Dark events in Kilflynn and Ballyseedy became a microcosm of Ireland’s Civil War 

O’Shea’s teammate Fuller, along with Lyons, Twomey and Shanahan followed their friend into the Irish Volunteers and O’Shea was quickly elected captain of the Kilflynn Company. One of his superiors described him as "a splendid type of man and a credit to the national movement". Lyons was recalled as having "a name of power". His evocative epithet ‘Aero’ was derived from the reputation he earned during the IRA’s campaign of confounding his enemies by suddenly appearing and disappearing, as if from thin air.

Their Company fought with distinction in the War of Independence but as elsewhere, the Treaty’s terms proved hugely divisive. After a vote on the issue Fuller recalled that of the 100 men enlisted "nearly all went Free State", leaving just 34 behind. Some like John Brosnan, O’Shea’s neighbour in Fahavane, now volunteered for the National Army once its troops landed in Kerry in August 1922. Following this the Company remained "on the run", engaging in an ever-hopeless guerrilla war against Government forces. 

A revealing illustration of how the conflict was fracturing communities like Kilflynn came in early September. With the Catholic Hierarchy now vehemently denouncing the Anti-Treatyites, O’Shea posted a proclamation in the village declaring that "drastic action" would be taken against the local priest and any other "persons who assist in establishing British Authority under the guise of the Free State in Ireland".

Entering the spring of 1923 the Republican’s position in North Kerry was grave as enemy sweeps and roundups decimated their ranks. On 23 February the Examiner reported that Fuller, O’Shea, Shanahan and Twomey had been captured "in a dug-out at Glenballyma Wood, near Kilflynn". Brought to Tralee’s Ballymullen Barracks, the four were interrogated by Colonel David Neligan who was handpicked by Michael Collins to oversee the Army’s intelligence network in Kerry. 

This "interrogation" amounted to being blind-folded and having their arms tied at their side, as their body and limbs were smashed with hammers. An eyewitness remembers some prisoners being thrown back to their cells so spattered in their own blood, their shirts clung to their backs. Although Fuller was spared this torture by the intervention of one local Army officer who protested "that I was a good fellow in the Tan time", he, like the others, suffered the terrifying ordeal of a mock execution by firing squad in another effort to make the prisoners talk.

Later they were brought before a military tribunal and found guilty of taking up arms against the State. Then the night after the Knocknagoshel mine, Fuller, O’Shea and Twomey were among the seven prisons brought upstairs, given cigarettes and informed by Captain Ned Breslin that they were to be taken out and blown up in reprisal. Shanahan was left behind, having become temporarily paralysed due to the damage inflicted on his spine.

The unimaginable horror of what transpired among the tenebrous trees of Ballyseedy Wood encapsulated the crescendo of depravity that marked the last stage of Ireland’s Civil War in Kerry. Fuller later wrote how he famously "escaped death by a miracle". Yet his friends, O’Shea and Twomey, were now nothing but pieces of flesh festooning branches and pulverised bodies being shovelled back into crude coffins by their fellow countrymen, whose nerves for this gruesome task had to be fortified with drink. O’Shea’s death certificate described how he suffered "shock, haemorrhaging and a fractured skull". 

When rumours quickly swept Tralee of coffins being seen unloaded and of a massive explosion and body parts being found at Ballyseedy, the families of the prisoners converged on Ballymullen that afternoon demanding to be handed back the remains. Outraged into hysterical fury by the mutilated condition of their sons and the sneering contempt of the Army’s brass-band that played jazz music as this macabre transaction was taking place, the crowd rioted pelting the onlooking soldiers with rocks.

Back at Ballyseedy, Fuller, whose skin had been burnt off "my hands [and] back of my legs", regained enough composure after the blast to escape undetected by wading through a nearby river and scrambling across several fields until, in the pre-dawn light, he reached a local house and raised the alarm. John Joe Sheehy, a senior IRA commander whose hideout was near the wood, would come to Fuller’s aid and released a brief testimony from Fuller exposing the truth about Ballyseedy. 

For the next several days Fuller was moved from one Republican safehouse to the next. Yet his mental and physical state grew progressively worse. Local woman, Mary Daly, recalls him being taken to her family home and slipping into a comma before recovering. A fortnight later he experienced a serious attack of nerves. All the while his back, legs and hands remained "lacerated" and "peppered" with the metal, gravel and gunpowder that was imbedded in the skin by the force of the explosion. Fuller spent most of the next year in hiding, making one brief trip home to his family in Kilflynn as soon as he felt able "to let them know I was ok". Yet for fifteen months he was unable to sleep owing to stress and trauma he continued to suffer.

A week after Ballyseedy, the Examiner carried a brief report of the burial of O’Shea and Twomey in front of a large congregation. Soon after Jeremiah Twomey, Timothy’s father, wrote to the Government’s Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee requesting recompense over the nature of his death. But as part of the cover-up surrounding the Army’s mine atrocities in Kerry, records that were finally released in 2008 describe how the Committee assured the Government they would ‘be very careful to guard against making any recommendation for payment of compensation’ in these specific cases.

The sadistic killings of O’Shea, Twomey and fifteen other Republican prisoners in the landmine explosions served their purpose. An internal Army report jubilantly observed that morale among the local IRA was "sinking to a low level". The military situation had become so favourable that in April Neligan was transferred back to Dublin with a promotion. A farewell dinner given by his fellow officers was described by them as an "expression of their appreciation for all 'Long Dave' had done to...enforce the will of the people in Kerry".

The last notable engagement in the county was the siege of Clashmealcon Caves where ‘Aero’ Lyons meet his death. After taking command of a small column, on 15 April Lyons and six comrades made for this remote hideout on the Atlantic Coast near Ballyduff after coming under attack from an Army patrol. For three days they held out without water or supplies as a substantial enemy force unsuccessfully tried to dislodge them from the cliffs overhead, suffering two deaths in the process. Having themselves lost two men, who drowned in a failed attempt to escape under cover of darkness, Lyons appeared at the mouth of the cave on the morning of 18 April to negotiate in order to spare the lives of the others. 

A rope was lowered to pull Lyons up but as he neared the clifftop it suddenly snapped. His body crashed onto the sea-rocks below and was then ‘riddled by machine gun fire’. It was subsequently claimed that the rope had been deliberately severed and that the culprit boasted about it afterwards to his colleagues. Lyons’ body was swept out to sea but was washed ashore and recovered two weeks later. Being so heavily decomposed it was only identifiable by the distinctive boots he was wearing. His remains were buried next to O’Shea and Twomey and in July 1925 a large stone memorial cross was unveiled over their burial plot in Kilflynn cemetery in front of an enormous crowd monitored closely by Gardai and armed military.

Kilflynn, then, became a community traumatised by the deaths of these young men, the pitiless circumstances of which could never be remembered proudly in story and song. Instead for decades to come the pain and torment of those events would echo on.

Fuller finally returned home but remained in fear of his life. When his brother John was charged with the concealment of rifles in the family home in August 1925, his solicitor protested to the court that the police had come asking about Fuller and that ‘as far as he is concerned, he is under the impression that something else is going to be done to him. The man has gone through enough already’. Tellingly, in spite of the seriousness of the charge, the judge agreed to be lenient and John was fined just £2. 

Yet the physical and mental effects of Ballyseedy remained with Fuller ever after. In the early 1930s he was diagnosed with ‘neurasthenia’ and a host of ‘foreign bodies’ remained in his musculature. In 1933, after Fianna Fáil assumed power and finally allowed anti-Treaty combatants to apply for a military service pension, Fuller was awarded a wounded allowance of over £52 a year. A hugely popular and respected figure he entered local politics after joining Fianna Fáil, successfully standing for election as a TD in 1937 and serving in the Dáil until 1943.

Throughout his political career he always avoided speaking of the Civil War. His son Joe later remembered his father coming ‘to some level of forgiveness’ about what had been done to him and extoled in his children the necessity of letting go feelings of hatred or revenge. Yet the pettiness of local Kerry politics meant that, incredibly, he was not invited to the unveiling of the Ballyseedy monument in 1959 organised by Sinn Féin. When finally approached by the BBC to film an interview about Ballyseedy in 1979, Fuller expressed his surprise "that I have not been interviewed before, I suppose it was because it was a job done by Irishmen". His death in February 1984, at age of 84, was met with glowing local and national tributes.

The distraught families of O’Shea, Twomey and Lyons were left to bitterly mourn their sons while facing years of bureaucratic barriers to get some small compensation for their incalculable personal loss. The fathers of Lyons and Twomey were eventually awarded a gratuity of £112 from the Military Service Pension’s Board as compensation for their deaths, the sum reflecting the Board’s view that both were only "partially dependent" on them. 

No doubt their own thoughts echoed those of another father of a Ballyseedy victim who indignantly retorted: ‘I think you have put a very poor valuation on his life and had he lived to help me now instead of dying for his country I should not be in the poor position in which I now find myself.’ The resentment that dripped through these applications was reflected in the account of the men’s service records given by their Brigade commander Humphrey Murphy. When requested to give particulars of Twomey and O’Shea’s death he pointedly wrote: "ask Davy Neligan and Paddy Daly".

Unlike the others, O’Shea was the main breadwinner for his family having worked maintaining roads for Kerry County Council. The impact of his sudden death in an emotional and material sense is painfully felt in the pension applications submitted by his widowed mother and siblings. His sister Mollie was only 21 when George died. A local member of Cumann na mBan she had already been sexually assaulted by a raiding party of Black and Tans on the family home in 1921. 

During the Civil War she acted as a scout, cook and messenger for her brother’s unit. However, the cruel killing of her adoring brother and then that of her close friend Lyons so soon afterwards caused Mollie to have a complete mental breakdown. She would spend years in a local psychiatric hospital before the authorities classified her as a "harmless lunatic" and "hopelessly insane" and allowed her brother Dan to take her home to Kilflynn to care for her. Mollie died in 1948 aged just 39. She was but one thread of the traumatic tapestry the Civil War wove in places like Kilflynn.

And while the dead might finally lie in peace, there were those who would not extend the same civility to the living. In the years which followed suspicion, bred by the remorse of those who had buried their young, would shadow Shanahan. Some asked how he was not selected for Ballyseedy when another man, John Daly, was similarly paralysed but still brought out on a stretcher. Until his own death there were locals, susceptible to groundless rumour, who would turn back if coming upon him on the road, who would drink up and leave if he entered the pub, who would constantly look on with accusing eyes and held tongues.

A yet under-studied legacy of the Civil War is the eruption of such communal breakdowns and mistrusts that played out for decades in communities across this country.

Dr Richard McElligott is a lecturer in Modern and Irish History in the Department of Business and Humanities, Dundalk Institute of Technology. A native of Kilflynn, North Kerry, he has taught and published extensively on the history of the Irish Revolutionary era.