DESCRIBED BY PROFESSOR ROY FOSTER AS “THE MOST ORIGINAL AND INFLUENTIAL IRISH HISTORIAN OF HIS GENERATION”, THE LATE AUSTRALIAN PROFESSOR BRIAN FITZPATRICK OF TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, WAS INDEED INFLUENTIAL.
Fitzpatrick was inventive. Foster appears to have been one of many who unwittingly fell under his influence, making a career as his disciple.
Octogenarians such as myself who have not yet lost all their wits, can remember an Ireland where Protestants and Catholics, former “Treatyites”, “Irregulars”, and Irishmen who served in the British forces, worked and lived beside each other in friendship for nearly fifty years after the end of the 1919-23 Anglo Irish and “Civil” Wars, until 1970 and the invention of a false history.
Almost alone amongst West European countries workers in Ireland were not free on Holy Days established by the Catholic Church. The fear of God was not seen as the beginning of wisdom. Deference was instead paid to Usurers, called “Bank Holidays.”
MY father had to work, but as I went to a Catholic School, I had a holiday on a Holy Day. My engineer father was an Inspector with the Land Commission, a Civil servant. His area for Inspection covered the Counties Wicklow, Wexford and part of Carlow and he would take me alone, or with siblings, on his trips. This was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
He had a 1934 Model Y Ford, a 4 seater with a top speed of just over 50mph. When it gave up the ghost there were no car-hire firms about, so he would hire, at the Commission’s expense, a car with its owner driver. The car was a brand new Dodge V8, as bright as a new
pin. Much of his area was in the horse and buggy age, and in the mountains people kept Greenwich Mean Time while the town went by British Summer Time. Locals seeing me and my siblings getting out of the Detroit monster must have thought us Lords’ Bastards. to use Brendan Behan’s phrase.
Generally before we set out for the country trip we dropped into the Land Commission Head Office in Merrion Square. There I met my father’s senior colleagues, John Kilkenny and Charles Kettle. Mr Kilkenny and Mister Kettle to my father. John Kilkenny had served with the British Army throughout the Great War of 1914-18. My father recalled Kilkenny’s story of Chinese labourers, conscripted and shipped to France, to dig trenches and other work in a quarrel not of their making. Sometimes, in despair, they would sit or lie down, saying “I think I do a die” and expire uninjured in body.
His companion, Charles Kettle, was the younger brother of Tom Kettle MP, a leading Nationalist MP, who had joined the Irish Volunteers, once associated with unrepentant Fenian Dynamitards on a fundraising mission in New York, probably the most intellectual of Irish MPs. Come August 1914 Tom Kettle turned his persuasive talents into demonising the Germans and enlisted in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He was killed in action as a 35-year-old platoon commander in September 1916. Platoon commanders had a short shelf-life in that conflict, weeks rather than years, dying in their teens or early twenties.
The driver of the Dodge V8 was a veteran IRB man Maurice Collins, in on the planning of the 1916 Rising and a participant in it. In 1920-1921 he ran an apparent tobacconist’s shop in Parnell Street with a concealed drawer where messages from and to the IRA’s Director of Intelligence, Michael Collins, were exchanged. These identified spies and informers for elimination by the Defence Force of the democratically accountable Government of Ireland.
At Easter 1966 the Sunday Times Magazine featured Maurice Collins on its front cover, He was standing beside the spot in Kilmainham Prison Yard where the Insurgent leaders had been shot by the British in 1916.
In County Wicklow I met another IRB veteran, Mick Lynch who had fought in 1916 and until the 1921 Truce. He had a small farm near Rathhdrum and worked also as a Ganger or Overseer on projects inspected by my father. A native of West Cork, he was reputed to have been the first Volunteer there to acquire a Lee Enfield Rifle. He later created a cast for moulding hand grenade cases, adopted by IRA HQ. He emerges from the pages of “With the Irish in Frongoch”, published in 1917, as the most crafty and engaging of internees in their battle of wits with their captors in that University of Revolution.
Conscription had been enacted for Britain and the many insurgents who had been born or lived there would have been forced into khaki, had prisoners raise their hand when parcels and mail addressed to them been claimed. Hence arose the battle of wits which the prisoners won.
Mick Lynch had many skills, including with horses, which he trained,, He attended the races and chatted with British Officers, a good source of Intelligence, and he later rode to Hounds. He rode once a motorbike with de Valera in a sidecar, running a gauntlet through missile throwing Orangemen in an Armagh election. At the time of the 1922 split, he kept out of it, telling Michael Collins that each side was mad – on the night of 21st August 1922, when he wrestled with him in Cork’s Imperial Hotel.
I spent my first 23 years on the Hill of Howth where most of my close neighbours were Protestants. Most of the larger shops in the village below were Protestant-owned. My elder sister, born 1938, could remember the Orange Order parading in the village on the 12th of July, led by the farmer Davy Campbell. We bought milk from Davy and his eldest son, Dick Campbell. Davy had 7 sons and a daughter and they all lived in Howth. If there was any sectarian animosity in Howth it escaped my notice.
Beann Eadair (Howth) Gaelic Football Club, “The Bens” had Protestant players. (Of course Sam Maguire, the Cork IRB man who swore Michael Collins into the IRB in London, was a Protestant)
The IRB had determined to bend every available body to republican requirements, and the GAA had, as an autonomous, voluntary, democratic body, chosen to ban its members from playing or watching “garrison games”. It adopted the old Land League tactic of the boycott. But it also sought to establish Vigilance Committees in every branch. Spies and Informers, a less honoured tradition than “boycotting.”
.In Howth I don’t think there was a Vigilance Committee but there was one “Cute Hoor” a Garda from the Kerry Gaeltacht who played for Ben Eadair’s as Mairtin de hOra , and for Suttonians Rugby Club as Martin Hoare.
But in Ben Eadair, the job of enforcing the ban fell on “Brud” Campbell, son of Howth’s leading Orangeman.
There was never a regular army Captain Boycott. But there was an Ensign – a sub Lieutenant of Militia who posed as a Captain. Rather like some chancers get passed off as bona fide historians
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