Dan Breen and the IRA (3 page)

‘Hitherto we had looked to the townspeople as being more in touch with things and perhaps as countrymen we suffered some sense of inferiority,' said Breen. ‘Now however, for some reason, after the Rising the townspeople were more inclined to look to us and so conditions were reversed. Treacy and I went about to all the towns like Tipperary, Cahir and other places about there and urged the reorganisation of the Volunteers.'

Seán Horan
,
terribly demoralised by the failure of the Rising, ran into Treacy in Tipperary town. He'd left work with the intention of travelling to Dublin to fight but, on Easter Monday night, in Tipperary, he'd found out that there wasn't a hope of getting into the city.

‘Seán [Treacy] got to know my mind,' said Horan. ‘It was through Dan Breen that I met him. Before Seán and I parted that evening he invited me to Lisheen Grove, two and a half miles from Tipperary town … The Lisheen Grove officers decided to go to the outside parishes and get companies working. So Seán Treacy went to Mount Bruis. Dan Breen and I went to Solohead and Cappawhite. We paraded each company and when we had finished we went to Mount Bruis. When we met with Seán he was drilling about twenty ladies. I remarked to Seán, “What will you put the ladies to doing, Seán?” “Well,” said he, “they'll be put to something. They can carry dispatches”.'

The main Volunteer organisers in south Tipperary were Eamon O'Duibhir, Seán Treacy and Pierce McCan. Joost Augusteijn, in
From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare
, claims the RIC didn't detect evidence of the existence of Irish Volunteers in south Tipperary until the end of 1915: ‘By January 1916 the RIC … had become aware of 380 Irish Volunteers in five units … one in Ballagh under Eamon O'Dwyer, one under Pierce McCan around Cashel, one in Fethard, one in Clonmel under Frank Drohan and one near Tipperary town under Seán Treacy.' None of these men saw the coming revolution through to its conclusion. Treacy and McCan died, and Drohan and O'Duibhir eventually withdrew from the fray, dismayed by the realities of guerrilla warfare.

The RIC talked in their reports of a local farmer – O'Duibhir – who had contacts with Dublin and who was busy organising malcontents into some sort of separatist movement. O'Duibhir (1883–1963) was a burly, complex, good-humoured man valued throughout his area, busy putting the Sinn Féin policy of economic autonomy into practice. He sold insurance on behalf of Irish insurance companies, encouraging people who sought cover to withdraw their business from the then-dominant English firms. By 1916, O'Duibhir, a farmer/entrepreneur, more prosperous than most other leaders of the nascent south Tipperary IRA, was county centre for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). There were thirty-two such individuals in the country, one for each county. The county centre's job was to recruit suitable new members, to organise the spread of IRB branches throughout the county, and to encourage the infiltration of other “Irish Ireland” organisations by IRB members.

The IRB – a secret society disapproved of by the catholic church and by many republicans – was the lineal successor to the clandestine fenians. The fenians' 1867 rebellion had been a dismal failure, but surviving old fenians – like Roscarbery's O'Donovan Rossa and Tipperary's John O'Leary – had a profound influence on the 1916 leaders and on young IRA organisers like Breen and Treacy. Between 1908 and 1914, the IRB revived itself and was the chief organising force behind the 1916 Rising. It subsequently infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. Michael Collins became its leader in 1919. Their oath asserted:

‘In the presence of God, I, … , do solemnly swear that I will do my utmost to establish the independence of Ireland and that I will bear true allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the government of the Irish Republic and implicitly obey the constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and all my superior officers and that I will preserve inviolable the secrets of the organisation.'

It was Seán Treacy who administered this oath to Dan Breen. Breen later quit the IRB when they attempted to rein in his activities. Ernie O'Malley – never a member – afterwards accused the IRB of undermining the ideal of the republic.

O'Duibhir said that his interest in separatist thinking had been awakened early in the century by Irish language lessons in the
Weekly Freeman's Journal
. The learning of Irish, in chronic decline all over rural Ireland, suggested to thoughtful men like O'Duibhir that they belonged to a place which was culturally unlike England.

Through a locally organised Irish class he came to know a lot of like-minded individuals. In 1908, they started a Sinn Féin club in the parish. Politically and openly, these people eventually involved themselves in the anti-ranch campaign, the anti-conscription movement and in the broad range of farmers' concerns.

The November 1913 trip to Munster by IRB man Seán Mac Dermott – which had such a profound effect on Breen – is often mentioned as the event which triggered the start of covert paramilitary action in south Tipperary. He spoke at the Tivoli Hall in Tipperary town. Seán Fitzpatrick – later in the flying columns with Dinny Lacey and Dan Breen – talked of a speech which ‘aroused the dormant, but by no means dead, national spirit of the townspeople … a shot in the arm for Irish Irelanders amongst his audience.'

Through Gaelic League connections Eamon O'Duibhir had already met the passionate, intense, young Seán Treacy, busy organising Volunteers in Tipperary town – ten miles away from O'Duibhir's base at Ballagh. It fell to O'Duibhir – a natural leader, educator and organiser – to call a meeting in Ballagh, at the time of the MacDermott visit, at which an Irish National Volunteer company was formed. This company then assisted others in getting units going. Irish language classes arranged by O'Duibhir played a key part in recruiting men and women to parallel organisations like the Irish National Volunteers, the IRB and Sinn Féin. Thomas Ryan – eventually a member of the Second South Tipperary Flying Column under Seán Hogan – said that it was these classes which awakened his interest in Irish history and, by implication, since the two things are rarely separated, in Irish politics.

Joost Augusteijn says that by 1914 there were 2,000 Volunteers in south Tipperary.

In those early days Pierce McCan (1882–1919) was as important as Eamon O'Duibhir. McCan was rich, the son of wealthy catholics whose fortune had been made in Australia. The McCan family owned several homes and Pierce grew up on a 1,000 acre estate, complete with a mansion house residence, at Ballyowen, near Cashel. He became a progressive farmer whose methods were admired by his less prosperous neighbours. He formed a Volunteer company from the men working on his land and was able to train and drill them there clandestinely.

McCan, who was to be involved in nearly every nationalist organisation, was educated like an English gentleman. As a child he had a private tutor, Southendy, who was brought over from England. After that he was sent to Rockwell College and then Clongowes, as if his family was determined to send him on a grand tour of the best catholic boarding schools Ireland had to offer. In 1900, he visited France, before going to Denmark to look into Danish farming methods. By 1909 he was, like the entire revolutionary generation, caught up in Irish language classes. Love of the language caused him to holiday in the west of Ireland where he developed an affinity for the wild windy vistas of the Aran Islands and the highlands of Donegal.

Through the ubiquitous Gaelic League (by 1908, there were eighteen Gaelic League branches in Tipperary) McCan knew many IRB and revolutionary people in Dublin. In 1914, together with Frank Drohan and Rockwell College Irish teacher, Séamus O'Neill, McCan organised a Volunteer group in Clonmel. Perhaps because of his class background and because he had once shared a platform with Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, many thought that McCan was more of a Home Ruler than a Sinn Féiner but he was especially close to Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin.

When Redmond urged the Volunteers to join the British army and participate in the Great War – effectively signing the death warrant of the once-illustrious Parliamentary Party – the Volunteer movement split in September 1914. The vast majority supported Redmond and became the National Volunteer organisation. McCan refused to back Redmond and the Doon Volunteers were the only corps in Tipperary whose members refused to join the British army. ‘This was probably because Seán Treacy and Dan Breen were members of it,' suggests Tipperary historian, John Shelley.

When the greatly depleted Volunteers regrouped at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in October 1914 – with wary conspiratorial IRB figures like Bulmer Hobson, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott playing prominent roles – Pierce McCan and Eamon O'Duibhir led the small Tipperary delegation.

Two years later, during the 1916 Rising, McCan made every effort to bring the Tipperary Volunteers into the rebellion. He was arrested and sent from his patrician mansion to the gloomy Arbour Hill prison where he witnessed the execution and burial of men who were his friends and comrades.

In a memoir of his incarceration he described what he saw in the prison yard: ‘At one end a huge trench was dug … the full length of the end of the yard. A very small portion of the upper end of this grave, for grave it was, had been filled in. Under this filling lay the corpses of Pearse, MacDermott and the rest … who had been shot. Full boxes of quicklime were thrown on the ground nearby. There were a few empty ones there also, the contents of which had been doubtlessly thrown upon the dead bodies of my friends and fellow Volunteers of a few days ago.'

McCan was subsequently sent to Frongoch interment camp, a university for the revolution about to happen. When he got back to Tipperary the first thing he did was re-start Irish language classes. He played an active role in setting up branches of Sinn Féin in Clonmel, Rosegreen, Killenaule, Tipperary and Carrick-on-Suir.

By December 1917, he was encouraging boycotts against state institutions like crown courts and the RIC. He called on people to turn to republican alternatives and emphasised the ultimate necessity of violence.

On 19 May 1918, McCan was arrested for his part in the fabricated German Plot and jailed in England. He was one of the large number of Sinn Féin MPs elected in 1918 – his constituency was east Tipperary – who were unable to attend the meeting of the first dáil because they were incarcerated. In prison he contracted the flu bug then sweeping through Europe and died in March 1919. His funeral, a choreographed political affair, was one of the events which restored the fortunes of the embryonic IRA after Soloheadbeg. Michael Collins and Harry Boland* were just two of the republican luminaries who participated in the Dublin end of the funeral at the pro-cathedral – an occasion said to have been attended by 10,000 mourners.

In the years immediately before the War of Independence, young people in Ireland enjoyed new freedoms, both socially and politically. New ways of life were emerging all over Europe. The old order was collapsing, undermined by the traumas of the Great War. The men and women who fought the War of Independence enjoyed music, dancing, movies, late night shin-digs and situations in which three was a crowd. Many narratives of the Third Tipperary Brigade find them departing from dances at 4 a.m., having discussions in bars, leaving cinemas, or eagerly roaming the countryside – day and night.

James Malone, theoretically an Irish teacher in Tipperary in 1917, nurtured the cultural and social changes which went hand in hand with an emergent militancy. ‘I spent one night per week in each place,' he told Uinseann MacEoin. ‘There was an Irish class from eight to nine-thirty, a céilí from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty and I drilled the Volunteers for an hour after that. There were classes for the schoolchildren in the evenings. I spent the day travelling the countryside, trying to set up new branches or representing the Volunteers or the Brotherhood. Some branch held a big céilí every Sunday night, as a rule and in the fine weather there was a feis somewhere on a Sunday. Well known speakers from Dublin and from other places attended the feises for the purpose of exhorting the people.'

Patrick ‘Lacken' Ryan, a man subsequently remembered in memoirs by Ernie O'Malley and Dan Breen, described the early days of Volunteer organising: ‘On a night in the early summer of 1917 I attended a meeting which was held in a place called Downey's Barn at Cramps Castle, Fethard. This meeting was called for the purpose of organising an Irish Volunteer company in Fethard and district … The meeting itself was a small one, as for obvious reasons only a selected number of men were invited to attend. I should say, however, that there were about twenty men present, all of whom agreed to become members of the Volunteer organisation.'

Trustworthy men in inactive areas who were thought to be willing and able to start a company were approached. Joost Augusteijn discovered that the obvious starting point – when initiating a company or setting up a battalion – was often a relative.

The enrolment of Thomas Ryan from Ballylooby was a prime example of relatives recruiting one another. Ryan was related to Seán Treacy by marriage and was an obvious choice when Treacy was looking for a local contact to set up the Volunteers in his district. Ryan had always been involved with what might be regarded as ‘improving' activities. An accomplished athlete with the GAA, he played football for Tipperary at county level and was subsequently a member of the Tipperary team playing at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. At one stage, legend has it, he was offered £8 a week to play soccer for Glasgow Celtic. In 1914, he was captain of the local Irish National Volunteer company but, as a result of the split in the National Volunteers, was not involved in 1916.

‘Some time about April 1917 Seán Treacy made a few trips to the locality and suggested the organising of a Volunteer unit there,' said Ryan. ‘On his second visit to us, he gave us an outline of the organisation and generally encouraged us, pointing out what should be done and how to do it. As a result of Treacy's visit, the battalion was formed with Ned McGrath as the battalion commandant. I was vice-commandant. This was really the beginning of my career in the Volunteer movement. Following Treacy's instructions, we set to work from then on to organise companies in the surrounding parishes, to appoint officers for these and to direct their training.'

At the start of 1917 Eamon O'Duibhir had obtained a loan and bought Kilshenane House and farm, with a view to using it as a base for Gaelic League, Sinn Féin and Volunteer activities. During his Easter Week-induced internment in England he had met a Belfast man called Séamus Robinson who had trouble finding work after his release from prison. Robinson had played a considerable part in the Rising, having been in charge of the farthest outpost from the GPO on Sackville Street, holding the Hopkins and Hopkins shop which looked out over O'Connell Bridge. From that vantage, he was face to face with the full might of the British response to the GPO insurgency. His building was one of the last to be evacuated despite heavy British gunfire. O'Duibhir, in prison, noted Robinson's obvious sincerity and capability. After their release he invited the firm catholic to come and live at Kilshenane as an alleged farm labourer. In fact, Robinson's job was to help manage the Volunteers.

‘Robinson arrived some day in January 1917, in the midst of a snow storm,' said O'Duibhir. ‘He had with him a small black travelling bag that we got to know very well and to associate with him. As a farm worker he made up for his lack of knowledge by his honesty, hustle and zeal. He certainly worked as hard as he could and left nothing undone that he could do and in addition to all that he was a very gentlemanly man.'

In August 1917, O'Duibhir was arrested for the second time, sent to Cork jail, court-martialled and sentenced to two years. He was transferred to Mountjoy where he went on the first of many hunger strikes, protests which did permanent damage to his health: ‘Some of the principal men of the movement in Co. Tipperary were in prison with me, Seán Treacy and Séamus O'Neill in particular. As far as the organisation was concerned, I need not have worried, for Robinson, although new to the place and unknown, had stepped into the gap … we had a housekeeper at Kilshenane and now, when I was taken away and Robinson was left in charge, the P.P. of Knockavilla was not at all satisfied that it was proper to have this young lady in charge of the house with a crowd of young men, some of whom he did not know, in particular Robinson. I am sure Robinson must have been amused at the time over this, because certainly no more proper man could be found than the same Robinson.'

Conditionally released in November 1917, O'Duibhir made a moderate but threatening speech in front of a crowd of 200 people who met him at the railway station when he got home to Tipperary. He said that their collective idea was to make British rule in Ireland impossible and that he believed they would achieve this without firing a shot. If necessary, he went on, they would adopt active resistance.

This notion that the Volunteers could put ‘impossible pressure' on the British without resorting to
actual
violence was shared by other Volunteer leaders such as Cathal Brugha.

A few weeks later, the RIC recorded a more bellicose O'Duibhir in front of ninety people: ‘That the Volunteers policy today was the same as that for which the Manchester Martyrs died – complete separation from England – that the young men should train and make themselves efficient and ready to act their part when the time came. As surely it would come, as the men of Easter Week did. That no one should be afraid to die as there was nothing about it to be afraid of. That it was far easier to die on the battlefield than on the scaffold or in prison. That at the present time there was a great movement afoot to secure the independence of Ireland by “passive resistance” which was all very well in its way. But it was necessary that this movement should have the support of rifles and machine guns. That they had them already and were still getting them. That at the present time the only enemy they had was England … that they should take no notice of the laws i.e. the laws of a political character dealing with drilling and such like. They should not mind the police as no one was afraid of the police now … that they should ignore the law courts and set up their own arbitration tribunals … that the police if they were sensible men should now throw in their lot with their fellow countrymen in their struggle for freedom and not be on the side of the enemies of their country as heretofore.'

Patrick Ryan provided an account of O'Duibhir and Robinson's rifle-gathering techniques: ‘This soldier got off the train at Goold's Cross on furlough … We got in touch with Séamus Robinson who was in Kilshenane with Eamon O'Duibhir and I located this soldier. Eamon O'Duibhir was at home from gaol, so the two O'Keefes and I went with three lads from Knockaville to Kilshenane and they wanted to put disguises on their faces … Eamon O'Duibhir was inclined to tell them that it was too dangerous. Séamus Robinson went with us. We had a sort of an old .32 and one round of ammunition. Con Keefe had another gun and he had a strange round of ammunition. Séamus Robinson had a .22 Smith and Wesson automatic. This soldier home on furlough got married and he was more or less on his honeymoon in a house. They were all gone to bed. I went to one room. There were four huge bloody men in two beds. I took a squint but I couldn't see any sign of a rifle but I heard Con's voice … Con had it. I handled the rifle and the fellows in the room were made very aggressive by this. I told these fellows that I'd have to blow out their brains. I said we were soldiers of the Irish Republic doing our duty … Séamus was delighted with the gun and we came out onto the road. Séamus Robinson fired the rifle and when he had the gun in his hand I thought it would make an awful report to frighten them, but all it did was to make a ping.'

Another of the 1916 survivors, who'd once been a Donohill Gaelic League teacher, now re-established contact with Treacy and Breen and got to know Robinson. Thomas Malone (whose brother, James, was busy cycling all over the county attending dances, teaching Irish and training Volunteers) had just been elected to the army council with IRB support. He had been sent, early in 1917, to west Limerick – a GHQ man – to knock the local Volunteers into shape. Padraic O'Farrell describes Malone as being ‘an astoundingly successful leader'. Aware that the south Tipperary men were better organised and motivated than most other units, he took an interest in what they were up to.

Malone said: ‘They were a grand collection of men. Eamon O'Duibhir of Ballagh, Dan Breen, Ned Reilly, Séamus Robinson, Paddy Kinnane, Jimmy Leahy, Joe McLoughlin and Micksey Connell of Thurles, most of them to become well known in the fight afterwards … We planned to ambush and disarm four RIC guarding a boycotted farm. That was two years before Soloheadbeg. We lay in wait, Paddy Kinnane, Breen, Treacy and myself, but they did not come at the right time. We raided Molly's of Thurles and carried away eight boxes of gelignite.'

Early in 1918, O'Duibhir got the job of organiser of the Irish National Assurance Society, for which he recruited hundreds of agents and got a good business going. Kilshenane operated as a live-in semi-collective with Volunteers being given both employment and cover as farm workers or insurance salesmen.

O'Duibhir and his circle set about collecting arms throughout Munster, buying them in Dublin or grabbing them off the RIC whatever chance they got. Thomas Ryan held up a British officer using a carved wooden fake gun and got a Webley .45. Another time he stole a revolver from an RIC man who was courting in a park. Big houses were methodically raided, their hunting rifles seized in the name of the Irish Republic. This resulted in a motley – sometimes useless – arsenal, said by Ernie O'Malley to include British long and short Lee-Enfields, police carbines, Lee-Metfords, single shot Martini-Henris, Sniders, Remingtons, Winchesters, German, Turkish or Spanish Mausers, French Lebels, American Springfields, old flint muskets and muzzle-loading Queen Annes. There were also Webley, Colt, and Smith and Wesson revolvers. There were not too many machine guns but they had gunpowder, gelignite and dynamite.

In March 1918, a confrontation arose between the RIC and the Volunteers on the streets of Tipperary town. The cause of the confrontation was the trial, at Tipperary courthouse, of Seán Duffy and Tom Rodgers on charges of drilling a few days previously. Duffy, in particular, was a well-known local Volunteer.

Breen was in charge because Treacy was locked up in jail. A few days before the trial Breen sent out orders that as many men as possible from the battalion area were to mobilise at 11 a.m. in the market yard, Tipperary, on the day of the trial, carrying hurleys or stout sticks. About 200 men turned up.

‘The men were divided into two companies, Dan taking charge of one and I of the other,' said Maurice Crowe. ‘We marched to the courthouse, Dan's party leading and, on our approach, the RIC, under District Inspector Brownrigg, drew a cordon across the road between St Michael's church and the courthouse gate. Dan halted his company near the cordon and my party halted at St Michael's Road, opposite the church.'

The two men began to drill their Volunteers. Since Rodgers and Duffy were being tried on drilling offences, this was an overtly political action.

‘The district inspector asked us to stop drilling,' continued Crowe. ‘We refused, so the RIC got an order to draw sticks and at this time it looked as if there would be a clash. But the District Inspector saw that the Volunteers were determined and under perfect discipline. The police put back their batons and sent for the military.

‘Our scouts gave warning of the approach of the military. Dan immediately gave the order to march and we proceeded down St Michael's Road for some distance and halted. The RIC laughed as they thought we had taken to flight, but they were soon to find out otherwise; instead we held a council of war.

‘The military, armed with rifles, had by now arrived and took up positions in Maguire's (stonecutters) Yard opposite the courthouse, some in the courthouse yard, others above and below the courthouse in St Michael's Street. We had by this time divided our whole party into four sections and, at a blast of the whistle from Dan Breen, we came back on the double.

‘Dinny Lacey took charge of one of the new sections. Lacey got round to the back of the courthouse. Paddy Deere, who took charge of the other, took up a position above the courthouse, near the Convent Cross. My party went to the back of Maguire's Yard and Dan Breen took up his old position, thereby surrounding the RIC and the military.'

Crowe recalled that the officer in charge had a sense of humour and laughed at being cornered. The Volunteers went into the courthouse and made ‘a laughing stock' of proceedings. When the case was over they marched away from the courthouse to the local market yard where they were dismissed by Breen.