Dan Breen and the IRA (2 page)

In Tipp, landlords' estates had been broken up and there were many small holdings. The men were more independent; the houses neater and better built than in other counties I had visited. The men were tall and quiet; they had a great deal of purpose and were dependable.

Ernie O'Malley,
The Singing Flame

Dan Breen was born in the village of Donohill, Tipperary, probably on 11 August 1894, to Daniel Breen, a labourer, and Honora Breen, née Moore, a midwife from a district close to Doon in Co. Limerick. Daniel Breen died of blood poisoning at the age of sixty, when Dan was a small child.

Breen had a clear memory of his father's coffin being brought into the room in which he was waked. The women keened so much that they were sent down to the kitchen. In
My Fight for Irish Freedom
, Breen spoke warmly of a father he scarcely knew: ‘I remember one sunny day when he took me up by the hand and led me through the fields. When I got tired he lifted me on to his shoulders and brought me home pick-a-back.'

In his subsequent statement to the Bureau of Military History he was more dismissive. He said his father's people had been fenians but the impression gained was, ‘that he belonged to a type of fenian who's more talk than anything else … I had heard it said of the people that he resembled that they were great fellows for talking and drinking and doing very little else after that but, on the other hand, I suppose there was little they could do in their day.'

Breen's family was a large one; his siblings were Laurence, Mary, John, Winifred, Catherine, Patrick and Laurence Junior, who was known as Lar. The older Laurence died when Dan was four years old.

‘We were not blessed with a lot or worldly goods,' remembered Breen. ‘My mother was a midwife and so when my father died she had to work very hard to support us. The family was generally a young family [at the time of Daniel's death], I being about six and there was another brother after me who was only in his cradle but, nevertheless, we lived happily there. My mother was a hard worker and thrifty and contrived to make ends meet.'

Honora Breen spent some of her widow's pittance purchasing popular paperback books containing the rebel writings of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and the other icons of Irish nationalism. Breen reckoned that the women were the most impressive people in the south-west Tipperary society from which he came. He said it was the women who promoted fenian ideals: ‘The men of my father's generation had apparently drifted into a system of what we would call public house debate as their only contribution to the national movement of the time, but it is the women who kept alive the traditions of the past and handed those things on to my generation.'

‘Dan regularly spoke about his mother,' said Clonmel Fianna Fáil activist Ernie Hogan. ‘The other men and women who were active at that time talked about her too, saying that she was formidable. She entirely egged Dan on in his political activities. By general agreement, she was more “extreme” than Dan – she was one of those great old fenian ladies. Little learning perhaps but a great spirit. The Tan War cost her dearly and she ended up nearly destitute.'

Life in Tipperary towards the end of the nineteenth century was tough. Brutalising rural poverty was never far away, in the midst of the ascendancy architecture of the big towns and big houses. Between 1891 and 1911 Tipperary lost fourteen per cent of its population. The towns didn't decline as dramatically as the countryside – and some even prospered. Tipperary town, the nearest sizeable settlement to Donohill, had three creameries. One of these, owned by Cleeve's Condensed Milk Company, employed 300 people, including a large percentage of women.

‘We were not too well off in those days,' Breen told Jim Maher in 1967, ‘and our neighbours were only barely above the poverty line too. We mostly ate potatoes and milk. Sometimes we had salted pork for our dinner, but we hardly ever ate fresh meat. We also ate much cabbage and turnips.'

Tom Garvin in
Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland
, points out that society had just recently emerged from agrarian feudalism and was ‘only partly affected by urban culture, denied political power by the colonial establishment, without any self-assured intelligentsia other than the priests and the young men whom the priests had educated.'

Watching what was happening to neighbouring small farmers and noting the poor prices they got for their produce, Breen developed a lifelong interest in the politics of land and property. Childhood political memories included the brutal eviction of a nearby cousin who died homeless on the side of the road.

‘I was a socialist in outlook,' he told Jim Maher, ‘I was never a communist; I never believed in communism but I was a strong socialist. I did not see any possibility of a socialist state, because I knew that the establishment would step in and crush it. I never understood why any man with a family, denied work, should let himself and his family go hungry. I always felt that it was the duty of a man to provide for his family and if he couldn't get enough food by honest means, he should take it.'

The great political debate of his childhood concerned the Boer War (1899–1902), a key conflict which saw the emergence of jingoism, Winston Churchill and concentration camps. People around Donohill were pro-Boer and Breen overheard their daily discussions concerning the war's progress.

Like most boys of his social class, Breen enjoyed a good primary education at the hands of teachers who, in addition to the British curriculum, taught the Irish language and the story of Ireland seen through the prisms of ancient mythology or more recent history. Fenians and other separatists took their place in a colourful pantheon alongside Cúchullain,* Oisín* and the Fianna.* The children heard a great deal about the Famine (1845)
,
with England's assumed role in it brought up at every opportunity.

The schoolboy Breen could never understand ‘why a million people were allowed to starve to death in Ireland in the Great Famine in an agricultural country, when Irish wheat and other foodstuffs were allowed out of the country. I wanted to take the people of Ireland out of serfdom. I did not want to enrich them but I wanted them to have a better way of life. I wanted to take the people out of the slums and bad living conditions and give them decent lives – lives as good as they would get anywhere else in the world.'

Most of the nationalist-minded primary teachers – later to play an important role in the emergence of the IRA – were members of the Tipperary-founded Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and of its companion organisation, the Gaelic League – a reasonably altruistic organisation dedicated to the revival of the Irish language.

The school in Donohill was an architecturally unimpressive affair, recalled by Breen as a, ‘drab two-storey building with no playground for the pupils.' Girls were educated upstairs, boys on the ground floor. One teacher in particular had a significant impact on Breen: a Kerryman called Charlie Walshe. Walshe, who was subsequently a Fianna Fáil TD and mayor of Dublin (as Cormac Breathnach), was employed by the Gaelic League to teach Irish in the rural districts. ‘He did relief work in several of the schools in our district,' Breen said. The stimulating and confrontational Charlie Walshe also taught Seán Treacy (vice-commandant, Third Tipperary Brigade IRA), Dinny Lacey (commandant, Third Tipperary Brigade, IRA Flying Column) and Seán Hogan (Third Tipperary Brigade, IRA Flying Column).

‘We learned about the Penal Laws, the systematic ruining of Irish trade, the elimination of our native language,' said Breen. ‘He told us about the ruthless manner in which Irish rebellion had been crushed. By the time we had passed from his class, we were no longer content to grow up “happy English children” as envisaged by the Board of Education.'

Another seditious travelling teacher who passed through the neighbourhood was Thomas Malone (aka Seán Forde) who would eventually return to that part of the world as an organiser from Volunteer GHQ and who would lead former pupils like Breen and Treacy into fierce battle.

Breen left school at the age of fourteen and did a number of farm labouring jobs before going to work as a linesman for the Great Southern Railway in 1911 when he was seventeen. This work brought him around the country and meant that he was out of Donohill at a time when his pal and neighbour, Seán Treacy, began organising the Irish Volunteers.*

Treacy's father, like Breen's, died young. This led to Treacy's family moving in with their maternal aunt, Mary Anne Allis. Allis was a hard-nosed small farmer who wanted Seán to concentrate on farming, which he was good at, and to avoid the covert militant circles towards which he was drawn. She regarded Breen as a bad influence on her nephew and, in later years, would refer to him as ‘Breen the Murderer'. She, understandably, hoped that Treacy would ‘make his way in the world'. Breen – who disliked her intensely – said she wanted Treacy ‘to work like a nigger on the small farm that they had and which could scarcely make a living for them.'

In 1911, Treacy, aged sixteen, joined the IRB and began attending Irish language classes at Eamon O'Duibhir's home in Ballagh; the two usually spoke to each other in Irish after that. Between 1914 and 1917, he continued to attend Irish classes at the Tipperary Technical School.

‘Seán was taller,' wrote Ernie O'Malley. ‘An easy smile or a long grin showed his teeth. Glasses gave him a quiet appearance; he had a good strong-thrusting chin. His humour was dry enough. He dealt with men quietly. I envied him his ease; yet he never allowed slackness to pass by.' Breen said that Treacy was, ‘away ahead of anything one might expect to meet in a country district. He had vision and to him nothing was impossible.' Another contemporary, Seán Horan, described Treacy as ‘a silent and also a sincere worker.'

Treacy was also a keen, if tone deaf, singer. One of his favourite songs, ‘Oró 'Sé do Bheatha 'Bhaile', concerned Grace O'Malley, the west of Ireland pirate queen, and it celebrated armed youth who would root the foreigner out of Ireland:

Tá Gráinne Mhaol ag teacht thar sáile,

Óglaigh armtha léi mar gharda;

Gaeil iad féin 's ní Gaill ná Spáinnigh,

'S cuirfid siad ruaig ar Ghallaibh.

Dan Breen once said that ‘Seán Treacy tried to form himself on the image of Michael O'Dwyer of Wicklow; the rebel who held out in the Wicklow hills after 1798. Treacy loved everything that was Gaelic. He spent much time studying the Irish language when he was young. And he fancied himself as a singer, although he had a voice like a crow. Often he nearly drove me insane listening to him trying to sing “Oró 'Sé do Bheatha 'Bhaile” but it sounded to me like “A Nation Once Again”!'

Breen's job as a linesman paid reasonably well, allowed him to see the country, familiarised him with the workings of the railway system, and meant he was stationed at Inchicore in Dublin for quite long periods of time. He witnessed at close quarters the 1914 Lock Out and the baton-wielding repression meted out to the striking workers. No matter where he was stationed, he kept an eye on developments back home.

‘Dan took a shine to Dublin, to city living, like many a country man before him,' said IRA man Seán Dowling. ‘When I got to know him it was apparent that he knew the place well, had clearly cycled and walked all over the city back when he was working at Inchicore. He set great store by the Dublin working-classes, regarded them as natural supporters of our cause. Treacy liked Dublin too, liked the trams and the cinemas, but Treacy always wanted to get home to Tipperary. Dan wanted to linger and, as it turned out, he ended up lingering in Dublin for good.'

‘The IRB circle to which we belonged was centred at Doon,' noted Breen. ‘There were very few people around our part of the country that could be relied upon and so we had to cycle eight or nine miles to attend those circle meetings. Packy Ryan of Doon was the centre of the circle and it was at Ryan's that I first met Seán Mac Dermott who, I believe, was on some kind of an organising mission around Munster. It may have been at Kilmallock because Packy Ryan also had a place there … We were only ordinary members and, being little more than boys, we were just looked upon as handy messengers and suchlike, so that we did not know about what was going on except what we could see for ourselves.'

At the time of the 1916 Rising, Breen was working on a line near Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, as part of a gang of 150 men. Out of that number, only he and one other man were militant separatists. ‘When I came home for Easter,' he said, ‘Treacy told me he expected a rising to take place on Easter Sunday but when the cancellation messages were received he told me about them and I went back to my work beyond Kilmallock … Having heard further messages of the Rising in Dublin I returned home again on Tuesday until the Friday of that week … he [Treacy] was away from home and, so we learned since, was cycling around from one centre to another trying to urge the Tipperary Volunteers to take action to support the fighting in Dublin.'

The collapse of the Rising, particularly Tipperary's insignificant role in it, confused and angered Treacy and Breen but strengthened their youthful resolve. When they'd studied the history of 1798, they'd wondered why the entire country had not risen up. They were sure that when
their
turn came, they'd strike out in a meaningful manner but, Breen said, ‘wrong orders and not knowing what to do kept us from taking part … We made up our minds then that when anything like that would happen again we would be part of it no matter what.'

In the aftermath of the Rising debacle, the Donohill revolutionaries whipped themselves up into a frenzied campaign of recruitment and organisation. A headquarters/meeting place was eventually established at Lisheen Grove, not far from Tipperary town.