Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ the royal visit and called attention to the plight of the Boers fighting ‘an empire that has robbed [them] of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers’. A year earlier, when the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain visited Trinity College Dublin, pro-Boer demonstrations turned into full-scale rioting. With a prescience that was generally lacking in Dublin Castle, Under Secretary for Ireland David Harrel warned that the Boer struggle created ‘this idea amongst the younger men of getting the possession of arms’.18 A cultural revolution was under way, encouraged by Yeats and Lady Gregory who wrote of Irish themes in English, and by Irish language activists seeking to overturn English influence in the cultural sphere. The future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, the son of a Protestant clergyman, deplored the ‘constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas’.19

      But in those days a rural policeman like Tobias O’Sullivan was more likely to be preoccupied with disputes over rights of way and grazing, petty theft, illegal poitin distilling and prosecuting the owners of unlicensed livestock than with the dangers posed by nationalist agitators. By 1907 he was stationed in County Sligo where his name appears in court reports, a constable prosecuting groups of men involved in agitation against dairy farms. They were men of no property who sought fields in which to plant crops; they drove the cattle onto the roads, a symbol of wealth that lay perennially beyond their reach. My maternal great-grandfather, Patrick Hassett, was a thirty-year veteran of the police force by the time Tobias O’Sullivan joined up. A tall, sturdy figure with a piercing gaze, I know Patrick was physically brave. A newspaper report from 1895 refers to him as a man of ‘rare coolness and self-possession’ and describes how he killed a rabid dog with the stock of his rifle in order to save the life of a young boy.20

      Yet the politics of the age seeped through. Two court cases from Patrick’s service speak of an Ireland more unsettled than the British understood. One afternoon in Cork city, towards the close of the nineteenth century, he, his brother and a fellow constable hailed a horse-drawn cab. They asked to be taken to a police barracks on the western fringe of the city. The driver was the worse for drink and, for reasons unknown, resentful of the police. As soon as they had climbed on board he drove the horse at a furious pace, causing a collision with another cart, carrying lumber. My great-grandfather and his comrades were thrown into the road. His brother John suffered a broken collarbone. But when Patrick Hassett made to arrest the driver a crowd gathered and began to jostle the police. My great-grandfather drew his sword. Then the chanting began: ‘Boycott the police!’ Constable Hassett emerged unscathed with his prisoner, but the newspapers would later describe how the case had caused ‘some stir in the city … when it was reported that a serious conflict took place between the police and the people’.21

      Three years later in rural Waterford, Patrick was dispatched to arrest a land campaigner and local Home Rule councillor who had shot at a wealthy Catholic farmer. Patrick succeeded in disarming the assailant who told him: ‘God is on my side … I had every right to do it.’22 The fight was about land and the big farmer’s purchase of ground rented by the poorer man. Land and who lost it, who stole it, who worked it, who gained from it, was the marrow of my ancestors’ lives. As I travelled further I would discover in north Kerry, in the fields of my grandmother’s people, how nothing was more political than the ground beneath their feet.

      My great-grandfather was lucky to have retired from the RIC by the time a choice had to be made about what kind of country he was willing to fight for. In his last years, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, there was a growing campaign to isolate policemen and their families from the communities in which they lived. The boycott chant he heard in Cork now echoed across rural communities. In 1897 the Gaelic Athletic Association, which attracted hundreds of thousands of young men to the sports of hurling and Gaelic football, banned police and soldiers from membership. Retired policemen faced discrimination in jobs controlled by nationalist town and county councils. When the War of Independence escalated the boycott extended to undertakers who were warned not to transport the bodies of dead policemen back to their home districts.

      After the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, many policemen became conflicted about their role. The outbreak of guerrilla war in 1919 put the RIC directly in the firing line of the IRA. The first victims of the IRA were Irish policemen: eighteen were killed before the end of the year. By the middle of the following year more than fifty were resigning every week to avoid the violence. Policemen and their families were directly boycotted. Hundreds of remote police barracks were closed because they could not be defended. Scores of others were burned down.

      Tobias O’Sullivan was the sergeant in charge of Athea barracks in County Limerick when it was closed in early 1920 and the police redeployed to more easily defended locations. The village was about eight miles from Listowel where he would be posted the following year. But first he was sent to the County Limerick town of Kilmallock which had a strong barracks in the heart of the town. Twenty years into his police career, O’Sullivan was determined not to be intimidated by the IRA. His resolve hardened in the face of the escalating campaign which branded men like him as traitors. An IRA poster in Cork in March 1920 was explicit in its threat: ‘Whereas the spies and traitors known as the Royal Irish Constabulary are holding this country for the enemy … we do hereby proclaim said spies and traitors, and do hereby solemnly warn prospective recruits that they join the RIC at their own peril. All nations are agreed as to the fate of traitors. It is the sanction of God and man.’23 Some police cooperated with the IRA. The flow of information from inside police barracks, and from the British administration’s headquarters at Dublin Castle, was instrumental in the IRA’s successful targeting of spies and informers. Others looked the other way when confronted with information about IRA operations.

      Yet the majority remained loyal. This was partly to do with tradition and discipline, and also the power of the status quo. Every previous rebellion in Irish history had been suppressed and life had always returned to a version of normal. To men like Tobias O’Sullivan the gunmen presented a vision of chaos, threatening the destruction of the more ordered world that had emerged from the anguish of the great Famine and the struggle for land. Late nineteenth-century British governments had been reformist. In the words of Irish chief secretary Gerald Balfour, they set about ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’. Still Home Rule within the empire was now promised, a perilous pledge given the obduracy of Ulster Unionists, but a distinct probability in some form in the early years of the twentieth century.

      An Ireland run by the armed separatists would probably have horrified O’Sullivan. The British Empire had been shaken by the Great War but in 1920 nothing indicated that it was on the cusp of irreversible decline. Tobias O’Sullivan must have felt he was on the right side of history. His wife May went with him, into the heart of a war she knew could claim her husband’s life at any moment. When they married Ireland was already restive. But nobody then anticipated that revolution was looming. May’s family had experienced eviction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, migrating south from County Fermanagh after their first dispossession. They lived on a small, poor farm in Aughagower in County Mayo, around thirty miles from the O’Sullivan homestead. Tobias may have met her at a country fair or when he went into John Gibbons’ grocery shop in Westport where she worked as an assistant. Nearly seventeen years older, Tobias was handsome and would have radiated calm authority. They married in February 1915 with the world at war and Ireland slipping towards revolution.

* The rebellion was inspired by the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and led by the United Irishmen, many of them Protestants, who wanted to sever Ireland’s connection with Britain. As many as thirty thousand people are believed to have died before the rebellion collapsed after a brutal campaign of government repression. What began, in part, as rebellion to create an Ireland СКАЧАТЬ