Dan Breen and the IRA Page 2
The school in Donohill was an architecturally unimpressive affair, recalled by Breen as a, ‘drab two-storey building with no playground for the pupils.’ Girls were educated upstairs, boys on the ground floor. One teacher in particular had a significant impact on Breen: a Kerryman called Charlie Walshe. Walshe, who was subsequently a Fianna Fáil TD and mayor of Dublin (as Cormac Breathnach), was employed by the Gaelic League to teach Irish in the rural districts. ‘He did relief work in several of the schools in our district,’ Breen said. The stimulating and confrontational Charlie Walshe also taught Seán Treacy (vice-commandant, Third Tipperary Brigade IRA), Dinny Lacey (commandant, Third Tipperary Brigade, IRA Flying Column) and Seán Hogan (Third Tipperary Brigade, IRA Flying Column).
‘We learned about the Penal Laws, the systematic ruining of Irish trade, the elimination of our native language,’ said Breen. ‘He told us about the ruthless manner in which Irish rebellion had been crushed. By the time we had passed from his class, we were no longer content to grow up “happy English children” as envisaged by the Board of Education.’
Another seditious travelling teacher who passed through the neighbourhood was Thomas Malone (aka Seán Forde) who would eventually return to that part of the world as an organiser from Volunteer GHQ and who would lead former pupils like Breen and Treacy into fierce battle.
Breen left school at the age of fourteen and did a number of farm labouring jobs before going to work as a linesman for the Great Southern Railway in 1911 when he was seventeen. This work brought him around the country and meant that he was out of Donohill at a time when his pal and neighbour, Seán Treacy, began organising the Irish Volunteers.*
Treacy’s father, like Breen’s, died young. This led to Treacy’s family moving in with their maternal aunt, Mary Anne Allis. Allis was a hard-nosed small farmer who wanted Seán to concentrate on farming, which he was good at, and to avoid the covert militant circles towards which he was drawn. She regarded Breen as a bad influence on her nephew and, in later years, would refer to him as ‘Breen the Murderer’. She, understandably, hoped that Treacy would ‘make his way in the world’. Breen – who disliked her intensely – said she wanted Treacy ‘to work like a nigger on the small farm that they had and which could scarcely make a living for them.’
In 1911, Treacy, aged sixteen, joined the IRB and began attending Irish language classes at Eamon O’Duibhir’s home in Ballagh; the two usually spoke to each other in Irish after that. Between 1914 and 1917, he continued to attend Irish classes at the Tipperary Technical School.
‘Seán was taller,’ wrote Ernie O’Malley. ‘An easy smile or a long grin showed his teeth. Glasses gave him a quiet appearance; he had a good strong-thrusting chin. His humour was dry enough. He dealt with men quietly. I envied him his ease; yet he never allowed slackness to pass by.’ Breen said that Treacy was, ‘away ahead of anything one might expect to meet in a country district. He had vision and to him nothing was impossible.’ Another contemporary, Seán Horan, described Treacy as ‘a silent and also a sincere worker.’
Treacy was also a keen, if tone deaf, singer. One of his favourite songs, ‘Oró ’Sé do Bheatha ’Bhaile’, concerned Grace O’Malley, the west of Ireland pirate queen, and it celebrated armed youth who would root the foreigner out of Ireland:
Tá Gráinne Mhaol ag teacht thar sáile,
Óglaigh armtha léi mar gharda;
Gaeil iad féin ’s ní Gaill ná Spáinnigh,
’S cuirfid siad ruaig ar Ghallaibh.
Dan Breen once said that ‘Seán Treacy tried to form himself on the image of Michael O’Dwyer of Wicklow; the rebel who held out in the Wicklow hills after 1798. Treacy loved everything that was Gaelic. He spent much time studying the Irish language when he was young. And he fancied himself as a singer, although he had a voice like a crow. Often he nearly drove me insane listening to him trying to sing “Oró ’Sé do Bheatha ’Bhaile” but it sounded to me like “A Nation Once Again”!’
Breen’s job as a linesman paid reasonably well, allowed him to see the country, familiarised him with the workings of the railway system, and meant he was stationed at Inchicore in Dublin for quite long periods of time. He witnessed at close quarters the 1914 Lock Out and the baton-wielding repression meted out to the striking workers. No matter where he was stationed, he kept an eye on developments back home.
‘Dan took a shine to Dublin, to city living, like many a country man before him,’ said IRA man Seán Dowling. ‘When I got to know him it was apparent that he knew the place well, had clearly cycled and walked all over the city back when he was working at Inchicore. He set great store by the Dublin working-classes, regarded them as natural supporters of our cause. Treacy liked Dublin too, liked the trams and the cinemas, but Treacy always wanted to get home to Tipperary. Dan wanted to linger and, as it turned out, he ended up lingering in Dublin for good.’
‘The IRB circle to which we belonged was centred at Doon,’ noted Breen. ‘There were very few people around our part of the country that could be relied upon and so we had to cycle eight or nine miles to attend those circle meetings. Packy Ryan of Doon was the centre of the circle and it was at Ryan’s that I first met Seán Mac Dermott who, I believe, was on some kind of an organising mission around Munster. It may have been at Kilmallock because Packy Ryan also had a place there … We were only ordinary members and, being little more than boys, we were just looked upon as handy messengers and suchlike, so that we did not know about what was going on except what we could see for ourselves.’
At the time of the 1916 Rising, Breen was working on a line near Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, as part of a gang of 150 men. Out of that number, only he and one other man were militant separatists. ‘When I came home for Easter,’ he said, ‘Treacy told me he expected a rising to take place on Easter Sunday but when the cancellation messages were received he told me about them and I went back to my work beyond Kilmallock … Having heard further messages of the Rising in Dublin I returned home again on Tuesday until the Friday of that week … he [Treacy] was away from home and, so we learned since, was cycling around from one centre to another trying to urge the Tipperary Volunteers to take action to support the fighting in Dublin.’
The collapse of the Rising, particularly Tipperary’s insignificant role in it, confused and angered Treacy and Breen but strengthened their youthful resolve. When they’d studied the history of 1798, they’d wondered why the entire country had not risen up. They were sure that when their turn came, they’d strike out in a meaningful manner but, Breen said, ‘wrong orders and not knowing what to do kept us from taking part … We made up our minds then that when anything like that would happen again we would be part of it no matter what.’
In the aftermath of the Rising debacle, the Donohill revolutionaries whipped themselves up into a frenzied campaign of recruitment and organisation. A headquarters/meeting place was eventually established at Lisheen Grove, not far from Tipperary town.
‘Hitherto we had looked to the townspeople as being more in touch with things and perhaps as countrymen we suffered some sense of inferiority,’ said Breen. ‘Now however, for some reason, after the Rising the townspeople were more inclined to look to us and so conditions were reversed. Treacy and I went about to all the towns like Tipperary, Cahir and other places about there and urged the reorganisation of the Volunteers.’
Seán Horan, terribly demoralised by the failure of the Rising, ran into Treacy in Tipperary town. He’d left work with the intention of travelling to Dublin to fight but, on Easter Monday night, in Tipperary, he’d found out that there wasn’t a hope of getting into the city.
‘Seán [Treacy] got to know my mind,’ said Horan. ‘It was through Dan Breen that I met him. Before Seán and I parted that evening he invited me to Lisheen Grove, two and a half miles from Tipperary town … The Lisheen Grove officers decided to go to the outside parishes and get companies working. So Seán Treacy went to Mount Bruis. Dan Breen and I went to Solohead and Cappawhite. We paraded each c
ompany and when we had finished we went to Mount Bruis. When we met with Seán he was drilling about twenty ladies. I remarked to Seán, “What will you put the ladies to doing, Seán?” “Well,” said he, “they’ll be put to something. They can carry dispatches”.’
2 – Eamon O’Duibhir and Pierce McCan
The main Volunteer organisers in south Tipperary were Eamon O’Duibhir, Seán Treacy and Pierce McCan. Joost Augusteijn, in From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, claims the RIC didn’t detect evidence of the existence of Irish Volunteers in south Tipperary until the end of 1915: ‘By January 1916 the RIC … had become aware of 380 Irish Volunteers in five units … one in Ballagh under Eamon O’Dwyer, one under Pierce McCan around Cashel, one in Fethard, one in Clonmel under Frank Drohan and one near Tipperary town under Seán Treacy.’ None of these men saw the coming revolution through to its conclusion. Treacy and McCan died, and Drohan and O’Duibhir eventually withdrew from the fray, dismayed by the realities of guerrilla warfare.
The RIC talked in their reports of a local farmer – O’Duibhir – who had contacts with Dublin and who was busy organising malcontents into some sort of separatist movement. O’Duibhir (1883–1963) was a burly, complex, good-humoured man valued throughout his area, busy putting the Sinn Féin policy of economic autonomy into practice. He sold insurance on behalf of Irish insurance companies, encouraging people who sought cover to withdraw their business from the then-dominant English firms. By 1916, O’Duibhir, a farmer/entrepreneur, more prosperous than most other leaders of the nascent south Tipperary IRA, was county centre for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). There were thirty-two such individuals in the country, one for each county. The county centre’s job was to recruit suitable new members, to organise the spread of IRB branches throughout the county, and to encourage the infiltration of other “Irish Ireland” organisations by IRB members.
The IRB – a secret society disapproved of by the catholic church and by many republicans – was the lineal successor to the clandestine fenians. The fenians’ 1867 rebellion had been a dismal failure, but surviving old fenians – like Roscarbery’s O’Donovan Rossa and Tipperary’s John O’Leary – had a profound influence on the 1916 leaders and on young IRA organisers like Breen and Treacy. Between 1908 and 1914, the IRB revived itself and was the chief organising force behind the 1916 Rising. It subsequently infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. Michael Collins became its leader in 1919. Their oath asserted:
‘In the presence of God, I, … , do solemnly swear that I will do my utmost to establish the independence of Ireland and that I will bear true allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the government of the Irish Republic and implicitly obey the constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and all my superior officers and that I will preserve inviolable the secrets of the organisation.’
It was Seán Treacy who administered this oath to Dan Breen. Breen later quit the IRB when they attempted to rein in his activities. Ernie O’Malley – never a member – afterwards accused the IRB of undermining the ideal of the republic.
O’Duibhir said that his interest in separatist thinking had been awakened early in the century by Irish language lessons in the Weekly Freeman’s Journal. The learning of Irish, in chronic decline all over rural Ireland, suggested to thoughtful men like O’Duibhir that they belonged to a place which was culturally unlike England.
Through a locally organised Irish class he came to know a lot of like-minded individuals. In 1908, they started a Sinn Féin club in the parish. Politically and openly, these people eventually involved themselves in the anti-ranch campaign, the anti-conscription movement and in the broad range of farmers’ concerns.
The November 1913 trip to Munster by IRB man Seán Mac Dermott – which had such a profound effect on Breen – is often mentioned as the event which triggered the start of covert paramilitary action in south Tipperary. He spoke at the Tivoli Hall in Tipperary town. Seán Fitzpatrick – later in the flying columns with Dinny Lacey and Dan Breen – talked of a speech which ‘aroused the dormant, but by no means dead, national spirit of the townspeople … a shot in the arm for Irish Irelanders amongst his audience.’
Through Gaelic League connections Eamon O’Duibhir had already met the passionate, intense, young Seán Treacy, busy organising Volunteers in Tipperary town – ten miles away from O’Duibhir’s base at Ballagh. It fell to O’Duibhir – a natural leader, educator and organiser – to call a meeting in Ballagh, at the time of the MacDermott visit, at which an Irish National Volunteer company was formed. This company then assisted others in getting units going. Irish language classes arranged by O’Duibhir played a key part in recruiting men and women to parallel organisations like the Irish National Volunteers, the IRB and Sinn Féin. Thomas Ryan – eventually a member of the Second South Tipperary Flying Column under Seán Hogan – said that it was these classes which awakened his interest in Irish history and, by implication, since the two things are rarely separated, in Irish politics.
Joost Augusteijn says that by 1914 there were 2,000 Volunteers in south Tipperary.
In those early days Pierce McCan (1882–1919) was as important as Eamon O’Duibhir. McCan was rich, the son of wealthy catholics whose fortune had been made in Australia. The McCan family owned several homes and Pierce grew up on a 1,000 acre estate, complete with a mansion house residence, at Ballyowen, near Cashel. He became a progressive farmer whose methods were admired by his less prosperous neighbours. He formed a Volunteer company from the men working on his land and was able to train and drill them there clandestinely.
McCan, who was to be involved in nearly every nationalist organisation, was educated like an English gentleman. As a child he had a private tutor, Southendy, who was brought over from England. After that he was sent to Rockwell College and then Clongowes, as if his family was determined to send him on a grand tour of the best catholic boarding schools Ireland had to offer. In 1900, he visited France, before going to Denmark to look into Danish farming methods. By 1909 he was, like the entire revolutionary generation, caught up in Irish language classes. Love of the language caused him to holiday in the west of Ireland where he developed an affinity for the wild windy vistas of the Aran Islands and the highlands of Donegal.
Through the ubiquitous Gaelic League (by 1908, there were eighteen Gaelic League branches in Tipperary) McCan knew many IRB and revolutionary people in Dublin. In 1914, together with Frank Drohan and Rockwell College Irish teacher, Séamus O’Neill, McCan organised a Volunteer group in Clonmel. Perhaps because of his class background and because he had once shared a platform with Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, many thought that McCan was more of a Home Ruler than a Sinn Féiner but he was especially close to Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin.
When Redmond urged the Volunteers to join the British army and participate in the Great War – effectively signing the death warrant of the once-illustrious Parliamentary Party – the Volunteer movement split in September 1914. The vast majority supported Redmond and became the National Volunteer organisation. McCan refused to back Redmond and the Doon Volunteers were the only corps in Tipperary whose members refused to join the British army. ‘This was probably because Seán Treacy and Dan Breen were members of it,’ suggests Tipperary historian, John Shelley.
When the greatly depleted Volunteers regrouped at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in October 1914 – with wary conspiratorial IRB figures like Bulmer Hobson, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott playing prominent roles – Pierce McCan and Eamon O’Duibhir led the small Tipperary delegation.
Two years later, during the 1916 Rising, McCan made every effort to bring the Tipperary Volunteers into the rebellion. He was arrested and sent from his patrician mansion to the gloomy Arbour Hill prison where he witnessed the execution and burial of men who were his friends and comrades.
In a memoir of his incarceration he described what he saw in the prison yard: ‘At one end a huge trench was dug … the full length of the end of t
he yard. A very small portion of the upper end of this grave, for grave it was, had been filled in. Under this filling lay the corpses of Pearse, MacDermott and the rest … who had been shot. Full boxes of quicklime were thrown on the ground nearby. There were a few empty ones there also, the contents of which had been doubtlessly thrown upon the dead bodies of my friends and fellow Volunteers of a few days ago.’
McCan was subsequently sent to Frongoch interment camp, a university for the revolution about to happen. When he got back to Tipperary the first thing he did was re-start Irish language classes. He played an active role in setting up branches of Sinn Féin in Clonmel, Rosegreen, Killenaule, Tipperary and Carrick-on-Suir.
By December 1917, he was encouraging boycotts against state institutions like crown courts and the RIC. He called on people to turn to republican alternatives and emphasised the ultimate necessity of violence.
On 19 May 1918, McCan was arrested for his part in the fabricated German Plot and jailed in England. He was one of the large number of Sinn Féin MPs elected in 1918 – his constituency was east Tipperary – who were unable to attend the meeting of the first dáil because they were incarcerated. In prison he contracted the flu bug then sweeping through Europe and died in March 1919. His funeral, a choreographed political affair, was one of the events which restored the fortunes of the embryonic IRA after Soloheadbeg. Michael Collins and Harry Boland* were just two of the republican luminaries who participated in the Dublin end of the funeral at the pro-cathedral – an occasion said to have been attended by 10,000 mourners.
3 – Séamus Robinson arrives in Tipperary, 1917–19