‘Tragedies of Kerry’ - Dorothy’s Macardle’s Civil War
By Dr. Leeann Lane
Tragedies of Kerry (1924) by Dorothy Macardle was the first publication on the civil war in the county. An advertisement in Sinn Fein on 2 August 1924 described the volume as a ‘brief record of men of the Kerry Brigades, I.R.A., killed on the road-sides of Kerry in 1922 and 1923, with the full story of the fight at the Clashmealcon Caves’.
An advertisement for Emeton Press publications in Sinn Fein on 16 August listed Macardle’s publication with My Fight for Irish Freedom by Dan Breen. By this date the first edition of Tragedies was sold out. By 6 December it was ‘approaching its third edition’. On 16 August 1924 Macardle wrote to Frank Aiken that the book was ‘selling beyond any expectations’. He in turn voiced criticism that the book did not ‘deal with all of the tragedies’ and suggested that the next edition would ‘expand on the brutality of the Free State against republicans in the county’. Her retort was that she had ‘deliberately confined it to road-side murders of unarmed prisoners’. Tragedies of Kerry, as the emotive title signalled, was a work of propaganda. For Macardle, the killing of unarmed men had greater propaganda value than the murder of republicans killed while engaged on active duty.
Dorothy Macardle was an unlikely republican. The daughter of the upper middle-class Thomas Callan Macardle, owner of Macardle Moore Brewery in Dundalk, she was educated in Alexandra College, Dublin. She graduated with a first-class honours BA in English literature in 1912. When the 1916 rising occurred she was out of Ireland teaching in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her Irish ‘awakening’ followed the trajectory of so many of her generation in revolutionary politics as she moved from cultural nationalism to assume an advanced nationalist political perspective in the period after 1916. She adopted an anti-Treaty stance, leading to her arrest on 9 November 1922. Released from the North Dublin Union in early May 1923 after six months in various civil war prisons in the capital, Macardle, having lost her teaching position in Alexandra College, intended to harness her intellect for the service of the Republic yet to be achieved. Initially employed by Sinn Féin as a researcher at a salary of £2.10s a week, she spent the spring of 1924 gathering testimonies and eyewitness accounts in Kerry, where the high levels of dislocation, damage and violence were attested to in the compensation claims that came from individuals and businesses. This fieldwork, following on from her six-month imprisonment, was a far remove from her privileged background.
Tragedies of Kerry became, as historian Owen O’ Shea has written, ‘a totemic reference point for the republican narrative of the war’. Macardle referred to ascertaining ‘clear facts’ through the ‘intimate questioning of witnesses’. Her protestations to objectivity notwithstanding, she created a clear distinction between villains and heroes, revealing her republican leanings throughout the text. The noble republican was the foil to the Irish Free State soldier who acted as the proxy of the officials and politicians of the treacherous, duplicitous British Empire. In his Bureau of Military Witness Statement, Brigade Engineer, Seamus Babbington, 3rd Tipperary Brigade, described the Free State soldiers during the Civil War as the ‘Green and Tans’ and directed the reader to Tragedies of Kerry for an illumination of the term. Tragedies of Kerry was considered inflammatory by the government, a testimony to Macardle’s success. Tadhg Coffey, the only survivor of the Countess Bridge ambush of 7 March 1923, testified that while receiving medical treatment in Markievicz ’s home in 1924, the Irish Free State conducted a raid in a bid to seize copies of Tragedies of Kerry.
In Tragedies of Kerry the massacre of republicans during the terror month of March 1923 at Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge, Killarney, and at Bahaghs near Cahirciveen, were described in some detail. The latter was attributed to the work of a murder gang amongst the Dublin Guard who wanted to keep the war going. In The Irish Republic (1937), a later book on the Irish revolution for which she is perhaps best remembered, Marcardle declared: ‘undoubtedly the less disciplined elements of the Free State Army were in control in Kerry’. Paddy O’Daly, who was appointed General Officer in Command of Free State forces in Kerry in January 1923, had been a member of Michael Collins’s assassination squad during the War of Independence. He approached his Kerry mandate with a determined ferocity. The deaths at Knocknagoshel amplified his propensity towards violent excess unleashing what Diarmaid Ferriter describes as a ‘lust for revenge’.
In Tragedies of Kerry, the anti-Treaty attack at Knocknagoshel on 6 March which precipitated the reprisals and the decision to use republican prisoners to clear landmine, the pretext for summary executions was represented as the legitimate actions of desperate men who sought to put a stop to the pernicious behaviour of Lieutenant O’Connor of the National Army. O’Connor, according to Macardle, ‘had made a hobby of torturing Republican prisoners in Castleisland’. In her account, the deaths at Knocknagoshel are glossed over in a short paragraph. There is no discussion of the fact that, as Owen O’Shea has observed, the animosity of Paddy Pats O’Connor towards the IRA was partly personal and emanated from the plunder of the home of his elderly parents and the kidnap and torture of his father. Macardle evocatively described ‘the birds … eating the flesh off the trees at Ballyseedy Cross’. Referring to the Cahirciveen massacre on 12 March she emotively described two nurses picking up ‘a chain of rosary beads … soaked in blood’. She wrote how the owner of the field in which the Bahaghs killings occurred could no longer graze his horses in it because they ’went mad with the smell of blood’.
There were no similar haunting descriptions of the Knocknagoshel murders in Tragedies of Kerry even though, as the Cork Examiner declared, ‘portions of … mangled bodies were found hundreds of yards away’. O’Connor himself was decapitated in the landmine attack, his head discovered by a young girl, Bridie Lyons. The distress that she must have experienced was not mentioned by Macardle. By contrast, the trope of the female as witness to the violence and brutality of the Irish Free State soldiers runs through Tragedies, even in the inclusion of certain photographs that focus on the maternal loss or the domestic space of the home. Through the photographs the reader is brought into the kitchen of the family home of Dan Shea, killed at Bahaghs; photographs of the mother of Aero Lyons and Stephen Buckley, victims of Clashmealcon Caves and Countess Bridge respectively, are also included. Dan Shea’s mother, father and two young sisters stare out of the photograph forcing the reader to contemplate the way whole families were affected by the violence against republicans in the county.
Image of Dr. Leeann Lane's book Dorothy Macardle
In Tragedies O’Connor and three other men were killed at Knocknagoshel; the total death toll was five, the highest daily number sustained by the National Army in six months. Another man, Joseph O’Brien sustained severe injuries. Although he would survive, he had both his legs amputated. Macardle’s republican perspective is evident at the level of language. The men who were lured to the Knocknagoshel mine on 6 March on the pretense of an anonymous letter giving details of a hidden IRA arms dump were ‘killed’ – a somewhat neutral term. The men at Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and Bahaghs were ‘slaughtered’ and ‘massacred’. Repeatedly Macardle referred to the violence carried out by ‘drink-sodden, irresponsible men’. Throughout Tragedies National Army soldiers are described as hunting republicans. Outlining the death of Michael O’ Sullivan of Knockanes, North Kerry, Macardle wrote that the Free State soldiers ‘fell on him in fury’. On 11 March during the transfer of prisoners from Cahirciveen to Killarney, Michael ‘Tiny’ Lyons, having killed Frank Grady, was ‘pushing his gun into the faces of the other prisoners and seemed eager to kill more’. By contrast, Macardle claimed that to ‘kill or ill-use a prisoner in any way was impossible’ for republicans. Having no recourse to buildings to house captors, they had ‘no alternative but to disarm the men and set them free to hunt their captors again’.
Macardle delineated the manner in which the nine men were bound together and strapped to the mine at Ballyseedy cross. She details the fear they felt as they ‘gripped one another’s hands’, some praying for ‘God’s mercy upon their souls’. Particulars of the blast are described from the perspective of Stephen Fuller, who was the only one of the nine men not killed. The account allows speculation that she met and talked to Fuller when she was in Kerry in 1924 as she did to Tadhg Coffey. Of course, Fuller gave a statement in Éire, the republican paper put out by Cumann na mBan in 1922-1923 and to which Macardle regularly contributed. Realising he was alive after the mine exploded at Ballyseedy, Fuller turned over: ’sounds came to him - cries and low moans, then the sounds of rifle fire and exploding bombs. Then silence again: the work was done’.
By contrast with the depravity of the National Army, in Tragedies the violence of the republican male was mitigated by the righteousness of fighting for the ideal of the Republic – republican violence was a violence that was stripped of brutality and mindlessness. Knocknagoshel in Tragedies of Kerry was the result of the brutality of Paddy Pats O’Connor not the men – and indeed, by association, the two Cumann na mBan women, Kathleen Walsh and Kathleen Hickey – who lured the eight members of the National Army to the landmine.
In Tragedies of Kerry, Macardle marked the way acceptance of the Treaty and the establishment of the provisional government had allowed the values of the Republic to give way to an altogether less edifying society, and a polity that facilitated the brutalities at Ballyseedy and elsewhere. During the siege at the Clashmealcon caves the beam of the National Army searchlight made the creek ‘look like the pit of hell’. Rage and fury grew in the defeated horde of Irish Free State solders above the cliff. The din was fiendish.
The republican dead of Ballyseedy and throughout Kerry had, according to Macardle’s construction, an inner nobility: they could, she wrote, ‘have saved themselves if they chose to surrender to their torturers, to betray their comrades or desert their cause’. In her civil war jail journal Macardle wrote of a new ignoble society that resulted from acceptance of the Treaty: ‘it seemed as if the people of Ireland had lost that living spiritual sense which revolts against cruelty and responds to suffering & is inspired by courage & courageous moods. … And in the leaders who have inducted the change in the people it is as if all the spiritual force had turned to malice and hideousness & would never give way to justice or mercy again’. In Tragedies of Kerry Macardle asserted that the men who took the ‘shameful oath’, were ‘vile & guilty men’, ‘bestial & so grossly insane’. Ireland’s freedom, she wrote, ‘is a thing of spiritual life or death that there is no evading; purified by spendthrift sacrifice it makes heroes; denied and stifled it makes treacherous men.’
Dr Leeann Lane is a Lecturer in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University
