List of Abbreviations

BMH    Bureau of Military History

GHQ    General Headquarters

IRB        Irish Republican Brotherhood

O/C       Commanding Officer

RIC        Royal Irish Constabulary

V/C        Vice-Commanding Officer

WS          Witness Statements

Preface

On 27 September 1922, during fierce fighting for control of the town of Killorglin, IRA Volunteer Con Looney was shot and fatally wounded. As his young life ebbed away, his final words were recorded by his comrades: ‘Give my rifle to my brother, my love to my mother and tell them I am dying for the cause.’ His rifle was brought back to his brother and perhaps his mother’s grief was eased a little by his last declaration of affection. And he did die for ‘The Cause’ – the cause of Irish freedom. With the passage of time, as his comrades died and the generations changed, the story of Con Looney faded in all but the memories of his family and An Dream Beag Dilís, ‘The Faithful Few’.

The men and women who fought for Ireland’s freedom were not conscripted to do so, nor were they paid for their services. They were volunteer soldiers driven only by an ideal which had been handed down to them by generations past and that ideal was the unquenchable belief that the Irish people should live in freedom, unfettered by foreign domination. In the course of their brief lives not force of arms, not lonely prison cells, not inhuman torture, not material inducements and ultimately not even death could separate these volunteer soldiers from that ideal.

Ironically, however, it was this idealism that proved to be the catalyst that hastened their memory on its journey into a national amnesia. While soldiers fight wars, it is politicians who get to guide the subsequent histories. Such histories are often based on the requirements considered expedient for their current political needs. Unrealised ideals become embarrassments and so must follow the well-worn path of apathy to antipathy and eventually to ridicule. The volunteer soldiers who died for the cause of freedom could not and cannot be separated from the beliefs that inspired them and so it was deemed necessary to consign these men and women to the national amnesia along with their ideals. Thus it is a sad fact that within a couple of generations the nation that they fought and died for has shamefully forgotten these heroes. It is the aim of this book to go some way towards preserving the memory of the lives, deaths and ideals of these men of Kerry who died for ‘The Cause’.

During the twentieth century over 150 Kerry men died in the fight for Irish freedom. Many were killed in action but others were executed or died while in captivity as a result of brutality or neglect. Some had their physical or mental health broken, ending their young lives prematurely, but theirs was no less a sacrifice than had they fallen in the heat of battle. A final, definitive list of those who died for ‘The Cause’ defied any clear criteria and so it was left to the fallen Volunteers’ comrades to be the arbiters of whom they considered had given their lives for Ireland’s freedom. Just as the fight for freedom in Kerry was fought by local men with little outside assistance or influence, thus the patriotic dead would be remembered by locally erected memorials without any ‘official’ twenty-six county government input. The names of the fallen were inscribed by their comrades on monuments at Ballyseedy, Cahersiveen and Rathmore, and on memorials in numerous cemeteries and on roadsides, in fields and on the streets of Kerry. It is these men, whose names are carved in stone and who generations before us considered to have had died for ‘The Cause’, that are remembered in this book.

A strong sense of local identity has always been a defining feature of the Kerry persona. That bond between the person and native place was forged by centuries of battling nature and foreigner to maintain a precarious foothold on a land that was challenging but beautiful, unyielding but embracing. These young men defined themselves by the land which nurtured them. Thus they were part of a townland, part of a parish, part of a village or town. They fought and died with comrades from their own areas and so guided by this, they are listed not by rank or chronology, but in the battalions to which they were attached. Each battalion was formed from companies which generally represented parishes and from 1919 onwards these battalions evolved and divided, were named and renamed, designated to brigades and re-designated. As such, assigning fallen soldiers into precise military units is inherently flawed but does serve a useful purpose in the pursuit of local remembrance. Other Kerrymen died outside the county. There are several Volunteers from other counties who died in Kerry and others who were buried in Kerry soil having fallen elsewhere in the fight for freedom. All had a story and all died for ‘The Cause’ and so are included in these pages. Finally there are some who died, not in the line of fire, but whose surviving comrades thought their contribution or sacrifice sufficient to inscribe their names in stone on monuments so that these men too would be remembered.

With his last breath Con Looney wished his people to know that he was dying for ‘The Cause’. This book is not a history of Kerry’s contribution in the fight for Irish freedom in the twentieth century. Rather, it was written as a memorial to those men who gave their lives in that struggle, so that all those who died for ‘The Cause’ would be remembered with pride by their people.

Tim Horgan

2015

Introduction

On a winter’s evening in November 1583 in Glanageenty, Ballymacelligott, another war of independence ended. The Earl of Desmond was finally captured and beheaded by Irishmen in the service of the English crown. All that remained of his army after four years of warfare was a small guerrilla band, and with his death, Queen Elizabeth I’s rule over County Kerry was no longer disputed. Banished to the mountains and bogs, the people brought only their faith, their stories and a deep sense of grievance. When the rebellion of 1641 erupted in Ulster this emboldened the dispossessed in Kerry and, led by the remnants of the old Gaelic nobility, the county was quickly in the hands of the people who had become rebels in their own land. But that brief interlude lasted only until Cromwell’s armies crushed the hopes of Gaelic Ireland. When General John Ludlow captured Ross Castle in 1653, the rebellion was over and English rule was made more secure as the lands of Kerry were planted with Cromwellian officers as part of the division of the spoils of war.

For two centuries the county would remain in a peaceful but unjust equilibrium, victor and vanquished, landed and landless, prosperous and impoverished, English and Irish. The ideals of the American and French Revolutions would inspire the great rebellion of 1798, but only elsewhere in the country, as Kerry remained almost untouched by the events of that summer of freedom. The agrarian unrest of the Whiteboys in the early decades of the nineteenth century did nothing to change the equilibrium between conquerors and conquered. Daniel O’Connell’s great promises of a new order with Catholic Emancipation and Repeal would fail to upset the unjust balance between landed and landless as he left Ireland firmly part of Britain’s now mighty Empire. Hundreds of thousands of lives spent eking out miserable existences on mountainsides and bogs would be quenched in the Great Famine of the 1840s. While corn still grew and fish still swam in rivers, the crown forces guarded food exports and starvation and disease took a third of the population of Kerry to unmarked and mass graves. Yet that unjust equilibrium between master and slave endured.

A broken people found refuge on America’s shores and there Ireland’s exiles gained a new confidence and the flames of freedom began to ignite once again. Just as people went west across the ocean, the seeds of revolution in the form of the Fenian Brotherhood came east across the Atlantic. In the 1860s the Fenian message found fertile ground in the towns of Kerry and murmurings of rebellion again swept the countryside. But hampered by indecision and infiltrated by Irishmen whose loyalty lay with the crown rather than their own people, the rebellion foundered before it could start. In February 1867 Colonel J. J. O’Connor, a Valentia-born American Civil War veteran, led the Fenians of Cahersiveen in open rebellion, but within days the ‘gold sun of freedom’ had once again set. The might of Britain quickly crushed his heroic band that would be recalled in song as the ‘Boys of Foilmore’. But still their cause endured, undeterred by the power of the Empire or the condemnation of its clerical allies.

In the 1880s the power of the landed gentry to extract rents from an impoverished people began to be resisted. The confrontation between the landlords and those whose battle cry was ‘The land to the People’ was most acute in Kerry. As the constitutional Land League was unable to match the power of the landlords, the police and the legal system that stood behind them, groups of young men banded together to defend their people using guerrilla tactics. These Moonlighters were especially active in the Castleisland, Ballymacelligott and Firies areas, which were described in contemporary police reports as ‘the most disturbed districts in Ireland’. By the early 1890s the sway of the landlords within the county was broken.

But the people of Ireland would still not sit comfortably within Britain’s Empire. The colonial government had been largely successful in suppressing Ireland’s identity, with our native language and culture pushed towards extinction as the Irish became increasingly anglicised. Then, in 1884, the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed to promote native games and in 1893 the Gaelic League was established to promote the revival of what remained of the Irish language and culture. Soon the national spirit was regaining its confidence. Politicians promised Home Rule for Ireland but failed to deliver as Britain was determined to keep its first colony within its imperial clutches. However, the separatist tradition amongst the Irish people could not all be enticed by political promises. On 25 November 1913 the Irish Volunteers were formed in Dublin’s Rotunda and their founding manifesto stated the organisation’s aim ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all Irish People’. Though initially unstated, Republicans saw the Volunteers as a vehicle for securing Ireland’s independence, even if that entailed an armed uprising, while moderate nationalists saw the rapidly growing organisation as a force that would pressurise the British government into implementing Home Rule. Within a week Volunteer companies were formed in Killarney and Tralee. It was an idea whose time had come and soon every parish in Kerry had a group of young men drilling with rudimentary weapons and awaiting a time to strike. Britain’s difficulty should have been Ireland’s opportunity, but with the advent of the Great War in August 1914, John Redmond caused a split in the Irish Volunteers as he called on Ireland’s young men to support Britain’s war with Germany. Throughout the land the vast majority heeded Redmond’s call and became the National Volunteers. He had gambled Ireland’s youth in the hope of having Home Rule, now on the statute books, implemented at the end of the war, but as a result Ireland’s young men died in their tens of thousands on the battlefields of Europe. In Kerry, however, the Irish Volunteers remained largely intact, with only a minority joining the National Volunteers. Shorn of moderate nationalist influence the Irish Volunteers, increasingly controlled by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), laid plans for an armed uprising while Britain was distracted by the war.

In Kerry Austin Stack, a renowned Gaelic footballer and administrator, was the commander of the Irish Volunteers. It was to him that the Military Council of the IRB entrusted the task of unloading and distributing the vast arsenal of weapons that Germany was to send on board the arms ship Aud at Easter 1916. The Aud was expected in Tralee Bay on Easter Saturday and Stack’s closely guarded arrangements were based on this exact date. However, the German High Command had been given a three-day window to get its arms shipment to Fenit. So when Captain Spindler sailed into Tralee Bay on Thursday 20 April, he was not expected and neither were Roger Casement and his two companions who came ashore from a submarine at Banna Strand on Good Friday. Meanwhile, at Ballykissane, also on Good Friday, three Volunteers died during an attempt to acquire radio equipment to be used to contact the Aud – they were to be the first casualties of the Rising. Con Keating, Charlie Monaghan and Donal (Dan) Sheehan were also the first of about 150 Republican Volunteers to die in Kerry in an attempt to establish an Irish Republic.

When the Aud was scuttled and Casement detained, the plans for a rising in Kerry fell into chaos and this deteriorated into a paralysis when a lapse in judgement by Stack led to his incarceration by the RIC. Robert Monteith, who had come from Germany with Casement, was given command of the mustered Volunteers at Tralee on Easter Sunday. However, he judged it more prudent to dismiss them and prepare for another fight on another day.

The military defeat of the Rising and its subsequent executions and imprisonments did not cower the people of Ireland as it had done in other generations. Within a year the Irish Volunteers had reorganised and gained in confidence as sympathy towards the national cause replaced the apathy or antagonism a year previously. In Kerry, two Volunteers had died in April 1918 in an attack on the Gortatlea RIC Barracks and in retaliation two of the constables involved were shot in Tralee in broad daylight while attending the resulting inquest. The general election of November 1918 confirmed the popular support for the Republican cause and with the formation of Dáil Éireann in January 1919 a new era had begun. The Irish Volunteers armed themselves with weapons procured locally or captured from the enemy. Within months the paramilitary RIC had retreated from the countryside and fortified their barracks in the larger towns as they came under increasing attack from a guerrilla force that was rapidly gaining in confidence and sophistication. By the summer of 1920 vast areas of County Kerry had no police presence and the county became ungovernable. The civic administration of the British crown also collapsed in rural Ireland. With the RIC unable to cope with the deteriorating situation, they were reinforced by hastily recruited temporary constables. These Black and Tans would work in tandem with the RIC as they attempted to quell the rebellion with brutality. But their terrorist methods only provoked those they sought to control and in late 1920 a further force was sent to assist the RIC. The former British officers who made up the Auxiliary Division of the RIC were efficient and seasoned fighters. ‘H’ Company of the Auxiliary Division was based in Kerry under the command of the notorious and fearless Major McKinnon. But as the forces of the crown increased in strength so too did the resolve of those resisting British rule. Each battalion within the county had an active service unit by the spring of 1921 and the intensity of the conflict remorselessly grew until 11 July 1921, when, unable to quell the Republican forces, the British entered into a truce with Republicans.

Treaty negotiations went on until December until, under threat of ‘terrible war’, the Irish plenipotentiaries agreed to terms. Ireland was to be partitioned and those who governed the twenty-six counties were to be given limited power in exchange for an oath of allegiance to the crown. Ireland was to remain part of the Empire. The country’s opinion divided, as was to be expected. Most of the men who had done the fighting objected that their sacrifices were to be sold for far less than a thirty-two county Republic free from Britain. Those under the age of twenty-five, which was the majority of active Volunteers, did not even have a vote; nor did women under the age of thirty. But Michael Collins and his pro-Treaty faction in Dáil Éireann won the day. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified and from now on Irishmen would be used to do what Britain could not; quell the Republican rebellion.

The inevitable Civil War began on 28 June 1922 when Free State forces shelled the Republican headquarters in Dublin’s Four Courts. Within a week the Republican forces in Dublin had been defeated, but a quick and decisive Free State victory was not to be as the men of Munster stood firm in defence of the Republic that they had fought for during the previous three years. A defensive line was formed between Limerick and Waterford, and Republican columns from Kerry, Cork, Limerick and Tipperary prevented Free State forces from entering the Republican heartland in the south. But soon this defensive strategy began to crumble in the face of better-equipped and numerically superior pro-Treaty forces. In the first fortnight of August, Free State Army units invaded by sea in Fenit, Tarbert, Kenmare, Passage West and Union Hall and quickly captured the virtually undefended towns of Munster. The Republican forces were again forced to retreat to the countryside and revert to the guerrilla warfare that had been successful against the British. Nowhere was this phase of the conflict more bloodily fought than in Kerry, as the IRA units continued to resist even as the hope of victory grew dimmer.

The Dublin Guard and 1st Western Division of the Free State Army became an occupying army in Kerry. Guerrilla warfare by the Republicans was met with mass arrests of Republican men and women, executions, the mass killings of prisoners and a brutality that the British had been reticent to use on the native population. On 10 April 1923, IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch was killed in action and his replacement Frank Aiken declared a ceasefire on 30 April, followed by an order for Republican forces to dump their arms on 24 May. The defence of the Republic had ended. Apart from the many dead, hundreds were imprisoned and these men and women would have to endure appalling conditions and a long hunger strike in November 1923 before most were released in December. It would be the summer of the next year when the last prisoners were finally freed. There was no attempt at any reconciliation as the new state stamped its authority on the twenty-six counties it controlled.

The Irish Free State was an unwelcome place for the defeated Republicans and hundreds left to begin their lives anew in the United States, free from the harassment, unemployment and disillusionment that was their lot following their release from prison. The Republican movement fragmented, with most following de Valera into the constitutional politics of a partitioned country. A minority remained true to the original ideals of 1916 and a much weakened IRA and Sinn Féin continued to survive. When de Valera and his Fianna Fáil party was elected to power in 1932, there were high expectations that partition might be unravelled, but this was not the case as the party diluted its Republican values and promoted populist economic policies. Figures from the revolutionary period such as John Joe Rice and John Joe Sheehy continued to carry the Republican torch in Kerry.

In 1938 the IRA launched a campaign of bombing in Britain, mirroring a similar tactic used in the 1880s by the Fenian Dynamitards. Several Kerry IRA Volunteers were amongst those who operated in English cities, but by 1940 the campaign instigated by 1916 veteran Seán Russell had petered out.

The Second World War was regarded as another opportunity to pressurise Britain into withdrawing from Ireland. While a campaign was planned in 1942 to attack British targets in the six counties, it failed to materialise as the Fianna Fáil government turned on their erstwhile allies. Hundreds of Republicans were interned, including many from Kerry. Those executed for Republican activities by the de Valera regime included two from County Kerry: Maurice O’Neill and Charlie Kerins.

While another military campaign along the border began in 1956, it too was short-lived. IRA activists from Kerry were involved and several received prison sentences. A swell of popular support for the Republican cause saw Tan War veteran John Joe Rice elected as a Sinn Féin TD for South Kerry. But by 1962 the IRA leadership accepted defeat and declared a ceasefire.

In 1969, precipitated by demands for civil rights, Irish Republicans embarked on another struggle for independence in the six counties. A long and bloody campaign would see some Kerry IRA Volunteers on active service in Northern Ireland and in Britain. The Kerry command played an important role as the latest Troubles went on for three decades. Many from the county suffered long terms of imprisonment, hunger strikes and years on the run until a negotiated settlement allowed for an uneasy peace. A degree of self-rule for the six counties, a continuation of partition and the promise of stepping-stones to ultimate Irish freedom silenced the guns. Whether these stepping stones will go the way of those of Michael Collins and later those of Éamon de Valera, only time will tell.

An American general once memorably reminded his people ‘Freedom is not for free, somebody has paid the price’. And so it is in Ireland. In the pages that follow are the stories of these men of Kerry who paid the ultimate price for our freedom.

The sacrifices of these men are as great, and often greater, than those patriots whose memory is preserved in the national narrative. Each of these fallen soldiers was an individual with his own unique story and this book tries to portray each man as such. Some fell in action with their comrades and others shared their last moments with other Volunteers, dying together in captivity. As a result there is, of necessity, a degree of repetition in many of the brief stories of these men’s lives and deaths.

Those who died for ‘The Cause’ in Kerry are sometimes remembered by written words and more often by ever-fading oral narratives. Most are also remembered by more permanent memorials, whether a headstone or a monument at the site where they fell. On such stone testaments the dead are often recalled by the names being inscribed in their native language. This is often in the old Gaelic script and in the text of this book these Gaelic spellings are also recorded under the more anglicised form of their names. Thus it is hoped that future generations will be able to link the inscriptions on such monuments and gravestones to the stories which are preserved in this book.

Ná déan dearmad and bí bródúil astu, agus ‘Beidh Éire fós ag Cáit Ní Dhuibhir’.

1st and 9th (Tralee) Battalions,
Kerry No. 1 Brigade

The Irish Volunteers were established in Tralee on 10 December 1913 during a meeting of the weekly Gaelic League class. Matthew McMahon of Urban Terrace, Boherbue, had been at the inaugural meeting of the Volunteers at the Rotunda in Dublin fifteen days previously and at his instigation a company was formed in Tralee. Tralee had a been a centre of IRB activity in the preceding years and within a short time the Brotherhood had gained prominent positions within the fledgling Volunteer movement. Austin Stack, the head of the IRB, was appointed O/C of the Tralee Volunteers and Alf Cotton, a civil servant and fellow IRB member, was his deputy. In March 1916, weeks before the Rising, Cotton was expelled from Kerry by the authorities and Paddy Cahill became the second in command. Though well organised and drilled before the Rising, the unexpected arrival of Casement at Banna, the premature arrival and subsequent capture and scuttling of the arms ship Aud, and the arrest of Stack on Good Friday threw plans for a rising in Kerry into chaos. Within days, all senior members of the Irish Volunteers were under arrest and it would not be until 1917 that the movement would attempt to resurrect itself in Tralee.

During 1917 the Tralee Volunteers began reorganising, arms were collected and recruitment and drilling continued. Austin Stack remained O/C of the battalion and also the leader of the Irish Volunteers in the county. Paddy Cahill was V/C and Dan Sullivan, the chairman of the Tralee Urban Council, was the battalion adjutant. Billy Mullins served as the quartermaster. The election of 1918 resulted in Austin Stack being appointed Minister for Home Affairs in the first Dáil and following his departure to Dublin in January 1919, Cahill became the battalion O/C and Joe Melinn his deputy.

In the spring of 1919 the single Kerry Irish Volunteer command was divided into three brigades. Paddy Cahill, who had been O/C of the original Kerry Brigade and also of the Tralee (1st) Battalion, now became O/C of Kerry No. 1 Brigade, which consisted of the Tralee, North and West Kerry Battalions. The Tralee Battalion was composed of companies from Boherbue, Rock Street, Strand Street, Farmer’s Bridge, Ballyroe, Oakpark, Blennerville and Curraheen. Several of Cahill’s staff from Tralee joined him in the new brigade staff and as a result a new leadership was appointed to the 1st Battalion. Dan Healy was appointed battalion O/C with Michael Doyle as his deputy. Michael Fleming of Gas Terrace was the battalion adjutant and Paddy Barry of Rock Street was the new quartermaster, with Thomas Foley being appointed the intelligence officer.

On the orders of GHQ, following the death of Terence MacSwiney on hunger strike, the IRA was to engage the crown forces wherever they could be encountered during the last week of October 1920. The killing of several RIC men in North Kerry brought about a dramatic escalation of the conflict that forced Paddy Cahill and other active IRA men in his Tralee command to go into hiding. They set up a brigade headquarters at Fybough, near Keel, seventeen miles by road from Tralee. In this remote location Cahill also located his brigade active service unit, which was mainly composed of Tralee IRA Volunteers who could not return to the town. The exodus of so many fighting men hampered the activity of what remained of the 1st Battalion in Tralee. However, in March 1921 Brigade Adjutant Paddy Garvey was detailed to set up a battalion active service unit within the town. This was commanded by the ‘A’ Company officer, Captain John Joe Sheehy, and was composed of IRA Volunteers still living in Tralee. This battalion unit was soon taking the fight to the local RIC and Auxiliaries. Their most notable successes were the killings of Auxiliary commander Major John McKinnon on 15 April and Head Constable Francis Benson on 14 May 1921. By this time Paddy Cahill had been relieved of his command by GHQ, who had judged him to be ineffectual as a military leader.

While Cahill’s military leadership of the brigade could certainly be questioned, there was no doubt that he was a popular figure with many of the fighting men. He had a loyal following within the brigade staff and especially within the Strand Street area of Tralee in which ‘B’ Company was based, the district of Tralee where Cahill was from. His second in command, Tadhg Brosnan, refused to become the Kerry No. 1 Brigade O/C such was his loyalty to Cahill, with the result that GHQ was obliged to appoint Andy Cooney, an organiser who had been operating in South Kerry, as brigade commander. While Cahill withdrew from his position, his staff were defiant and refused to cooperate with Cooney in an attempt to isolate the new brigade O/C. Cooney’s orders were ignored, especially by ‘B’ Company. However, within the town John Joe Sheehy’s active service unit was now waging the fight against the crown forces and this unit remained aloof from the Cahill controversy. Dan Healy’s command as O/C of the Tralee-based 1st Battalion was transferred to Sheehy, though Cahill loyalists within the town refused to accept his leadership and they remained outside the battalion structure.

This situation whereby a significant section of the town’s IRA Volunteers refused to accept the command of the local 1st Battalion was to remain a source of contention for nearly fourteen months. Eventually IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch brokered a deal in the summer of 1922 whereby the Cahill loyalists would form a separate battalion in the Tralee district and this was to be termed the 9th Battalion. This new battalion was composed of companies from Strand Street, Blennerville, Ballyroe, Churchill and Curraheen. Its O/C was Paddy Paul Fitzgerald and in theory it was not to be under the direct command of the brigade O/C, who by that time was Humphrey Murphy. However, although the outbreak of Civil War saw both the 1st and 9th Battalions united in their opposition to the Treaty, the personality differences that arose from GHQ’s ill-considered removal of Paddy Cahill remained simmering under the surface until well after the war ended.

Following the withdrawal of the British Army in January 1922, the 1st Battalion used its barracks in Ballymullen as their new headquarters. The outbreak of the Civil War saw many of the town’s experienced fighters in action in the Limerick and Tipperary area, but the Free State’s seaborne invasion at Fenit on 2 August 1922 caught the battalion unaware, as most of the active Volunteers were engaged in the faltering defence of the Limerick to Waterford line. After some bloody fighting, General Paddy Daly and his Dublin Guard captured Tralee on that summer’s day and went on to establish garrisons in the towns of Kerry. However, the rural areas remained in Republican hands and within days Sheehy’s battalion was waging a guerrilla war against the Free State Army, which had its headquarters in Ballymullen Barracks. The next nine months of fighting would see the deaths of many of the 1st and 9th Battalion’s Volunteers, some of whom would be summarily executed following capture. Others would die in captivity due to poor prison conditions, while hundreds were interned in prison camps in the Curragh, Newbridge and Gormanston, and in Mountjoy and Limerick Gaols and women’s prisons at the South Dublin Union and Kilmainham Gaol. The suffering of the bereaved, imprisoned, exiled and brutalised unfortunately cannot be measured, but the following pages contain the stories of those of the Tralee battalions who paid the ultimate price in the search for an independent Irish Republic.

John Conway

Seán Ó Conbuiḋe

John ‘Sonny’ Conway was born in Abbey Street, Tralee, in 1894 into a large family. His younger brother, Dan Joe, gained fame as an All-Ireland-winning Kerry footballer. John, like his father, worked as a general labourer. He was married and lived at 61 Caherina, Strand Street, Tralee. As a young man he had emigrated to the United States and had enlisted in the American Army under the name John Rundle.¹ During the Great War he served with the American forces in Europe. On demobilisation following the end of the war he returned to Tralee. On doing so, he joined the Irish Volunteers in the town. Conway was attached to ‘A’ Company, 1st Battalion, Kerry No. 1 Brigade and later was part of the 9th Battalion formed in 1922.

In February 1923 he was in custody in what was called the Workhouse Barracks in Tralee. This was the town’s workhouse, which had been occupied by the Free State Army to be used as a barracks to supplement their main garrison in Ballymullen and is now the County Council offices. Free State Army reports at the time of the inquest into John Conway’s death indicate that he was a civilian prisoner when he was killed. However, the IRA lists him amongst those Volunteers killed during the Civil War. While his status as a prisoner may be in doubt, the circumstances of his death are not.

On 24 February 1923 Captain Patrick Byrne shot John Conway dead while a prisoner in the barracks.² Byrne was an officer in the Dublin Guard and was from Gardiner Street in Dublin. Conway was brought by the officer to a place on the main road opposite the town’s Rath Cemetery. There he was shot. Initially the Free State officer claimed that he had shot the prisoner as he was attempting to escape, but later confessed that he had summarily executed him for no apparent reason.

A coroner’s court investigated the death in custody of John Conway and the medical evidence revealed that he had been shot six times and died as a result of shock and haemorrhage. General Paddy Daly gave evidence at the inquest and said that Byrne had confessed to him that he had shot the prisoner and that he could give no explanation for the killing. Daly said that he had known Byrne for fifteen years and that the officer had fought in the Tan War. Daly went on to say that Captain Byrne had been captured and badly beaten by the IRA some months previously. He gave evidence that his mind had become ‘unhinged’ as a result and that he had attempted suicide. Despite his unstable character Byrne was left on active duty in the barracks. The court held that Captain Patrick Byrne was responsible for the killing, but General Daly’s evidence ensured that he was not held accountable.

John Conway was buried in the family grave in Rath Cemetery, Tralee and his name is inscribed on the Republican monument there.

Daniel Daly

Doṁnall Ó Dálaiġ¹

Dan Daly was thirty-seven when he was shot dead by Free State forces near Tralee’s railway station. He was a native of Killorglin and was employed by the Great Southern and Western Railway in Tralee. He joined the company as an engine fireman and when single he lived in Rock Street in Tralee, close to the station. He was promoted to the position of engine driver and drove trains on the rail network in the Tralee area, which was then far more extensive than now. By 1923 he was married to Julia O’Connor, whose family had a business in Upper Bridge Street in Killorglin. The couple had five children and were expecting a sixth child when he was killed.²

While in Tralee Dan enlisted in the 1st Battalion of the Irish Volunteers and played an active part in the conflict with the crown forces in his adopted town. In July 1920 he used his train to carry a detachment of his fellow Tralee Volunteers for a surprise attack on the British Army post in the Tralee railway station. Daly and his engine fireman, named Mulchinock, stopped their train at Ballyroe as it was coming to Tralee from Fenit. There they allowed a large contingent of IRA Volunteers to board. The train then arrived shortly afterwards on the lightly guarded platform at Tralee. The Volunteers got off and quickly disarmed the surprised British Army picket who had a post at the station. The military offered no resistance and the IRA unit disarmed the soldiers and escaped with a valuable haul of Lee Enfield rifles.

During the Civil War, on the evening of 23 January 1923, several armed men left the Free State barracks which was situated in Tralee’s workhouse. Arriving near the house in Railway Terrace where Dan was living, they waited on the street outside. Dan Lynch of Cork, a colleague of Dan Daly’s at the nearby railway station, arrived at the house as he and Dan Daly were to go together to the local Dominican church for the devotions which were held nightly at 7.30 p.m. Lynch told Daly of the five men in trench coats who were loitering outside the house but Daly was not worried by their presence. When the two railway workers left together to go to the church, the men in the trench coats had already departed from outside Daly’s house. Daly and Lynch proceeded down to the top of Edward Street, passing the station as they walked. Further down this street, Lynch saw a group of men whom he presumed were the same men who had been lingering outside Daly’s home a few minutes earlier. He advised Daly to proceed to the Dominican church through Nelson Street, which is now Ashe Street, thus avoiding the men who had been acting suspiciously. However, Daly was curious and opted to continue down Edward Street where the men were now standing. As Daly and Lynch walked along the path, a man came running down the street and crossed over to where Daly and Lynch were. He stopped and asked Daly to identify himself and when he revealed his name the stranger pulled a gun from his coat and shot Daly at point blank range. The wounded Daly slumped on his companion, whereupon the attacker fired five or six more shots, wounding Lynch in the process. The shooter then ran up Edward Street towards the railway station and into the night.

Lynch managed to carry his seriously wounded friend up to the railway station where some Free State soldiers placed him in a waiting room and called the military doctor. Dr George O’Riordan arrived while Daly was still conscious and asked him if he had recognised his attacker. Daly said that he had not seen him before and then drifted into unconsciousness, dying from his wounds minutes later.

A few days before this incident the IRA had issued a proclamation warning against the use of the railways in support of the Free State war effort. It was assumed by the public that it was the IRA that shot the men for a breach of this instruction. However, an inquest was held two days later, on 25 January, at which the Free State O/C Paddy Daly made an unexpected appearance. He testified that shortly after midnight on the day before the shooting four Republicans had been arrested and they had two documents in their possession. General Daly stated that these papers implicated Dan Daly in a plot to disable railway engines, to kidnap a Free State officer and to participate in an attack on soldiers at the station. General Daly made no apology for the summary execution of Dan Daly and the wounding of Dan Lynch near Tralee’s railway station on 23 January 1923.³ The inquest jury brought in a verdict of the wilful killing of Dan Daly by persons unknown.

Thirty-seven-year-old Dan Daly was buried in the family grave at Dromavalla Cemetery in his native Killorglin and was survived by his wife, Julia, and five young children. Mrs Daly subsequently lost the child that she was pregnant with following her husband’s murder. Dan Daly’s widow and family lived in the railway houses on School Road in Killorglin.