Executed a lot more than 77
The Uber free state cunts
Partial republic
My father dragged me to a wake once upon a time. I was in my early 20s. An auld buck, hadnt much belonging to him. I later found out he’d done some service during the War of Independence and the ensuing civil war. During our time at the house, a buck landed in. There were a few whispers from the older stock there. My father pulled me aside. ‘Does that phone of yours record’. It was a Motorola flip top, it could record audio notes, so I nodded. He said if yer man sings, record it, but don’t be seen. I’d no idea really what was going on and the father wasn’t in a position to elaborate.
Anyway, we had a few drinks, me auld fella telling yarns and listening intently to other ones. I popped in and out, having a few smokes and then me man stoood up and cleared the throat. I quietly took out the phone and began recording behind me back. He launched into a a song I never heard before or again. 2 lines in, he spied me, out of the corner of his eye. ‘Put it away son, I might have one more left in me’. Me auld lad nodded furiously and I obeyed. Me man started again.
The song detailed the comings and going of a flying column, the men within, and the actions and raids carried out. Powerful stirring if not exactly chart topping stuff. Once done, he drained his glass and headed out the door, into the dark of night. We had one or two more, before we headed off ourselves. As we tipped home my father told me the man in the coffin was a member of a flying column, the last one they thought. Until me man arrived in, a fella long since believed dead abroad. Anyway, no one ever got the song, and me man was determined it and the actions would die with him. And no doubt they did.
My point being, you’d wonder about these centenary things. Sometimes, some things, are best left in the past.
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No mention of the fact the fact that Liam Lynch called on all TDs and Senators to be shot dead. The shooting of Hales was in response to that.
Lynch the simpleton after losing Limerick ensured that conflict was only going to go one way.
One of the stupidest conflicts in the history of the world. Thankfully it was so stupid that most of the anti Treatyites ended up getting away from violence quicker than they would likely have done otherwise.
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Hard to argue with that. An absolute shit show
That never happened
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I’m glad someone said that, it gave the other lurker a chance
The Kerry killings and how GAA helped hope replace horror
The scars may remain prominent, but the influence of their sport started the lengthy healing process
Fuller, circled, died at the age of 84 in 1984, having become an embodiment of Kerry in the difficult years that followed the harrowing Ballyseedy massacre
Sunday March 05 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
On fine days in north Kerry over a century ago, sports were played on Sundays a few miles from Kilflynn at Foran’s bridge. In these fields and along these country roads people shook off the burdens of their time. A pound of tobacco went to the best runner; five shillings to the winner of the pony race. Some played tug-of-war. Others tried hammer-throwing or weightlifting.
Across in Kilflynn, Stephen Fuller and George O’Shea had ideas about hurling. In 1916 Fuller was among the locals who founded the Tullig Gamecocks. They won a county junior title straight away, then met the senior champions Kenmare for the only set of medals available. Tullig won, and decided they were entitled to claim the senior title as well.
A year later O’Shea gathered a mix of locals, labourers and newcomers to the area and created a hurling team in Kilflynn. “He got a trial for the Kerry hurlers as well,” says his nephew, John O’Shea. “He applied for jerseys and got given the Kildare colours, lilywhite. Those jerseys were the Kilflynn colours.”
He played maybe a half-dozen matches before hurling receded from their sights, overtaken by conflict. O’Shea had joined the local Volunteers alongside Fuller and their friends Timothy Lyons, John Shanahan and Timothy Twomey. Fuller became first lieutenant of the Kilflynn company; O’Shea was his captain. “A splendid type of man and a credit to the national movement,” said one commanding officer.
They raided RIC barracks and ambushed police and soldiers; stole mail, and fashioned ammunition. In October 1920 O’Shea was part of an IRA attack in Abbeydorney that killed two RIC officers and wounded a Black and Tan. When a truce came followed by the Treaty, 34 of the hundred Volunteers in Kilflynn rejected the deal. By February 1923, Fuller and O’Shea were IRA men on the run.
One night they were among a group captured in a dugout in a wood near Kilflynn and taken to the army barracks in Tralee. The prisoners were tied up and their bodies smashed with hammers. They faced a firing squad in a mock execution, and were found guilty by a military tribunal of taking up arms against the state.
On March 6, 1923, five soldiers were killed by an IRA mine at Knocknagoshel, the worst death toll suffered by the army in a single day for six months. The IRA prisoners in Tralee suddenly became the lightning rod for the army’s rage.
Nine of them were taken away the following night, including Fuller, Twomey and O’Shea. Their neighbour John Shanahan had been so badly beaten he couldn’t walk, and was left behind. They were taken to Ballyseedy Wood. The prisoners were given cigarettes and tied up, arranged in a circle around a trap mine. They whispered prayers and said goodbye to each other. Then the mine went off.
When the army returned to gather the bodies they found lumps of flesh and clothes hanging from the trees. But Fuller had survived.
“I was tied up in three places. The explosion cut all the ropes,” Fuller said in an interview as part of a military pension application in 1935. “I was able to scramble away somehow. I recovered my senses when I went up in the air but I lost them again when I hit the road. I went straight up, and must have been blown up fairly high. All my clothes were blown off. It was not known I escaped till the following day, I believe.”
By then he had waded across a river to a house where he was found by John Joe Sheehy, IRA man and Kerry footballer. His skin, he recalled, was burnt off “my hands and back of my legs”. He fell into a coma at one safe house before recovering and suffered the agonies of the shrapnel embedded in his back, hands and legs.
Fuller later helped to establish the Tullig Gamecocks
Back at the explosion site George O’Shea’s sister Mollie was among those gathering her brother’s remains. She was 21 and a member of Cumann na mBan and had acted as cook, scout and lookout for her brother. She had already suffered the atrocities of this era; a group of Black and Tans had sexually assaulted her in 1921 during a raid on her home. The horror of her brother’s death would never leave her.
She died at home in 1948 after long spells in the local psychiatric hospital in Killarney, “hopelessly insane”, according to a statement from the local Cumann na mBan. The whole family suffered in different ways. “The day they announced my uncle’s death,” says O’Shea, “three as horrible fellas as you’ve ever met came out taunting and blackguarding my grandmother and her daughters, tormenting them with insults.”
The impact on the O’Sheas mirrored traumas suffered across the country, buried deep within the generations for a century. His mother was a widow and the family lived off 19 acres of poor land and George’s work on the roads for Kerry County Council. When O’Shea’s mother applied for compensation over a decade after the Civil War, the Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee recommended a payment of £150, but the money was “withheld on the instructions of the Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe”.
“It had a devastating impact,” says Dr Richard McElligott, lecturer in modern and Irish history at Dundalk IT. “This was a village of 124 people in the 1911 census. You take out three well-known young men, to be killed like that in the most barbaric way by their fellow countrymen, it leaves an awful legacy.”
After the Civil War had ended people buried their feelings and got on, but some stories were too volatile to simply dissolve beneath the surface. In an incredible twist, Ned Breslin, the officer in charge of the mine explosion at Ballyseedy, married George O’Shea’s sister-in-law. When he was young, McElligott’s father told him the story of how John Shanahan always choreographed his journeys to the local creamery to avoid meeting Fuller’s brother. “That stuck with me,” he said. “If you were trying to pinpoint why I became a historian: I wondered what happened? When I was growing up it was still there. You could still feel it in some way.”
When the story of the country’s recovery from Civil War is told, the chapter that recalls IRA men and national army soldiers sharing the same dressing rooms for the following decade to create one of the greatest Kerry football teams ever has often been raised as a cherished example of sport’s capacity to heal the deepest wounds. George O’Shea’s brother-in-law John Slattery won an All-Ireland football medal in 1926, and his uncle Pat played junior football for Kerry. Another uncle, Tom, was known as a good footballer, but was killed with the national army in February 1923.
“My uncle John was in prison,” says O’Shea. “The authorities gave him papers to come out for the funeral, but he wouldn’t come out. He was such an out-and-out republican.”
Nothing that deep resolves itself that cleanly, either. The process of healing was more complex in the villages and townlands where families and communities tried to piece themselves back together.
“The divides were more subtle and unspoken,” says McElligott. “Hurling comes back very strongly in Kilflynn as soon as the GAA reorganises itself. But the GAA at local level, as a bridge for people on both sides, it’s hard to quantify. I wouldn’t think it had the same resonance as the county team. The cleavages weren’t as clear-cut.”
By 1927 the Tullig Gamecocks had dissolved but Kilflynn were still alive. That year they won a North Kerry hurling league title. Fuller was their captain. Tommy O’Connor’s outstanding book on the history of North Kerry hurling shows Fuller in the middle of a team photograph, somehow recovered sufficiently to play again.
Fuller was still captain when Kilflynn made county finals in 1931 and 1933 and served as chairman of the North Kerry hurling board for years. In time the old hurling tribes around Kilflynn were gathered up and reformed as Crotta O’Neills. Fuller would serve as a Fianna Fail TD for the area and died in 1984, aged 84, remembered with glowing tributes.
Still people gather to remember and try to make sense of a terrible time. This weekend five different commemorations will mark the centenary of the Ballyseedy massacre. The Kerry Civil War conference in Tralee last weekend delved deep into the hurt and the impact of a vicious conflict. “Some things never heal,” says McElligott, “but it has healed as much as it ever can.”
Even though the lives of O’Shea and Fuller as hurlers were largely buried beneath the tragedy of their deaths, there remains the picture of the Kilflynn hurlers from 1927: Fuller as a living embodiment of Kerry itself in the years that followed, miraculously transformed from a victim broken by a brutal war into a young hurler again. Horror, replaced by hope.
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I repeated stuff above. Apologies…
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Thanks for that. A great but harrowing read. Foley has had a tour de france 10 year commemoration.
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He’s very good on that general era
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Thought there’d be more talk here of Ballyseedy. Anyone drop down over the weekend?
Was at a kick off event in community hall last week. Plenty of Irish music and story telling. Excellent fare. Graingers from Cork on Uilleann pipes and a very talented young group called Sult blew the house down.
This weeks activities will consist of a bus tour from Newcastle tomorrow young man. Up to the Monument. Leaving the village at half 10. Should take no more than 4 hrs. Let me know if you need a seat. I put my name down for 2 on the bus Easter Monday too but probably wont be able to go both days. That one is leaving at 8am. Eamonn O Cúiv doing an oration I believe. Let me know if you want those.
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Thanks pal. Going down Easter Monday. Haven’t booked tickets
Looking forward to this
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Planning on settling a few scores?
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I always thought this was very lax from the volunteers and a serious blunder.
Victims of Caherguillamore Ambush memorialised in Limerick - Limerick Live (limerickleader.ie)
Granted @ciarancareyshurlingarmy boys got some revenge a few weeks later.
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