Important sentiments for all:
http://www.llgc.org.uk/ymgyrchu/Pleidleisio/lleiafrifol/WRM/PLLLWR05-eTEXT.htm
WELSH REPUBLICAN MANIFESTO
STATEMENT OF POLICY FOR THE WELSH REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT
No movement that seeks to assert the fundamental historic and moral right of the Welsh Nation to freedom and independence can acknowledge any ties whether real or formal which tend directly or indirectly to bind Wales and her people in subjection to English or any external sovereign institutions. Wales is a nation and her loyalty is to herself, as her sovereignty is in herself and in her historic and undivided nationhood. We cannot, consequently, accept allegiance to the English Crown as a condition imposed upon or attached to our freedom and independence. Furthermore, the Welsh nation is essentially a community of the common people (y werin bobl). Therefore the movement that is to enshrine the spirit of our liberation and express and conduct the struggle for freedom must aim at establishing a Republic of Wales, which will be the symbol of our independence as a nation and of the democratic community of our people.
The people, that is, the so called common people, everywhere are striving towards a fuller and more fundamental democratic order based upon the recognition of the political, social and economic equality of all men, an order in which men and women shall enjoy a larger freedom and in which nations and national life will be fully recognised. The Welsh national movement must not only accept this as its basic outlook, but must become its interpreter and guiding spirit. To succeed in this mission the Welsh national movement must renounce the political forms, social canons and economic precepts associated with the decaying and discredited aristocratic-imperialist civilization, of which the English Empire is one of the best examples, and of which the English Crown is its classic emblem and protector. That civilization all over the world is under challenge from two directions, namely, from nations which are becoming conscious of their nationhood, and at the same time from men and women who are becoming increasingly conscious of the commonalty of all humanity. In a real democratic society, as distinguished from the formal democracy of our time, there are no gradations of rights, with larger rights for some and lesser right for others, either as between men in their society and work, or as between nations and peoples. The doctrine of social stratification with its superior and inferior classes, with its privileged and unprivileged and with its higher and lower orders must be renounced and its institutions abolished. The Welsh national movement of liberation must, therefore, of necessity be a revolutionary movement aiming at the overthrow of all those powers which hold men and nations in political or social or economic servitude. In our progress towards the goal of our freedom as a nation and a people a new social and moral synthesis will be created which will at once be the assurance and the expression of a new civilization. We feel that an acceptance of the forms and symbols of the old will effectively defeat the reality and substance of the new civilization.
We would, consequently, set forth as our aims and objectives for a free and independent Wales and declare as follows:
I. That Wales must be a sovereign democratic Republic subject only to such authority as it may accept or subscribe to as a member of the community of free nations.
2. That the King of England whether in person as liege lord or through any constitutional agency as monarch shall have no jurisdiction in or dominion over Wales or any person in Wales.
3. That no Welshman or Welsh woman shall owe allegiance to or be the subject of any liege lord or any other person.
4. That there shall be in Wales no hereditary or other titles or any other form of political or social or economic prerogatives or distinctions nor any privileges which are not shared or capable of being shared by all.
5. The people of Wales shall be a free people in a free country and not subject to any servitudes whether political, social or economic and shall enjoy in their society a status of unqualified equality. All class distinctions whether based on claims of birth or property shall be abolished.
6. The Republic of Wales shall be founded upon the unreserved recognition of the dignity and worth of the human personality and shall guarantee to the people of Wales without distinction the unrestricted rights of the moral person in order to secure and promote the fullest development of the individual person and of the national life.
7. It shall be the aim of the Republic of Wales to bring to consummation the idea of the democratic society in all fields of human activity and interest and establish the principle of co-operation as the democratic basis of our economy in the form of co-operative organisations or guilds in which the work, the responsibilities and the fruits shall be shared by all who work.
8. To the same end ownership shall be by and for use only. All the archaic forms of land tenure shall be abolished and land, houses and all other properties shall vest in those who for living purposes or for work use them either individually or in co-operation as co-owners.
9. The Welsh language as the native language of the Welsh people shall be the first and official language of the Republic of Wales but in the circumstances which have resulted in Wales through English rule the English language shall be used as a second language and as such shall be officially recognised.
10. It shall be a primary aim of the Republic of Wales to increase the acreage of Welsh land under food production and to establish a balanced Welsh economy by means of a vigorous policy of land settlement and development of rural trades and industries.
11. The Republic of Wales shall live in close association with all the other Celtic peoples and shall endeavour in every way to co-operate fully with all other nations and particularly with its near neighbours in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England.
12. The Republic of Wales must have and take its place and play its part in the international community of nations.
Published by The Welsh Republican Movement at Glaslwyn, Cwmoernant, Carmarthen, and printed by Gee & Son, Ltd., Denbigh.Price 2d.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Sean Garland, Operation Harvest, and Brookeborough
At the following page there's an excellent two-part interview with Sean Garland in which he describes his experiences in the IRA during the 50's and during Operation Harvest (including the attack on Brookeborough- see the last quarter of Part 1)
http://www.workerspartyireland.net/history.html
(Sorry there isn't a link for interview specifically)
http://www.workerspartyireland.net/history.html
(Sorry there isn't a link for interview specifically)
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Various obits (Jim Columb, Jim Woll, Paddy Harney)
The following are some obituaries of 50's men who died in the late 90's from the RSF paper "Saoirse."
Jim Columb
Republicans were deeply grieved at the death on March 28 in the Mater Hospital, Dublin of Jim Columb (65), a veteran of the 1956-62 Campaign in the Six Occupied Counties. He had been in failing health for some time.
A native of Dernaferst, Gowna, Co Cavan, Jim lived and worked in Dublin for the latter part of his life. He is remembered with strong affection by all Republicans who were in contact with him down the years.He himself was an unswerving and no-nonsense Republican and a soldier in the very best sense who commanded respect at all times.
At the removal to St Colmcille’s Church, Aughnacliffe, Co Longford on March 29 the coffin was draped in the Irish Tricolour. There was a huge turn-out of the local community together with Republicans from Longford and surrounding counties.
Among the gifts presented during Mass the next morning were his fishing rod and a Long Kesh harp. Hymns sung in Irish included Ag Críost an Síol and Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire.
Councillor Seán Lynch, Aughnacliffe, presided at the graveside ceremony in the adjoining cemetery. He spoke highly of Jim Columb whom he had known all his life. He and Jim went to school together at Polladoey NS and were in the same class. They had joined the Republican Movement together in the 1950s.
“Jim Columb was,” he said, “above all else a Republican soldier. He remained loyal and true to the end with the courage of Cúchulainn and the determination of Cathal Brugha.”
Éamon Larkin, South Armagh represented An Ard Chomhairle, Republican Sinn Féin and the attendance included Republicans from North Louth and South Armagh who were comrades and friends of Jim Columb.
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh in his oration quoted Brendan Behan’s poem The Dead March Past (in an Easter commemoration parade). Jim Columb was very proud to have shouldered Behan’s coffin when he was given a Republican funeral in 1964.
A highly-skilled plasterer by trade, Jim was noted as a good worker. During his time in Dublin he showed himself a caring human being by visiting any local people while in hospital there and by helping others to find work and arrange accommodation in the city.
A report received by the GHQ Staff officer in charge of training in the western and midland counties in 1956 indicated that “Volunteer Columb shows exceptional determination and fighting spirit and is a natural soldier”.
As was to be expected he was engaged in active service in 1957 against the British armed Forces of Occupation in south Fermanagh. Eventually he was arrested with four other Cavan men on the Monaghan side of the Fermanagh border and sentenced to six months imprisonment for “refusing to answer questions”.
Jim refused to recognise the court and in Mountjoy joined immediately in a hunger strike then in progress for political status which had been withdrawn. Ten days later the strike ended in total success. Removed to the Curragh Concentration Camp on expiration of sentence. Jim took part in the mass escape of December 1958 but was shot in the knee and recaptured.
On release in 1959 he carried on as an active Republican and when the Workers’ Party/Democratic Left broke away in 1969 he rejected them. Right through the 1970s and early 1980s until ill-health overtook him he was active in a support capacity in the South Armagh-North Lough Border with Liam Fagan of Ravensdale and Séamus Heuston of Keady, both of whom have now passed on.
From 1986 on he stood by Republican Sinn Féin, Cumann na mBan, Fianna Éireann and the Continuity IRA. There was no easy road or no shortcuts to freedom, he would contend.
A permanent peace, so earnestly desired by all, would come when the British armed forces evacuated Ireland. The British government would leave our country only when compelled to do so, was his stance.
Jim Columb’s father, Johnny, had served in the Longford Brigade, IRA against the Black-and-Tans and he himself had given service all his life in good measure.
“Leaba i measc na bhFíníní go raibh aige de shíor.” Sympathy is expressed to his sisters Anna (Minnesota), Maureen (Donegal), brothers Mel (Gowna), Seán (New York), Frank (Dublin) and Fintan (Manchester).
Among the many floral tributes was one from the US in the names of Peter Quinn, Longford, Pat McGirl, Leitrim, Frank Skuse, Cork and Seán Cronin, Kerry — all of them comrades from the 1950s.
Contents
Jim Woll
On March 12, 1998 Jim Woll of Cloyne, Co Cork passed to his eternal reward in the Mercy Hospital, Cork. On March 14 his remains were removed from his daughter Rosaleen’s house to Cloyne Church, with full Republican honours. The guard of honour which accompanied Jim’s remains to the church was drawn from East Cork Graves Association and old comrades and was led by a lone piper.
Jim’s funeral Mass was on Sunday March 15. Chief celebrant of the Mass was Father Fitzgerald accompanied by personal friends of Jim’s, among whom were Fathers’ Herlihy and Slattery.
In a homily Father Fitzgerald described Jim as a warm-hearted person who was always worried about others. Jim would always ask about others who were sick in the area and never complained about his own illness. He was also a loving father and grandfather. Fr Fitzgerald also said that once Jim’s mind was made up that was it. He said he had very strong views on the national issue and these views also have to be respected.
After Mass accompanied by an East Cork Graves Guard of Honour and preceded by a lone piper, his remains were taken a short distance to the family grave in the adjoining cemetery. After blessing and prayers, his coffin was lowered into the grave by personal friends of his.
A decade of the rosary as Gaeilge was followed by the playing of the last post by Pat Varian on the bugle. Norman O’Rourke finished off proceedings when he played a lament on the Pipes.
It has to be said that the large gathering of mourners behaved impeccably, as one could hear the proverbial pin drop such was the quietness and dignity during the proceedings. It was surely a mark of the respect that the people of his beloved Cloyne and District and indeed all over Cork held for Jim.
Jim Wall was involved in Republican activities from the 1930’s right up to shortly before his death.
The 1940s found Jim in The Curragh concentration camp, where he spent a number of years. Conditions could be described as atrocious, but he emerged in the mid-1940s more committed than ever. Later he became the owner/driver in his own lorry business.
Again he risked all. In 1954 Armagh Barracks was stripped of all the contents of its armoury. The booty was safely delivered by Jim’s V8 truck. A song entitled My little V8 truck was composed at the time to celebrate the event. No need to add who owned and drove same. Had the Omagh raid been successful some months later, Jim was ready to deliver the captured arms. Many Republicans travelled in this lorry to camps preparing for the 1956-1962 campaign. When the time came they travelled North in the luxury of self same truck.
While the 1960s were relatively quite, Jim’s lorry was always an instant platform for speakers at the parades or meetings, especially for the Boys of Clonmult and the Manchester Martyrs Commemorations locally.
At this time of his life he became IO for the Republicans in East Cork. Even this was to bear fruit in later years as information he gathered, on two occasions, foiled planned ambushes on local Republicans.
In the 1970s he was again in the thick of things. Suffice to say he put his life, freedom and business on the line on a lot more than one occasion. The 1980s were only a little less hectic.
In the 1990s he became Chairman of the reconstructed East Cork Graves Association. It was as if he knew that he only had a limited amount of time to do all that was needed to the graves and monuments in the area. He was ruthlessly efficient in getting his work done. Jim was helped by fellow members in collecting money and running Wolfe Tones concerts.
These concerts were hosted to raise the considerable sums of money needed to totally refurbish the Republican plot in Midleton. Most of the Republican monuments in the area were in addition cleaned and repointed .
There is only one monument for Jim and it is a 32-County Republic, nothing less. Ní bheidh a leithéid againn arís.
On the business side he was a great time keeper and worked like a slave, indeed only part of his exploits would fill this paper. “Wollway” was what his business went by. It was a unique achievement to deliver four loads of sugarbeet to Mallow from East Cork in a day, at a time when all beet had to be hand picked. Once I heard him remark that “those bags are a bit small, it takes too long to fill the lorry”. “Those bags” were from 16-20 stone each, filled with wheat. Hoping that this gives people a feel for Jim’s attitude to life.
His life could be summed up Dia, Domhain agus a Chlann. Condolences are extended to his daughter, Rosaleen, son Séamas and his grandchildren, James, Stephanie, Raymond, Claire and Tanya and other relatives and his many friends on their loss.
Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a anam dílís.
Paddy Harney
Republicans were deeply grieved by the death in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin on March 14 of life-long Republican Paddy Harney of Athlone.
There was a huge turn-out at the removal from his home at Cloonrullay Beálnamullia, Co Roscommon to Drum Church, Athlone. The coffin was draped in the Tricolour and Guard of Honour of Republican Sinn Féin comrades escorted the hearse.
A piper and a concert flautist played during Mass next morning and also accompanied the funeral to the local cemetery. Seosamh Ó Maoileoin, Co na h-Iar-mhí led the immense attendance in a decade of the Rosary in Irish.
“Paddy Harney, affectionately called Packey, was an honourable and uncompromising Republican whose principled stand all his life involved much sacrifice for himself and his family”, said Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, President, Republican Sinn Féin at his graveside in Drum cemetery, Athlone on March 16.
He went on; “Packey joined the Athlone Unit of the IRA in the early 1950s while he was still in his twenties. After returning from the funeral of Seán Sabhat in Limerick in January 1957 he was arrested for taking part in a Guard of Honour at the funeral of veteran Republican Paddy Givern of Monksland, Athlone.
“He was sentenced to three months imprisonment in the political wing of Mountjoy jail. On his release he found his employment as a railway man with CIE taken from him.
“Three months later again he was taken in the internment swoop of July 1957 and held without trial in the Curragh Concentration Camp.
“He had but to sign a form undertaking to secure immediate release and the return of his job with CIE.
“Packey refused and he and his wife Teresa and four young children suffered much distress and privation as a result.
“A year and three months later he was released unconditionally and resumed activities with Republican Sinn Fén. He found work in Dublin, returning to Athlone at weekends, and after some years his job as a railway man was restored to him.
“In the late 1960s he was among those who set up a public meeting locally for Civil Rights leaders from the Six Counties. Later he assisted families suffering distress and helped refugees from the North.
..........
Mourners at the funeral re-called how the local parish priest attempted to have Teresa pressurise Paddy to sign the form while he was in the Curragh.
“His first duty is to his wife and family”, said the PP.
“No”, replied Teresa, “his first duty is to God and his country.”
End of encounter.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis cróga.
Jim Columb
Republicans were deeply grieved at the death on March 28 in the Mater Hospital, Dublin of Jim Columb (65), a veteran of the 1956-62 Campaign in the Six Occupied Counties. He had been in failing health for some time.
A native of Dernaferst, Gowna, Co Cavan, Jim lived and worked in Dublin for the latter part of his life. He is remembered with strong affection by all Republicans who were in contact with him down the years.He himself was an unswerving and no-nonsense Republican and a soldier in the very best sense who commanded respect at all times.
At the removal to St Colmcille’s Church, Aughnacliffe, Co Longford on March 29 the coffin was draped in the Irish Tricolour. There was a huge turn-out of the local community together with Republicans from Longford and surrounding counties.
Among the gifts presented during Mass the next morning were his fishing rod and a Long Kesh harp. Hymns sung in Irish included Ag Críost an Síol and Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire.
Councillor Seán Lynch, Aughnacliffe, presided at the graveside ceremony in the adjoining cemetery. He spoke highly of Jim Columb whom he had known all his life. He and Jim went to school together at Polladoey NS and were in the same class. They had joined the Republican Movement together in the 1950s.
“Jim Columb was,” he said, “above all else a Republican soldier. He remained loyal and true to the end with the courage of Cúchulainn and the determination of Cathal Brugha.”
Éamon Larkin, South Armagh represented An Ard Chomhairle, Republican Sinn Féin and the attendance included Republicans from North Louth and South Armagh who were comrades and friends of Jim Columb.
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh in his oration quoted Brendan Behan’s poem The Dead March Past (in an Easter commemoration parade). Jim Columb was very proud to have shouldered Behan’s coffin when he was given a Republican funeral in 1964.
A highly-skilled plasterer by trade, Jim was noted as a good worker. During his time in Dublin he showed himself a caring human being by visiting any local people while in hospital there and by helping others to find work and arrange accommodation in the city.
A report received by the GHQ Staff officer in charge of training in the western and midland counties in 1956 indicated that “Volunteer Columb shows exceptional determination and fighting spirit and is a natural soldier”.
As was to be expected he was engaged in active service in 1957 against the British armed Forces of Occupation in south Fermanagh. Eventually he was arrested with four other Cavan men on the Monaghan side of the Fermanagh border and sentenced to six months imprisonment for “refusing to answer questions”.
Jim refused to recognise the court and in Mountjoy joined immediately in a hunger strike then in progress for political status which had been withdrawn. Ten days later the strike ended in total success. Removed to the Curragh Concentration Camp on expiration of sentence. Jim took part in the mass escape of December 1958 but was shot in the knee and recaptured.
On release in 1959 he carried on as an active Republican and when the Workers’ Party/Democratic Left broke away in 1969 he rejected them. Right through the 1970s and early 1980s until ill-health overtook him he was active in a support capacity in the South Armagh-North Lough Border with Liam Fagan of Ravensdale and Séamus Heuston of Keady, both of whom have now passed on.
From 1986 on he stood by Republican Sinn Féin, Cumann na mBan, Fianna Éireann and the Continuity IRA. There was no easy road or no shortcuts to freedom, he would contend.
A permanent peace, so earnestly desired by all, would come when the British armed forces evacuated Ireland. The British government would leave our country only when compelled to do so, was his stance.
Jim Columb’s father, Johnny, had served in the Longford Brigade, IRA against the Black-and-Tans and he himself had given service all his life in good measure.
“Leaba i measc na bhFíníní go raibh aige de shíor.” Sympathy is expressed to his sisters Anna (Minnesota), Maureen (Donegal), brothers Mel (Gowna), Seán (New York), Frank (Dublin) and Fintan (Manchester).
Among the many floral tributes was one from the US in the names of Peter Quinn, Longford, Pat McGirl, Leitrim, Frank Skuse, Cork and Seán Cronin, Kerry — all of them comrades from the 1950s.
Contents
Jim Woll
On March 12, 1998 Jim Woll of Cloyne, Co Cork passed to his eternal reward in the Mercy Hospital, Cork. On March 14 his remains were removed from his daughter Rosaleen’s house to Cloyne Church, with full Republican honours. The guard of honour which accompanied Jim’s remains to the church was drawn from East Cork Graves Association and old comrades and was led by a lone piper.
Jim’s funeral Mass was on Sunday March 15. Chief celebrant of the Mass was Father Fitzgerald accompanied by personal friends of Jim’s, among whom were Fathers’ Herlihy and Slattery.
In a homily Father Fitzgerald described Jim as a warm-hearted person who was always worried about others. Jim would always ask about others who were sick in the area and never complained about his own illness. He was also a loving father and grandfather. Fr Fitzgerald also said that once Jim’s mind was made up that was it. He said he had very strong views on the national issue and these views also have to be respected.
After Mass accompanied by an East Cork Graves Guard of Honour and preceded by a lone piper, his remains were taken a short distance to the family grave in the adjoining cemetery. After blessing and prayers, his coffin was lowered into the grave by personal friends of his.
A decade of the rosary as Gaeilge was followed by the playing of the last post by Pat Varian on the bugle. Norman O’Rourke finished off proceedings when he played a lament on the Pipes.
It has to be said that the large gathering of mourners behaved impeccably, as one could hear the proverbial pin drop such was the quietness and dignity during the proceedings. It was surely a mark of the respect that the people of his beloved Cloyne and District and indeed all over Cork held for Jim.
Jim Wall was involved in Republican activities from the 1930’s right up to shortly before his death.
The 1940s found Jim in The Curragh concentration camp, where he spent a number of years. Conditions could be described as atrocious, but he emerged in the mid-1940s more committed than ever. Later he became the owner/driver in his own lorry business.
Again he risked all. In 1954 Armagh Barracks was stripped of all the contents of its armoury. The booty was safely delivered by Jim’s V8 truck. A song entitled My little V8 truck was composed at the time to celebrate the event. No need to add who owned and drove same. Had the Omagh raid been successful some months later, Jim was ready to deliver the captured arms. Many Republicans travelled in this lorry to camps preparing for the 1956-1962 campaign. When the time came they travelled North in the luxury of self same truck.
While the 1960s were relatively quite, Jim’s lorry was always an instant platform for speakers at the parades or meetings, especially for the Boys of Clonmult and the Manchester Martyrs Commemorations locally.
At this time of his life he became IO for the Republicans in East Cork. Even this was to bear fruit in later years as information he gathered, on two occasions, foiled planned ambushes on local Republicans.
In the 1970s he was again in the thick of things. Suffice to say he put his life, freedom and business on the line on a lot more than one occasion. The 1980s were only a little less hectic.
In the 1990s he became Chairman of the reconstructed East Cork Graves Association. It was as if he knew that he only had a limited amount of time to do all that was needed to the graves and monuments in the area. He was ruthlessly efficient in getting his work done. Jim was helped by fellow members in collecting money and running Wolfe Tones concerts.
These concerts were hosted to raise the considerable sums of money needed to totally refurbish the Republican plot in Midleton. Most of the Republican monuments in the area were in addition cleaned and repointed .
There is only one monument for Jim and it is a 32-County Republic, nothing less. Ní bheidh a leithéid againn arís.
On the business side he was a great time keeper and worked like a slave, indeed only part of his exploits would fill this paper. “Wollway” was what his business went by. It was a unique achievement to deliver four loads of sugarbeet to Mallow from East Cork in a day, at a time when all beet had to be hand picked. Once I heard him remark that “those bags are a bit small, it takes too long to fill the lorry”. “Those bags” were from 16-20 stone each, filled with wheat. Hoping that this gives people a feel for Jim’s attitude to life.
His life could be summed up Dia, Domhain agus a Chlann. Condolences are extended to his daughter, Rosaleen, son Séamas and his grandchildren, James, Stephanie, Raymond, Claire and Tanya and other relatives and his many friends on their loss.
Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a anam dílís.
Paddy Harney
Republicans were deeply grieved by the death in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin on March 14 of life-long Republican Paddy Harney of Athlone.
There was a huge turn-out at the removal from his home at Cloonrullay Beálnamullia, Co Roscommon to Drum Church, Athlone. The coffin was draped in the Tricolour and Guard of Honour of Republican Sinn Féin comrades escorted the hearse.
A piper and a concert flautist played during Mass next morning and also accompanied the funeral to the local cemetery. Seosamh Ó Maoileoin, Co na h-Iar-mhí led the immense attendance in a decade of the Rosary in Irish.
“Paddy Harney, affectionately called Packey, was an honourable and uncompromising Republican whose principled stand all his life involved much sacrifice for himself and his family”, said Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, President, Republican Sinn Féin at his graveside in Drum cemetery, Athlone on March 16.
He went on; “Packey joined the Athlone Unit of the IRA in the early 1950s while he was still in his twenties. After returning from the funeral of Seán Sabhat in Limerick in January 1957 he was arrested for taking part in a Guard of Honour at the funeral of veteran Republican Paddy Givern of Monksland, Athlone.
“He was sentenced to three months imprisonment in the political wing of Mountjoy jail. On his release he found his employment as a railway man with CIE taken from him.
“Three months later again he was taken in the internment swoop of July 1957 and held without trial in the Curragh Concentration Camp.
“He had but to sign a form undertaking to secure immediate release and the return of his job with CIE.
“Packey refused and he and his wife Teresa and four young children suffered much distress and privation as a result.
“A year and three months later he was released unconditionally and resumed activities with Republican Sinn Fén. He found work in Dublin, returning to Athlone at weekends, and after some years his job as a railway man was restored to him.
“In the late 1960s he was among those who set up a public meeting locally for Civil Rights leaders from the Six Counties. Later he assisted families suffering distress and helped refugees from the North.
..........
Mourners at the funeral re-called how the local parish priest attempted to have Teresa pressurise Paddy to sign the form while he was in the Curragh.
“His first duty is to his wife and family”, said the PP.
“No”, replied Teresa, “his first duty is to God and his country.”
End of encounter.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis cróga.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Sean South of Garryowen
Sean South of Garryowen
By Seams O Dufaigh
Sad are the homes round Garryowen
Since long lost their joy and pride
And the banshee cry links every vale
Around the Shannon side
That city of the ancient walls
The broken treaty stone,
Undying fame surrounds your name,
Sean South from Garryowen
T'was on a dreary New Years Eve
As the shades of night came down
A lorry load of volunteers approached the border town
There were men from Dublin and from Cork, Fermanagh and Tyrone
And the leader was a Limerick man
Sean South from Garryowen
As they moved along the street
Up to the barracks door
They scorned the danger they might meet
The fate that lay instore
They were fighting for old Ireland's cause
To claim their very own
And the foremost of that gallant band
Was South from Garryowen
But the sergeant foiled their daring plan
He spied them trough the door
From Sten guns and from rifles
A hail of death did pour
And when that awful night had passed
Two men lay cold as stone
There was one from near the border town.
And one from Garryowen
No more will he hear the seagull's cry
Over the murmurring Shannon tide
For he fell beneath a Northern sky
Brave Hanlon by his side
They have gone to join that gallant band
Of Plunkett, Pearse and Tone
A martyr for old Ireland
Sean South from Garryowen
May God reward those gallant men,
May heaven be their home
In Brookburogh Town, where they were shot down
In a cabin they lay cold
They never feared the R.U.C.,
Or the B men on patrol
O'Hanlon from the border
And South from Garryowen
(There are several inaccuracies in the song, which was written shortly after the event. 1) He was not from Garyowen, though its a good poetic term and 2) he was not the leader of the column, the then-unknown Sean Garland was. Details aside it well captured the spirit that roused the nation behind the new martyrs.)
(Photo: Last cartoon penned by Sean South shortly before his death. Apologies for blur, and GRMA to GB for sharing)
By Seams O Dufaigh
Sad are the homes round Garryowen
Since long lost their joy and pride
And the banshee cry links every vale
Around the Shannon side
That city of the ancient walls
The broken treaty stone,
Undying fame surrounds your name,
Sean South from Garryowen
T'was on a dreary New Years Eve
As the shades of night came down
A lorry load of volunteers approached the border town
There were men from Dublin and from Cork, Fermanagh and Tyrone
And the leader was a Limerick man
Sean South from Garryowen
As they moved along the street
Up to the barracks door
They scorned the danger they might meet
The fate that lay instore
They were fighting for old Ireland's cause
To claim their very own
And the foremost of that gallant band
Was South from Garryowen
But the sergeant foiled their daring plan
He spied them trough the door
From Sten guns and from rifles
A hail of death did pour
And when that awful night had passed
Two men lay cold as stone
There was one from near the border town.
And one from Garryowen
No more will he hear the seagull's cry
Over the murmurring Shannon tide
For he fell beneath a Northern sky
Brave Hanlon by his side
They have gone to join that gallant band
Of Plunkett, Pearse and Tone
A martyr for old Ireland
Sean South from Garryowen
May God reward those gallant men,
May heaven be their home
In Brookburogh Town, where they were shot down
In a cabin they lay cold
They never feared the R.U.C.,
Or the B men on patrol
O'Hanlon from the border
And South from Garryowen
(There are several inaccuracies in the song, which was written shortly after the event. 1) He was not from Garyowen, though its a good poetic term and 2) he was not the leader of the column, the then-unknown Sean Garland was. Details aside it well captured the spirit that roused the nation behind the new martyrs.)
(Photo: Last cartoon penned by Sean South shortly before his death. Apologies for blur, and GRMA to GB for sharing)
"The Patriot Game" - Fergal O'Hanlon
The Patriot Game
By Dominic Behan
Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.
My name is O'Hanlon, and I've just turned sixteen.
My home is in Monaghan, and where I was weaned
I learned all my life cruel England's to blame,
So now I am part of the patriot game.
This Ireland of ours has too long been half free.
Six counties lie under John Bull's tyranny.
But still De Valera is greatly to blame
For shirking his part in the Patriot game.
They told me how Connolly was shot in his chair,
His wounds from the fighting all bloody and bare.
His fine body twisted, all battered and lame
They soon made me part of the patriot game.
It's nearly two years since I wandered away
With the local battalion of the bold IRA,
For I read of our heroes, and wanted the same
To play out my part in the patriot game.
I don't mind a bit if I shoot down police
They are lackeys for war never guardians of peace
And yet at deserters I'm never let aim
The rebels who sold out the patriot game*
And now as I lie here, my body all holes
I think of those traitors who bargained in souls
And I wish that my rifle had given the same
To those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.
Dominic Behan himself sings it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6K1ECpdPws&feature=related
*- This verse almost certainly reflects the personal views of Behan (a working class Dubliner) rather than near-sainted O'Hanlon's. Along with the one about Connolly, and De Valera, it is usually left out. The result is a more anti-war lament, rather than the clearly republican song Dominic intended it to be.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Volunteer Sean O Cheallachain (Cork)
This past June saw the death of Border Campaign veteran Vol Sean O Cheallachain (Callahan) of the Cork Brigade.
Sean took part in the raid on Omagh Barracks in 1954, but was among group that became separated from the column in the ensuing fray. He was arrested along with 7 others (including 2 other Cork men) and given ten years in Belfast Gaol. During the trial he declared from the dock "God will reward me for service to my country and my place in the IRA will be filled tenfold." After his release in 61 he rose to become the O/c of the IRA in Cork.
He died on June 27th 2013. Fellow Omagh prisoner Tom Mitchell gave the oration at his funeral.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Edentubber 2013 Oration
The text of the oration at this year's Edentubber commemoration by Francis O'Donaghue, a Border Campaign volunteer. Quite a few surviving Harvest campaign veterans were in attendance.
First posted at cedarlounge.wordpress.com
Sunday, December 1, 2013
A Letter from Brendan Behan (1954)
After Omagh Barracks raid, Brendan Behan wrote this letter to the Editor of "The Dublin Evening Mail" expressing his thoughts about the way in which the press misportrayed the op eration and the 8 volunteers arrested in the wake of the raid.
(Taken from page 59 of "The Letters of Brendan Behan.")
3rd December, 1954
Sir- I should like to point out to some of your correspondents that:
(1) The IRA is not a sectarian organization.
(2) The district in which the raid was carried out was obviously not enemy territory as far as the raiders were concerned, for the men accused of it were greeted by such demonstrations of approval by the local populace, and their captors showered with so much abuse that, according to the newspaper reports, the streets of Omagh are now cleared before the treason felons-elect or British military, or police come within miles of the court.
(3) I don't know whether these men are the ones who raided Omagh Barracks, but they have as good a right, who ever did to try the old method of physical force in getting rid of England as the prudent members have to try their more modern (Redmond, Wooden bridge, 1914) method of promising England a hand in her next war for civilization, which, I presume, also means taking a half share in the belt of a hydrogen bomb.
(4) It is not fair to the lowest criminal to cry him down before the case is heard, much less give the green light to the british empire to do what she will to these men.
Now I cannot claim even to be an external associate of theirs, but I am damn sure I am nearer the feelings of the less glib section of the people of Ireland, viz, the vast majority, who haven't got as much time as you and I to be writing to the papers, when I say in their regard:
"We love them yet, we can't forget
The felons of our land."
Brendan Behan
70 Kildare Road, Crumlin
(Taken from page 59 of "The Letters of Brendan Behan.")
3rd December, 1954
Sir- I should like to point out to some of your correspondents that:
(1) The IRA is not a sectarian organization.
(2) The district in which the raid was carried out was obviously not enemy territory as far as the raiders were concerned, for the men accused of it were greeted by such demonstrations of approval by the local populace, and their captors showered with so much abuse that, according to the newspaper reports, the streets of Omagh are now cleared before the treason felons-elect or British military, or police come within miles of the court.
(3) I don't know whether these men are the ones who raided Omagh Barracks, but they have as good a right, who ever did to try the old method of physical force in getting rid of England as the prudent members have to try their more modern (Redmond, Wooden bridge, 1914) method of promising England a hand in her next war for civilization, which, I presume, also means taking a half share in the belt of a hydrogen bomb.
(4) It is not fair to the lowest criminal to cry him down before the case is heard, much less give the green light to the british empire to do what she will to these men.
Now I cannot claim even to be an external associate of theirs, but I am damn sure I am nearer the feelings of the less glib section of the people of Ireland, viz, the vast majority, who haven't got as much time as you and I to be writing to the papers, when I say in their regard:
"We love them yet, we can't forget
The felons of our land."
Brendan Behan
70 Kildare Road, Crumlin
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Internment
Taken from Chapter 4 of John McGuffin's masterful book "Internment"
"The 1956-1962 border campaign was planned well in advance. Raids at Felstead (Essex OTC school) in July 1953, Gough barracks, Armagh, in June 1954, and Arborfield on 11 August 1954, had gained guns and kudos, as well as life sentences for Donal Murphy, James Murphy and Joe Doyle,[33] and eight years for Cathal Goulding, Sean MacStiophan and Manus Canning. By December 1955 the IRA felt it could act. In many ways they were more sophisticated than before, but the old naïveté persisted. In a directive from Oglaigh na h-Eireann to all O/Cs, dated 12 December, GHQ stated;
In view of recent pronouncements by the leader of the Twenty-six County Government and his reminder to the press of the fact that certain Acts, passed by the Leinster House regime in 1939, are still in force, it is not reasonable [sic] to assume that coercive measures against the army are under consideration by the Twenty-six County authorities.[34]
The campaign got under way on 11 December 1956 with a series of explosions. Eleven days later internment was introduced in the North and 30 men were lifted; the figures rose to 256 (about 400 were detained at first). After signings-out, 167 remained in for the duration. On 1 January 1957, in the abortive Brookeborough barracks raid, Sean South and Fergal O'Hanlon were killed, only to become immortalized in the Republican songbook. All 12 survivors of the raid who got back over the border got six months under the Offences Against the State Act for refusing to answer questions, but massive turnouts at the funerals of South and O'Hanlon convinced many Republicans in the South that the Taoiseach, Costello, would not move against them. Nonetheless, on 8 and 12 January swoops netted virtually the entire IRA council and GHQ staff, including MacCurtain, Magan, Grogan and Russell, who all ended up in the Bridewell and later in Mountjoy with three six month sentences. The number of prisoners rose to 53, but MacBride and his party, Clan na Poblachta, forced Costello to call an election. Fianna Fail won with 78 seats. Republicans were jubilant. De Valera and Fianna Fail had condemned the arrest of the Republican prisoners, and surely they would release them as they had done in 1932.
Sinn Fein polled 65,640 votes and had O'Bradaigh, J.J. Rice, J.J. McGirl (in Mountjoy at the time) and Fergal O'Hanlon's brother elected. Now they could even claim some sort of mandate from the people.
The elation was to be short lived. Some prisoners were released. But on 4 July 1957 an RUC man, Cecil Gregg, was killed at Forkhill. Colonel W.W.B. Topping the North's Minister of Home Affairs, demanded internment in the Twenty-six Counties. The Dail had adjourned for its summer recess that day, but within the next two days 63 Republicans were arrested. Most had made no attempt to go underground, believing that quiescence in the Twenty-six Counties would guarantee immunity. They had no concept of the economic and diplomatic pressures which could be put upon the Southern Government and, despite their abhorrence for politicians and party politics, they had failed to realise how easily TD's or MP's can shelve their principles.
On 8 July the Government of the South announced that Part 2 of the Offences Against the State Act was in operation. Internment was on again. Those Fianna Fail TD's (especially in North Tipperary) who had publicly supported resolutions calling on Costello to release all Republican prisoners had to keep quiet or resign. There were no resignations. Moreover, 36 Republicans still in Mountjoy were trapped. On their release, they would go straight to the Curragh camp. On 20 July, 24 tried to escape with a large scaling ladder, but were spotted. All were soon in the Curragh camp.
Conditions this time were better, but certainly not as pleasant as T.P. Coogan paints them in The IRA. The Irish Red Cross, headed by Mrs. Tom Barry, inspected the camp and found it 'excellent'. She, however, did not have to live there. Numbers were fewer – four huts with 40 men in each hut,[35] but the huts were still damp and dirty and the timbers were rotting. The camp authorities claimed that red tape was responsible for delays in obtaining new planks, and it was a year before the rotting timbers were replaced. The camp was surrounded by five sets of barbed-wire fencing and there was a trench, six feet deep and eight feet wide, which was booby-trapped with flares. Watch towers were manned by armed guards who also patrolled the perimeter and were equipped with ammonia grenades. Despite these precautions there were escapes. Three prisoners, Conlon, O'Toole, Kelly, climbed through the showers' window, an obvious weak spot in the defence, and made off but were recaptured a few days later. This provoked intense speculation in the camp. Official IRA policy was 'no escapes, it's too risky', but many internees were unwilling to accept the rule. On 27 September 1958, Rory O'Bradaigh and Dave O'Connell (then 18 and now a leading Provisional), escaped through the wire during a football match and, after hiding under a camouflage grass blanket, made their escape. This was an 'official' escape, made with the blessing of the O/C MacCurtain. But to the men in the Charlie Murphy group, brooding in their hut, which was known as 'Little Rock', it was not ambitious enough. Accordingly, after hearing from Sean MacBride that the International Court at Strasbourg would be unlikely to find against the Government, Murphy decided to go ahead with a mass break attempt. The military guards were accustomed to frequent alarm drills often caused by sheep springing the trip wires. They were, therefore, somewhat lethargic. On the face of it, the attempt was madness, but, on 2 December, 26 men armed with wire cutters rushed the wire in broad daylight. The guards were so astonished that the men were through the first fence before warning shots were fired. The men ignored them and ran on past the guards. Brian Boylan was shot and wounded, but the rest cleared the second and third fences. At the ditch ammonia grenades were hurled at them, flares went off and prisoners reeled about in a haze of gas while bullets flew. The guards did, however, fire high – the only man who did not was disarmed by a prison officer. Despite the wire and gas 16 men got through and only two were recaptured. A week-long police and army hunt was in vain because the local people hid most of the escapees.
Surprisingly, there were no reprisals in the camp and life continued as boring as ever for most of the prisoners, the oldest of whom, Padraig O'Ceallaigh of Mayo, was 68; the youngest, 17-year-old Michael Kelly of Galway.
The huts were open at 7.00 a.m., and recreation included football and darts as well as handicrafts; the usual plethora of crosses and handkerchiefs was produced. Frank McGlade, who had experienced internment in Derry, Crumlin, and on the Al Rawdah, was in the Curragh during 1958-1959 (he had been on the run since 1956) and described it as his 'favourite'. He liked the open countryside, but found it ironic that the tricolour flew and the huts were named after men like Pearse, McDonagh and Brugha.
This time the campaign to release the internees was more active. It was costing the Prisoners Dependants Fund £400 a month to keep up the payments, inadequate though they were, and money was scarce. The imaginative suggestion of internee Frank Driver that a wife of an internee with ten children should take them to the palace of the late Most Reverend Dr. John C. McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, and deposit them there for safekeeping until her husband was released, was not put into operation. Nor was his scheme for a band of women relatives to march on the camp armed with wire cutters and cut their way in. More practical steps were taken. Sean MacBride took up the case of Gerry Lawless. Lawless and eight others had been interned in July 1957 but were given a separate hut to themselves because they were ostracized by the rest of the camp. Eight were released upon signing an undertaking, but Lawless, who was not in the IRA, having sided with Joe Christle in the split, refused to do so. After the appeal to the High Court failed, MacBride took the case to the Human Rights Commission at Strasbourg, where it was entered in November 1957 and ruled admissible on 30 August 1958.[36] On advice of his lawyers, Lawless signed out on 10 December 1958. It was not until 1 July 1961 that the verdict was eventually given, long after the last internee was released. It went against Lawless (as Unionists such as Brian McRoberts were to gleefully point out whenever internment was challenged) but mainly on technicalities. It did establish that the 'undertaking' given by internees who sign out has no legal status since it was not included in the Offences Against the State Act. Even more importantly, the court ruled that it was for them to judge whether a state of emergency existed in the country in question and that in future they need not merely accept the assurances of whatever government chose to opt out of the provisions against detention without charge or trial – as Greece was to discover in 1970.
The IRA border campaign of 1956-1962 was an almost unmitigated disaster. The IRA could claim that about 200 militants had taken on 5,000 TA men, 3,000 RUC men, 12,000 B men, 1,500 specially trained commandos plus a large number of security guards – close on 30,000 men. There had been, in the five-year campaign, 300 major incidents. And several hundred minor ones. Six members of the RUC had been killed, 19 wounded. Eleven B specials and two soldiers had been wounded also. Several million pounds of damage had been caused – the overtime bill for the police alone was £10m. But in the last analysis the campaign was an abysmal failure. Two IRA men had been killed in action by the police and five had accidentally blown themselves up. The people had not rallied, as anticipated, behind the IRA. The Six Counties had not been 'won back'. The Unionist Government had, indeed, been strengthened. "If the IRA had not existed, they would have been invented," as many a Unionist politician said to his friends. And so the campaign petered out. By 15 March 1959 the last internee in the South had been released. The North was not to follow suit until April 1961. A forthcoming visit of the Irish President, Sean T. O'Kelly, to the USA probably had something to do with the Southern Government's decision, but by then it was clear that the campaign was sputtering out. Moreover, there were always the military courts to sentence recalcitrants. Accordingly the Curragh was closed.
http://www.irishresistancebooks.com/
internment/intern4.htm
"The 1956-1962 border campaign was planned well in advance. Raids at Felstead (Essex OTC school) in July 1953, Gough barracks, Armagh, in June 1954, and Arborfield on 11 August 1954, had gained guns and kudos, as well as life sentences for Donal Murphy, James Murphy and Joe Doyle,[33] and eight years for Cathal Goulding, Sean MacStiophan and Manus Canning. By December 1955 the IRA felt it could act. In many ways they were more sophisticated than before, but the old naïveté persisted. In a directive from Oglaigh na h-Eireann to all O/Cs, dated 12 December, GHQ stated;
In view of recent pronouncements by the leader of the Twenty-six County Government and his reminder to the press of the fact that certain Acts, passed by the Leinster House regime in 1939, are still in force, it is not reasonable [sic] to assume that coercive measures against the army are under consideration by the Twenty-six County authorities.[34]
The campaign got under way on 11 December 1956 with a series of explosions. Eleven days later internment was introduced in the North and 30 men were lifted; the figures rose to 256 (about 400 were detained at first). After signings-out, 167 remained in for the duration. On 1 January 1957, in the abortive Brookeborough barracks raid, Sean South and Fergal O'Hanlon were killed, only to become immortalized in the Republican songbook. All 12 survivors of the raid who got back over the border got six months under the Offences Against the State Act for refusing to answer questions, but massive turnouts at the funerals of South and O'Hanlon convinced many Republicans in the South that the Taoiseach, Costello, would not move against them. Nonetheless, on 8 and 12 January swoops netted virtually the entire IRA council and GHQ staff, including MacCurtain, Magan, Grogan and Russell, who all ended up in the Bridewell and later in Mountjoy with three six month sentences. The number of prisoners rose to 53, but MacBride and his party, Clan na Poblachta, forced Costello to call an election. Fianna Fail won with 78 seats. Republicans were jubilant. De Valera and Fianna Fail had condemned the arrest of the Republican prisoners, and surely they would release them as they had done in 1932.
Sinn Fein polled 65,640 votes and had O'Bradaigh, J.J. Rice, J.J. McGirl (in Mountjoy at the time) and Fergal O'Hanlon's brother elected. Now they could even claim some sort of mandate from the people.
The elation was to be short lived. Some prisoners were released. But on 4 July 1957 an RUC man, Cecil Gregg, was killed at Forkhill. Colonel W.W.B. Topping the North's Minister of Home Affairs, demanded internment in the Twenty-six Counties. The Dail had adjourned for its summer recess that day, but within the next two days 63 Republicans were arrested. Most had made no attempt to go underground, believing that quiescence in the Twenty-six Counties would guarantee immunity. They had no concept of the economic and diplomatic pressures which could be put upon the Southern Government and, despite their abhorrence for politicians and party politics, they had failed to realise how easily TD's or MP's can shelve their principles.
On 8 July the Government of the South announced that Part 2 of the Offences Against the State Act was in operation. Internment was on again. Those Fianna Fail TD's (especially in North Tipperary) who had publicly supported resolutions calling on Costello to release all Republican prisoners had to keep quiet or resign. There were no resignations. Moreover, 36 Republicans still in Mountjoy were trapped. On their release, they would go straight to the Curragh camp. On 20 July, 24 tried to escape with a large scaling ladder, but were spotted. All were soon in the Curragh camp.
Conditions this time were better, but certainly not as pleasant as T.P. Coogan paints them in The IRA. The Irish Red Cross, headed by Mrs. Tom Barry, inspected the camp and found it 'excellent'. She, however, did not have to live there. Numbers were fewer – four huts with 40 men in each hut,[35] but the huts were still damp and dirty and the timbers were rotting. The camp authorities claimed that red tape was responsible for delays in obtaining new planks, and it was a year before the rotting timbers were replaced. The camp was surrounded by five sets of barbed-wire fencing and there was a trench, six feet deep and eight feet wide, which was booby-trapped with flares. Watch towers were manned by armed guards who also patrolled the perimeter and were equipped with ammonia grenades. Despite these precautions there were escapes. Three prisoners, Conlon, O'Toole, Kelly, climbed through the showers' window, an obvious weak spot in the defence, and made off but were recaptured a few days later. This provoked intense speculation in the camp. Official IRA policy was 'no escapes, it's too risky', but many internees were unwilling to accept the rule. On 27 September 1958, Rory O'Bradaigh and Dave O'Connell (then 18 and now a leading Provisional), escaped through the wire during a football match and, after hiding under a camouflage grass blanket, made their escape. This was an 'official' escape, made with the blessing of the O/C MacCurtain. But to the men in the Charlie Murphy group, brooding in their hut, which was known as 'Little Rock', it was not ambitious enough. Accordingly, after hearing from Sean MacBride that the International Court at Strasbourg would be unlikely to find against the Government, Murphy decided to go ahead with a mass break attempt. The military guards were accustomed to frequent alarm drills often caused by sheep springing the trip wires. They were, therefore, somewhat lethargic. On the face of it, the attempt was madness, but, on 2 December, 26 men armed with wire cutters rushed the wire in broad daylight. The guards were so astonished that the men were through the first fence before warning shots were fired. The men ignored them and ran on past the guards. Brian Boylan was shot and wounded, but the rest cleared the second and third fences. At the ditch ammonia grenades were hurled at them, flares went off and prisoners reeled about in a haze of gas while bullets flew. The guards did, however, fire high – the only man who did not was disarmed by a prison officer. Despite the wire and gas 16 men got through and only two were recaptured. A week-long police and army hunt was in vain because the local people hid most of the escapees.
Surprisingly, there were no reprisals in the camp and life continued as boring as ever for most of the prisoners, the oldest of whom, Padraig O'Ceallaigh of Mayo, was 68; the youngest, 17-year-old Michael Kelly of Galway.
The huts were open at 7.00 a.m., and recreation included football and darts as well as handicrafts; the usual plethora of crosses and handkerchiefs was produced. Frank McGlade, who had experienced internment in Derry, Crumlin, and on the Al Rawdah, was in the Curragh during 1958-1959 (he had been on the run since 1956) and described it as his 'favourite'. He liked the open countryside, but found it ironic that the tricolour flew and the huts were named after men like Pearse, McDonagh and Brugha.
This time the campaign to release the internees was more active. It was costing the Prisoners Dependants Fund £400 a month to keep up the payments, inadequate though they were, and money was scarce. The imaginative suggestion of internee Frank Driver that a wife of an internee with ten children should take them to the palace of the late Most Reverend Dr. John C. McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, and deposit them there for safekeeping until her husband was released, was not put into operation. Nor was his scheme for a band of women relatives to march on the camp armed with wire cutters and cut their way in. More practical steps were taken. Sean MacBride took up the case of Gerry Lawless. Lawless and eight others had been interned in July 1957 but were given a separate hut to themselves because they were ostracized by the rest of the camp. Eight were released upon signing an undertaking, but Lawless, who was not in the IRA, having sided with Joe Christle in the split, refused to do so. After the appeal to the High Court failed, MacBride took the case to the Human Rights Commission at Strasbourg, where it was entered in November 1957 and ruled admissible on 30 August 1958.[36] On advice of his lawyers, Lawless signed out on 10 December 1958. It was not until 1 July 1961 that the verdict was eventually given, long after the last internee was released. It went against Lawless (as Unionists such as Brian McRoberts were to gleefully point out whenever internment was challenged) but mainly on technicalities. It did establish that the 'undertaking' given by internees who sign out has no legal status since it was not included in the Offences Against the State Act. Even more importantly, the court ruled that it was for them to judge whether a state of emergency existed in the country in question and that in future they need not merely accept the assurances of whatever government chose to opt out of the provisions against detention without charge or trial – as Greece was to discover in 1970.
The IRA border campaign of 1956-1962 was an almost unmitigated disaster. The IRA could claim that about 200 militants had taken on 5,000 TA men, 3,000 RUC men, 12,000 B men, 1,500 specially trained commandos plus a large number of security guards – close on 30,000 men. There had been, in the five-year campaign, 300 major incidents. And several hundred minor ones. Six members of the RUC had been killed, 19 wounded. Eleven B specials and two soldiers had been wounded also. Several million pounds of damage had been caused – the overtime bill for the police alone was £10m. But in the last analysis the campaign was an abysmal failure. Two IRA men had been killed in action by the police and five had accidentally blown themselves up. The people had not rallied, as anticipated, behind the IRA. The Six Counties had not been 'won back'. The Unionist Government had, indeed, been strengthened. "If the IRA had not existed, they would have been invented," as many a Unionist politician said to his friends. And so the campaign petered out. By 15 March 1959 the last internee in the South had been released. The North was not to follow suit until April 1961. A forthcoming visit of the Irish President, Sean T. O'Kelly, to the USA probably had something to do with the Southern Government's decision, but by then it was clear that the campaign was sputtering out. Moreover, there were always the military courts to sentence recalcitrants. Accordingly the Curragh was closed.
http://www.irishresistancebooks.com/
internment/intern4.htm
"Omagh and After" - 1954
The following is a piece from The Spectator (26 Nov, 1954) after the botched raid on Omagh Barracks.
OMAGH AND AFTER
By JACK WHITE
Dublin.
DRIVE ENGLAND OUT :
"It was an army of soldiers that England first sent over to conquer our Nation. It is with an army of soldiers that England today maintains the conquest of our Nation. What established the conquest and what maintains the conquest—FORCE--is the one effective weapon that we can use to undo it."
This succinct statement of policy appears in a small news- sheet published in Dublin and entitled The United Irishman. Below is a list of names--including two in Scotland and one in England—of ' contact addresses for people who wish to join the -Republican movement.
Lest they should be in doubt about what they are doing, the advertisement says : "An active Civil Organisation backed by a strong military arm can smash England, but not without your help.' And on the front page is a glowing account of the raid by the Trish Republican Army on the Omagh barracks.
The name of the IRA recalls to British minds, no doubt, the days of 1939 anthe days of 1939 and bombs in pillar-boxes. To the Irishman it rings with half a' dozen different notes. For it was an IRA that fought the Black and Tans, and its ex-members today draw State pensions and parade on Easter Sunday, decked with medals, behind the Aryl), hand,
The IRA split on the Treaty, and when the civil war began Mr. de .Valera threw in. his lot With the anti-Treaty faction and became their nominal head.
But, in 1926, when he decided to form his political party, Fianna Fail, the IRA split away from him, too: and he, who was once its leader, became one of its bitterest enemies when his Government was obliged to execute IRA members., From that time onward it was an underground movement, proscribed by law, rent by its own differences of leadership and policy. With no leaders well known to the public and making little impact on everyday life.
The strength of the IRA has always been a matter for conjecture, and remains so today. It must be so, indeed, because it is impossible for even the well-informed outsider to draw a line between, the " activists" ' and the mere fellow-travellers and sYmpathisers. During the war the number interned was about 2,000 (nearly 1.000 of them in Eire), and the total strength may have been 7,000 or 8,000. But the war brought a major split on principle. The rightists and the opportunists —those whose only principle was to support anybody who was fighting England —wanted to aid Germany. and some contacts were in fact established. But the leftist-liberal element, which has always been strong since the days of the Citizen Army, could not stomach the idea of an alliance with the Nazis. In the prison camp this split on principle was embittered by the clash of personalities. and when war ended and the internees were released the IRA was only a remnant of its former strength. The last few years have seen a rebuilding of the organisation combined (apparently) with changes in leadership and policy.
The pre-war IRA was purely a military movement which called itself a 'government.' Today it is the military arm of a political movement whose speakers appear in public and which publishes The United Irishman. The " activists ' number perhaps 800 to 1,000. They still have substantial dumps of arms, and they are sustained by funds coming largely from America. As a matter of policy, the organisation seems to have abandoned the wiping out of old scores within the Twenty-Six Counties: there is no more talk of the ' execution lists' that were notorious during the war. The new policy is concentrated on one objective, expressed by The United Irishman: . . . ' after thirty Years or futility . . . getting down to the 'vital, fundamental Issue—to get the invaders out, completely and as quickly as Possible.'
"The invaders": those words are the keynote. It is an article of faith that England is the only architect of Partition. The United Irishman denounces those who misrepresent' the purpose of the IRA as an attack on Northern Protestantism as such and no doubt it is sincere, as it is no part of the IRA
tradition to be the spearhead of "Rome Rule.' But one can imagine that the distinction seems a fine one to the 750,000 or so people in the North who vote Unionist. In fact, this distinction, or lack of one, seems to lie at the root of the conflict between IRA policy and Government policy. In the Dail debate that followed the Omagh raid, Mr. John A. Costello, the Prima Minister, made a reasoned case against the use of force, and he was supported by Mr. de Valera as leader of the Opposition. Both of them accepted explicitly the fact that' the ending of Partition depends on winning over the Northern Unionists, and that getting the invaders out.' even if it were possible, would
be no solution. Let us have a united nation,' said Mr. Costello, but let it be a union of free men, and not a united nation in which one-fifth of the people have been cowed by • force or fear and feel themselves enslaved.'
How is it that, against all this consensus of political wisdom, the lRA can still gain recruits for its ' physical force ' policy? The answer 'is that those political leaders themselves, who . have now attained to wisdom with the years, have put the sticks under the pot. The right of a fervent minority to take it upon itself to represent the nation is sealed by the niemory of 1916 (when there were some 300,0(X) Irishmen in the British forces, as compared with a thousand in the Rising) and 1922. The "lesson that you can get nothing out of England except by force ' is rammed home by a teaching of history which represents a gallant Ireland as forcing the mighty Empire to its knees. In fact, for all the courage and resourcefulness of the men who carried on the war, the victory was won in 1921 by public opinion, in the world at large and in Britain itself. And it is that force of world opinion which would be firmly, decisively and almost unanimously against any use of force to reunite Ireland today. To Americans-- --even to Irish Americans. -the alliance with Britain against Communism is too important- to be jeopardised by quarrels like this.
The elder statesmen lit the fire, and now they find themselves ignored or scorned when they try to damp it down. Indeed, it is not hard to see why their hard-won wisdom is spurned by those ardent young men whose anger has been aroused by the injury of Partition. Not only the extremist but the moderate must feel that thirty years have failed to produce a positive policy on Partition, and that moderation, in the official mouth, is only an excuse for doing nothing. It is possible, I feel, to produce a policy which, if it will not appease the extremists, will relieve the moderates of their feeling of frustration. First of all, there is one point on which the Northern Ireland case is vulnerable, and can be shown to be vulnerable. The two counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone have consistent nationalist majorities, and there is no argument for dividing the Six Counties from the Twenty-Six which will not go equally for dividing these two from, the Six. Here is the point on which to concentrate propaganda. The alleged misdemeanours of the Northern Ireland Government. which Republican spokesmen have spent so much time in denouncing, are totally irrelevant, as long as it continues to get elected.
Secondly, there is no evidence (or at any rate none known to the public) that the Government of the Republic has ever given a day's thought to the practical problems—fiscal, financial, economic—which would be raised instantly by the abolition of the Border. Why should it not appoint at once a non-political Working Party, to ask the necessary questions and try to work out the answers ? A start could be made with an examination of the practicability of a customs union between North and South. Here there would be the precedent of Benelux. and the blessing of OEEC; and no doubt the scheme could count on United States support. It would be at least a start towards a plan for wiping out a Border which cannot, after thirty years, be demolished simply by proving it absurd. if the result was merely to force an ackhowledgement of their true position on some of the Southern businessmen who are making money out of non-competitive, tariff-protected industries, the Working Party would have paid its keep.
OMAGH AND AFTER
By JACK WHITE
Dublin.
DRIVE ENGLAND OUT :
"It was an army of soldiers that England first sent over to conquer our Nation. It is with an army of soldiers that England today maintains the conquest of our Nation. What established the conquest and what maintains the conquest—FORCE--is the one effective weapon that we can use to undo it."
This succinct statement of policy appears in a small news- sheet published in Dublin and entitled The United Irishman. Below is a list of names--including two in Scotland and one in England—of ' contact addresses for people who wish to join the -Republican movement.
Lest they should be in doubt about what they are doing, the advertisement says : "An active Civil Organisation backed by a strong military arm can smash England, but not without your help.' And on the front page is a glowing account of the raid by the Trish Republican Army on the Omagh barracks.
The name of the IRA recalls to British minds, no doubt, the days of 1939 anthe days of 1939 and bombs in pillar-boxes. To the Irishman it rings with half a' dozen different notes. For it was an IRA that fought the Black and Tans, and its ex-members today draw State pensions and parade on Easter Sunday, decked with medals, behind the Aryl), hand,
The IRA split on the Treaty, and when the civil war began Mr. de .Valera threw in. his lot With the anti-Treaty faction and became their nominal head.
But, in 1926, when he decided to form his political party, Fianna Fail, the IRA split away from him, too: and he, who was once its leader, became one of its bitterest enemies when his Government was obliged to execute IRA members., From that time onward it was an underground movement, proscribed by law, rent by its own differences of leadership and policy. With no leaders well known to the public and making little impact on everyday life.
The strength of the IRA has always been a matter for conjecture, and remains so today. It must be so, indeed, because it is impossible for even the well-informed outsider to draw a line between, the " activists" ' and the mere fellow-travellers and sYmpathisers. During the war the number interned was about 2,000 (nearly 1.000 of them in Eire), and the total strength may have been 7,000 or 8,000. But the war brought a major split on principle. The rightists and the opportunists —those whose only principle was to support anybody who was fighting England —wanted to aid Germany. and some contacts were in fact established. But the leftist-liberal element, which has always been strong since the days of the Citizen Army, could not stomach the idea of an alliance with the Nazis. In the prison camp this split on principle was embittered by the clash of personalities. and when war ended and the internees were released the IRA was only a remnant of its former strength. The last few years have seen a rebuilding of the organisation combined (apparently) with changes in leadership and policy.
The pre-war IRA was purely a military movement which called itself a 'government.' Today it is the military arm of a political movement whose speakers appear in public and which publishes The United Irishman. The " activists ' number perhaps 800 to 1,000. They still have substantial dumps of arms, and they are sustained by funds coming largely from America. As a matter of policy, the organisation seems to have abandoned the wiping out of old scores within the Twenty-Six Counties: there is no more talk of the ' execution lists' that were notorious during the war. The new policy is concentrated on one objective, expressed by The United Irishman: . . . ' after thirty Years or futility . . . getting down to the 'vital, fundamental Issue—to get the invaders out, completely and as quickly as Possible.'
"The invaders": those words are the keynote. It is an article of faith that England is the only architect of Partition. The United Irishman denounces those who misrepresent' the purpose of the IRA as an attack on Northern Protestantism as such and no doubt it is sincere, as it is no part of the IRA
tradition to be the spearhead of "Rome Rule.' But one can imagine that the distinction seems a fine one to the 750,000 or so people in the North who vote Unionist. In fact, this distinction, or lack of one, seems to lie at the root of the conflict between IRA policy and Government policy. In the Dail debate that followed the Omagh raid, Mr. John A. Costello, the Prima Minister, made a reasoned case against the use of force, and he was supported by Mr. de Valera as leader of the Opposition. Both of them accepted explicitly the fact that' the ending of Partition depends on winning over the Northern Unionists, and that getting the invaders out.' even if it were possible, would
be no solution. Let us have a united nation,' said Mr. Costello, but let it be a union of free men, and not a united nation in which one-fifth of the people have been cowed by • force or fear and feel themselves enslaved.'
How is it that, against all this consensus of political wisdom, the lRA can still gain recruits for its ' physical force ' policy? The answer 'is that those political leaders themselves, who . have now attained to wisdom with the years, have put the sticks under the pot. The right of a fervent minority to take it upon itself to represent the nation is sealed by the niemory of 1916 (when there were some 300,0(X) Irishmen in the British forces, as compared with a thousand in the Rising) and 1922. The "lesson that you can get nothing out of England except by force ' is rammed home by a teaching of history which represents a gallant Ireland as forcing the mighty Empire to its knees. In fact, for all the courage and resourcefulness of the men who carried on the war, the victory was won in 1921 by public opinion, in the world at large and in Britain itself. And it is that force of world opinion which would be firmly, decisively and almost unanimously against any use of force to reunite Ireland today. To Americans-- --even to Irish Americans. -the alliance with Britain against Communism is too important- to be jeopardised by quarrels like this.
The elder statesmen lit the fire, and now they find themselves ignored or scorned when they try to damp it down. Indeed, it is not hard to see why their hard-won wisdom is spurned by those ardent young men whose anger has been aroused by the injury of Partition. Not only the extremist but the moderate must feel that thirty years have failed to produce a positive policy on Partition, and that moderation, in the official mouth, is only an excuse for doing nothing. It is possible, I feel, to produce a policy which, if it will not appease the extremists, will relieve the moderates of their feeling of frustration. First of all, there is one point on which the Northern Ireland case is vulnerable, and can be shown to be vulnerable. The two counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone have consistent nationalist majorities, and there is no argument for dividing the Six Counties from the Twenty-Six which will not go equally for dividing these two from, the Six. Here is the point on which to concentrate propaganda. The alleged misdemeanours of the Northern Ireland Government. which Republican spokesmen have spent so much time in denouncing, are totally irrelevant, as long as it continues to get elected.
Secondly, there is no evidence (or at any rate none known to the public) that the Government of the Republic has ever given a day's thought to the practical problems—fiscal, financial, economic—which would be raised instantly by the abolition of the Border. Why should it not appoint at once a non-political Working Party, to ask the necessary questions and try to work out the answers ? A start could be made with an examination of the practicability of a customs union between North and South. Here there would be the precedent of Benelux. and the blessing of OEEC; and no doubt the scheme could count on United States support. It would be at least a start towards a plan for wiping out a Border which cannot, after thirty years, be demolished simply by proving it absurd. if the result was merely to force an ackhowledgement of their true position on some of the Southern businessmen who are making money out of non-competitive, tariff-protected industries, the Working Party would have paid its keep.
Friday, November 29, 2013
The Welsh Ivy
Some readers might recall a post about the Welsh republicans in the 1950's. On that note, here is an explanation of the Welsh equivalent of the Easter Lilly . Do remember to wear an ivy - or stick up one of the following designs (see photo and links below)- as a gesture of support.
DECEMBER 11- WEAR YOUR IVY
Irishmen wear an Easter Lilly to honor their dead, specifically on Easter Sunday; the English, a poppy on November 11; the Scottish, a thistle; but were you ever told of the Welsh day of mourning and its symbol?
On December 11, 1282 , Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last independent Prince of Wales (thereafter known as "Llewlyn the Last") met the forces of King Edward I at the Battle of Orewin Bridge. It was the culmination of decades of struggle between Norman expansionism and the Welsh princes and leaders, many of whom had made peace (or compromised) before but were forced into rebellion by Norman taxes, laws, and aggression against those who remained independent.
During the battle, Llywelyn was separated from his army under questionable circumstances and ambushed near the town of Cilmeri, along with 18 of his guards, retainers and chaplains who were with him. As he lay dying he revealed his identity and was executed on the spot. His head was afterwards cut off and paraded through London where they crowned it in ivy in mockery.
Llywelyn's 18 companions were killed as well, along with most of his army. His brother Daffydd fought on for a short period but was captured and became the first recorded person to be hung, drawn, and quartered.
Wales, effectively leaderless, was soon after brought under British rule and has remained so since.
Llywelyn's death has come to symbolize the death of the Welsh nation as a whole. On December 11th Welsh nationalists wear an Ivy in honor of Llywelyn and many others from then to now who fought and died for their freedom.
Cofiwn- Remember
***
Gethin ap Gruffydd, along with the late Tony Lewis, has done much to put the Ivy campaign back in public consciousness in recent decades. At the following link he has some photos, background, and creative ideas:
http://ymgyrchtreftadaeth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/cofiwn-1282-wearing-ivy-leaf-in-memory.html
DECEMBER 11- WEAR YOUR IVY
Irishmen wear an Easter Lilly to honor their dead, specifically on Easter Sunday; the English, a poppy on November 11; the Scottish, a thistle; but were you ever told of the Welsh day of mourning and its symbol?
On December 11, 1282 , Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last independent Prince of Wales (thereafter known as "Llewlyn the Last") met the forces of King Edward I at the Battle of Orewin Bridge. It was the culmination of decades of struggle between Norman expansionism and the Welsh princes and leaders, many of whom had made peace (or compromised) before but were forced into rebellion by Norman taxes, laws, and aggression against those who remained independent.
During the battle, Llywelyn was separated from his army under questionable circumstances and ambushed near the town of Cilmeri, along with 18 of his guards, retainers and chaplains who were with him. As he lay dying he revealed his identity and was executed on the spot. His head was afterwards cut off and paraded through London where they crowned it in ivy in mockery.
Llywelyn's 18 companions were killed as well, along with most of his army. His brother Daffydd fought on for a short period but was captured and became the first recorded person to be hung, drawn, and quartered.
Wales, effectively leaderless, was soon after brought under British rule and has remained so since.
Llywelyn's death has come to symbolize the death of the Welsh nation as a whole. On December 11th Welsh nationalists wear an Ivy in honor of Llywelyn and many others from then to now who fought and died for their freedom.
Cofiwn- Remember
***
Gethin ap Gruffydd, along with the late Tony Lewis, has done much to put the Ivy campaign back in public consciousness in recent decades. At the following link he has some photos, background, and creative ideas:
http://ymgyrchtreftadaeth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/cofiwn-1282-wearing-ivy-leaf-in-memory.html
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Vol Connie Green's Grave
"A Grave in Carrickroe" - a lament for Connie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-k2YhQPcQ&sns=em
Monday, November 11, 2013
Edentubber Martyrs- 56 years Today
The Eentubber Martyrs -died 56 years ago today.
Vol. Paul Smith
Adjutant Paul Smith from Bessbrook, Co. Armagh was the eldest of a family of seven.
An architects apprentice he was said to be of a happy and carefree nature, was widely and deeply read and had a flair for leadership and responsibility.
Slightly built he was described as being' as hard as iron' and had been involved in many daring missions.
For this the British and Stormont authorities had put a price on his head. Paul who had been away from home for over six months died aged 19 years.
Vol. George Keegan
George Keegan came from an impeccable tradition of separatism going back to to 1798. Born under the shadow of Enniscorthy's Vmegar Hill, a fact of which George was extremely proud, he came from a family with a deep rooted Republican tradition being a descendant of a rebel hanged in 1798.
His father Capt. Patrick Keegan was commandant of the North Wexford brigade of the Irish Republican Army during the Tan War (1919-21) and was in the Atheneum in Enniscorthy in 1916 when they were the last group in Ireland to surrender to the British forces.
In 1948 he was also involved in the 150th anniversary commemorations of 1798. His father before him was also involved and was arrested for being a Fenian organiser.
As boyhood friends of the young George, Mick Leary and Bob Kehoe have many fond memories. 'He was a genius in school with a great knowledge of history, dates and facts and was also very talented with his hands. Even as a schoolboy he was politically involved -launching an appeal to save the life of the 'Boy from Tralee', Vol. Charlie Kerins who was to be hanged by the Fianna Fail government in 1944. He was always very mature for his age, had a dry sense of humour and was very cheery going.
All his short life he was extremely popular and had no times for phonies." Mick and Bob continue: "George had great culinary skills too. Whenever his comrades in the Vmegar Hill column were billeted together, he was affectionately given the title 'cook-sergeant'. A baker by trade he was also known to poach the salmon." Through enigmatic in some ways', he was described by those who served with him as 'the ideal soldier perhaps more suited to Tom Barrys column of the Tan War and left an indelible impression on all around him.'
A single man he was last seen in Co. Wexford several weeks before his death at Edentubber, aged 29.
Vol. Paddy Parle
Paddy, from WIlliam St., Wexford town was a founding member of the Parnell G.A.A. Club. A worker in a local printing firm, he loved all things Irish, was a member of Conradh na Gaeilge and was a fluent Irish speaker, having secured a scholarship to Colaiste Charman, outside Gorey in his schooldays -a distinction of which he was very proud.
Paddy was born into a staunch labour family in Wexford in 1930. That influence led him to have a special regard for James Connolly and the working class cause.
He became an apprentice typesetter in the firm of John English and Co., Custom House Quay in the mid forties and remained there until his seven years were concluded. He also worked in Cahills of Dublin and spent a short period in England.
On returning to Wexford in the mid fifties he joined the local IRA. unit on the outbreak of the 'border campaign' and was largely instrumental in organising an active membership. Seven or eight Wexford men became part of the Vinegar Hill column and operated for a few months until arrests etc. put an end to their activities. Also the Chief of Staff of Oglaigh na hEireann of that period was of Wexford background and was fused with the '98 vision.
Paddy was described by a comrade, Labhras O'Donnghaile as the 'life and soul of the group on the border', was good humoured and lifted the spirits of those around him. During the years previous to volunteering for the campaign, he acted as 'Fear an Tl' at the many ceilithe held in the town hall and was a very popular character. Though devoted to the memory of Connolly, he was described by a comrade as being 'cut out in the mould of Pearse and acted out that role without realising it. Besides the cultural aspirations he was a deeply spiritual person and had not truck with vulgar talk etc. and was attentive to his religious upbringing.'
Bob and Mick recall his good humoured nature, cheering all the rest of them up and his flair for singing rebel songs. Bob recalls the last words heard from Paddy on that night in Edentubber -words that would ring prophetically, it was his favourite song, 'Padraig Pearses Farewell' -
'Farewell, farewell my lovely land farewell, When May dawn breaks, The last May I shall see ..." A single man he had been last seen by his brother, two months previously. Died aged 27.
Vol Oliver Craven
Oliver from Newry, Co. Armagh was a labourer and had been a driver before joining Oglaigh na hEireann.
Described as powerfully built and quietly spoken, he was particularly noted for his cool headedness.
On the run and wanted by the Stormont authorities, he had evaded capture several times.
Like the others, he read a lot in his spare time. Also, single, he had been away from home for almost six months and was only 19 when he died.
Michael Watters
Michael who owned the cottage where the bombs exploded was a forestry worker and had lived their alone since the death of his mother two years previously.
l-r Keegan, Parle, Smith, Craven, and Watters. Photo from An Phoblacht and Text from Edentubber 50th website.
Vol. Paul Smith
Adjutant Paul Smith from Bessbrook, Co. Armagh was the eldest of a family of seven.
An architects apprentice he was said to be of a happy and carefree nature, was widely and deeply read and had a flair for leadership and responsibility.
Slightly built he was described as being' as hard as iron' and had been involved in many daring missions.
For this the British and Stormont authorities had put a price on his head. Paul who had been away from home for over six months died aged 19 years.
Vol. George Keegan
George Keegan came from an impeccable tradition of separatism going back to to 1798. Born under the shadow of Enniscorthy's Vmegar Hill, a fact of which George was extremely proud, he came from a family with a deep rooted Republican tradition being a descendant of a rebel hanged in 1798.
His father Capt. Patrick Keegan was commandant of the North Wexford brigade of the Irish Republican Army during the Tan War (1919-21) and was in the Atheneum in Enniscorthy in 1916 when they were the last group in Ireland to surrender to the British forces.
In 1948 he was also involved in the 150th anniversary commemorations of 1798. His father before him was also involved and was arrested for being a Fenian organiser.
As boyhood friends of the young George, Mick Leary and Bob Kehoe have many fond memories. 'He was a genius in school with a great knowledge of history, dates and facts and was also very talented with his hands. Even as a schoolboy he was politically involved -launching an appeal to save the life of the 'Boy from Tralee', Vol. Charlie Kerins who was to be hanged by the Fianna Fail government in 1944. He was always very mature for his age, had a dry sense of humour and was very cheery going.
All his short life he was extremely popular and had no times for phonies." Mick and Bob continue: "George had great culinary skills too. Whenever his comrades in the Vmegar Hill column were billeted together, he was affectionately given the title 'cook-sergeant'. A baker by trade he was also known to poach the salmon." Through enigmatic in some ways', he was described by those who served with him as 'the ideal soldier perhaps more suited to Tom Barrys column of the Tan War and left an indelible impression on all around him.'
A single man he was last seen in Co. Wexford several weeks before his death at Edentubber, aged 29.
Vol. Paddy Parle
Paddy, from WIlliam St., Wexford town was a founding member of the Parnell G.A.A. Club. A worker in a local printing firm, he loved all things Irish, was a member of Conradh na Gaeilge and was a fluent Irish speaker, having secured a scholarship to Colaiste Charman, outside Gorey in his schooldays -a distinction of which he was very proud.
Paddy was born into a staunch labour family in Wexford in 1930. That influence led him to have a special regard for James Connolly and the working class cause.
He became an apprentice typesetter in the firm of John English and Co., Custom House Quay in the mid forties and remained there until his seven years were concluded. He also worked in Cahills of Dublin and spent a short period in England.
On returning to Wexford in the mid fifties he joined the local IRA. unit on the outbreak of the 'border campaign' and was largely instrumental in organising an active membership. Seven or eight Wexford men became part of the Vinegar Hill column and operated for a few months until arrests etc. put an end to their activities. Also the Chief of Staff of Oglaigh na hEireann of that period was of Wexford background and was fused with the '98 vision.
Paddy was described by a comrade, Labhras O'Donnghaile as the 'life and soul of the group on the border', was good humoured and lifted the spirits of those around him. During the years previous to volunteering for the campaign, he acted as 'Fear an Tl' at the many ceilithe held in the town hall and was a very popular character. Though devoted to the memory of Connolly, he was described by a comrade as being 'cut out in the mould of Pearse and acted out that role without realising it. Besides the cultural aspirations he was a deeply spiritual person and had not truck with vulgar talk etc. and was attentive to his religious upbringing.'
Bob and Mick recall his good humoured nature, cheering all the rest of them up and his flair for singing rebel songs. Bob recalls the last words heard from Paddy on that night in Edentubber -words that would ring prophetically, it was his favourite song, 'Padraig Pearses Farewell' -
'Farewell, farewell my lovely land farewell, When May dawn breaks, The last May I shall see ..." A single man he had been last seen by his brother, two months previously. Died aged 27.
Vol Oliver Craven
Oliver from Newry, Co. Armagh was a labourer and had been a driver before joining Oglaigh na hEireann.
Described as powerfully built and quietly spoken, he was particularly noted for his cool headedness.
On the run and wanted by the Stormont authorities, he had evaded capture several times.
Like the others, he read a lot in his spare time. Also, single, he had been away from home for almost six months and was only 19 when he died.
Michael Watters
Michael who owned the cottage where the bombs exploded was a forestry worker and had lived their alone since the death of his mother two years previously.
l-r Keegan, Parle, Smith, Craven, and Watters. Photo from An Phoblacht and Text from Edentubber 50th website.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Vol Jim Lane
Interviews with Vol Jim Lane, Cork, about his experiences and that of the Cork Brigade before and during Operation Harvest; and later the Irish Revolutionary Forces in the early 60's, and the events leading up to 69.
A must watch.
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45i1FgDBE3M&sns=em
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpxxpTI-bL8&sns=em
Great work by Mick Healy and co with this; see the interview with Liam Sutcliffe posted earlier, or check out his website at
http://irishrepublicanmarxisthistoryproject.wordpress.com/
A few things...
First, a shout out for info regarding some people- mostly Saor Uladh related-
Pat Murphy
Jim Killeen (prominent 30's and 40's man)
Joe Lyons
Sean O'Neill
And particularly, if anyone reading this knew Liam Kelly I'd be especially grateful.
Second, my previous e-mail (miceal3@) has been acting up, not sending or receiving, and I just received a notice it will be shut down in 24 hours for something (couldn't be arsed to make sense of the alert). Apologies to anyone who wrote, I'll be using spiritoffreedom69@rocketmail.com as the unofficial blog e-mail for now.
In case anyone hasn't seen yet, I've updated the piece on Leo Steenson, with a rather interesting operation - Go raibh mile maith agat to his son Malachy for providing new info and polishing details.
I also completely revised my piece on Cathal Goulding- some atrocious inaccuracies from hasty publishing I'm loathe to admit to!
This month has the anniversaries of Edentubber and the death of Connie Green on the 11th and 26th respectively. Will be posting lots about both. Even if you're unable to attend a comm' do remember them in your own way.
And finally, we've reached the 2000 mark and even had some visitors from Russia, Ukraine, and even Finland- "a hundred thousand welcomes" to all!
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Goulding "On the Inside"
Goulding "On the Inside"
By Miceal
In the early 50's the IRA had sufficiently restored its confidence after the disaster of the 40's to carry out an arms raid in England. This raid was to be part of similar raids ongoing in Ireland to gather arms for the hopeful yet seemingly distant next campaign. The target was the Officer Training Corp in Felstead near Essex. It was a school, which meant low security, yet it had a considerable armory. A republican-inclined Scotsman informed the IRA of the fact, and their own investigation confirmed it. To avoid disaster, the raiding party was small, even for IRA standards, and avoided already established Republicans in England for their own security. Sending men into England, the proverbial "belly of the beast," was a dangerous task but the leadership felt it was worth the risk if pulled off.
Cathal Goulding was one of the IRA's leading men at the time, despite being only 30. He had served time as a POW in the 40's campaign and was a popular figure in prison. When he emerged afterwards he found an army without leadership on a grassroots level, and quickly took the initiative to fill the gap. He reorganized and revitalized the Dublin Brigade and set up -and ran -training camps in the Wicklow mountains. He was also made the Dublin Brigade's intelligence officer, and was on the GHQ Army Council which governed the organization. Thus his organizational skills and experience, made him top billing to lead the team.
A young English born volunteer and mechanic in the RAF, John Stephenson, was also chosen to take part. He afterwards recalled being taught his first words in Irish by Cathal Goulding while preparing for the raid; Stephenson later gaelicised his name and became known as Sean MacStoifain. The third and final man Manus Canning was called from Derry. Chief of Staff Tony Magan personally made arrangements for them in London and wanted to take part in the raid but was - luckily, as it turned out- talked out of it.
The raid (July 25) was a success. There was indeed low security and they gained entry by simply prying open a window at night. They then loaded the arms into an old van parked nearby with the windows pasted over with paper. It was an enormous haul, including 98 rifles, eight sten guns, ten brens, dummy bombs, an anti-tank PIAT and mortars. So much in fact, that the van at first would not move when they tried to leave. They unloaded some material and set off, yet they were still overloaded.
The raid was a success but they encountered problems in the getaway. First they lost their way on the unfamiliar streets and were still driving about come daylight. Also they had not taken into account the effect of the weight, and the erratically driving, heavily loaded vans, slowing rows of traffic and loosing control on down slopes, drew the suspicion of the police. The van tried to avoid the first police car that pulled out but they were unable to make a break for it and a second car forced them to pull over. With police now swarming around them, they were searched and the baggage was duly discovered.
Photo: Left to right, Canning, MacStoifain, and Gouldng are led away.
On October 7th a jury found them guilty and sentenced them to eight years in prison. "Without retiring," MacStoifain recalled, "the jury found us guilty in a record 90 seconds by the simple procedure of turning to each other and nodding." Goulding declared to the court:
"We are soldiers of the Irish Republican Army: we believe the only way to drive the british from our country is by force of arms. For that purpose we think it no crime to capture arms from our enemies. We make no apology for our action."
Cathal Goulding became prisoner 1584. His previous convictions and prominence in the IRA made him a Class A prisoner- always under the watch, continually transferred (an estimated total of 9 times), and while the other prisoners could freely associate, he was often kept isolated. In addition to contending with the medieval conditions of the prison, Sean MacStoifain recalled how they were always monitored wherever they went and no matter what they did. As a result the prisoners had no room to themselves and "nothing to draw on for strength to carry them through their sentences." Goulding fought against this well by withdrawing into himself, keeping his self discipline, and staying busy mentally through reading and planning. Well did a eulogist later state "Cathal knew the surest way to lose one's faith is to succumb to one's immediate environment."
Any volunteer in jail is a loss to the organization, but loosing Goulding was a particularly severe blow. Tony Magan was understandably eager to get him back and went over several escape plans for the purpose. Charlie Murphy was made messenger between the two so they could discuss the plans. It was invaluable help for other republican prisoners as well, most of whom had no way of securely communicating with the IRA back home. For all his talent and charisma, the problem was, in J Bowyer Bell's words, he was "cursed with incredibly bad luck."
In one plan, hatched in Wakefield, Goulding calculated that at one point of the day he had enough time to make it to the wall, where two supporters on the other side would throw a rope over, and he could climb out before the alarm was sounded. Wakefield's wall was over 30 ft high, and on the inside was a 14 foot trench: Cathal made it into the trench, but the two with the rope fumbled throwing it over. Time and again they tried until Cathal finally decided to climb out and jump for the rope, but as he did they pulled it away. The time limit was up and he had to scramble back into the prisoners area.
Another plan sanctioned by Magan involved Sean Garland and Sean Cronin flying a C-47 full of volunteers disguised as a drama group (complete with Cumann na mBan "actresses") to an airfield outside Wakefield. Goulding would then see the volunteers inside the prison over the wall where they would be escorted to the C-47 and fly home. Everything went according to plan until the prisoners once again could not get over the wall in time and Cronin, Garland, and their men had to flee the scene to avoid being put in the gaol as well. Magan lamented how buying the C-47 for an unsuccessful mission had nearly bankrupt the IRA but then as another volunteers told him, they always were bankrupt. For his escape attempts, patches were added to Cathal's uniform by the prison authorities as a brand of sorts, to mark him as an escaper to be watched.
Out of all the prisons he saw the inside of, Wakefeld was the most important in the long term as Goulding was exposed to a melting pot of peoples and causes of the time.
Foremost among them were about a half dozen Cyrpiot EOKA men. The IRA and EOKA men recognized the similarities in their struggles and turned to each other to help survive their stay. Goulding quickly formed a joint escape committee of the two groups. While his transfer came before he could see any plans come to fruition (in late 1956), the committee was the source of close dialogue between the two organizations. Military cooperation was on the cards for some time and a joint escape was in fact hatched in 1959. After his death in 1998 the surviving members of the Wakefield EOKA men presented a plaque posthumously to his son, Cathal Og, in gratitude.
In the same prison he also met Welsh socialist and saboteur Pedr Lewis, in for trying to destroy the Fron Aqueduct in the bitter contest between England and Wales for Welsh water resources. Lewis' connection with Goulding was the first of many for the latter with Welsh Nationalists, culminating with his sending arms to the Free Wales Army and sheltering OTR Welshmen in later years.
The most significant personality may have been Klaus Fuchs, a scientist turned spy who leaked England's atomic secrets to the Soviets. He aided the volunteers in a variety of ways and is said to have converted some to marxism. Around this time Goulding began professing a brand of marxism quite similar to that of Fuchs and became well read on the Russian revolution. He read about current left wing leaders as well- such as Tito- and even suggested to Sean MacStoifain they contact the Soviet Union for assistance. Now how much of this can be credited to Fuchs is up for debate. Many (especially future Provisionals such as Joe Cahill and Ruairi O'Bradaigh) claim it was Fuchs. Others say it was Goulding's own development. Seamus Murphy says "Fuchs never tried to turn anyone- it was hard to get a word out of him!" As Murphy was in Wakefield and shared Cathal's growing political interest, his version is the most likely one. In any event, it would have far reaching implications that went unseen at the time.
Aside from these few events and contacts, they were still trying years for Cathal. He missed out on any role in Operation Harvest, and the latter was no doubt all the worse for it. After Wakefield he served another 3 years in several prisons, mostly in solitary confinement for trivial reasons and, as Sean Garland put it, "the odd serious reason such as attempting to escape on numerous occasions." "He always maintained his humanity and never allowed the screws to get the better of him," Garland continues - which was no small feat.
One episode illustrates well how he refused to let the screws get to him. In the late 50's his old friend and fellow volunteer Brendan Behan appeared on BBC live, completely drunk. Since he was in the country, Behan had scheduled a visit but instead the warden canceled it. He called Goulding into his office to explain that he would never allow a drunk like that to enter his prison. Cathal replied "But drunk or sober, you'll never be on BBC!"
After serving six of their eight years he, Macstoifain, and Canning were released in 1959. Cathal was welcomed home to Dublin with enthusiastic celebrations and a parade. He did not waste time though, and just as soon as he returned he was leading the Easter Commemoration and was back at work with the Dublin Brigade as Quartermaster, where his first project was arranging a shipment of bazookas from America. In a few short years he had risen to Chief of staff.
This time however, he used his position to reorganize the movement's politics rather than its military. He was always left-leaning, but he had now developed his own specific analysis in line with his working class background, reinforced by what he had read in jail. "I could see that he was different" Ruairi O'Bradaigh says. He teamed up with like-minded individuals (such as Thomas Mac Goilla, Roy Johnston, Sean Garland- the future leaders of the Officials) and tried to shift the movement slowly but surely towards class politics while promising another campaign, which, he declared in a memo to the volunteers, "I intend to be the last."
Sources:
"Armed Stuggle"- Richard English
"The IRA"- J Bowyer Bell
"Cathal Goulding: Thinker, Socialist, Republican, Revolutionary" Pamphlet
"Official Irish Republicanism"- Sean Swan
Various United Irishman clippings
"Memoirs of a Revolutionary"- Sean MacStoifain
"The Lost Revolution- Hanley and Millar
http://wwwcathalgouldingbykenneth.blogspot.com/2012/12/its-been-while-since-i-took-time-to.html
(Thanks to the above for the quote from MacStoifain. Kenneth, who runs it, is writing a bio of Goulding so if anyone reading this is interested or has information do check it out
Thanks also to G. B for the images.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Bodenstown - 58
Bodenstown, 1958.
"Sweet, sweet tis to find that such faith can remain
To the cause and the man so long vanquished and slain."
(Thanks t GB)
From the '98 to '57- Interview with Vol Bob Kehoe (Wexford)
Many phases of the struggle
AP/RN 1998
Roisín de Rossa interviews Bob Kehoe from Wexford, a Border Campaign veteran who this year marched with the pike men and women to remember 1798
http://republican-news.org/archive/1998/December17/17wex.html
This year has been an amazing year in County Wexford as hundreds of pikemen and women have commemorated the part played by their ancestors in 1798.
History has lived again in every parish as their pike people walked in the steps of the 30,000 men and women from County Wexford who died in the revolution 200 years ago, and as they celebrated the struggle for the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity which inspired the 1798 revolution and generations of republicans since.
In 1798 survivors of the battle at Vinegar Hill and the terrible slaughter that followed it fought their way north in the hope of joining their comrades in Antrim. In the 1950s, Bob Kehoe, another Wexford man, trod in their steps. He was one of a handful of men who went to Louth to join the fight in the 50s campaign - they were `The Vinegar Hill Column.'
d at Edentubber this year, Bob returned after 41 years to the site of the terrible night when his comrades were killed by the bomb they were preparing in order to attack the brand new automatic telephone exchange across the border. No one will ever know the horror of that night wandering on a desolate hillside by the cottage after the explosions.
Bob Kehoe, who was very sick, was not allowed to go on the operation. He left the cottage only minutes before the two explosions. Paul Smith (Bessbrook), Oliver Craven (Newry), and Michael Watters, who owned the cottage where the bomb was being made up, and Bob's comrades who had come from Wexford with him - Paddy Parle and George Keegan - were all killed.*
``Paddy Parle, he was a great fellow - real happy-go-lucky,'' says Bob. ``I was walking out the door. Bit disappointed, d'you know, and I looked back at him. He quoted Pearse - Pearse was his idol - he was always quoting him - `Farewell, farewell, beloved land, farewell, the May dawn breaks the last my eyes should see, Here in my own lovely land, farewell.' A few minutes later - the blast''.
A man was sent back to Wexford to tell them how all three Wexford men were dead. It was only later that Bob was discovered. ``They brought the coffins on a lorry back to Dundalk,'' he says. ``There were crowds lining the streets, to pay respects in Dundalk, and then afterwards in Wexford. Thousands came. There was a lot of encouragement from local people. They along with Dublin had risen in 1916. They knew their history. They took a great pride in the Wexford men. This year has revived all that again for Wexford. History has been relived in a way.''
At this year's Edentubber commemoration Bob laid the wreath at the memorial. It was a very moving occasion. Local bands played the beautiful Wexford tunes, Boulavogue, Kelly of Killane, Boys of Wexford. There were colour parties including the New Women's Colour party from South Armagh which is so much acclaimed, and marked the bravery of the women who fought in 1798. There was a guard of honour for the two Wexford men, Bob and Liam McGarry, a comrade from Kilmore, and 100 pikemen from all over the county.
``It was an occasion of terrible sadness,'' Beth, Bob's wife, says. Tears fell as he laid the wreath.
``We'd come up to fight. There was no more about it,'' he says.
Then, with delight and a wink of enjoyment, he says, modestly, ``and we weren't bad. We concentrated on the communications networks - knocking out the bridges, the customs posts, had the odd pot at an RUC man. It was hard to find a Brit around there. We fought with one hand tied behind our backs. The B-specials were taboo. In fact it was B-men who were guarding the customs out at Edentubber, so we had to torch it. But we did a good job on it.''
In December, after the June `56 convention, two men had come down to Wexford from HQ asking for men to take part in training `at a very advanced stage', and Bob was the first to volunteer. ``We'd seen what was happening to the people in the North at the time... And we knew our history - through the 1948 commemorations - what had been done in Wexford 1798. I heard Fr. Murphy, PP of Glynn at the time, staunch republican, always in his black beret, speaking at Bunclody, `We must continue the struggle begun by our forefathers so that the Tricolour can float, North and South, East and West'.''
Bob tells how the Irish Press serialised Tom Barry's `Guerrilla Days in Ireland'. ``We all read it. He was the hero. And Dan Breen's `My Fight for Irish Freedom' - a great cowboy read. And then there was the battle of Longstone Road. That inspired all of us.''
Bob, a teenager, joined up, and set about organising the IRA in the county which had been much weakened by so many republicans joining de Valera's Fianna Fail and what they still believed to be the Republican party, and by the repression, the isolation, the executions, the hunger strikes and terrible prison struggles of the 40s.
However in `56 he was needed in Wexford and had to stay back when the first Wexford men went up to the border, and it wasn't until the raid on Gough Barracks, and subsequent arrests, that IRA men were back down to Wexford asking again for more volunteers `for training at an advanced stage.'
Eight men went. They were the Vinegar Hill Column: Liam McCarthaigh (Wexford and Cork), George Keegan (Enniscorthy). Paddy Parle and Labhras O'Donaile (both from Wexford Town), Bob Kehoe (Galbally), Paddy Berry (Duncormack), Liam McGarry (South Wexford), Ned Ryan (Oulart) and Frank Armstrong (Boulavogue). They left Wexford for active service on the Monaghan and Louth borders.
A young lad from one of the bands came over to Bob at the commemoration and asked him to come over to them and talk to them. He remembered his grandfather telling him of those times when the Wexford men were up to fight in Louth, Down and Armagh.''
At a reception after the commemoration Bob met Lilly Watters, Michael's sister-in-law. She threw her arms around his neck, ``Why had it to take 41 years to meet,'' she said.
She presented him with an old bottle of stout. ``It is God's will that you have it,'' she said. Only two things were recovered from the house, the bottle and a first communion picture of Michael's niece, who was also at the commemoration that day.
After the tragedy at Edentubber in November of `57, Bob was transferred to the Donegal border and was active through Pettigo, Beleek, until he was arrested at Ballintra in December. He was sentenced for three and six months consecutive for failure to account for his movements and IRA membership. ``You, Kehoe,'' spat Judge Huaigh, ``didn't recognise the court. For that I sentence you to six months.''
Bob landed into Mountjoy on 17 December, 41 years ago today. He was three stone underweight, and on his second morning there was refused the special grub of a pint of milk and porridge that the Republican prisoners had won after refusing to eat the prison dinners. Straightway the OC, Sean Daly, called a meeting. A hunger strike was agreed, and four volunteered: Willie Gleeson, Sean Daly, Jim Coyle and Bob Kehoe.
By January of the new year, Bob got a septic throat. He refused to go to hospital. The Governor buckled and went to the Minister of Justice to inform him that he would not take responsibility for the men, and in particular for Kehoe who, without treatment, was going to die. The Governor returned to the jail and reported back to OC Daly what he had won for them - more than what the republican prisoners had demanded! The prisoners were then separated to D-Wing with political recognition.
Immediately in D-wing they began to cut their way out, ``using a surgeon's saw which had great teeth and could handle the pine wood floor,'' says Bob. Sadly the escape was foiled - by an informer. However Bob was not long in attempting another escape, which again very nearly succeeded - the grappling hook, thrown over the wall, landed well at the feet of two great cumann na mBan women, there to enable the escape, but was just four inches short to grip the wall, and the screws landed on the assembled escapees. A hard hand-to-hand fight ensued with the screws - a few got broken ribs. Bob lost his teeth with a baton blow across the face.
In September `58, Bob was transferred from the Joy to the Curragh where Republicans were interned. A soldier's first duty is to escape and he hadn't been long in the Curragh before on 2 December, 19 men escaped through and over the wire. 16 got away.
One of the men who escaped with Bob that time was Seosamh O'Cuinneagain, an old comrade of his from Enniscorthy - ``he was in the lead as we ran over the Curragh''. Loyal to the last to his fellow Wexford men, Bob said he was not going on the escape unless Seosamh came too.
``Seosamh had been a marvellous organiser in the county. There was at the time a Sinn Fein cumann in almost every parish. They sold several hundred copies of their paper in the county. People would say, as the paper sellers came round, `we've our man up there, you know.' They were very proud of us.''
On the way back from Edentubber on the bus, Beth noticed a pikeman who appeared distraught. She asked him what was troubling him. ``I am ashamed to be on this bus,'' he said, ``so ashamed. I helped to put the wire up round that man [Bob]''.
``I felt so sorry for him,'' she said.
Bob spoke at the reception after the commemoration of `the several phases' in the fight for freedom. There was 1918 after the 1916 executions, when Sinn Fein won an overall majority and set up the First Dail. ``We were young, inexperienced in the 50s, yet we had four TDs elected in `57. We now have two MPs and one TD. There is no reason why the men and women of the present day can't do what our forefathers did in 1918. They can do it if they put their shoulders to the wheel, now,'' he said.
At one of the first `98 commemorations this year in Wexford, in Horetown Cemetery, Bob recalls, a Protestant minister, the Rev. Norman Ruddock, said in his address, ``It took 40 years to get rid of the border between East and West Germany, yet we have failed to get rid of an artificial border in 200 years. I can't understand why we can't march as one to Wolfe Tone's grave in Bodenstown and reclaim our Irish Nation.''
Bob says we should go there next year. He says the Reverend's words were never referred to anywhere in the media. He wasn't asked to speak again. Buried in Norman Ruddock's graveyard at Killurin are Anne Flood who killed a Hessian captain and Matthew Furlong, who had been adjutant to Bagenal Harvey and was shot down at New Ross, as he carried the flag of truce.
``But there were people who didn't want to hear a Protestant minister say this, and at the same time, they would say it was sectarian to commemorate the men and women of the 1798 revolution; politicians, like Seamus Brennan, who advised Wexford to keep the `pike in the thatch' in this year's commemorations; those who feared a democratically elected Senate in Wexford, who wanted to make sure it ended in December 1998; those who feared to take part as pikepeople when Gerry Adams came to the Vinegar Hill Commemoration in February, who said it was too `political'. What did they think 1798 was all about? But these people are slowly being isolated as people get to know their history again.''
Bob recalls going to commemorations for the 150th anniversary of `98 with his father. ``I didn't get to them all. I didn't have a bike of my own in those days. But the commemorations this year were better,'' he says. ``In 1948 the commemorations concentrated very much on the leaders, this time it was on the ordinary people.''
The Carrigbyrne pikegroup was the first group formed for the 200th anniversary. ``We started organising in 1997. We had over 200 pikemen and women, sometimes 300, drawn from 16 parishes in the County and organised by Bill Murray. An FCA man trained us. It has been great. We made the documentaries of the 1798 Rising (for RTE, TnaG and BBC).
``People came in their droves to Dublin. There were 2000, from all over Ireland marching that day. The Comoradh Committee wanted to close it all down by 6 December. How can they close it down? You can't close history down.''
Which of the `78 commemorations meant most to them this year? ``Oulart, I think, apart of course from Bodenstown. It was after all a victory, and we hadn't a flurry of politicians there that time. They want to keep the political arena to themselves, to isolate us outside. We've a real chance to change all that now with the [local] elections coming up,'' Bob says. ``This year has brought a lot of pride into the county - it has focused people on their history and what was done to the people, and what has gone on in the north over 30 years.
``The men who broke out after Vinegar Hill who went North. Sure we just did the same.'
AP/RN 1998
Roisín de Rossa interviews Bob Kehoe from Wexford, a Border Campaign veteran who this year marched with the pike men and women to remember 1798
http://republican-news.org/archive/1998/December17/17wex.html
This year has been an amazing year in County Wexford as hundreds of pikemen and women have commemorated the part played by their ancestors in 1798.
History has lived again in every parish as their pike people walked in the steps of the 30,000 men and women from County Wexford who died in the revolution 200 years ago, and as they celebrated the struggle for the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity which inspired the 1798 revolution and generations of republicans since.
In 1798 survivors of the battle at Vinegar Hill and the terrible slaughter that followed it fought their way north in the hope of joining their comrades in Antrim. In the 1950s, Bob Kehoe, another Wexford man, trod in their steps. He was one of a handful of men who went to Louth to join the fight in the 50s campaign - they were `The Vinegar Hill Column.'
d at Edentubber this year, Bob returned after 41 years to the site of the terrible night when his comrades were killed by the bomb they were preparing in order to attack the brand new automatic telephone exchange across the border. No one will ever know the horror of that night wandering on a desolate hillside by the cottage after the explosions.
Bob Kehoe, who was very sick, was not allowed to go on the operation. He left the cottage only minutes before the two explosions. Paul Smith (Bessbrook), Oliver Craven (Newry), and Michael Watters, who owned the cottage where the bomb was being made up, and Bob's comrades who had come from Wexford with him - Paddy Parle and George Keegan - were all killed.*
``Paddy Parle, he was a great fellow - real happy-go-lucky,'' says Bob. ``I was walking out the door. Bit disappointed, d'you know, and I looked back at him. He quoted Pearse - Pearse was his idol - he was always quoting him - `Farewell, farewell, beloved land, farewell, the May dawn breaks the last my eyes should see, Here in my own lovely land, farewell.' A few minutes later - the blast''.
A man was sent back to Wexford to tell them how all three Wexford men were dead. It was only later that Bob was discovered. ``They brought the coffins on a lorry back to Dundalk,'' he says. ``There were crowds lining the streets, to pay respects in Dundalk, and then afterwards in Wexford. Thousands came. There was a lot of encouragement from local people. They along with Dublin had risen in 1916. They knew their history. They took a great pride in the Wexford men. This year has revived all that again for Wexford. History has been relived in a way.''
At this year's Edentubber commemoration Bob laid the wreath at the memorial. It was a very moving occasion. Local bands played the beautiful Wexford tunes, Boulavogue, Kelly of Killane, Boys of Wexford. There were colour parties including the New Women's Colour party from South Armagh which is so much acclaimed, and marked the bravery of the women who fought in 1798. There was a guard of honour for the two Wexford men, Bob and Liam McGarry, a comrade from Kilmore, and 100 pikemen from all over the county.
``It was an occasion of terrible sadness,'' Beth, Bob's wife, says. Tears fell as he laid the wreath.
``We'd come up to fight. There was no more about it,'' he says.
Then, with delight and a wink of enjoyment, he says, modestly, ``and we weren't bad. We concentrated on the communications networks - knocking out the bridges, the customs posts, had the odd pot at an RUC man. It was hard to find a Brit around there. We fought with one hand tied behind our backs. The B-specials were taboo. In fact it was B-men who were guarding the customs out at Edentubber, so we had to torch it. But we did a good job on it.''
In December, after the June `56 convention, two men had come down to Wexford from HQ asking for men to take part in training `at a very advanced stage', and Bob was the first to volunteer. ``We'd seen what was happening to the people in the North at the time... And we knew our history - through the 1948 commemorations - what had been done in Wexford 1798. I heard Fr. Murphy, PP of Glynn at the time, staunch republican, always in his black beret, speaking at Bunclody, `We must continue the struggle begun by our forefathers so that the Tricolour can float, North and South, East and West'.''
Bob tells how the Irish Press serialised Tom Barry's `Guerrilla Days in Ireland'. ``We all read it. He was the hero. And Dan Breen's `My Fight for Irish Freedom' - a great cowboy read. And then there was the battle of Longstone Road. That inspired all of us.''
Bob, a teenager, joined up, and set about organising the IRA in the county which had been much weakened by so many republicans joining de Valera's Fianna Fail and what they still believed to be the Republican party, and by the repression, the isolation, the executions, the hunger strikes and terrible prison struggles of the 40s.
However in `56 he was needed in Wexford and had to stay back when the first Wexford men went up to the border, and it wasn't until the raid on Gough Barracks, and subsequent arrests, that IRA men were back down to Wexford asking again for more volunteers `for training at an advanced stage.'
Eight men went. They were the Vinegar Hill Column: Liam McCarthaigh (Wexford and Cork), George Keegan (Enniscorthy). Paddy Parle and Labhras O'Donaile (both from Wexford Town), Bob Kehoe (Galbally), Paddy Berry (Duncormack), Liam McGarry (South Wexford), Ned Ryan (Oulart) and Frank Armstrong (Boulavogue). They left Wexford for active service on the Monaghan and Louth borders.
A young lad from one of the bands came over to Bob at the commemoration and asked him to come over to them and talk to them. He remembered his grandfather telling him of those times when the Wexford men were up to fight in Louth, Down and Armagh.''
At a reception after the commemoration Bob met Lilly Watters, Michael's sister-in-law. She threw her arms around his neck, ``Why had it to take 41 years to meet,'' she said.
She presented him with an old bottle of stout. ``It is God's will that you have it,'' she said. Only two things were recovered from the house, the bottle and a first communion picture of Michael's niece, who was also at the commemoration that day.
After the tragedy at Edentubber in November of `57, Bob was transferred to the Donegal border and was active through Pettigo, Beleek, until he was arrested at Ballintra in December. He was sentenced for three and six months consecutive for failure to account for his movements and IRA membership. ``You, Kehoe,'' spat Judge Huaigh, ``didn't recognise the court. For that I sentence you to six months.''
Bob landed into Mountjoy on 17 December, 41 years ago today. He was three stone underweight, and on his second morning there was refused the special grub of a pint of milk and porridge that the Republican prisoners had won after refusing to eat the prison dinners. Straightway the OC, Sean Daly, called a meeting. A hunger strike was agreed, and four volunteered: Willie Gleeson, Sean Daly, Jim Coyle and Bob Kehoe.
By January of the new year, Bob got a septic throat. He refused to go to hospital. The Governor buckled and went to the Minister of Justice to inform him that he would not take responsibility for the men, and in particular for Kehoe who, without treatment, was going to die. The Governor returned to the jail and reported back to OC Daly what he had won for them - more than what the republican prisoners had demanded! The prisoners were then separated to D-Wing with political recognition.
Immediately in D-wing they began to cut their way out, ``using a surgeon's saw which had great teeth and could handle the pine wood floor,'' says Bob. Sadly the escape was foiled - by an informer. However Bob was not long in attempting another escape, which again very nearly succeeded - the grappling hook, thrown over the wall, landed well at the feet of two great cumann na mBan women, there to enable the escape, but was just four inches short to grip the wall, and the screws landed on the assembled escapees. A hard hand-to-hand fight ensued with the screws - a few got broken ribs. Bob lost his teeth with a baton blow across the face.
In September `58, Bob was transferred from the Joy to the Curragh where Republicans were interned. A soldier's first duty is to escape and he hadn't been long in the Curragh before on 2 December, 19 men escaped through and over the wire. 16 got away.
One of the men who escaped with Bob that time was Seosamh O'Cuinneagain, an old comrade of his from Enniscorthy - ``he was in the lead as we ran over the Curragh''. Loyal to the last to his fellow Wexford men, Bob said he was not going on the escape unless Seosamh came too.
``Seosamh had been a marvellous organiser in the county. There was at the time a Sinn Fein cumann in almost every parish. They sold several hundred copies of their paper in the county. People would say, as the paper sellers came round, `we've our man up there, you know.' They were very proud of us.''
On the way back from Edentubber on the bus, Beth noticed a pikeman who appeared distraught. She asked him what was troubling him. ``I am ashamed to be on this bus,'' he said, ``so ashamed. I helped to put the wire up round that man [Bob]''.
``I felt so sorry for him,'' she said.
Bob spoke at the reception after the commemoration of `the several phases' in the fight for freedom. There was 1918 after the 1916 executions, when Sinn Fein won an overall majority and set up the First Dail. ``We were young, inexperienced in the 50s, yet we had four TDs elected in `57. We now have two MPs and one TD. There is no reason why the men and women of the present day can't do what our forefathers did in 1918. They can do it if they put their shoulders to the wheel, now,'' he said.
At one of the first `98 commemorations this year in Wexford, in Horetown Cemetery, Bob recalls, a Protestant minister, the Rev. Norman Ruddock, said in his address, ``It took 40 years to get rid of the border between East and West Germany, yet we have failed to get rid of an artificial border in 200 years. I can't understand why we can't march as one to Wolfe Tone's grave in Bodenstown and reclaim our Irish Nation.''
Bob says we should go there next year. He says the Reverend's words were never referred to anywhere in the media. He wasn't asked to speak again. Buried in Norman Ruddock's graveyard at Killurin are Anne Flood who killed a Hessian captain and Matthew Furlong, who had been adjutant to Bagenal Harvey and was shot down at New Ross, as he carried the flag of truce.
``But there were people who didn't want to hear a Protestant minister say this, and at the same time, they would say it was sectarian to commemorate the men and women of the 1798 revolution; politicians, like Seamus Brennan, who advised Wexford to keep the `pike in the thatch' in this year's commemorations; those who feared a democratically elected Senate in Wexford, who wanted to make sure it ended in December 1998; those who feared to take part as pikepeople when Gerry Adams came to the Vinegar Hill Commemoration in February, who said it was too `political'. What did they think 1798 was all about? But these people are slowly being isolated as people get to know their history again.''
Bob recalls going to commemorations for the 150th anniversary of `98 with his father. ``I didn't get to them all. I didn't have a bike of my own in those days. But the commemorations this year were better,'' he says. ``In 1948 the commemorations concentrated very much on the leaders, this time it was on the ordinary people.''
The Carrigbyrne pikegroup was the first group formed for the 200th anniversary. ``We started organising in 1997. We had over 200 pikemen and women, sometimes 300, drawn from 16 parishes in the County and organised by Bill Murray. An FCA man trained us. It has been great. We made the documentaries of the 1798 Rising (for RTE, TnaG and BBC).
``People came in their droves to Dublin. There were 2000, from all over Ireland marching that day. The Comoradh Committee wanted to close it all down by 6 December. How can they close it down? You can't close history down.''
Which of the `78 commemorations meant most to them this year? ``Oulart, I think, apart of course from Bodenstown. It was after all a victory, and we hadn't a flurry of politicians there that time. They want to keep the political arena to themselves, to isolate us outside. We've a real chance to change all that now with the [local] elections coming up,'' Bob says. ``This year has brought a lot of pride into the county - it has focused people on their history and what was done to the people, and what has gone on in the north over 30 years.
``The men who broke out after Vinegar Hill who went North. Sure we just did the same.'
Wexford Memories of the Border Campaign
(There is no author listed for these wonderful recollections. A book on Wexford and the Campaign was recently published, "From Vinegar Hill to Edentubber" by Ruan O'Donnell.)
20 December 2007
Wexford memories of the 1956-'62 Border Campaign
http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/17921
THE IRA unit in the Wexford Town area was re-formed in 1954 when Seamus Mac Suain returned home from abroad, taking over from the former Curragh internees and ex-prisoners who had kept the organisation intact through an underground network of meetings similar to the IRB organisation of a past generation.
Their main objective was to hold the Army intact until a younger generation of Volunteers was ready to take over. These veterans had, by the mid-1950s, married and settled down to domestic life with all the mundane problems of young families and had neither the energy nor time for the serious effort required. Besides, it was considered that they had endured enough hardship. Mac Suain’s initial support came from Liam McGarry, Tommy ‘Brownie’ Nolan, Richard ‘Mangans’ Hynes, Jimmy ‘Wheesie’ Murphy and Aidan Duggan.
There had not been a Sinn Féin cumann in the county for many years and few were interested in forming one. Despite the weak state of the Republican Movement in the aftermath of the mass imprisonments and heavy tactics of the government during the 1940s, the local Easter Commemoration Committee still continued to enjoy enthusiastic support with a substantial annual turn-out at the Crosstown Memorial Plot.
After several abortive attempts, the Paddy McGrath Sinn Féin Cumann was eventually formed in 1955 and has been in operation since (though the name has changed).
The radio news that followed the series of border raids of 12 December 1956 at first filled us with feelings of elation followed later by a sense of disappointment of not having taken part: a repeat of the 1916 Rising when Wexford Town had failed to rise. Despite that setback, a strong Sinn Féin cumann had been formed in Wexford Town in 1956 and young people were again openly promoting the republican cause through sales of The United Irishman newspaper and other activities.
Despite the shortage of numbers in the Republican Movement, most Wexford people were quietly proud of their republican heritage and resistance to British rule. The fields and streets of our county had run red with the blood of thousands in 1798 and we were constantly reminded of that struggle.
The numbers of active IRA Volunteers in the unit over the period from ‘54 to ‘58 came to approximately 30 but they were supported by many background workers. There seemed to be no shortage of arms for training purposes. We could do everything with the various weapons except what they were designed for, there being a chronic shortage of ammunition.
In 1954, the IRA staged a spectacular raid when they cleaned out the British armoury at Gough Barracks in Armagh. It was major news and had a profound effect on republican morale throughout the country. We were later to be supplied with some of the arms seized.
Then, in October, another spectacular occurred when the Omagh Barracks was raided and Volunteers (some later to be nationally well-known) were captured and imprisoned.
Emigration took its toll and this, together with ‘doing what comes naturally’ and other factors, combined to deplete our numbers in early ‘56. Jack Dunne, a veteran republican returned home from Kilkenny to work in the Wexford Gas Company and despite his hearing handicap, was totally committed and a steadying influence.
Sinn Féin did little to address the many social problems at the time, concentrating instead on “breaking the connection with England”. Selling papers, Easter Lilies, tickets, commemorations and ceilithe was quite enough to go on with. Selling dozens of the United Irishman around the pubs each month was a soul-destroying task facing cumann members and it did more to drive people out of the Movement than any hostile laws. But the commemorations and ceilithe became social occasions, particularly Easter Sunday and the annual pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, County Kildare. Open-air rallies were common both in the Bull Ring and the Square in Enniscorthy where we became experts at the rent-a-crowd tactic. At the height of the resistance campaign there were 16 Sinn Féin cumainn in the county.
Due to a communications breakdown the Wexford unit did not participate in the 12 December 1956 attacks on installations but the Enniscorthy unit did and they acquitted themselves admirably. The Radio Éireann news bulletins on the morning after the attacks did raise our spirits and we were determined not to be left out of the next wave.
Then the Coalition Government fell and Fianna Fáil regained power. The Establishment closed ranks once again and republicanism was effectively ostracised in both states on the island of Ireland. The Special Powers Act was in full force in the North and the repressive Offences Against the State Act was reactivated in the South. The jails were filling up and republicans were under surveillance at every turn of the road. However most of the gardaí in Wexford had taken part in the earlier fight for freedom and would have understood our aims. Older Republicans were used by gardaí as their conduit if we were seen or rumoured to be breaking the law.
The Church in Wexford, ever part of the Establishment, acted to form though some clerics were initially supportive. After the Edentubber tragedy, the then Bishop of Ferns sent priests out to selected secondary schools, warning of the dangers to the faith. In contrast, priests from the border areas came and ministered to us.
Paddy Parle and Liam McCarthy (Liam McGarry was then based in Mayo) got things moving again and the unit was re-activated. Parle had returned from abroad and was working in English’s Printing Company.
The main strategy was to strike a blow against the British Army of occupation in the hope that the Irish people would eventually unite and demand freedom. None of us expected to win the battle, but we hoped to stir the national consciousness.
September 1957 dawned and we were called up at last. Frank Armstrong led us to a training camp at the Cull Bank, where it was a case of training all night and sleeping all day for security reasons.
The following weekend, Seán Hennessy picked us up and we arrived in Dublin, in the dead of the night to be collected the following day and brought to Frank and Vera Lanny’s home at Anyart, outside the town of Castleblayney in County Monaghan, the first of the many safe houses we were to know so well. There we were presented with the special anorak with Tricolour flash on the arm which we were told was required to comply with the Geneva Convention.
From ‘Blaney we were billeted in a succession of farms, houses and barns all along the borderline from Dundalk to Monaghan. The people were very kind to us and we felt at times that they were doing without themselves to feed their guests.
There were eight from Wexford and some Armagh Volunteers in the group which assembled on old Jim Finn’s farm, near Iniskeen, under the command of Limerickman Paddy Kelleher and aptly named ‘The Vinegar Hill Column’ by the Chief of Staff, Charlie Murphy, a Dublin man with Boolavogue connections. That was the last contact I had with either Paddy Parle or George Keegan, who would both be dead within weeks
The other Wexford Volunteers present were P Berry, from Duncormack; Bob Kehoe, Galbally; Liam McCarthy, a native of Mallow working in Wexford Post Office; Ned Ryan, Oulart; Frank Armstrong, Boolavogue; and myself. From Iniskeen we split up and departed to other locations near the Armagh border.
That little farm on the border at Iniskeen was probably the last of the Flying Column camps we had heard so much about from the Tan War. There was nothing romantic, however, about 20 young men sleeping rough in a barn on a bachelor’s small farm in the middle of nowhere. We did not expect hotel fare, nor did we get it, but there is nothing like the experience of the real thing.
Paddy Parle led everything from the Rosary, the singing and the general banter whilst the technicians working on the large kitchen table primed grenades and very heavy mines which we had on occasions to lug back and forth across the border.
The first of the Soviet Union’s Sputniks had been launched in space in October and could be seen each night in the Northern sky. We found it difficult to understand the Northern accent, especially the Ulster Scots words used in rural areas. The opposite sex was the most popular topic of conversion though girls were neither seen nor heard. Frank Armstrong, a seasoned Army man, expressed his surprise in ‘56 going into action with Seán Garland and him bemoaning the fact that he was missing a good dance that night in the Crystal Ballroom.
Volunteers were considered very fortunate to be billeted in a house with a TV but, due to the security situation, we were usually ‘confined to barracks’ and reading matter became a problem.
One house I was billeted in had a complete set of Annie Smithson books and a copy of Ethel Mannin’s famous book, Late Have I Loved Thee. These I had disposed of within days and was hungry for more. Emigrant family members regularly posted home banned magazines such as Reveille, Tit Bits, and The Daily Sketch.
My closest comrade across the fields was not too fortunate as his host, a retired sailor, had never learned to read and had no stock of literature, not even a newspaper. Due to his perceived anti-clerical reputation, the local branch of the Legion of Mary continually plied him with religious literature, which he used to kindle the turf fire.
Castleblayney then was a typical market town with little sign of life during the week. It was well-known for its ballroom, Muckno Lakes (‘The Killarney of the North’), Faugh’s Football Club, furniture manufacturing and, as in all areas close to the border, smuggling. Unlike today, there were few if any cars and parking did not create a problem.
My ‘farmhouse holiday’ came to a sudden end on the night of 10 November when we were assembled at the Lanny home at Annyart, near Castleblayney, for a proposed attack on the barracks at Crossmaglen. Our mission, part of a three-pronged attack on installations was planned as a diversionary tactic, to draw the enemy towards that area, away from Middletown and the Newry area where the other operations were planned.
There were only four in our party, led by Paddy Kelleher. George Poyntz, our driver, was an ex-Irish-Army man who lived and worked in Castleblayney. Then there was Eugene McGuinness, from County Armagh, and myself. After receiving instructions, chewing gum for the nerves and reciting the obligatory Rosary with Vera, the woman of the house, Poyntz had the engine of the van running and we took off towards our destination.
At Cullaville, the road was blocked but a local man was more than happy to surrender his van which took us to the perimeter of Crossmaglen.
There we were ordered to make a few dummy mines with the large old-style Jacob’s biscuit tins. These would be later spread across the main road, wired and primed with sod and stones. It was an exceptionally bright, moonlit night as we set about our task when the horizon was suddenly lit up, accompanied by two loud bangs like claps of thunder from the Newry direction. McGuinness remarked: “There goes the transformers but they’re too early.” It was five minutes to one o’clock on 11 November: Armistice Day. The fact that there were two loud explosions gives rise to the theory that the deaths may have been deliberate and Bob Kehoe insists that there was only one mine.
The reason I am attempting to relate all these minor details is to give an insight into what later transpired regarding George Poyntz, our driver, who was exposed as a British agent during the long war, in the 1980s. The local people we stayed with did not trust him and they were right about others also. The question is: was he an agent back then?
When our task had been completed, the van was abandoned at the border, where we then split into pairs, taking to the countryside towards Castleblayney. For long hours we tramped over and around “the little hills of Monaghan” until we reached safety at dawn. We were not expected but as the barn door was invitingly open we settled into an exhausted sleep on the barley animal feed.
Our sleep was shattered some hours later when the son of the family woke us in a state of shock to tell us the radio had reported several men had been killed in an explosion near Newry.
There were few details and it was some days before all five were identified as some bodies had been badly mutilated. An undertaker told me how he picked pieces of flesh off the bushes around the area of the house which was completely destroyed.
The deaths at Edentubber were a tragic setback to the resistance campaign and we found ourselves scattered and confined to safe houses in the major towns of Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin City for some time afterwards.
‘round lonely Edentubber,
The banshee loudly wails
For five brave Volunteers who died,
The pride of Granuaile.
20 December 2007
Wexford memories of the 1956-'62 Border Campaign
http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/17921
THE IRA unit in the Wexford Town area was re-formed in 1954 when Seamus Mac Suain returned home from abroad, taking over from the former Curragh internees and ex-prisoners who had kept the organisation intact through an underground network of meetings similar to the IRB organisation of a past generation.
Their main objective was to hold the Army intact until a younger generation of Volunteers was ready to take over. These veterans had, by the mid-1950s, married and settled down to domestic life with all the mundane problems of young families and had neither the energy nor time for the serious effort required. Besides, it was considered that they had endured enough hardship. Mac Suain’s initial support came from Liam McGarry, Tommy ‘Brownie’ Nolan, Richard ‘Mangans’ Hynes, Jimmy ‘Wheesie’ Murphy and Aidan Duggan.
There had not been a Sinn Féin cumann in the county for many years and few were interested in forming one. Despite the weak state of the Republican Movement in the aftermath of the mass imprisonments and heavy tactics of the government during the 1940s, the local Easter Commemoration Committee still continued to enjoy enthusiastic support with a substantial annual turn-out at the Crosstown Memorial Plot.
After several abortive attempts, the Paddy McGrath Sinn Féin Cumann was eventually formed in 1955 and has been in operation since (though the name has changed).
The radio news that followed the series of border raids of 12 December 1956 at first filled us with feelings of elation followed later by a sense of disappointment of not having taken part: a repeat of the 1916 Rising when Wexford Town had failed to rise. Despite that setback, a strong Sinn Féin cumann had been formed in Wexford Town in 1956 and young people were again openly promoting the republican cause through sales of The United Irishman newspaper and other activities.
Despite the shortage of numbers in the Republican Movement, most Wexford people were quietly proud of their republican heritage and resistance to British rule. The fields and streets of our county had run red with the blood of thousands in 1798 and we were constantly reminded of that struggle.
The numbers of active IRA Volunteers in the unit over the period from ‘54 to ‘58 came to approximately 30 but they were supported by many background workers. There seemed to be no shortage of arms for training purposes. We could do everything with the various weapons except what they were designed for, there being a chronic shortage of ammunition.
In 1954, the IRA staged a spectacular raid when they cleaned out the British armoury at Gough Barracks in Armagh. It was major news and had a profound effect on republican morale throughout the country. We were later to be supplied with some of the arms seized.
Then, in October, another spectacular occurred when the Omagh Barracks was raided and Volunteers (some later to be nationally well-known) were captured and imprisoned.
Emigration took its toll and this, together with ‘doing what comes naturally’ and other factors, combined to deplete our numbers in early ‘56. Jack Dunne, a veteran republican returned home from Kilkenny to work in the Wexford Gas Company and despite his hearing handicap, was totally committed and a steadying influence.
Sinn Féin did little to address the many social problems at the time, concentrating instead on “breaking the connection with England”. Selling papers, Easter Lilies, tickets, commemorations and ceilithe was quite enough to go on with. Selling dozens of the United Irishman around the pubs each month was a soul-destroying task facing cumann members and it did more to drive people out of the Movement than any hostile laws. But the commemorations and ceilithe became social occasions, particularly Easter Sunday and the annual pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, County Kildare. Open-air rallies were common both in the Bull Ring and the Square in Enniscorthy where we became experts at the rent-a-crowd tactic. At the height of the resistance campaign there were 16 Sinn Féin cumainn in the county.
Due to a communications breakdown the Wexford unit did not participate in the 12 December 1956 attacks on installations but the Enniscorthy unit did and they acquitted themselves admirably. The Radio Éireann news bulletins on the morning after the attacks did raise our spirits and we were determined not to be left out of the next wave.
Then the Coalition Government fell and Fianna Fáil regained power. The Establishment closed ranks once again and republicanism was effectively ostracised in both states on the island of Ireland. The Special Powers Act was in full force in the North and the repressive Offences Against the State Act was reactivated in the South. The jails were filling up and republicans were under surveillance at every turn of the road. However most of the gardaí in Wexford had taken part in the earlier fight for freedom and would have understood our aims. Older Republicans were used by gardaí as their conduit if we were seen or rumoured to be breaking the law.
The Church in Wexford, ever part of the Establishment, acted to form though some clerics were initially supportive. After the Edentubber tragedy, the then Bishop of Ferns sent priests out to selected secondary schools, warning of the dangers to the faith. In contrast, priests from the border areas came and ministered to us.
Paddy Parle and Liam McCarthy (Liam McGarry was then based in Mayo) got things moving again and the unit was re-activated. Parle had returned from abroad and was working in English’s Printing Company.
The main strategy was to strike a blow against the British Army of occupation in the hope that the Irish people would eventually unite and demand freedom. None of us expected to win the battle, but we hoped to stir the national consciousness.
September 1957 dawned and we were called up at last. Frank Armstrong led us to a training camp at the Cull Bank, where it was a case of training all night and sleeping all day for security reasons.
The following weekend, Seán Hennessy picked us up and we arrived in Dublin, in the dead of the night to be collected the following day and brought to Frank and Vera Lanny’s home at Anyart, outside the town of Castleblayney in County Monaghan, the first of the many safe houses we were to know so well. There we were presented with the special anorak with Tricolour flash on the arm which we were told was required to comply with the Geneva Convention.
From ‘Blaney we were billeted in a succession of farms, houses and barns all along the borderline from Dundalk to Monaghan. The people were very kind to us and we felt at times that they were doing without themselves to feed their guests.
There were eight from Wexford and some Armagh Volunteers in the group which assembled on old Jim Finn’s farm, near Iniskeen, under the command of Limerickman Paddy Kelleher and aptly named ‘The Vinegar Hill Column’ by the Chief of Staff, Charlie Murphy, a Dublin man with Boolavogue connections. That was the last contact I had with either Paddy Parle or George Keegan, who would both be dead within weeks
The other Wexford Volunteers present were P Berry, from Duncormack; Bob Kehoe, Galbally; Liam McCarthy, a native of Mallow working in Wexford Post Office; Ned Ryan, Oulart; Frank Armstrong, Boolavogue; and myself. From Iniskeen we split up and departed to other locations near the Armagh border.
That little farm on the border at Iniskeen was probably the last of the Flying Column camps we had heard so much about from the Tan War. There was nothing romantic, however, about 20 young men sleeping rough in a barn on a bachelor’s small farm in the middle of nowhere. We did not expect hotel fare, nor did we get it, but there is nothing like the experience of the real thing.
Paddy Parle led everything from the Rosary, the singing and the general banter whilst the technicians working on the large kitchen table primed grenades and very heavy mines which we had on occasions to lug back and forth across the border.
The first of the Soviet Union’s Sputniks had been launched in space in October and could be seen each night in the Northern sky. We found it difficult to understand the Northern accent, especially the Ulster Scots words used in rural areas. The opposite sex was the most popular topic of conversion though girls were neither seen nor heard. Frank Armstrong, a seasoned Army man, expressed his surprise in ‘56 going into action with Seán Garland and him bemoaning the fact that he was missing a good dance that night in the Crystal Ballroom.
Volunteers were considered very fortunate to be billeted in a house with a TV but, due to the security situation, we were usually ‘confined to barracks’ and reading matter became a problem.
One house I was billeted in had a complete set of Annie Smithson books and a copy of Ethel Mannin’s famous book, Late Have I Loved Thee. These I had disposed of within days and was hungry for more. Emigrant family members regularly posted home banned magazines such as Reveille, Tit Bits, and The Daily Sketch.
My closest comrade across the fields was not too fortunate as his host, a retired sailor, had never learned to read and had no stock of literature, not even a newspaper. Due to his perceived anti-clerical reputation, the local branch of the Legion of Mary continually plied him with religious literature, which he used to kindle the turf fire.
Castleblayney then was a typical market town with little sign of life during the week. It was well-known for its ballroom, Muckno Lakes (‘The Killarney of the North’), Faugh’s Football Club, furniture manufacturing and, as in all areas close to the border, smuggling. Unlike today, there were few if any cars and parking did not create a problem.
My ‘farmhouse holiday’ came to a sudden end on the night of 10 November when we were assembled at the Lanny home at Annyart, near Castleblayney, for a proposed attack on the barracks at Crossmaglen. Our mission, part of a three-pronged attack on installations was planned as a diversionary tactic, to draw the enemy towards that area, away from Middletown and the Newry area where the other operations were planned.
There were only four in our party, led by Paddy Kelleher. George Poyntz, our driver, was an ex-Irish-Army man who lived and worked in Castleblayney. Then there was Eugene McGuinness, from County Armagh, and myself. After receiving instructions, chewing gum for the nerves and reciting the obligatory Rosary with Vera, the woman of the house, Poyntz had the engine of the van running and we took off towards our destination.
At Cullaville, the road was blocked but a local man was more than happy to surrender his van which took us to the perimeter of Crossmaglen.
There we were ordered to make a few dummy mines with the large old-style Jacob’s biscuit tins. These would be later spread across the main road, wired and primed with sod and stones. It was an exceptionally bright, moonlit night as we set about our task when the horizon was suddenly lit up, accompanied by two loud bangs like claps of thunder from the Newry direction. McGuinness remarked: “There goes the transformers but they’re too early.” It was five minutes to one o’clock on 11 November: Armistice Day. The fact that there were two loud explosions gives rise to the theory that the deaths may have been deliberate and Bob Kehoe insists that there was only one mine.
The reason I am attempting to relate all these minor details is to give an insight into what later transpired regarding George Poyntz, our driver, who was exposed as a British agent during the long war, in the 1980s. The local people we stayed with did not trust him and they were right about others also. The question is: was he an agent back then?
When our task had been completed, the van was abandoned at the border, where we then split into pairs, taking to the countryside towards Castleblayney. For long hours we tramped over and around “the little hills of Monaghan” until we reached safety at dawn. We were not expected but as the barn door was invitingly open we settled into an exhausted sleep on the barley animal feed.
Our sleep was shattered some hours later when the son of the family woke us in a state of shock to tell us the radio had reported several men had been killed in an explosion near Newry.
There were few details and it was some days before all five were identified as some bodies had been badly mutilated. An undertaker told me how he picked pieces of flesh off the bushes around the area of the house which was completely destroyed.
The deaths at Edentubber were a tragic setback to the resistance campaign and we found ourselves scattered and confined to safe houses in the major towns of Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin City for some time afterwards.
‘round lonely Edentubber,
The banshee loudly wails
For five brave Volunteers who died,
The pride of Granuaile.
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