin.[3]

If Mac Eoin had been surprised and more than a bit flustered at Brugha’s briefing, then Michael Collins was aghast when Mac Eoin relayed the details of the undertaking to him. “You are mad!” Collins said. “Do you think that England has only the makings of one Cabinet?”

Michael Collins

As if not angry enough, Collins was flummoxed as to why Mac Eoin was wasting time in Dublin when he already had more than enough work to do in his native county. Collins ordered him back to Longford henceforth, to which Mac Eoin – however little he liked the situation – stood his ground, pointing out that Brugha, as Minister for Defence, could not simply be overruled, least of all by a mere verbal command. Calming down, Collins promised to provide him with a more concrete directive in writing.[4]

In this, Collins was true to his word. When they met next on the Wednesday, Collins handed Mac Eoin a letter from Brugha, cancelling the mission to London. As good and dutiful a soldier as he was, Mac Eoin doubtlessly breathed a sigh of relief – whatever arguments Collins had made or strings he pulled behind the scenes had worked. Mac Eoin was now free to return home, to pick up the fighting from where he had left off in Longford, and not a minute too soon.[5]

That is, if he made it back at all.

A Soldier’s Attempt

From the Irish Times, 4^th March 1921:

A report that McKeon [alternative spelling], the rebel leader in Ballinalee, who was wanted by the police on several charges, was captured at Mullingar on the arrival of the night mail on Wednesday [2^nd March 1921], is confirmed at Longford.

It is stated that the fugitive, who travelled in a third class carriage, was surrounded by the military and police, and that in an attempt to escape he was fired on and seriously wounded. McKeon, who is a blacksmith by trade, had been “on the run” for many months.[6]

Mullingar Train Station (today)

From the sworn testimony of a police witness for the prosecution during the court-martial of Séan Mac Eoin, three months later, on the 14^th June 1921:

Q: Were you stationed at Mullingar with a party of police in March of this year?

A: Yes.

Q: On the 2^nd March, were you at the Railway Station?

A: Yes.

Q: On the arrival of the 9 o’clock train from Dublin that night?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you see some male passengers on the platform?

A: Yes, a number of male passengers were taken from the train after it came in and lined up on the platform and searched. Among them was a man who gave his name as Smith from Aughnacliffe.

Q: When you heard him say that did you say anything?

A: Yes, I recognised him and I said: “You are John James McKeon from Ballinalee.”[7]

Irish Times, 4^th March 1921:

As the police and military were marching the prisoners from the station…McKeon made a dash for liberty…Shots rang out, and McKeon was struck, but continued to run.

Being a very quick runner, he had gained considerable ground when he was again hit, the bullet passing through the right breast. When he was turning into a gateway he was hit in the arm, and felled. He was then taken to the police barracks in the town under a heavy escort, and his condition is considered precarious.[8]

Mullingar Garda Station, formerly the RIC barracks where Seán Mac Eoin was taken after capture

Q: Did you proceed to take him to the barracks?

A: Yes.

Q: Was he handcuffed on the way to the barracks?

A: Yes.

Q: During the journey to the barracks, did he make a determined effort to escape from the escort?

A: He did.

Q: Was he recaptured?

A: He was.

Q: During the process, was he fired at and wounded?

A: Yes.

Q: On the way to the barracks after being wounded, did he say anything?

A: Yes. Going on towards the barracks he turned to me and said, “You are right, I am the man. I made a soldier’s attempt to escape and failed.” Then, after a pause, he said: “I know I am for a firing squad, anyway.”[9]

Seán Mac Eoin in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer

A Mullingar Mess

To add insult to injury, the whole debacle could have been avoided. Mac Eoin’s capture had been the consequence of carelessness, by others – and himself.

While contemporary accounts indicate that the discovery of Mac Eoin in Mullingar had been by chance, Mac Eoin later told a different spin on the story to Ann Farrington, manager of the Crown Hotel, adjoining the Gresham on O’Connell Street, where Mac Eoin stayed while in Dublin, as did a number of other rebel leaders such as Collins, Eoin O’Duffy and Dan Breen. Mac Eoin had a number of aliases under which to sign in – ‘Mr Brown’, ‘Mr Black’, ‘Mr Green’ and so on – but he was less cautious during his last stay, when he had with him a female acquaintance, who he intended to use as a courier for orders to his Longford IRA column.

The Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, Dublin (today)

As the pair sat opposite each other at a table in the hotel smoking-room:

He took a sheet of paper and started writing out the message and when he had finished he put it in an envelope which he closed and handed to her. He was not aware that she had followed every word as he wrote it and therefore knew the contents of the message.

What followed then is a matter of conjecture on Farrington’s part, but, according to her, the girl – who Farrington had never seen before or since, and whose name is unknown – passed on the envelope as instructed, and then went to her uncle, a retired RIC man:

Evidently the uncle went to the Tans and told them about the message which gave the clue about the train he intended to travel by. As a result the train was met in Mullingar by the Tans who started to search for McKeon.

As for further details, Farrington wrote, “probably Seán himself would be able to give the information.”[10]

Mac Eoin did not, making no mention of any double-crossing colleen or leaked itinerary in his own account. He noted, however, that his train stopped at a different platform in Mullingar Station than expected, one crowded with RIC personnel and British soldiers, who ordered the passengers out before lining them up for inspection. With them was a Head Constable who had previously escorted Mac Eoin to jail in 1919 and was thus qualified to recognise the fugitive – as indeed he did.

Black-and-Tans search Irish suspects (possibly staged photo)

Even so, Mac Eoin could have escaped, as one of the other senior policemen present, District Inspector Harrington, was one of Michael Collins’ many agents within the Crown forces. Mac Eoin was to learn that Harrington had been instructed by Collins to alert the Mullingar IRA of Mac Eoin’s arrival and for them to stop the train and take him off before it pulled into the station – “a tip that the Mullingar Brigade, never any good, had failed to act upon,” as Mac Eoin stingingly put it.[11]

He would have been even angrier had he known the difference a simple bicycle could have made. A telegram from Dublin Castle to the Mullingar police had been intercepted by another rebel mole, this being Jimmy Hynes, the principal telegraphist in Mullingar Post Office. Upon Mac Eoin’s arrest, Hynes asked his IRA contact what had happened. Had he not received the warning Hynes had sent?

“Yes,” said the other man, “but I could not get a bicycle.”[12]

‘Alas and Alas!’

Michael Noyk

Mac Eoin’s arrest was a heavy blow, not least to Collins, who would be preoccupied by his fate for as long as it hung in the balance. Michael Noyk, an in-house solicitor for the revolutionary underground, described Mac Eoin as being “one of the special favourites of Michael Collins,” who paid tribute to him as being worth four or five other men.[13]

Efforts to rescue Mac Eoin began a day or two after his arrest, when Collins dispatched seven members of his ‘Squad’ to Leixlip, Co. Kildare, through which, it was believed, Mac Eoin would be transported en route to Dublin. Collins would have sent more but those were the most to be found at such short notice.

Time, after all, was of the essence.

Members of the ‘Squad’

The selected men drove to Leixlip, keeping their eyes along the road for the Red Cross ambulance Mac Eoin was supposed to be hidden in and their firearms ready should the chance of a hijack arise. It did not and, with no sight of the desired vehicle, the would-be-rescuers returned to Dublin, where Mac Eoin already was, having been delivered by a different way as it turned out.[14]

Perhaps this failure was just as well. Inside the ambulance with Mac Eoin had been two policemen and an army officer, all armed with guns that they intended to use on him in the event of trouble, as they warned at the start. Mac Eoin protested that this was hardly appropriate for the Red Cross; besides, he was still weak from the wounds received from his ill-fated dash for freedom but the officer replied: “We know you too well to take any risk” – which was a compliment of sorts.

The ambulance drove first in the opposite direction towards Longford, then doubled back through Meath and reached Dublin by the Trim-Belfast road – a roundabout route, but it did the trick of outfoxing any ambushers. After more than two years of insurgency, the British were becoming savvy to Ireland’s ways.

The first stop was the King George V Military Hospital, for a bullet still lay buried beneath the skin at the back of Mac Eoin’s shoulder, requiring an operation to extract. This process was not a pleasant one, for Mac Eoin refused any anaesthetic stronger than a localised sort for fear of spilling any incriminating secrets in a drugged state.

St Bricin’s Military Hospital (formerly the King George V Military Hospital)

But the pain was worth it, with the offending item successfully plucked out, and Mac Eoin had the first glimmer of hope when the hospital chaplain startled him with word from the ‘Big Fellow’: Collins was planning to send a group of his followers disguised in British uniforms on the following evening, at 11 pm:

I need not say that this was joyful intelligence to me. I slept very little that night, but did not care, and every hour of the next day was long in passing until night should come – and the fateful eleven o’clock. But my fate was settled two hours earlier for, on the stroke of nine o’clock, I was astonished to see a military officer walk into me – attended by his satellites. But alas and alas! They proved to be real Britishers.[15]

There was nothing be done but allow himself to be transferred to his accommodation at Mountjoy Prison. Since he was still on the mend, he was allowed a ground-floor room in the hospital wing, facing the main building, which Mac Eoin could see through a window with about half a dozen iron bars across.

A formidable obstacle, to be sure, but one that would hopefully be breached by the hacksaw that a female visitor had smuggled in under her overcoat, complete with instructions from Collins – who was not one to give up – for Mac Eoin, at the assigned time on a certain date, to saw his way through. Then Mac Eoin was to cross the yard to the prison wall, in time for the wicket gate there to be opened by men from the Dublin IRA, waiting on the other side.

IRA men

in his weakened state, Mac Eoin succeeded in cutting through the bars, working at intervals to allow for the turnkey on duty to pass by obliviously. Only the last few inches of metal remained, and Mac Eoin rested in bed, mustering his strength for the final push, when a doctor stopped by to check on him. Shocked at his patient’s high temperature, the conscientious-but-meddlesome physician ordered the warden to remove Mac Eoin to a different room, one on the third floor for the fresh air.

“And another bright hope of Séan MacEoin was nipped in the bud,” the man in question later bewailed in the third person.[16]

Mountjoy Prison

A Rescue Planned

With the days counting down towards Mac Eoin’s court-martial and the almost inevitable sentence of death, only the direct approach was left to try.

The germ of the idea came when Michael Lynch noticed the armoured car outside the Dublin Corporation abattoir on North Circular Road every morning to escort the van picking up the daily meat for the British Army. Lynch was in an unusual position, being Superintendent of the butchery as well as O/C of Fingal IRA Brigade, a combination of civilian and guerrilla duties that required him to be absent from work during the day until he could enter the slaughterhouse at night when everyone else had gone.

It was his wife, from their house opposite the abattoir gate, who drew his attention to the armoured vehicle, and Lynch, seeing its potential for the IRA’s own use, relayed this to Collins. Collins was infuriated at what he saw as a fool’s errand but Lynch was adamant. He had been observing the car for some time from his window and how sloppy the crew had become through routine, to the point of leaving their ride unguarded save for a mere padlock on a chain. Collins sent two of his Squad, Joe Leonard and Charlie Dalton, to the Lynch residence to gauge the potential prize for themselves.

Members of the Squad, with Joe Leonard (far left) and Charlie Dalton (far right)

What they reported back must have satisfied Collins for, at a subsequent meeting, he announced to the others that the car was to be seized and put to use for a very special job: the liberation of Seán Mac Eoin from the bowels of British captivity.[17]

But, first, planning was key. With help from a sympathetic warden in Mountjoy, one of the many pair of eyes and ears so essential to the rebel underground, Collins:

…got all the local information about wardens, position of Military guards, police and auxiliary relief times. Seán McKeon had been instructed to get an interview on any complaint pretext, every morning at 10 a.m. with the Governor, and so be on the outside of three obstructing gates when an attempted rescue would be made.[18]

Taking the armoured car would be the first step in this complicated scheme. In preparation for this, Lynch procured some Dublin Corporation uniform caps for the IRA men assigned to the mission to wear inside the abattoir, which they did for five consecutive day beforehand, in order to keep the soldiers who came by complacent.

Paddy Daly

But there was still so much that could go wrong. Even if only one or two of the targets stayed inside the car, they could slam the door shut and deny the ambushers access. In addition, Lynch was aware that some of the IRA men involved had a tendency to shoot first and ask question afterwards. With his wife, sister and children in their house across from the abattoir, the last thing Lynch wanted was a stray bullet. To help put his mind at ease, Paddy Daly, the officer in charge of this step of the rescue, agreed that, once things began, he would remove the Lynch household upstairs and lock them in a bedroom.[19]

The only thing left to do…was do.

“Well, good luck,” Collins said as the men set forth, “but whatever happens, come back.”[20]

Carjack

Daly and Mrs Lynch were watching through the window of the latter’s home as the armoured car stopped by the abattoir as expected on the 14^th May 1921. What was not expected, but feared, was how the passengers had not all disembarked, putting the plan too gravely at risk to proceed. It would have to wait until the following morning….and then Mrs Lynch saw the remaining soldiers step out on to the pavement. Daly had turned to leave when Mrs Lynch shouted out, snapping his focus, and the plan, back on. He blew a whistle and the IRA men on standby rushed to perform their roles.[21]

“In less time than it takes to tell we had taken over the car,” described one participant, John Caffrey, proudly.[22]

British armoured car in Ireland, with soldiers nearby

Lynch would recall a more chaotic, bloodier scene in which a soldier reached for his firearm, only to be cut down by a bullet. Upon hearing the commotion, a second serviceman, acting as an orderly, dashed outdoors:

When he saw the guns in the hands of our men, he pulled up with a jerk. Unfortunately, another man behind him, not realising what was on, bumped into him, pushed him forward, and he emerged from the building, with his right hand down low on his thigh, steadying his butcher’s sheath. Our men told me afterwards that it looked as if he was in the act of pulling a gun, and they fired.[23]

Unfortunate, indeed; of the wounded pair, one would later expire in hospital. The rest of the soldiers quickly surrendered, allowing their vehicle to be boarded and then driven off at great speed. The whole incident, according to one eyewitness, had lasted for no more than ten minutes.[24]

To be continued in: Hanging by a Thread: Seán Mac Eoin and the Trial of his Life, 1921 (Part II)

References

[1] Mac Eoin, Seán (BMH / WS 1716, Part II), p. 181

[2] Ibid, pp. 168-70

[3] Ibid, pp. 171-4

[4] Ibid, pp. 176 -7

[5] Ibid, p. 180

[6] Irish Times, 04/03/1921

[7] Mac Eoin, Part I, p. 84

[8] Irish Times, 04/03/1921

[9] Mac Eoin, Part I, pp. 84-5

[10] Farrington, Ann (BMH / WS 749), pp. 2, 4-5

[11] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 183-5

[12] Maguire, James (BMH / WS 1439), pp. 33-4

[13] Noyk, Michael (BMH / WS 707), pp. 80, 85

[14] Stapleton, William James (BMH / WS 822), p. 51

[15] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 194-7

[16] Ibid, pp. 200-4

[17] Lynch, Michael (BMH / WS 511), pp. 123-5

[18] Leonard, Joe (BMH / WS 547), p. 16

[19] Lynch, p. 125

[20] Caffrey, John Anthony (BMH / WS 569), pp. 7-8

[21] Lynch, pp. 125-6

[22] Caffrey, p. 8

[23] Lynch, pp. 126-7

[24] Sunday Independent, 15/05/1921

Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Times

Sunday Independent

Bureau of Military History Statements

Caffrey, John Anthony, WS 569

Farrington, Ann, WS 749

Leonard, Joe, WS 547

Lynch, Michael, WS 511

Mac Eoin, Seán, WS 1716

Maguire, James, WS 1439

Noyk, Michael, WS 707

Stapleton, William James, WS 822

Shadows and Substance: Seán Mac Eoin and the Slide into Civil War, 1922

In the Interests of the Country

Seán Mac Eoin

Seán Mac Eoin’s speech to the Dáil on the 19^th December 1921 was notable in how brisk and business-like it was. The TD for Longford-Westmeath opened by seconding the motion by Arthur Griffith – the speaker proceeding him – that called for the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the item under discussion in the chamber.

As for the whys, Mac Eoin explained where his priorities lay:

I take this course because I know I am doing it in the interests of my country, which I love. To me symbols, recognitions, shadows, have very little meaning. What I want, what the people of Ireland want, is not shadows but substances, and I hold that this Treaty between the two nations gives us not shadows but real substances.[1]

As a soldier through and through, Mac Eoin focused on the military aspects of this substance. That he was not an orator was evident, as he halted more than once while talking, but he made an impression all the same to his viewers:

Clean-shaven, sturdily-built, wearing a soft collar, his pure, rich voice sounded like a whiff of fresh country air through the assembly. His hands were sunk into the pockets of his plain tweed suit.

For the first time in seven hundred years, Mac Eoin reminded his audience in his “pure, rich voice”, British forces were set to leave Ireland, making way for the formation of an Irish army, and a fully equipped one at that.[2]

This was what he and his comrades had been fighting for, to the extent that even if the Treaty was as bad as others said or worse, he would still accept it. After all, should England in the future prove not to be faithful to Ireland, then Ireland could still rely on its armed forces if nothing else (Mac Eoin was clearly a believer in the ‘good fences make good neighbours’ maxim).

An Extremist Speaks

Mac Eoin acknowledged that it might appear strange that someone considered an extremist like him should be in favour of a compromise:

Yes, to the world and to Ireland I say I am an extremist, but it means that I have an extreme love of my country. It was love of my country that made me and every other Irishman take up arms to defend her. It was love of my country that made me ready, and every other Irishman ready, to die for her if necessary.[3]

Mac Eoin wrapped up his speech with what would become the rallying cry of the pro-Treaty side: the agreement meant the freedom to make Ireland free. It was not the most eloquent of oratory on display that day, perhaps showing the haste in which it had been written on the tramcar to the National University where the debates were held.[4]

Nonetheless, it got across the essential points, and some of his statements lingered on afterwards in the minds of his listeners.[5]

Besides, what he said was perhaps less important than who he was. The reporter for the Irish Times certainly thought so, remarking on his reputation as a fighter par excellence and how his support alone would have an impact on the younger, more martial-minded members of the Dáil. As an experienced combatant, having earned renown as O/C of the North Longford Flying Column, while still only twenty-eight years old, Mac Eoin was one of their own, after all.[6]

National Concert Hall, site of the former National University where the Treaty debates took place

‘Red with Anger’

For the remainder of the debates, Mac Eoin kept his cool, refraining from the indulgence of interruptions, point-scoring and lengthy, out-of-turn discourses that characterised much of the subsequent exchanges.

Seán T. O’Kelly

When Seán T. O’Kelly, representing Dublin Mid, referred to “those who put Commandant Mac Eoin in the false position of seconding” the motion for the Treaty ratification, Mac Eoin asserted himself calmly: “Who did so? I wish to say that I seconded the motion of my own free will and according to my own free reason.”

“Well, I accept the correction with pleasure,” O’Kelly replied frostily.[7]

Still, there were moments when Mac Eoin could be roused, such as when Kathleen O’Callaghan, the TD for Limerick City-Limerick East, made a backhanded compliment about military discipline. Certain speakers, she noted, each with an Army background, had used the exact same three or four arguments with what were practically the same words.

Kathleen O’Callaghan

Although O’Callaghan insisted (not wholly convincingly) this was meant as a compliment and not as an insult, Mac Eoin – clearly one of the speakers referred to – was tetchy enough to retort that since every officer in the army had the same facts before him, it was only natural that they would come to the same conclusions and make the same arguments.[8]

Another display of emotion was when Cathal Brugha, in one of the more memorable monologues of the debates, launched a vitriolic attack on the character and record of Michael Collins. Mac Eoin, “red with anger”, according to the Irish Times, was among those who sprang to their feet in outrage at the treatment of their beloved leader.[9]

That Gang of Mine

Dan Breen

Those in the debating chambers were not the only critics with whom Mac Eoin had to contend. On the same day as his speech, he received a letter from Dan Breen, who had likewise achieved fame for his exploits in the past war. Breen took umbrage at the other man’s argument that the Treaty was bringing the freedom for which they and their comrades had fought. As one of his said comrades, Breen wrote with a snarl, he “would never have handled a gun, nor fired a shot, nor asked anyone else, living or dead, to do likewise if it meant the Treaty as a result.”

The word ‘dead’ had been underlined in the letter. In case Mac Eoin was wondering as to the significance of that, Breen pointedly reminded him that today was the second anniversary of the death of Martin Savage, killed in the attempted assassination of Lord French. Did Mac Eoin suppose, Breen asked sarcastically, that Savage had given his life trying to kill one Governor-General merely to make room for another?[10]

Breen warned that copies of this letter had been sent also to the press. He was to go as far as reprint it in his memoirs. Mac Eoin’s remarks had evidently cut very deeply indeed.[11]

Writing more in sorrow (and bewilderment) then in anger was Séamus Ó Seirdain. An old friend from Longford and a war comrade, he was writing from Wisconsin in the early months of 1922 for news from the Old Country, particularly in regards to the Treaty, over which he had the gravest of doubts. “A man may be a traitor and not know it,” he mused, though he hastened to add that he did not consider Mac Eoin a traitor any more than St. Patrick was a Black-and-Tan.

He was not writing for the purpose of hurting anyone, he assured Mac Eoin, only reaching out “to an old friend who has dared and suffered much for the cause and who may inform me as to what the mysterious present means.”

Men of an IRA Flying Column

Only One Army

When Mac Eoin wrote back in April 1922, he assured Ó Seirdain that everything was righting itself by the day. True, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was still divided to some degree but it would pull itself together in the course of a few weeks. It had, after all, taken an oath, one to the Republic, and it would never take another, Mac Eoin wrote. There would be no Free State Army. There would only be the IRA until its ideal was achieved and then there would only be the Irish Army.

Arguing for the tangible benefits of the Treaty, Mac Eoin pointed out that there were now more arms in Ireland and more men being trained in the use of them than at any other point in the country’s history. All their posts and military positions once occupied by Britain were in Irish hands. Reiterating much of what he had told the Dáil, by developing the Army (as well as the economy – a rare acknowledgment by Mac Eoin of something non-military) Ireland would be in the position to tell Britain where to go if it came to it.

Although Mac Eoin did not feel the need to be ostentatiously hostile to all things political like some others, he dismissed opponents of the Treaty as “jealous minded politicians…nursing their wounded vanity” while shouting the loudest about patriotism and freedom. If he had anyone in mind specifically, he left that unstated.[12]

Pro-Treaty poster

By September 1922, three months into the Civil War, it was an embittered Ó Seirdain who wrote to his old friend, denouncing the Free State and the “British-controlled” media in the United States that endorsed it. But if Ó Seirdain was unconvinced by Mac Eoin’s previous arguments in defence of the Treaty, he did not let it get personal, having said a Mass for both Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, both of whom he considered as tragic a loss as Harry Boland and Cathal Brugha on the other side.

As for Mac Eoin: “I know that you are in good faith, I know that your heart is true as ever, but I cannot understand why you are with the Free State. I may never hear from you again, and I want you to understand that no matter what you may think of me, I still stick to the old ideal, and I am still your friend.”[13]

Machinations

He may have castigated the oppositions as petty politicians but Mac Eoin, both publicly and behind the scenes, had helped spearhead much of the political manoeuvrings in the build-up to the fateful Treaty.

Éamon de Valera

On the 26^th August 1921, four months before the agreement was signed, Mac Eoin had been the one to propose to the Dáil the re-election of Éamon de Valera as President of the Irish Republic. Inside the Mansion House, Dublin, so packed with spectators that every available seat and standing room had been taken long before the Dáil opened, Mac Eoin praised de Valera as one who had already done so much for Irish freedom: “The honour and interests of the Nation were alike safe in his hands.”[14]

The Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy, seconded the motion right on cue, and de Valera was set to resume his presidency. This was, of course, a carefully choreographed performance, and Mac Eoin later wrote of how he had been acting on the direction of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).[15]

As a member of the IRB Supreme Council, Mac Eoin had boundless faith in the good intentions of the fraternity, which he defended long after it had ceased to exist. For Mac Eoin, the secret society had been the critical link between the days of revolution and the new dawn of a free, democratic country.

Not that everyone would have agreed with this glowing assessment, particularly about Mac Eoin’s later contentions that de Valera had merely been the ‘public’ head of the Republic, with the IRB remaining the true government of the Republic until February 1922, when the Supreme Council agreed to transfer its authority to the new state.[16] 

The Army of the Republic

Before then, de Valera, as Mac Eoin saw – or, at least, chose to see it – had been no more than a convenient figurehead:

At the time of the Truce, Collins was President of the Supreme Council of the IRB and thus President of the Republic. After the Truce, de Valera had journeyed to London and spoke with Lloyd George and each day he sent a report back to Collins: that was because he knew that Collins was the real President, although that was still secret.[17]

Michael Collins

The idea of the high and mighty de Valera answering to Collins like a dutiful servant may have been no more than a pleasing fantasy of Mac Eoin’s, who was never to entirely reconcile himself to how the Anti-Treatyites went on to dominate Irish politics in the form of Fianna Fáil. But, with the amount of genuine machinations going on behind the scenes, perhaps Seán T. O’Kelly and Kathleen O’Callaghan were not so unreasonable in their suspicions, after all.

Not so easily managed was the widening breach between the pro and anti-Treaty sides. When it came for the Dáil to count the votes on the 7^th January 1922, it had been agreed by 64 to 57 to ratify the Treaty. Almost instantly, the issue was raised as to whether it would be a peacefully accepted decision.

“Do I understand that discipline is going to be maintained in Cork as well as everywhere else?” asked J.J. Walsh, the TD for the city in question, a trifle nervously.

“When has the Army in Cork ever shown lack of discipline?” responded Seán Moylan, the representative of North Cork, to general applause.

Richard Mulcahy

As Minister of Defence, Richard Mulcahy hastened to reassure the Dáil. “The Army will remain occupying the same position with regard to this Government of the Republic,” he said, adding confidently: “The Army will remain the Army of the Irish Republic.”[18]

This was met with applause, but Mac Eoin would criticise what he saw as Mulcahy’s presumption. “I don’t think that was a wise thing to say,” he told historian Calton Younger years afterwards. “It was not a Government decision. He was giving it as his own.”[19]

For Mac Eoin, keeping to such distinctions would be critical if the fledgling nation was to survive as old certainties collapsed and loyalties blurred.

Securing Athlone

Still, for a while, it would seem as if Mulcahy’s assurance of an intact IRA would prove true. Now a Major-General, Mac Eoin was tasked with supervising the handover of Athlone by the departing British Army, as per the terms of the Truce, on the 28^th February 1922.

Thousands had gathered in Athlone for that historic day, lining the streets from the barrack gates to Church Street. The Castle square was likewise packed with people, young and old, trying to force their way to the front, many having come from miles around. Close to a hundred Irish soldiers had arrived the day before from Dublin and Longford, and had been met at the station by their comrades in the Athlone Brigade, who had taken up position on the platform and saluted the newcomers.

Athlone Bridge over the Shannon River

Their presence had already attracted the attention of a large crowd, complete with torchbearers and a brass-and-reed band. The new soldiers marched into the town, amidst scenes of ample enthusiasm, to the Union Barracks, before billeting in nearby hotels. Mac Eoin’s arrival later that evening in a car was low-key in comparison.

The following morning, the British garrison began departing in small detachments, while large companies of their Irish counterparts, and now successors, moved in from the opposite direction. The two armies met each other on the town bridge, the brass-and reed-band stopping in its rendition of God Save Ireland and the officer at the head of the IRA column giving his men the order to ‘left incline’ to allow the British sufficient space to pass by.

British soldiers leaving Ireland, 1922

The IRA resumed their journey while the band continued with Let Erin Remember the Days of Old. Tumultuous cheering greeted the Irishmen as they crossed the bridge to where the gates of the barracks were open to receive them. The last of the previous garrison still present, Colonel Hare, joined Major-General Mac Eoin as they entered the interior square and into the building headquarters.

After a few minutes, both men reappeared. Mac Eoin gave the orders ‘attention’ and ‘present arms’ to his arrayed soldiers who promptly obeyed. Colonel Hare returned the salute and was escorted by Mac Eoin to the gate. The two shook hands and with that, Colonel Hare and the last of a foreign presence departed from Athlone Barracks.

British soldiers lowering the Union Jack in Dublin Castle, 1922

The First Glorious Day

Given the press of people outside, the gates were closed, not without difficulty, to prevent the crowds from pouring in. The troops were paraded in the square before Mac Eoin, and only then were the gates reopened and the general public allowed in, where they were formed up at the rear of the uniformed ranks.

Interior of Athlone Castle

“Fellow soldiers and citizens of Athlone and the Midlands,” said Mac Eoin, standing in a motorcar in the centre of the square, “this is a day for Athlone and a day for the Midlands. It is a day for Ireland, the first one glorious day in over three hundred years.”

Look how we have regarded Athlone. Athlone had all our hatred and our joys and we looked on it with pride. We had hatred for Athlone because it represented the symbols of British rule and the might of Britain’s armed battalions. Thank God the day has come when I, as your representative, presented arms to the last British soldier and let him walk out of the gate – in other words – he skipped it!

This was met with appreciative laughter and applause. “You men of Athlone, you men who stand dressed in the uniforms of Sarsfield, on you devolves a very high duty,” Mac Eoin continued. Invoking the memory of Sergeant Custume, he invited his audience to look back at the heroic defence of Athlone in 1691, when Custume sacrificed his life in defence of the town bridge – “We go on in the scene and look as it were on the moving pictures” – as if they watching a movie.

“We see Sergeant Custume and the plain Volunteer making their brave struggle on that old bridge,” Mac Eoin said. “We see them tearing plank after plank and firing shot after shot until the last plank went down the river forever.” Just as those plain Volunteers of yesteryear had held out for Athlone, now the plain Volunteers of today held Athlone for Ireland.

Illustration of the siege of Athlone, 1691, by artist William Barnes Wollen

Mac Eoin smiled as he took in the rapturous cheers for the stirring images he had conjured for his listeners. “It is up to us now to maintain the high ideals of Custume and his men. As it has come to our hands once more, through no carelessness will it be lost. We have it and we will hold it!”

After the applause had died down, Mac Eoin requested the civilians present to leave the barracks at the end of the ceremony. He then held up a document that he said made him responsible for the property here. When things in Ireland were properly settled, Mac Eoin promised, he would invite the people in and let them go where they pleased.

Mac Eoin and his staff proceeded to the Castle. He climbed up on the ramparts, where he hoisted the tricolour on the yacht-mast that had been provided beforehand, the previous flagstaff having been cut down by the British garrison in a case of imperial sour grapes.

As he did so, his soldiers stood to attention, the officers saluted on the square below and a guard of honour fired three volleys as a salute amidst the continuous cheering of those civilians who had ignored the instructions to leave, instead climbing up on the castle and throwing their caps in the air with wild abandon.

Athlone Castle

To Fight or Not to Fight

Unperturbed by the carnival atmosphere beneath him, Mac Eoin called out to the crowd to say that it was over three hundred years since an Irish flag had been hauled down from amidst shot and shell. The flag of Ireland was being unfurled that day, also under fire, and they meant to keep it there.

Seán Mac Eoin, surrounded by his officers, raising the tricolour after Athlone Barracks

After descending from the Castle, Mac Eoin was met by representatives from the Athlone Urban Council and the local Sinn Féin Club. He accepted the complimentary addresses from each group on his own behalf and that of the Army. After hearing so much praise, he expressed the hope that “I will not suffer from vainglorious thoughts or a swelled head.”

When the Sinn Féin delegates congratulated him on his vote for the Treaty, Mac Eoin said that: “Were it not for the ratification of the Treaty this a day we would not see, or perhaps ever see.”

In response to those who believed that they should have continued to fight, Mac Eoin compared his stance to another of his sixteen months ago as he stood on the hill of Ballinalee, Co. Longford, in November 1920 at the head of his flying column:

On that morning a small party of us met a large party of the enemy that came to burn the town. We fought them a certain distance and I decided before going another round to keep cool. To fight that other round meant that they would stay and I would have to go. By not fighting it out I knew that we would remain and they would have to go. That is what has occurred as regards the Treaty.

No doubt, we can fight another round, but the chances are when we fight it that we go and they stay. As it is, we stay, we go. That is the test as to who has won. We hold the field where the fight was fought and therefore the victory is ours.

And with that, Mac Eoin and his staff returned to their barracks, their men following suit. The soldiers were allowed out later that evening, their green uniforms being much admired by the crowds that continued to fill the streets.[20]

Maintaining Athlone

The good will did not last long. A little under a month since claiming Athlone in the name of the Irish nation, Mac Eoin was forced to defend it for the sake of its new government.

He had left for Dublin to report on the local situation, which he considered serious enough for him to warn his acting commander, Kit McKeon, to take care in his absence. Upon returning, Mac Eoin met with McKeon who opened the reunion with: “I have held the barracks for you until this moment and I hand it over to you.”

Before Mac Eoin could reply, he heard shouting from outside the barracks. Looking out, he saw six of his officers with revolvers drawn, standing in a line in the square between the armoury and a group of agitated soldiers.

Mac Eoin acted quickly, calling out: “Fall in all ranks; officers take posts.” As he remembered:

Thank God they all fell in, and then I knew I could hold the Barracks in Athlone for the elected Government in Ireland. I addressed them, pointing out that Athlone was once again in Irish hands.

Mac Eoin pointed out the last time Athlone was in Irish hands was when Sergeant Custume and his eleven men tried and vain to hold the bridge in 1691 and died.

I pointed out that they were the successors of Custume and his men, but they could do more than Custume; they could hold Athlone. This was well received, and I then called each officer by name, putting him the question – was he prepared to serve Ireland and the Government, and obey my orders.

The first officer Mac Eoin called was Patrick Morrissey, who he had recently appointed as Athlone Brigade O/C. When confronted with the question, Morrissey replied that he was prepared to obey Mac Eoin’s orders but not those of the Government. Mac Eoin stressed to him and the others to note well that the only orders he would give were on the authority of the Government.

Backed into a corner, Morrissey made his choice clear: “Then I will not obey.”

That was enough for Mac Eoin. Wasting no further time, he stripped Morrissey of his rank and had him ejected from the barracks. He next went down the line of officers, putting the same question to each in turn. By the end, he was left with three officers from the Leitrim and Athlone brigades, standing in front of their respective companies.

Free State soldiers on parade

He repeated the same question to them all, rankers and privates alike. Only after they had answered that they were prepared to obey and serve both the Government and Mac Eoin did he dismiss them to their billets. It was then, in Mac Eoin’s opinion, that:

The Civil War was started. I had then no doubts about it, and the more I see of the whole position since then the more convinced I am that “the Civil War was on” and not of the Government’s or my making.

The opponents of the Treaty in the Four Courts and many Fianna Fáil supporters and writers today still assert that the “Civil War” began with the National Army attacking the Four Courts.

This is absolutely incorrect. The action by the National Forces at the Four Courts was the action of the Irish Government to end the Civil War and was, therefore, the beginning of the end.[21]

As steadfast as Mac Eoin’s performance had been that day, it had not been enough to hold over 80 of the 100 men from the Leitrim Brigade who deserted the following night. At least they had had no weapons to take with them, Mac Eoin having made the precaution of posting men from his native Longford over the armoury.

In his later notes, Mac Eoin called his men “soldiers-Volunteers.” It is an apt phrase, indicating men who were still in the transition between the IRA – part militia and part guerrilla force – and a professional army. In Athlone that day, this inability to reconcile the independence of the old and the demands of the new had threatened to be catastrophic.

The West Awakens

The situation remained perilous. The anti-Treaty IRA held the eastern half of Athlone by occupying a few shops there. Mac Eoin was sufficiently aggrieved to move against them:

As they seized private property, I exercised the power vested in me to protect life and property in my area. I won’t weary you with how I did it, suffice to say, that I put them out of the shops without loss of life.

That these rival posts were positioned to cut off lines of communication with Dublin was as much a motivation for their removal as respect for private property. The manager of the Royal Hotel argued for retaining the Anti-Treatyites lodged there since they were, after all, paying customers. To eject them would be interfering with his business.

Royal Hotel, Athlone

Mac Eoin was persuaded to leave these particular guests be on condition that they did not stop or hinder public transport through the town or put up any sentries or further military installations. The Anti-Treatyites agreed and remained until a bloody incident in Athlone on the 25^th April forced Mac Eoin’s hand. In the meantime, Mac Eoin had more than just Athlone to worry about, as the turmoil further west was demanding his attention.[22]

Arthur Griffith

A pro-Treaty meeting planned for Easter Sunday in Sligo town had become the flashpoint between the hostile sides. Arthur Griffith was due to talk in the town which was rapidly starting to resemble an armed camp with a number of Anti-Treatyites occupying buildings such as the town hall, the post office and the courthouse. Compounding the tension were the party of pro-Treaty men who had arrived one night in an armoured car and taken up residence in the jail.

“The scenes are truly warlike,” wrote the Sligo Independent, at this point still referring to both factions as the IRA, the Pro-Treatyites being the ‘official’ IRA and their counterparts as the ‘unofficial’ one.

The latter faction seemed to be the dominant one. Its commander, Liam Pilkington, had recently posted a proclamation that prohibited all local public meetings, ostensibly on the grounds of public order. Caught in the middle of an already tense situation, the town authorities sent a telegram to Griffith, cautiously asking if his talk was still going ahead.

Griffith swiftly sent back an implacable reply:

Dail Eireann has not authorised, and will not authorise, any interference with the rights of public meeting and free speech. I, President of Dail Eireann, will go to Sligo on Sunday night.

Mac Eoin, too, was not to be moved, especially on the question of who held the military power in the area:

As Competent Military Authority of Mid-Western Command, I know nothing of Proclamation.

And that was that. If the Sligo authorities had hoped Griffith and Mac Eoin would take the hint and cancel the event, thus saving the town from the risk of becoming even more of a battleground, then they were sorely disappointed.[23]

The Sligo Situation

The meeting went ahead as planned, largely without bloodshed – largely.

Sligo seethed with activity in anticipation of Griffith’s arrival, with men from both factions of the IRA piling their sandbags, barricading the windows of billets and obtaining a worryingly large amount of field dressings and other first-aid appliances from the local chemists.

Anti-Treaty men leaning out of a window in Sligo, 1922 (full video on YouTube)

Griffith arrived at Longford Station on the evening of the 16^th April where he was met by Mac Eoin, accompanied by a guard of honour with fixed bayonets on rifles. After a speech by Griffith from the train, they continued on to Sligo, arriving there on Saturday after 6 pm and joining the rest of the pro-Treaty forces based in the jail.

Other visitors to the town would have found accommodation scarce, as many hotels were already filled with young men from the ‘unofficial’ IRA who stood to attention in the hallways, holding their weapons – mostly shotguns, with an assortment of rifles and revolvers – and dressed in civilian attire save for a few uniformed officers. They had been coming to Sligo in intervals all day, also by train.

IRA men, standing to attention outside a hotel entrance

It was not just the Anti-Treatyites who were receiving reinforcements. The next day, at about 11 am, three lorries with about forty men from the ‘official’ IRA drove through the town, cheering and shouting, having come all the way from the Beggar’s Bush Barracks in Dublin. In contrast to their ‘unofficial’ counterparts, they went fully uniformed while equipped with service rifles, holding them at the ready. Some of them pulled up before the Imperial Hotel and the rest continued to Ramsay’s Hotel, about fifty yards down, both premises being in anti-Treaty hands.

Shots were fired in front of the two hotels. Which side had done so first was impossible to tell. The Anti-Treatyites received the worst of it, with three wounded, one in the neck, though there were no fatalities. The Free Staters drove away in their lorries, being cheered by the large crowd that had gathered at the sound of battle.

Shortly afterwards, General Pilkington sent word to General Mac Eoin, asking for a parley. Mac Eoin replied that he was willing to meet on the condition that the Anti-Treatyites evacuated the post office since that belonged to the Dáil as government property.

Mac Eoin had cut a commanding figure as he strode through the town earlier that morning, fully armed and unconcerned by the armed sentries staring out of fortified windows as he passed. He was not going to spoil the impression he made by agreeing too readily to talk, and negotiations withered on the vine when Pilkington refused to withdraw from the post office as demanded.

There was still the matter of three pro-Treaty soldiers who had been captured at the Imperial Hotel during the shootout there. When Mac Eoin came to demand their release, along with the return of their munitions, the Anti-Treatyite officer in charge meekly acquiesced.

Site of the former Imperial Hotel, Sligo

Success in Sligo

This set the tone for the rest of the day, which belonged to the Pro-Treatyites. Despite their numbers, the neutered Anti-Treatyites made no move or protest as a parade of cars, each flying a tricolour, slowly made their way through the streets to the town centre. Mac Eoin led the procession, one hand holding a revolver and the other on the turret of the armoured car at the front. This vehicle was positioned in the town centre near the post office, its gun trained in an unsubtle warning on the building the ‘unofficial’ IRA had refused to vacate.

Pro-Treaty soldiers onboard an armoured car with a machine-gun

As before, Mac Eoin’s war record served as a statement in itself. Alderman D.M. Hanley introduced the general as someone whose name was known and honoured from one end of the country to the other. He was the man who had fought the Black-and-Tans and not from under his bed, Hanley continued, in what was a similarly unsubtle jab at the young men who made up much of the ‘unofficial’ IRA currently in Sligo. And who could fail to admire a man who treated a captured and wounded enemy fairly, honourably and decently (a reference to the captured Auxiliaries Mac Eoin had spared after the Clonfin Ambush of February 1921)?

After the applause to this glowing introduction, Mac Eoin spoke. While the other speakers, such as Griffith, used as a platform the same car that had carried them to the meeting, Mac Eoin called down from a window overlooking the town centre.

Seán Mac Eoin addressing the crowd in Sligo from a window (note the pistol in hand)

He was there as a soldier, not to argue for or against the Treaty, he said (somewhat disingenuously), but to uphold the freedom of speech and the sovereignty of the Irish people. The Army must be the servant, not the dictator of the people. It must be the people’s protection from foes within and without.

As in the Dáil, Mac Eoin’s speech was short and unpretentious, saying no more than necessary. But then, his name and reputation were enough to do his talking for him. One of the subsequent orators, Thomas O’Donnell TD, praised him as the one who had taken arms from policemen when they had arms, as opposed to those Anti-Treatyites who were shooting policemen now and somehow thinking themselves better patriots than Seán Mac Eoin.

Arthur Griffith addresses the crowd in Sligo town square, April 1922

The general continued to lead by example. When the meeting came to a close, a dozen pressmen decided to drive to Carrick-on-Shannon to make their reports, the telegraph wires in Sligo having been cut to make communication from there impossible. Mac Eoin escorted them in his armoured car. Coming across a blockade of felled trees across the road, Mac Eoin threw off his heavy military overcoat and set to work clearing the way with a woodman’s axe.[24]

Footage of Seán Mac Eoin helping to clear the road (full clip on YouTube)

A Death in Athlone

The rally in Sligo had been a resounding success but Mac Eoin had scant time to savour the triumph. Back in Athlone, the simmering tensions finally boiled over in the early hours of the 25^th April. Mac Eoin was retiring for the night when, sometime after midnight, he heard about four shots nearby. He sprang out of bed, picking up the revolver at hand on a table before opening the window. He leaned out in time to see men running by.

“Who goes there?” Mac Eoin called.

“A friend” came the cryptic reply before the strangers disappeared.

George Adamson

Mac Eoin hurried outside to find three of his men, with another lying on the ground, his head in a spreading pool of blood. The stricken man, Brigadier-General George Adamson, was rushed to the military hospital where he died. The other men on the scene told of how they had been walking down the street when they found themselves surrounded by an armed party, whom of one had shot Adamson through the ear before fleeing.

Adamson’s death hit his commander hard. At the funeral two days later, before a crowd of ten thousand, a “visibly affected” Mac Eoin, according to a local newspaper, “delivered a short oratory at the graveside, and paid a glowing tribute to the many qualities of the deceased.”[25]

Mac Eoin had little doubt as to the motivation behind the killing. Adamson had been among those who had remained loyal from the outset during the attempted mutiny that Mac Eoin had quelled in Athlone Barracks. As Mac Eoin told the Pensions Board in 1929, as part of his recommendation for financial assistance to Adamson’s bereaved mother: “The rest of the officers of the Brigade who had turned Irregular always regarded Adamson as a traitor, that he let them down by his action at the meeting.”[26]

Mac Eoin decided that enough was enough. The anti-Treaty men in Athlone were taken into custody when their garrison in the Royal Hotel was surrounded by pro-Treaty soldiers. Conditions for them and subsequent POWs in Athlone Prison were harsh, with meagre food, a lack of fresh clothing and overcrowding in the cells.[27]

This, and that they were being detained without charge or trial, was of little consequence to Mac Eoin, who was in no mood for legal niceties. As far as he was concerned, he had allowed his enemies to remain at liberty and lost a valued soldier as a result.

George Adamson’s funeral passing through Athlone

Securing the Midlands

Not one to for half-measures, Mac Eoin moved to mop the remaining opposition nearby, by ordering the seizure of enemy posts in Kilbeggan and Mullingar. Assigned to the former, Captain Peadar Conlon drove there with two Crossley Tenders full of men on the 1^st May. When the demand to surrender was refused by the anti-Treaty garrison in the Kilbeggan Barracks, Conlon issued an ultimatum that he would attack in ten minutes unless they cleared out.

While waiting, Conlon had the building surrounded. When the ten minutes were up, the besieged men called out to say that they would leave as long as they could retain their arms, ammunition and everything else inside. Conlon agreed to let them keep their weapons but all other items in the barracks were to stay.

When that was refused, Captain Conlon gave then another two hours, after which the Anti-Treatyites, hoping to drag out the situation, asked if they could be allowed to remain until the next morning. Conlon refused and again repeated his threat to attack, this time to do so immediately. The garrison caved in at that and departed, leaving behind the furnishings as demanded.

At Mullingar, the Anti-Treatyites did not go so quietly. Two of them had been arrested by Free Staters on the 25^th April. When it seemed like they would resist, a couple of shots were fired at the ground to dissuade them. Getting the hint, the rest of their comrades evacuated Mullingar Barracks a week later on the 3^rd May.

IRA fighters, all in civilian dress

Later that night, an explosion ripped through the building. The fire brigade brought hoses to combat the flames enveloping the barracks and managed to save the adjacent houses, but with the barracks left a smouldering ruin. One of the former garrison later related to historian Uinseann MacEoin how he and another man had set the explosives in the barracks after the rest of the Anti-Treatyites had left.[28]

Regardless of the damage, Mac Eoin could report a victory. Lines of communication with Dublin were re-established, allowing the fledgling Free State a firmer hold on the Midlands.[29]

Squabbles in the Dáil

Back in Dublin, Mac Eoin returned to a Dáil forced to confront the depth of animosity inflicting the country. In addition to the death of Adamson and the subsequent fighting in the Midlands, pro and anti-Treaty forces had clashed in Kilkenny City on the 2^nd May and did not stopped until the following day when the Anti-Treatyites were effectively expelled from the town.

Free State soldiers outside Kilkenny Castle, where the Anti-Treatyites had held out in a last stand before surrendering, May 1922

The Dáil chambers listened to a report that eighteen men had been killed in Kilkenny – actually, there had been no fatalities, despite a number of injuries – which convinced many on both sides of the divide that enough was enough.

But not all agreed on the solution.

Mac Eoin listened incredulously to the talk of how peace needed to be made at once. On the contrary, Mac Eoin felt that the situation on the ground was too far gone for soft touches. The strong arm of the law was needed, and his men should be allowed to fulfil such a role. As he told the chamber in whose name he had been acting:

At present it may be difficult to arrange a truce in some particular instances. Men are engaged in the pursuit of men charged with serious offences, and justice demands that certain things be done. It would be difficult to stop men out at the moment to cause arrests for these incidents.

Éamon de Valera

Here, de Valera got his second wind. Minutes before, he had been humbly promising to do his best to make his IRA allies see sense, while all but admitting his powerlessness over them. Now, de Valera tried to regain some face by singling out one of the opposition facing him from the benches on the grounds of propriety:

De Valera: Is Commandant Mac Eoin speaking as a member of the House or in a military capacity? If this matter is to be raised it must be arranged with the Chief of Staff and not with a subordinate officer.

Seán Mac Eoin

Mac Eoin: I think I should speak without being interrupted by anybody – I do not care who it is. When I am here I am a member of the House. When I am in the field, I am a soldier and do not you forget it – or any other person. I am speaking from information at my disposal that such is the case. If you want me to act as a soldier, I can go outside and I will tell you.

De Valera: I suggest that any information Commandant Mac Eoin has had better be given to the Chief of Staff. My suggestion is that the Chief of Staff and the Chief Executive Officer get together and arrange a truce. It is for them to get information from their subordinate officers as to their conditions.

As Mac Eoin’s temper sizzled against de Valera’s glacial disdain, Collins waded in on the former’s side: “Lest there should be any misunderstanding, I take it that no one member of this House is censor over the remarks of another member of this House.”[30]

An Impossible Situation

Mac Eoin was to claim, years later, that a prominent Fianna Fáil supporter had said to him: “Thank God you won the Civil War, but we won the aftermath by talking and writing you out of the fruits of your victory. We have the fruits of your success. I shudder to think of what would have happened if we won the Civil War.”[31]

Whether or not someone had crossed party lines to actually say such a thing, it encapsulates perfectly Mac Eoin’s own attitudes. Sometime in the 1960s, he put his thoughts and memories of that turbulent era to paper. A memoir was intended, though one never materialise.

All the same, his notes and rough drafts do offer insight into what it must have been like to have been in the passenger seat, helpless to do anything but watch as the country, slowly at first but with rapid acceleration, slide into another war, this time between former comrades.

Harry Boland

At the start of May, Mac Eoin found himself part of a 10-person group, appointed by the Dáil to discuss the best way out of the impasse. Five represented the anti-Treaty side – Kathleen Clarke, P.J. Ruttledge, Liam Mellows, Seán Moylan and Harry Boland – and the other half for the Free State in the persons of Seán Hales, Pádraic Ó Máille, Séamus O’Dwyer, Joseph McGuinness and Mac Eoin.

It was an experience Mac Eoin would remember with profound horror.

Held in the Mansion House, the talks would begin well enough, with progress made until a member of the anti-Treaty delegation arrived late, forcing the others to explain everything to him. As often as not, the newcomer would not agree with what had already been settled, and the talks would have to start all over again, until an hour or so later when another tardy delegate came to send everything back to stage one.

Kathleen Clarke

Mac Eoin put the blame for the habitual tardiness on the opposing side – only Kathleen Clarke was consistently on time – unsurprisingly so, perhaps, though there is no reason to doubt the strain he felt: “This was exasperating…To me, it was an impossible situation.” His time as a guerrilla leader had ill-prepared him for such frustrations: “I had never met anything like it before.”[32]

At the same time, a similar set of meetings were held elsewhere in the building, in the Supper Room, which also included Mac Eoin, along with Eoin O’Duffy, Gearóid O’Sullivan for the Pro-Treatyites, and Liam Lynch, Seán Moylan and – again – Mellows on the other side. Mac Eoin was obliged to go back and forth between two conferences, dressed in his new green uniform and with a revolver in his belt.

The military leaders meet at the Mansion House, May 1922. From left to right: Seán Mac Eoin (in uniform), Seán Moylan, Eoin O’Duffy, Liam Lynch, Gearóid O’Sullivan and Liam Mellows (video on YouTube)

Vera McDonnell, a stenographer in the Sinn Féin Office, was assigned to take notes for the Dáil committee. She came to suspect that the presence of so many IRA leaders in the same building may have deterred the committee members from coming to any decisions on the basis that it would be the Army having the final say in any case.

She remembered a frustrated Mac Eoin being driven to tell them that surely they had enough brains to make their judgements, unless they wanted to wait until he came back from the other meeting. McDonnell thought this was very funny, though it is unlikely that Mac Eoin did as well.[33]

In any case, all the talks were to no avail. In a joint declaration read out to the Dáil by its Speaker, Eoin MacNeill, on the 10^th May, Kathleen Clarke and Séamus O’Dwyer admitted that, despite extensive dialogue during the course of eleven meetings since the 3^rd May to find a common basis for agreement: “We have failed.”

The laconic report was met with dread from those in attendance, the implications of such failure all too clear. Only Mac Eoin seemed unperturbed as he left the chamber, wearing an oddly benign smile.[34]

Pointing Fingers

The problems in the country were not limited to such futile talk shops. Like many in the IRA who had risked their lives against the British, he had a strong contempt for those who had only joined up after the Truce, once the immediate danger of a Tan raid or a police arrest had passed.

In Mac Eoin’s opinion, these ‘Trucateers’ brought nothing but trouble:

They were critical of the Officers and Volunteers who bore the brunt of the Battle prior to the Truce; they were very aggressive and militant at this time and in many places they were, by their actions, guilty of breaches of the Truce on the Irish side and were anxious to show their ability now. They were all ambitious for promotion, and this was something unknown in our ranks before the Truce.[35]

Rory O’Connor

At the same time, the problem did not lie entirely with the recruits, as far as Mac Eoin was concerned, for the old hands could be equally troublesome. Rory O’Connor and John O’Donovan, both Anti-Treatyites, found themselves in charge of the newly-formed Departments of Chemistry and Explosives respectively.

As their responsibilities were yet untried, both, according to Mac Eoin, were eager for war to resume:

I believe this was one of the major causes (of course, there were others) of the Civil War. They felt that they should have been allowed to test their new inventions against the British. They tested them during the Civil War against ourselves, and they were a failure.[36]

Such opinions are coloured, of course, with the lingering bitterness that characterised so much of the country after the Civil War. As history, they are debatable. As insight into the attitudes and prejudices of the times, they are invaluable.

Free State poster, denigrating the Anti-Treatyites as latecomers in the previous war against Britain

A Longford Wedding

Somehow Mac Eoin found the time for more personal matters. He wedded Alice Cooney on the 21^st June in Longford town, the streets of which were hung with bunting and tricolours by people eager to honour a native son and war hero. When one of the many cars thronging the streets parked in front of St Mel’s Cathedral, Collins and Griffith stepped out together, to be promptly lit up by camera flashes. Eoin O’Duffy was also present, and the three Free Sate leaders signed as the witnesses to their colleague’s wedding.

St Mel’s Cathedral, Longford

Collins in particular was noted to be in boyish good spirits in the company of his friend. He would later come to the rescue when the groom had forgotten the customary gold coin to be used in the wedding by providing one of his own. Other officers from the numerous divisions and brigades in the pro-Treaty forces were in attendance, along with members of the old Longford Flying Column who saluted Mac Eoin outside the Cathedral as their former commander passed by.

The newly-weds (video on YouTube)

Public interest did not end at the door. More people packed the Cathedral, some even standing on the aisle seats for a better view. Cameras were ever present, in the hands of local people as well as the ubiquitous pressmen, one of whom – untroubled by sacrilege – was resting his camera on a church candelabrum as he snapped away for posterity.

But possibly the most remarkable feature of the event was the present from Mrs McGrath, the bereaved mother of Thomas McGrath, the policeman for whose slaying seventeen months ago Mac Eoin had been sentenced to death and only narrowly reprieved. Mrs McGrath also sent a card wishing the newlyweds every possible happiness and good fortune. If a mother who had lost a son could make such a gesture, then perhaps there was hope for the country.[37]

Or perhaps not.

Seán Mac Eoin on his wedding day with Alice Cooney

A Return to Sligo

Joseph Sweeney

Mac Eoin enjoyed his honeymoon in the North-West, though even that proved eventful when his car accidentally ran into a ditch. He sent out a telegram to Joseph Sweeney, the senior Free State officer in Donegal, for help in rescuing the vehicle. When that was done, Sweeney took the opportunity of putting on a parade for his esteemed visitor in Letterkenny on the 28^th June.

Sweeney was marching down the main street with the rest of the men when a courier reached him with a message to pass on to Mac Eoin: the Four Courts, the headquarters of the Anti-Treatyites in Dublin, had been under attack since that morning. The long-dreaded fratricidal war had finally come about.[38]

Galvanised by this shocking news, Mac Eoin made it to Sligo town. The police barracks there was ablaze, its anti-Treaty garrison having pulled out in the early hours of the morning before torching it and the adjoining Recreation Hall in a ‘scorched earth’ tactic. Civilians who tried to reach the Town Hall where the fire-hose was kept were turned back at gunpoint by those same arsonists.

Front page of anti-Treaty newspaper

Mac Eoin was not so easily deterred. He marched to the Town Hall, a squad of his soldiers in tow, and returned to the barracks with the fire-hose in hand. Seeing that the Barracks and Recreation Hall, both burning fiercely, were beyond help, Mac Eoin instead turned the water on the neighbouring buildings.

It took three hours for the barracks to burn, during which a number of bombs carelessly left behind inside were heard exploding. By the time the flames died down, the two buildings were ruined shells, but the rest of the town was safe, from the fire at least. Mac Eoin, along with some local men, earned praise from the Sligo Independent “for their fearless work” in fire-fighting.[39]

Putting out the war, however, was not to be so readily done.

References

[1] Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, signed in London on the 6th December 1921: Sessions 14 December 1921 to 10 January 1922, 06/01/1921, p.  23. Available from the National Library of Ireland, also online from the University of Cork: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E900003-001.html

[2] De Burca, Padraig and Boyle, John F. Free state or republic?: Pen pictures of the historic treaty session of Dáil Éireann (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1922), p. 11

[3] Debate on the Treaty, pp. 23-4

[4] Seán Mac Eoin Papers, University College Dublin Archives, P151/80

[5] De Burca, Padraig and Boyle, John F. Free state or republic?, p. 11

[6] Irish Times, 20/12/1921

[7] Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, p. 134

[8] Ibid, p. 314

[9] Irish Times, 09/01/1922

[10] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/79

[11] Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), p. 168

[12] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/124

[13] Ibid, P151/162

[14] Irish Times, 27/08/1921

[15] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1786

[16] Ibid, P151/1835

[17] Ibid, P151/1837

[18] Debate on the Treaty, pp. 424-5

[19] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Fontana/Collins, 1970), p. 235

[20] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/131

[21] Ibid, P151/1809

[22] Ibid, P151/1812

[23] Sligo Independent, 15/04/1922

[24] Ibid, 22/04/1922

[25] Westmeath Guardian, 28/04/1922

[26] Adamson, George (Military Archives, 2/D/2,) http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Pensions/R3/2D2GEORGEADAMSON/W2D2GEORGEADAMSON.pdf (Accessed 03/05/2017), p. 131

[27] Irish Times, 01/05/1922

[28] Westmeath Guardian, 28/04/1922, 05/05/1922 ; Irish Times, 01/05/1922 ; MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), p. 375

[29] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1812

[30] Dáil Éireann. Official Report, August 1921 – June 1922 (Dublin: Stationery Office [1922]), p. 368

[31] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1812

[32] Ibid, P151/1813 ; Irish Times, 01/05/1922

[33] McDonnell, Vera (BMH / WS 1050), pp. 9-10

[34] Irish Times, 10/05/1922

[35] Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1804

[36] Ibid

[37] Longford Leader, 24/06/1922

[38] Griffith, Kenneth and O’Grady, Timothy. Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1998), p. 287

[39] Sligo Independent, 08/07/1922

Bibliography

Books

Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Dáil Éireann. Official Report, August 1921 – June 1922 (Dublin: Stationery Office [1922])

Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, signed in London on the 6th December 1921: Sessions 14 December 1921 to 10 January 1922. Available from the National Library of Ireland, also online: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E900003-001.html

De Burca, Padraig and Boyle, John F. Free state or republic?: Pen pictures of the historic treaty session of Dáil Éireann (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1922)

Griffith, Kenneth and O’Grady, Timothy. Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1998)

MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Fontana/Collins, 1970)

University College Dublin Archives

Seán Mac Eoin Papers

Newspapers

Irish Times

Longford Leader

Sligo Independent

Westmeath Guardian

Military Service Pensions Collection

Adamson, George (Military Archives, 2/D/2,) http://mspcsearch.militaryarchives.ie/docs/files//PDF_Pensions/R3/2D2GEORGEADAMSON/W2D2GEORGEADAMSON.pdf (Accessed 03/05/2017)

Bureau of Military History Statement

McDonnell, Vera, WS 1050