While the story of the combatants involved in the most violent episodes in Kerry has been well documented, the impact of their deaths and injuries on their families and survivors remained the untold story of the conflict for generations.
Thanks to the availability of the pension and allowance applications held in the Military Service Pension Collection — many of which have been digitised and made so accessible in recent years — we can begin to develop an appreciation of the previously understated but very significant suffering and trauma which the Civil War caused for families and ordinary civilians who were connected to the conflict.
In particular, these archives provide a disturbing and distressing catalogue of the immense physical, psychological, emotional, and financial suffering of those who were left behind.
This is one of a series of articles going online each day this week. The series will be published in the Civil War supplement with the (print and ePaper) on January 9, 2023.
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Not only do they highlight the enormous distress of so many loved ones and families, they also emphasise the bureaucratic hoops through which many of them had to jump to secure recompense from the State which their loved ones had either fought to subvert or fought to defend.
And, notably, the difficulties in securing compensation and pension payments for the bereaved was by no means confined to those who had taken up arms against the Free State in 1922-23.
The killing of eight anti-Treaty IRA members at Ballyseedy on March 7, 1923, is the most infamous incident of the so-called Terror Month of the conflict in Kerry.
A direct response to the deaths of five Free State officers at Knocknagoshel the previous night, Ballyseedy represented the highest death toll in any incident in the county.
George O’Shea from Kilflynn was one of those who died at Ballyseedy. His family suffered a litany of trauma, poor health, financial deprivation, and misery in the years after his death.
They had been heavily reliant on O’Shea’s income as a roads worker with Kerry County Council.
When his mother, Annie, applied for compensation, the payment of £150 was recommended by the Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee but was “withheld on the instructions of the Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe”.
The impact of Ballyseedy manifested itself in other ways on the O’Shea family.
One of George’s sisters, Mollie, was a member of Cumann na mBan. After George was killed at Ballyseedy and she helped in recovering his mangled remains, Mollie “got mental and is definitely mental since”.
She was, according to the local company of Cumann na mBan, “hopelessly insane”. She was admitted to Killarney Mental Hospital in 1928.
Among those who wrote in support of her pension claim was Stephen Fuller, the sole survivor at Ballyseedy, who stated that the Kilflynn IRA company “deeply regret her mental incapacity which is a sad one … we insist that she is one of those who qualify for the Military Service Pension”.
For the families of the four men who died at the hands of their Free State army captors at Countess Bridge in Killarney, the process of securing payments of allowances was convoluted.
Other Kerry IRA combatants and their families were left in dire straits in the years after the conflict ended.
Michael O’Connell of Castleisland, had been shot in the leg during the War of Independence but continued to be active with the anti-Treatyites during the Civil War.
In 1924, the Kerry Command of the Free State Army insisted that O’Connell was capable of maintaining “eight or nine cows” and that he didn’t appear disabled “in the least”.
His doctor disagreed completely, certifying that O’Connell was suffering from a “general nervous and physical breakup” after the Civil War. Ten years later, O’Connell was in dire straits. In 1933, he wrote:
It wasn’t just those on the anti-Treaty side who were adversely impacted in the years after the Civil War: The Military Archives are replete with the horror stories of the families of soldiers who faced financial, physical, and psychological trauma for years and decades afterwards.
The Military Service Pensions Collection reveals how families and the loved ones of those killed and injured during the Civil War, on both sides of the conflict, faced not only immense suffering, hardship and a range of physical and mental health problems, they were also confronted with a bureaucratic nightmare in securing financial recompense from the State.