In the late 1940s and early 1950s my father, an engineer, worked as Inspector with the Irish Land Commission, and his territory covered Wicklow and Wexford. He had a second-hand 8 horsepower 1934 Model Y “Baby” Ford and on school holidays he would take some of us along with him. Holy Catholic Ireland was, even then, more deferential to the banks than to the Pope, and state employees and other workers had their noses held to the grindstone when Catholics and Lutherans in Western Europe were enjoying Holy Days. But schools were an exception and on Holy Days in Spring and Summer we had the treat of the Garden of Ireland. It wasn’t exactly awful on the Hill of Howth either, where life was peaceful. Our house looked North to the Mournes. I understand that in those times British Prime Minister Attlee was driven around Ireland by his wife, and that the only hazard he had to face was her appalling driving. Anyhow the Model Y Ford, Registration ZA 5812 gave up the ghost and my father hadn’t got the cash to replace it. Car hire firms were yet to be established. The solution was to hire a car with its owner-driver at Government expense. And such cars were new American Chrysler and Dodge V8s. In those days to travel in a Model Y Ford was to travel in style. But in that horse and buggy age when we alighted in a country village or farm, from a gleaming gigantic Dodge “Fluid Drive” V8, my siblings and I must have been thought, in Brendan Behan’s phrase, “Lord’s Bastards.” At the time my father’s civil service status was “unestablished” and not pensionable and his salary about £300 per annum.
And it was on 29 June 1950, that I remember hearing my father and his driver talking about Korea, a world away from us. War had just broken out there and I’d have been in school had it not been the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. (I checked Whitaker’s Almanac to establish that). Though my father had been in the Irish Volunteers in Cork he had never been on active service. But his driver was a veteran of close-quarter combat in Dublin’s North King Street in 1916 which features in a recent study of the Rising. His name was Maurice Collins, and his photograph adorned the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine in 1966. His very modest and short witness statement to the Military History Bureau in 1949 doesn’t go into the details of the close-quarter fighting. But he was a key figure from the time he joined the IRB in 1908 , in the preparation of the Rising and the ‘Tan War when his shop in Parnell Street was used as a Republican post-office drop-in and collection depot for Michael Collins in the lethal intelligence war. Maurice Collins was a quiet and unassuming man.
During one scrape or other he had promised his Maker that if he survived it he would, in addition to abstaining from meat on a Friday, he’d also abstain on a Wednesday.And he kept his promise
In his Merrion Square office, my father had two colleagues, a Mr Kilkenny who had fought in the Great War of 1914, and a Mr. Kettle. Mr Kettle, Charles Kettle, was brother of TomKettle, the former Redmondite MP who had been killed fighting, objectively for British Imperialist aims’, though he described it differently. Ireland was a rather more broad-minded and tolerant country in 1950 than is now supposed and people rubbed along together. Ex-British officers, escaping Attlee’s Muscovite Bolshevism were settling there in droves. Evelyn Waugh had contemplated buying Gormanston Castle, but Ireland was saved that. In his Diaries he said he thought that the Catholic Church in England needed him. But, I digress.
Maurice Collins was interned in Frongoch. We had at home “With The Irish In Frongoch” published in 1917. Regarded as the University of the Revolution, it contained Dick Mulcahy, Michael Collins and scores more who had starring roles in the years to come. But the name which stands out from that account is that of Michael “Mick” Lynch.
Lynch’s name is much less well-known than that of his brother Diarmuid, which I leave yez to check on your own. Mick, too, was an old IRB man from Cork. I’ve read that he was the first Volunteer in Cork to get himself a Lee Enfield rifle. That he created a mould for the manufacture of cases for Mills type grenades that was adopted for the whole IRA. He trained horses and attended the races where he mixed with enemy officers and gathered useful intelligence. In 1950 he had a small farm near Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, and supplemented the farm’s income by working as a foreman, or “Ganger” for the Land Commission .I’ve been told that he rode a motorbike with de Valera in the sidecar, running the gauntlet of Orange missiles at an election, and that he kept out of the Civil War and wrestled with Michael Collins in Cork’s Imperial Hotel, the night before Collins was killed.Mick Lynch continued his involvement with horses and used ride to hounds like any good Fenian. My father had to retire from the Land Commision on health grounds in 1953 and was replaced by a young man with ambition.
The new Inspector parked his car away from where Lynch and his men were working. He got down in a ditch to sneak up to see if the men were fell-out for a smoke or otherwise slacking. But Mick Lynch had lost none of the skills which had served him as a revolutionary. He heard the guy and grabbed him by the lapels and shook him like a rat, and let loose a string of expletives he’d probably learned from Michael Collins. And lost employment by the State he had done so much to create.
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