Buried Lives Read online

  O’Donnell [had] got across the back field and out on the road at Quilty’s. He then got up to Burke’s house, where the police got him. He was in hospital and jail for a while but never really got a sentence. Ryan was carried around by the silos and on to that back road and picked up by an old Ford car. He was buried at night near Abington. He was the man who helped in shooting two unarmed officers, the Barrington girl and her friend. [The Barrington ‘girl’ referred to above.] With Ryan were Troy, O’Donnell, and a man called Hannan, I think from beyond Pallas and maybe four or five others.

  When the two men came in the house, they told Mary [presumably the housemaid] they knew Dad was out at the fence. They could have shot him there.

  O’Donnell claimed he had no intention of shooting Dad. Only wanted the guns. I had a small automatic with me.

  It was a lucky day for the de Burgh family. Next day I got all the silver packed up and taken to Woodville. Soldiers and police all over the place. One soldier said to Fitz, ‘Mr de B must be a wonderful shot’.

  ‘Well,’ said Fitz, pointing at the old family church, ‘if there was a bumblebee on that steeple, he could hit it from here.’

  Dad was in hospital for three weeks. I stayed there with him. Went back to Dromkeen for about one month. We packed up all the furniture and stuff and it was carted to Limerick, from there to Liverpool to Vancouver, to Port Washington, to Prevost Island … We had a police guard at all times till we left on October 24th 1924 and went to Dublin and on to Kingstown.6

  Hubert stayed with various relatives in Wales and London and then sailed to Vancouver and on to Prevost Island. His sisters, Evelyn and Elizabeth, went to join him.

  Digby de Burgh continued in his submission to the Irish Grants Committee:

  By reason of the matters aforesaid, the said conspiracy to drive your Suppliant out of his lands has to a large extent succeeded and your Suppliant has been driven out of Ireland. Such portions of his land as he was able to sell have had to be sold at prices representing merely a fraction of their true value. He has been unable to obtain the profits of said lands since the commencement of said conspiracy and by reason thereof has become involved in debt and much reduced in circumstances and has suffered losses which he estimates at £6000.7

  De Burgh received many cards and letters from local farmers while he was in hospital, congratulating him on shooting his assailants and escaping to tell the story. The descendants of the de Burghs believe that the attack was brought on by a ‘personal grudge stemming from his being a Justice of the Peace’,8 but many Justices of the Peace were left untouched.

  Being tough and resilient, he managed to sell some of his land and finally left Ireland for good, although he complained that the Irish Land Commission did him ‘a lot of mischief … £1,200 was kept from me for a year’.9 He ended up with his family at the other side of the world, where he bought over 1,000 acres of land. It was mostly rough forestland, but undaunted and tireless as ever, he fenced and seeded 300 acres of grassland, complaining about the effect of his wounds when he was undertaking this hard manual work.

  Impressed by his story, the Irish Grants Committee awarded him £8,080 in February 1928. Hubert declared that his father thought the ‘shooting was the best thing that ever happened to him in the long run, as with the money he got in compensation was able to buy more land out in Canada’.10 He had been thinking of emigrating to Canada before 1924 and had visited British Columbia in 1896, where he stayed with the Ruttle family on Salt Spring Island. A German Palatine family, they were friends he had known in Ireland who had lived there for a few generations.

  The story has a happy ending. Susan, Hussey de Burgh’s granddaughter, told me that she feels ‘welcome and free in a new country. It would never occur to me to ask what religion someone was: most Canadians take people for their worth without prejudice’.

  In time, Lieutenant Colonel Ulick de Burgh retired to Drumkeen after army service in Sudan in the Second World War, and lived there with his American wife, Dorothy Spencer, until the 1970s. They had no children and the land is no longer in the hands of the family. The house, however, still stands.

  There are many cases of Protestant landowners being the subject of violent campaigns aimed at seizing their lands. In Co. Roscommon on 7 April 1920, a Mr Levin was attacked and the windows and doors of his house were smashed, as he had refused to divide his land among the attackers. In Rockview, Co. Westmeath, Col. J.D. Fetherstonhaugh had his cattle driven on 12 April, while on 23 April in King’s County, now Offaly, a deputation called on H.L. King of Ballyline to give up his land. In Co. Galway, Lord Ashtown’s estate was attacked and several cattle drives took place. Graziers were asked to remove their stock.11 ‘There are assassinations, attempted assassinations, house burnings (sometimes to prevent its use by the military), housebreakings for arms; there is land-grabbing and cattle driving.’12

  An interesting explanation for the widespread outbreak of violence was given by James Campbell, 1st Baron Glenavy:

  The stoppage of emigration since 1914 has shut up in Ireland about 200,000 of the ablest and most enterprising of our youths [sic]. They can find no answer of employment here but owing to the profits made by their fathers in the war they can afford to live in idleness and have thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of conspiracy and crime. For the first time in Irish history they have got out of hand so far as their church is concerned and their bishops are afraid to openly defy them lest they may be courting defeat.13

  In many incidents, the motivation of the attackers was often land greed, using revenge as a cloak. In Co. Clare, R.F. Hibbert, a member of the Irish Unionist Association, reported that during the Anglo-Irish War, ‘when there was a sense of insecurity of life and property’,14 ‘the conditions of affairs in my neighbourhood in Co. Clare is [sic] beyond description; there is no protection whatsoever for life and property’.15 He was raided by forty masked men with guns and axes, but they left after Hibbert fired on them with a repeating rifle. The local barracks was closed, so there was no local police protection. His boathouse and outhouses were raided and the houses of most of his neighbours were attacked. Meanwhile:

  … every night gangs of armed men assemble in different houses and walk the countryside, terrorising the respectable inhabitants – from dark to dawn law-abiding people scarcely dare to sleep. Owing to the withdrawal of police all regulations are disregarded, and the public houses remain open night and day, consequently, as may be imagined, the state of drunkenness and robbery is appalling. Even the farmer’s crops are stolen out of the ground to buy drink.16

  Eventually, Hibbert and his family were forced to leave the country after disposing of their furniture. It has been estimated that ‘since 1919, seventy from a total of eighty Protestant landed families had left [the] county’.17 This is astonishing and may constitute the largest outflow of Protestants in percentage terms from any county in the Free State. Today Protestants have all but disappeared in Co. Clare, constituting just over 1 per cent of the population in the 2011 census of Ireland.

  Many Protestants in Co. Cork were subjected to intimidation and murder. Peter Hart has written in detail about this subject, stating that between 1919 and 1923, the IRA shot 44 Protestants accused of being ‘spies and informers’ out of a total of 122 people who were shot.18 Hart goes on to write:

  Of 113 private homes burned by the guerrillas, 96 (or 85 per cent) belonged to Protestants. None of the more than two dozen farms seized from ‘spies’ in 1921 and 1922 was owned by a Catholic. Protestants who wished to sell up and leave were presumed to have ‘guilty consciences.’ Their sales were often boycotted, fined or stopped altogether … Those who stayed were frequently subjected to a regime of boycotts, vandalism, and theft. Many had their property commandeered by neighbours or Volunteers and nearly all those who lived in rural areas had to put up with IRA squatters. Some indication of the severity of the terror is given by the scores of Protestant men and women who suffered nervous breakdowns, even to the p
oint of insanity and suicide.19

  James Donnelly tells us that ‘close to 50 Big Houses and suburban villas were burned there [Co. Cork] before the Truce in July 1921’.20 Co. Cork was deprived of much of its finest domestic architecture in a matter of a few years.

  Some Protestants were murdered for spying, or being suspected of spying. In Co. Cork, one such case is the 1921 murder of Lieutenant Colonel Warren John Peacocke DSO, from Innishannon, for supposedly assisting search parties of the Essex Regiment to capture IRA men. Lieutenant Colonel Peacocke was one of the best officers of the Ulster Division (9th Skins) and rallied the men in the Schwaben redoubt in France near the village of Thiepval, Picardie, on the afternoon of 1 July 1916. Tom Kelleher took credit for murdering Peacocke, on the orders of Tom Barry. But the report of the murder in the Cork Examiner states that he was out in his workshop cutting wood ‘when two men entered and fired several shots, two of which took effect in the stomach. It is stated the deceased ran into his house about thirty yards away and said he was shot’.21 Regardless of the exact circumstances, he died in agony on the morning of 1 June 1921. Richard Russell in his statement (BMH 1591) repeats the story of Peacocke being suspected of spying and gives details of his own spying on Peacocke without apparently finding any incriminating evidence. One trip by Peacocke to Dunmanway area, ostensibly on a fishing trip, was closely followed by Russell. It was a waste of time as Peacocke did just that – fished. Russell did this spying in May 1921, yet the IRA had already decided that he was guilty in March 1921.

  A few weeks after Peacocke’s murder, his widowed mother was burnt out following the looting of her house, Skevanish House, a Victorian Tudor-style building that had been altered at much expense. Mrs Peacocke left with her other son and his wife to settle in Somerset before the house was burnt. The contents were auctioned by local men and she complained that ‘Her cattle, horses, and farm stock were stolen, and since the Truce … everything in her garden, all her farm implements, carriages, electric engine, etc.,’ had been sold off by the IRA ‘by public auction without any interference by the British Government.’22

  The family had a peacock motif on their crockery and cutlery, and many republican homes throughout the district soon had peacock crockery and cutlery on their sideboards. The local Catholic priest condemned this, saying ‘what had peacocks, was Peacocke’s’, and ordered people to return the crockery to Mrs Peacocke, but she had already departed in fear for her life.

  In his book, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, Tom Barry wrote:

  [Peacocke] guided in person raiding parties of the Essex Regiment. He wore a mask and was dressed as a civilian during many of his early expeditions with the raiders, but one night, in the house of one of his victims, his mask slipped. From that night in December, 1920, we wanted him very badly, but he knew he was in danger and practically lived with the British Officers in barracks.

  Since he had been away at war for years, how could he have known IRA faces in the area around Innishannon? He had returned after July 1920, when his father died. What use would he have been to the RIC?

  After Peacocke was shot in late May 1921, Tom Barry boasted that six houses – five owned by Protestants – were set on fire in Innishannon, excluding Peacocke’s. The houses were Mrs Stephenson’s Cor Castle; Brigadier Caulfield’s Innishannon House; Mr Dennehy JP’s Prospect House; River View House, which was unoccupied for some time but had been occupied before the burning; the Stennings’ house, which had been occupied by the widow of F.C. Stenning, her husband having been recently shot dead, and lastly the Hungerfords’ house. It must have been terrifying for Protestants in the area. These houses were burnt because they were ‘British Loyalists’ houses’.23 It was an act of vengeance. The Essex regiment had been burning houses of IRA activists in the area, so houses of local loyalists were burnt ‘to teach the British a lesson, and once and for all end their fire terror.’24

  The IRA was at war with the British Army, the RIC and the Auxiliaries, so could expect strong retaliation, but local loyalist citizens were uninvolved, so why punish them? Presumably because they were loyalists.

  Ken Loach’s film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, supports the actions of the IRA against a Protestant landlord in Co. Cork, but the cardboard portrayal of the Anglo-Irish landlord, Sir John Hamilton, misses the point. Irish landlords were a broken force by 1920, both in ownership of land and political power. They avoided reporting IRA activists to the army and police, fearing retaliation. Hamilton is portrayed as stiff-necked, arrogant and spiteful; a snob who disdained his farm workers, seeing them as rebellious, difficult bogmen. The film also portrays the Auxiliaries in an extremist light that is not in keeping with modern historical reassessment. David Leeson has revealed that Irish Catholic members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, as well as the Black and Tans, took reprisals against their fellow Irishmen.25 Their friends and family were often boycotted and intimidated; people were told by the IRA not to sit beside RIC families in church; the court system was falling apart as jurors were intimidated; Summer Assizes could not be held; police barracks had been burned in outlying parts of the country, resulting in the closure of many and Republican insurgents were assassinating policemen throughout the South. The RIC saw itself as a target for what it considered to be a collection of cowardly terrorists. In such an environment, some Irish policemen turned to violence and vigilantism in frustration. The sacking of Balbriggan and Fermoy are examples of such undisciplined behaviour under provocation.

  Loach’s portrayal of the landlord in The Wind that Shakes the Barley was assessed by Irish Examiner columnist and former UUP advisor, Steven King: ‘The only Irish Protestant character [in the film] conforms to every worst stereotype of the gentry. Loach allows no subtlety. Protestant equals rich, equals bastard, equals asking to be murdered.’ Yet very few Protestant landlords were murdered. There were the attempted murders of Lord Dunalley and Robert Sanders in Co. Tipperary, and Hibbert in Co. Clare, but the IRA men involved in these attempted murders proved to be poor shots.

  Refusal of tenants to pay rent was another reason why some Protestants left. Lieutenant Colonel Cooke-Collis lived in Castle Cooke on the River Funcheon near Fermoy, Co. Cork. Cooke-Collis, a large-scale farmer, was ‘a kind and tactful man’26 who exhibited successfully at agricultural shows. According to James Donnelly: ‘There is some evidence that his extensive agricultural operations aroused local hostility and inspired covetousness among local farmers.’27 He decided to leave Ireland after his tenants refused to pay their rent and the IRA burnt his house and belongings on 8 June 1921. He received compensation from the Shaw-Renton Commission in 1923.

  Cooke-Collis was a man who tried to facilitate the locals as much as possible and claimed he had only a small amount of land left, although Patrick Lyons and his son Thomas tried to take 50 acres from him. This was likely to have been one of the factors that led to Castle Cooke being burned down. James S. Donnelly Jr claimed that Cooke-Collis’ ‘extensive agricultural operations’ aroused local hostility.28 This seems to contradict the claim in the Irish Grants Committee file. Cooke-Collis is also described as being ‘extreme anti-Irish’, as an ex-officer, in one of the Bureau of Military History statements. This would sound strange to anyone who knew him – or read the Irish Grants Committee file.29

  Some suffered for giving evidence to the police. Two Protestant farmers near Skibbereen, William Connell and Matthew Sweetnam, were murdered on 23 February 1921 in front of their wives. They were accused of having ‘given evidence against a man who had been levying subscriptions for the IRA’.30 Richard Draper, who lives in Skibbereen, informed me that Connell had mentioned that he was opposed to the IRA and would not give them any donations, unlike some of his Protestant neighbours, who wanted to be left in peace. Cattle were taken from their herd in lieu of monetary contributions and Connell and Sweetnam reported the theft to the RIC. They were under duress from the police to give evidence against some men arrested for the theft and they were shot for informing. They had
received written warning to leave the country, which Connell showed to a solicitor, Willie Kingston. However, Kingston advised them to ignore the letter. That proved to be a mistake. A revealing aspect of this story is that a young IRA man named Daly was instructed to murder Connell. But as he liked Connell, he refused. Daly was later murdered by the IRA for refusing to obey orders and years later his body was exhumed and buried in Abbeystrewry graveyard, outside Skibbereen.

  Draper’s father lived outside Skibbereen when these murders took place and he was told by a neighbour that it would be best if he and his entire family changed their religion. Draper, the church warden of Abbeystrewry Church of Ireland church at the time, said he would give the matter serious consideration, but decided to do nothing.

  Particularly harsh treatment was meted out to the Good family from Timaleague near Bandon, Co. Cork. John Good, murdered on 10 March 1921, was a parishioner of Revd Fleming of Timoleague parish, Co. Cork, where the most charming Church of Ireland church stands by the edge of the sea at Courtmacsherry Bay, close to the ruins of the Franciscan friary. He was the fifth Protestant victim within a few weeks. Good was a farmer with a medium-sized estate in Barryshall who took no interest in politics. Fleming’s son Lionel wrote movingly of him: ‘He was a good employer, and got on well with his neighbours, but one evening armed men came to his door and shot him.’ The Revd Fleming wrote in his diary:

  His son and daughter came for me about 11 p.m., and I drove back with them and stayed until John Good died – as a brave and Christian man can die, without a word of complaint or wish for vengeance on his murderers. I got home – walked home – about one in the morning. My brave wife neither by word nor sign tried to stop me going, though I know what those hours of waiting for my return must have meant to her.