Courtney McGrail
Dying for the Cause: Kerry’s Republican Dead
by Tim Horgan
(Mercier Press, €35.00)
J. Anthony Gaughan
This is a very useful collection of profiles of Kerry patriots. The author has impeccable republican credentials. His grandmother, Madge Clifford, among other things, was private secretary to Austin Stack, when he was deputy chief of staff of the IRA and Minister for Justice during the War of Independence.
In the introduction and the timeline he provides Tim Horgan makes it clear that he regards the struggle for independence to be far from over. Hence his list of the Kerry men who “died for the cause” ranges from the Easter Rising in 1916 to the end of the 1980s.
Thomas Ashe and The O’Rahilly (Michael Joseph Rahilly) are among the best known of the Kerry men who took part in the Easter Rising. Ashe was OC of the North County Dublin battalion of the Irish Volunteers. Their engagement with the RIC at Ashbourne is regarded as one of the few military successes of the Rising.
The O’Rahilly was a key-figure in the organisation of the Irish Volunteers and their preparation for the Rising, but he was kept unaware of the plans of the Military Council of the IRB. When he saw his comrades marching into the GPO he joined them and at the end of the week’s fighting was killed leading a charge against a British barricade in Moore Street.
Among the lesser known Kerry men involved in the Rising were Michael Mulvihill and Patrick Shortis. Both were members of the London Corps of the Irish Volunteers. They fought in the GPO and died in its vicinity.
One of the best known incidents in which Kerry republicans died during the War of Independence occurred near Listowel. It is recorded in the ballad The Valley of Knockanure. Four members of the North Kerry IRA Flying Column were captured unarmed by a Black and Tan patrol. They were lined up for execution. One literally ran for his life and made an amazing escape: the others were shot where they stood.
By far the highest death-toll of Kerry republicans occurred during the Civil War. The profiles of some of them highlight the savagery that was the Civil War in the county. Descriptions of the circumstances in which some of them died are shades of Dorothy Macardle’s controversial Tragedies of Kerry published in 1924. It was officially announced in April 1923 that in Kerry 69 members of the Irish Free State army had been killed and 157 wounded.
Partisans on the other side of the civil-war divide might well rue that none of their profiles and the circumstances in which they died will ever be published.
One of the saddest profiles for me was that of Charlie Kerins. A native of Tralee, he joined the IRA in 1940. He had become Chief of Staff of a demoralised and depleted IRA in 1944.
In that year he was arrested and arraigned before a military tribunal, where he was charged and found guilty of the assassination of Detective Denis O’Brien two years earlier. He was sentenced to be hanged.
Ironically the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, who himself had escaped a death sentence, refused to commute the sentence. Following the hanging of Charlie Kerins an almost palpable gloom remained over Tralee and the rest of the county for some time. It affected both Pro-Treatyite and Anti-Treatyite families alike.
One of the merits of this book is its record of the various ways in which these Kerry patriots have been honoured and the locations of the monuments and plaques on which they are remembered.
