Dan Keating - War of Independence Veteran

From The Village magazine:

Dan Keating: “Sure we achieved nothing, the British still hold part of our country”

Dan Keating was 14 years old and working in Tralee as an apprentice to the bar and grocery trade when the 1916 Rising broke out in Dublin. Following on from the execution of the the leaders of the rebellion there was a major shift in public opinion in favour of those seeking independence from England.

In Kerry support for Sinn Fein rose above 90%. Towards the end of that year Dan had joined Fanna ireann - the youth wing of the Irish Republican Army. By 1919, having purchased his own rifle for 1 from a profiteering British soldier at the local barracks, Dan became a fully fledged member of the Farmer’s Bridge (Boherbee :o Company of the local IRA. Very soon, having been wrongfully accused of involvement in the shooting of Denny O’Loughlin in Knightly’s public house in Tralee, he was on the run, and so began his full time service as an active participant in the War of Independence. Sitting in Dan’s kitchen in Ballygamboon, a few miles outside Castlemaine, it is difficult to imagine that this frail old man once formed part of a ragtag army that engaged and very nearly defeated the world’s only superpower of the time.

No doubt many are certain today that the War of Independence was a success and, indeed, all the official history books tell us so. Not so for Dan Keating. His refusal to accept an IRA Veterans’ Pension is a testament to his feelings on the matter. As he says, “Sure we achieved nothing. The British still hold part of our country”.

For Dan’s cause, and that of many of his comrades, was the upholding of the aspirations of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence. In short, nothing less than a thirty-two county Republic. For him that cause was betrayed by those who accepted the terms of the Anglo Irish Treaty of December 1921, which so radically compromised the ideals of the 1916 Rising.

Dan’s recall of the various engagements during the fight against Britain is astonishing in the amount of detail he has at his fingertips. Instantly he can reel off dates, participants, casualties inflicted, arms and equipment captured and losses suffered by the IRA.

Dan’s war is not the one we know of from the history books or from the roadside memorials or commemoration ceremonies for men long forgotten. The names of these soldiers trip off Dan’s tongue as though they were still out there working in the fields and could just as easily saunter up the road and call in for a chat at any minute. Soldiers of the revolution like ‘Sailor’ Dan Healy and Jimmy ‘Nuts’ O’Connor are very much alive in Dan’s kitchen.

Listening to him recount the personalities and events of the time is a rare privilege and a virtual treasure trove of information for anyone with an interest in the history of the period in Co Kerry.

The actions at Lispoole, Headford Junction, Castlemaine, Castleisland, etc., are brought to life in Dan’s retelling. The latter engagement, fought on the very eve of The Truce, saw, in Dan’s words, “four good men lost”. It is easy when listening to his recollection of that ambush to juxtapose those men, dying for a thirty-two county Republic on some laneway or field at Castleisland, with Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and the rest over in London signing away the cause for which those four were, practically at the same time, giving up their lives.

Given these experiences it was inevitable that Dan would take the Republican side in the ensuing civil war. “Kerry, almost to a man, was anti-treaty”. he recalls. His version of the progress of the civil war is that the Free State was facing an uphill battle and could easily have been defeated but for the collusion of the British and General Mulcahy, Minister of Defence in the Free State Government at the time.

Seeing things were going badly for the Free Staters in the Civil War, they decided that the Munster, Dublin and Leinster Fusilier regiments of the British Army should be abolished. Demobbed and with their severance pay of 10 per man soon gone, thousands of these ex-soldiers, with no other employment available, joined the Free State army for the 30 shillings a week on offer.

Hardened by the brutalities they had witnessed in France these men showed no mercy in their dealings with anti-treaty forces. “They were far worse than the Black and Tans” asserts Dan. “They murdered nineteen republican prisoners at Ballyseedy Cross, Countess’s Bridge and elsewhere in Kerry in three days. The Tans never did anything as bad as that”, he says. “It was very easy to get killed at that time”, remembers Dan.

But civil war or no civil war, there was an All Ireland football final to be played with Kerry facing Dublin. The only sticking point was that Kerry’s star player, John Joe Sheehy, was commandant of the IRA in Kerry at the time and liable to be shot on sight by Free State forces. At this stage, Dan remembers, “in steps Con Brosnin, a junior Free State officer from North Kerry who went to Dublin to arrange a safe pass for John Joe. The pass was for the two weeks preceding the final and the week after, from which time on he would again be regarded as a legitimate target by the Free Staters.” “But” Dan recalls appreciatively, “Brosnan wasn’t a Free Stater at all, really”.

“After the civil war most Republicans in Kerry found no room for them in the new Free State. Jobs were practically impossible to find for a Republican”, Dan recalls. The vast majority of those who fought on the anti-treaty side left for America.

Dan himself was lucky enough to find a job as a barman in Dublin but soon ran into difficulties when a sergeant of the new civic guards took Dan’s boss aside and told him, “You should never have employed that fellah.” The employer saved Dan from the certainty of the emigrant ship by claiming that Dan was a good worker and, as he was a union member, he couldn’t fire him as “there would be blue murder” with the Bar Workers Union if he did.

Dan, a lifetime teetotaller, was union representative in 1957 when Minister for Justice Cooney introduced legislation extending pub opening hours. The Bar Workers Union was opposed to these longer working hours and fought the issue.

“Cooney held a seminar at which all interested parties were represented” recounts Dan. “It eventually came down to a ballot and the deciding vote was with the Pioneers”. (Pioneers Total Abstinence Association) “I was sure we had it won,” he recalls, “but the Pioneers voted for it. I took off my Pioneer’s pin and flung it across the room in disgust. Cooney demanded that I apologise, but I refused and left the meeting. I went next door with the secretary of the Union and had my first drink, a glass of sherry” Dan says, and continues with a chuckle, “but you know, I never could drink. One small glass of Benedictine is all I can manage.”

According to Dan, Michael Collins was a confirmed “Free Stater” before he died but “he knew in his heart” he was wrong. He describes him as “a man at war with himself” in the months leading up to Bal na Blth and recounts widespread rumours at the time, rumours he was at pains to point out he couldn’t confirm, “that Collins had taken to the drink”. He discounts the notion that Collins was on a mission to end the war when he undertook his ill-fated journey to Cork in August 1922.

On De Valera, Dan pulls no punches. He says Dev began to lose respect among Republicans very soon after the Civil War. He becomes animated when describing the emergency legislation enacted by Dev during World War Two, which resulted in the execution of up to eighty Republicans active during the period.

It is with some relish he recounts the story of Dev’s attempt in the 1940s to execute the son of Toms Mac Curtain, the former Lord Mayor of Cork, murdered by British forces in 1920. Mac Curtain had shot a policeman in Patrick Street in Cork City some months earlier and Dev was determined to hang him.

But, according to Dan, he hadn’t reckoned on Martin Corry, an East Cork Fianna Fil TD and former soldier in the Troubles. Corry gathered together a group of likeminded TDs and they marched into Dev’s office, without knocking, and told Dev in very unparliamentary language that if Mac Curtain was hung, they would resign their seats and stand as independents.

Dev, with a majority of two seats in the Dil, had to back down and Mac Curtain was reprieved. Dev, however, soon had his revenge by engineering Corry’s electoral defeat. “But Corry was soon re-elected. The people of East Cork respected him. He was a great man, Martin Corry”, says Dan.

It was at this time too that Dev’s government recruited the Chief of Staff of the IRA, Stephen Hayes of Wexford, as a Free State spy. Under state supervision Hayes directed the IRA to carry out numerous acts which turned public opinion against the Republicans.

One such plot, it is alleged, involved the infamous raid on the Phoenix Park Magazine during which practically all the ammunition of the Free State army was seized by Republicans. Though all the munitions were recovered within days, the IRA were tarnished in the public mind and emergency powers were easily invoked by Dev’s government.

Dan, who at this time was interned in the Curragh with six hundred other Republicans was reprimanded by his commanding officer for stating that a man shot by the IRA as an informer in Co Wexford was innocent and a victim of the Hayes/De Valera conspiracy. “I was eventually proved right when Hayes was unmasked”, affirms Dan.

Dan’s vision of what he and his comrades fought and died for is undiminished and at the age of one hundred he refused the customary President’s cheque. “I voted for her you know” he says.

“Sure, there was only someone from Fine Gael besides her, but as I sat down to listen to her postelection speech the first thing she said was that her number one priority was to walk down O’Connell Street with the Queen of England. How could I take money from her?” he asks.

“Ah but she comes from a different climate from us. She spent an awful lot of her time in Queen’s University in Belfast and nothing good ever came out of that place” he says with an impish smile.

A lifelong devotee of the GAA he is scathing in his comments on the direction the organisation has taken of late. The abandoning of Rule 21 is a particular bugbear for Dan. “But,” he says, “there’s a lot of money floating about now and that can change an awful lot of people’s minds”.

Speaking of the country today he seems resigned to, but not accepting of, the realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland. “I see young people now and they couldn’t give a toss if they ever heard of Fermanagh or Tyrone. There was a time in the early 70s when there was a great revival of national pride, but that was lost. All they’re interested in now is money and porter. The attitude in the country is terrible. The attitude is just rotten” he says.

When asked if he’d do it all again, there’s not a moment’s hesitation before he answers, “Oh Christ I would! You met great people and made great friends, you know. They were great times,” he laughs, and adds, “as long as you kept your head low enough.”

Read about him before.

He’s very firm in his principles the way he refuses a pension.

Guys like that have amazing stories to tell about that time. Ask your family - they might have a few crackers too.

Great article @Rocko - Not Dan Keating related but it just about fits in here…

and here @Fagan ODowd

Today in Irish History: March 19, 1921: “George, I knew you as a child” – IRA Dungarvan Ambush.

On the same bloody day, the IRA ambush a convoy of RIC and Black and Tans near Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. Two men die on each side and the IRA subsequently execute the captured RIC sergeant Michael Hickey as a “police spy.”

As you will see some of the protagonists knew each other. Before being executed Hickey addressed one of those he knew – George Lennon.

“George, I knew you as a child,” the policeman said. “… You are the only person in the world that can save me.”

“I would give anything in the world to save you,” Lennon replied. “But I cannot.”
Unmarked Dungarvan grave pushes man to act as his father’s son.

Published on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
By Jim Memmott, Senior Editor, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Wrapped in sorrow and silence, this pre-Saint Patrick’s Day story seems to linger in time, haunting, unresolved.

It has a Rochester angle, certainly. But it focuses on a grave in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland.

Ivan Lennon, 62, a retired Rochester schoolteacher who was born in Ireland, would like to put a marker on the grave.

In a sense, he is acting as his father’s son in desiring to do this. But Lennon’s father is not in that grave. Resting there is a man his father had executed 85 years ago.

The details of that execution and its consequence are anchored in the Irish War of Independence, the uprising against the British that lasted from 1919 to 1921.

Lennon’s father, George, who later became a pacifist, was an officer then in the West Waterford Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, the force committed to disrupting and supplanting British rule.

On March 18, 1921, he led a group that ambushed some Black and Tans, members of the British paramilitary force.

Men on both sides died, and the IRA forces captured Sgt. Michael Hickey, an Irish police officer who was with the Black and Tans.

Hickey was well-known and well-liked, a respected community police officer. He was Catholic, he was Irish, but, at least technically, he worked for the British.

War has its own logic, and the IRA members decided Hickey had to be killed because he knew their identities.

Right before he was shot by a makeshift firing squad, Hickey turned toward George Lennon.

“George, I knew you as a child,” the policeman said. “… You are the only person in the world that can save me.”

“I would give anything in the world to save you,” Lennon replied. “But I cannot.”

As George Lennon later recalled in a memoir, Trauma in Time, the two men exchanged a “glance of understanding.”

Hickey, who had turned 36 the day before and was about to be married, squared his shoulders. Lennon tied a bandage around Hickey’s eyes.

Stepping back, he called, “Fire.” Shots rang out. Hickey slumped to the ground, dead.

Lennon walked over to his body and fired one shot into Hickey’s head, a coup de grace.

His killers put a tag on Hickey’s body that said “Police Spy.”

Gravediggers at first refused to dig a grave for his burial. They relented, but Hickey’s fiancée asked that no marker be put on the grave for fear that it would be defaced.

George Lennon laid down his arms in 1922. Eventually, he immigrated to the United States, only to return to Ireland in 1935.

Eleven years later, he came back to the United States. His wife, May, and his son joined him a few years later.

George Lennon, who never talked to his son about his time in the IRA, became a Quaker, an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He helped found the Rochester Zen Centre. He died in 1991.

But starting with a trip to Waterford in 1987, Ivan began to pick up on clues to his father’s past. Eventually, he understood his father’s role in Hickey’s death.

And eventually, he came to believe that he should put a marker on Hickey’s grave.

It has proved to be a sensitive issue. A contact at the Waterford Museum in Dungarvan has told Lennon that there is some opposition to a marker, some concern that it could raise old grievances against Hickey.

But Lennon says that he’ll persist.

“It’s 85 years later,” Lennon says. “The guy (Hickey) wasn’t a hero, but he was a victim. He was a good man.”

  • This report originally appeared in the March 11th edition of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York – www.democratandchronicle.com

Cracker of a thread. :clap:

While we are on the subject- Taken from another chaps FB page about the RIC.

The RIC was a centrally controlled, heavily armed in its latter years, dressed in dark green, army style uniforms, and subject to military drill and discipline.

The RIC was deployed throughout the country, except for Dublin city. Small parties of young, unmarried constables lived in barracks, under the command of a chief constable (later a sergeant) who was answerable to a sub (later district) inspector, who in turn reported to a county inspector.There was also a proud tradition of families serving in the RIC such as father, son(s) and brothers.

By 1919, when the Anglo Irish War broke out, the RIC was full of long serving, Irish constables with little military training, a significant number of who were nationalists. Most were ill-equipped to fight a guerrilla war and many were reluctant to do so. Even reinforced in 1920 by tough English and Scottish war veterans, in the form of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries the RIC was not able to defeat the IRA. In 1922 the RIC was disbanded and replaced in the north by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and in the south by the Gárda Síochána.

Between January 1919 and and 28th June 1922 442 RIC men were killed and 725 injured.After disbandment many RIC men had to leave Ireland due to intimidation.My records show of eight retired RIC men who were killed after disbandment,two of which were a father and son.A newspaper from April 1922 stated that 60/70 ex RIC men per day were arriving in England from all parts of Ireland.One of these was my grandfather who to my knowledge only ever visited the Enniscrone/Ballina area where he grew up ( and where his father Constable Edward Guilfoyle 40909 had served for many years) once more in his lifetime and that was in 1931.He later settled in Northern Ireland having spent 9 years working in New York.

There were 13000 full time RIC men at disbandment.Only 180 RIC men joined the Garda and a further 986 were absorbed into the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland,one of those being my Grand Uncle Constable William Guilfoyle 1747 who on retirement in 1961 was only one of twelve remaining ex RIC men still serving in the RUC.

Dan sounds like a spoofer or a psychopath

“They murdered nineteen republican prisoners at Ballyseedy Cross, Countess’s Bridge and elsewhere in Kerry in three days. The Tans never did anything as bad as that”, he says. “It was very easy to get killed at that time”, remembers Dan
…When asked if he’d do it all again, there’s not a moment’s hesitation before he answers, “Oh Christ I would! You met great people and made great friends, you know. They were great times,” he laughs, and adds, “as long as you kept your head low enough.”

@Mark Renton this is a very good book about George Lennon.

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It was at this time too that Dev’s government recruited the Chief of Staff of the IRA, Stephen Hayes of Wexford, as a Free State spy. Under state supervision Hayes directed the IRA to carry out numerous acts which turned public opinion against the Republicans.

Dan, who at this time was interned in the Curragh with six hundred other Republicans was reprimanded by his commanding officer for stating that a man shot by the IRA as an informer in Co Wexford was innocent and a victim of the Hayes/De Valera conspiracy. “I was eventually proved right when Hayes was unmasked”, affirms Dan.

Michael Deveraux was shot on Slievenamon.
George Plant was executed for killing him. Sean MacBride defended him at his trial in a “special military court” with army officers as judges as the 1st trial collapsed.
TG4 did a good 2 part documentary on this case.