Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ two and was sturdy with wavy dark hair and a thick moustache. A photograph of him in the last year of his life shows him gazing at the camera with a dogged expression. He came from the same Catholic faith as his assassins, and a similar rural background. But he had chosen to defend the existing order and for this his compatriots were ready to kill him.

      His family traced their roots to the Gaelic lordship of O’Sullivan Beare, who had fought the English until he was forced into exile in 1603 and was murdered fifteen years later, apparently by an English spy, as he left mass in Madrid. The family believed their ancestors had retreated north-west with O’Sullivan Beare after the battle of Kinsale in County Cork in 1602, when the forces of Elizabeth I defeated a combined Irish and Spanish force, presaging the death of the Gaelic order and the triumph of colonial power. According to family lore, the O’Sullivans fought on and were present at Aughrim in County Galway when their leader Donal Cam O’Sullivan defeated a larger English-led army in January 1603. These were the stories of resilience and hardiness that were told to the young Tobias O’Sullivan. He grew up in this Irish-speaking district believing he had inherited the blood of warriors.

      Tobias was born on 14 May 1877 in Doorus, a long narrow peninsula that reaches into Lough Corrib, a place of forbidding beauty where high mountains loom over lake and fields. He was the seventh of nine children whose mother died in childbirth when Tobias was just four years old. The O’Sullivans occupied a two-storey farmhouse on the lakeshore where the family owned boats for fishing and grazed sheep on twenty-six acres, a solid holding in those days. But Tobias’s father had known great hardship. He was seven years old when the potato crop failed and the Famine followed. Tobias would have heard stories of the catastrophe.

      ‘The very dogs which had lost their masters or were driven from their homes became roving denizens of this district,’ reported an English land surveyor at the time; they ‘lived on the unburied or partially buried corpses of their late owners and others, and there was no help for it, as all were prostrate alike, the territory so extensive, and the people so secluded and unknown’.14

In fact Tobias’s own grandfather, Patrick O’Sullivan, died of cholera during the Famine after going to help a shepherd who worked for him while the man lay dying. When he became ill himself he sent word back not to fetch him, conscious that he could infect others of his family. The O’Sullivans buried him on Inchagoill, a sacred island on Lough Corrib. At the height of the Famine the area also saw a concerted effort to convert Catholics to Protestantism, with considerable sectarian animosity between elements of the two churches. The evictions that accompanied the Famine, and escalated in its aftermath, deepened the alienation. As late as November 1875, ten families were forced off the land near Oughterard, around twenty miles from the O’Sullivans; among them was an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack on hearing that he was to be made homeless. When the RIC were called in to enforce the eviction one officer had hot coals poured down his back. Thirty men and women were injured by a subsequent police bayonet charge. By 1880 meetings of the Land League in the area were drawing crowds of more than five thousand people to the slogan ‘land for the landless people, land for the children of men’.* An English traveller wrote that ‘the law was ignored and agrarian crime respected and unpunished’. How can ‘this almost universally disaffected tone be changed into one of content and loyalty?’ he asked.15

      The young Tobias would have been aware of the complicated history of the police in the area. The Irish Constabulary were obliged to enforce the law of the land. They took part in evictions. They infiltrated and informed on secret anti-government societies. But Tobias was one among many thousands of Irishmen who signed up to the ranks of the police, joining in November 1899 at the age of twenty-two. Many hundreds of thousands of others joined the Irish regiments of the British Army. Without them, the writ of Britannia, from Ireland to the empire’s most far-flung borders, would have been hard to maintain. It was a choice made by members of my mother’s family too, as we will see. The O’Sullivan family had strong police links. Tobias’s older brother Bernard spent eight years in the RIC and became an inspector of police in Jamaica. Another brother rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army. Two of his cousins would become RIC sergeants in Limerick.

      Tobias O’Sullivan and his wife, Mary, known to her family as May (Desiree Flynn)

      Tobias O’Sullivan was an achiever. He was educated at the Galway Grammar School, a protestant institution with a strong academic reputation which admitted Catholic boys. Eleven years after joining the RIC, Tobias came second in Ireland in the exams for sergeant. He was ambitious with relatives on both sides who were doing well in business, the sons and daughters of the growing Catholic middle class. Growing up Tobias would have heard stories of the bravery of a local man, John Purcell, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Neighbours’ sons were far more likely to have joined the British Army than a militant nationalist organisation. Besides, the ranks of the Crown forces offered rare escape from rural poverty. The Connaught Rangers regiment recruited heavily from the young men of the region, and throughout the nineteenth century fought in wars across the British Empire.

      Why did young men join the police? At home the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary offered upward mobility. There was strong competition for positions. Tobias O’Sullivan joined the police with his two brothers and a cousin. My maternal great-grandfather made the same choice with his three brothers. For many young men in rural Ireland the RIC constable was accepted as a pillar of authority and respectability. Even after the upheavals of the Land War the commanding position of the police sergeant in village and town seemed immutable. ‘They all went to him for everything,’ one officer remarked, ‘he was the chief advisor and all.’16 The police constable’s salary was equivalent to that of the bank clerk, the civil servant and the schoolteacher, but the prospects of advancement were better. And while the young schoolteacher and bank clerk would be confined within the narrow space of a classroom or behind a counter, the police constable could get out in the open air, meeting people from town and country. RIC constables had to read and write, and their literacy gave them an additional measure of respectability. There were also other advantages such as the fact that uniforms and boots were supplied free, and married men received a lodging allowance. They were also an armed police force, although in the years before the Revolution they rarely carried their weapons on patrol.

      When O’Sullivan joined at the turn of the century the make-up of the force represented the sectarian reality in Ireland: eighty per cent of the constables were Catholic, but Catholics only made up ten per cent of the district and county inspectors. The leadership was dominated by Protestants; the strong Catholic middle class was still excluded from the upper echelons of the state security apparatus. A university education could not break this glass ceiling. No such restrictions existed in the colonies, however. A bright Catholic boy like Michael O’ Dwyer, for instance, one of fourteen children of a farmer in County Tipperary, could rise to become Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in which role he imposed martial law and defended his subordinate’s role in the massacre of between 400 and 1,000 Sikh civilians at Amritsar. (O’Dwyer lost his job and ultimately his life. A Sikh tracked him down and killed him in London twenty-one years later.)

      As the twentieth century opened, most Irishmen thought their position within the empire was settled. There was certainly enough consent from the governed for Her Majesty’s police to enforce the law largely unhindered. During Queen Victoria’s three-week visit to Ireland in April 1900 she had delighted in the ‘endless streets full of enthusiastic people’ in Dublin and the great fireworks display that lit the skies over the city.17 Later she entertained 52,000 children to a ‘Patriotic Children’s Treat’ in Phoenix Park.

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