Irish Civil War: Cork and Kerry's darkest days claimed 400 lives 

Initially, Michael Collins and his colleagues hoped the war would be over in a matter of weeks and, at first, both sides attempted to fight with clean hands, forbidding the killing of prisoners or attacks on unarmed combatants or civilians.

Yet, the war did not end quickly, but rather dragged on as a guerrilla conflict for many months and developed its own deadly momentum of killing and reprisal. Former comrades became demonised into a malevolent enemy who had to destroyed.

Together, Cork and Kerry saw more than 400 deaths in the Civil War and it was in south Munster, but particularly in Kerry, where the war’s worst atrocities took place.

A war that refused to end

Initially, most assumed that the war had ended in the second week of August 1922, when around 1,000 pro-treaty troops, led by Paddy O’Daly and Emmet Dalton, landed by sea, first in Fenit in Kerry and then at three points on the Cork coast. 

Tralee and Cork City were rapidly seized and the anti-Treatyites retired in disarray into the hill county along the Cork-Kerry border. 

The seaborne landings also collapsed the anti-Treaty frontline in Co Limerick, allowing pro-Treaty forces led by Eoin O’Duffy and W R E Murphy to roll almost unopposed into North Cork and Kerry.

However, the anti-Treaty IRA had been dispersed rather than destroyed and in the weeks that followed, on the direction of their chief of staff Liam Lynch, their columns took up a campaign of guerrilla warfare, destroying road and rail infrastructure and ambushing vulnerable columns of National Army soldiers.

While around 20 pro-Treaty troops had died in the Cork and Kerry landings in early August, by the end of September 1922 their fatal casualties in Cork and Kerry alone had reached nearly 100.

In Cork and even more so in Kerry, the anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas were generally locals, whereas the occupying pro-Treaty troops were often outsiders, initially largely from the Dublin Guard, though also including Clare men from the First Western Division and later some elements of the Northern Division from Belfast. 

John Joe Rice, a Kerry IRA leader recalled that “the Dublin Guards treated South Kerry as a hostile country”. 

John Pinkman, a Liverpool-born ex-IRA man in the Dublin Guards remembered that “most of our lads were Dubliners and retained the Dubliners’ traditional disdain for Irish country people”.

It was no coincidence that many of the worst reprisals carried out on the pro-Treaty side followed the killing of men who had served in the IRA, particularly in Dublin before the truce and were now serving in the Dublin Guard. 

Many pro-Treaty soldiers, particularly veterans of Michael Collins’ IRA intelligence unit, the Squad, characterised their enemies as “trucileers” — youths who had not fought the British but were now waging a cowardly guerrilla war against the men of the “National forces” who had been in the forefront of the War of Independence.

On the other side, anti-Treaty republicans came to see the “Free Staters” not simply as outsiders, but also as British forces in green uniforms, noting the preponderance of ex-British soldiers in their ranks and characterising the others as mercenaries, bought for the wages provided by the Free State.

This mutual incomprehension deepened as the war went on and motives for revenge grew.

Killings and reprisals

Among the pro-Treaty casualties in the autumn of 1922, famously, was National Army Commander in Chief Michael Collins, killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth on August 22, but also former Squad member Tom Kehoe, blown up with a mine near Macroom along with six other soldiers on September 16.

In Kerry, Captain Jim Burke of the First Western, again a former IRA officer, was among those killed in August as were two medics from the First Western, gunned down unarmed near Killarney while on a boating expedition. 

When the town of Kenmare fell to the anti-Treatyites on September 9, two brothers, the Scarteen O’Connors, local IRA men who had become officers in the National Army, were shot in their beds.

This very quickly led to a rush of reprisals by pro-Treaty troops. The first such case, the killing of Timothy Kenefick in Cork on September 8, was “a particularly brutal murder” by the Dublin troops, as Liam Lynch wrote, apparently involving torture before execution.

Another prisoner, James Buckley, was shot in reprisal for the mine that killed ex-Squad man Tom Kehoe and six other soldiers and his body dumped in the hole created by the mine explosion.

In Kerry, a 17-year-old prisoner, Bertie Murphy, was shot dead in revenge for an ambush at Brennan’s Glen, while another prisoner, John Galvin, was beaten and then shot by First Western troops, his body dumped at Ballyseedy Cross, in revenge for the death of their captain, Jim Burke.

In both Cork and Kerry, however, locally recruited National Army troops mutinied in objection to these killings by outsiders.

Mutiny

In Cork, locally raised troops refused to go back out on patrol until the culprits for the killings of Kenefick and Buckley were sent away. 

Emmet Dalton, their commander, wrote back to army commander in chief Richard Mulcahy in Dublin:

“The shooting [of Buckley] was the work of the Squad. 

Now I personally approve of the action, but the men I have in my command are of such a temperament that they can look at scores of their companions being blown to atoms by a murderous trick without feeling annoyed but when an enemy is found with a rifle they will mutiny if he is shot. 

"On this account I think it would be better if you kept the ‘Squad’ out of my area.” 

Most of the officers concerned were indeed duly sent back to Dublin.

This did not quite end National Army reprisals in Cork. Three anti-Treaty Volunteers were killed at Upton in October, for instance, allegedly after surrender, according to Tom Barry, on the orders of an army chaplain. 

Nevertheless, the transfer of vengeful Dublin Guard officers out of the command area helped to keep a lid on revenge killings in Cork thereafter.

In Kerry, however, the response of army command to the objections of Kerry troops to reprisals was different. Members of the army’s Kerry Number One Brigade, composed of pro-Treaty Kerry IRA men, led by Ned Horan, like their counterparts in Cork, raised an uproar over the killing of John Galvin. 

Horan stated that he had “tried to preserve the honour of the National Army” but that such incidents “only serve to incite public opinion against the Army… and if carried on we would soon find ourselves in arms against a hostile population such as existed against the Black and Tans”.

W R E Murphy, however, the general officer commanding in Kerry, told Mulcahy that Galvin had been “a scoundrel” and a “terror to the countryside” and that Horan “had best be removed... for his own safety… I will not sacrifice any officer or man from the First Western, a splendid lot of troops, for his cheap heroics”. Horan duly resigned.

Murphy, a veteran of the British Army, intended to execute four anti-Treaty IRA prisoners in Tralee in December 1922 but appears to have backed down and commuted the sentences when local anti-Treaty commander Humphrey Murphey threatened to shoot eight civilian pro-Treaty supporters in retaliation.

Paddy O'Daly, the commander of the Dublin Guard, who succeeded Murphy as general officer commanding in Kerry in December 1922, is often blamed for the subsequent killing of prisoners there and it is true that the worst reprisals in Kerry occurred under his command. 

But clearly the pattern of pro-Treaty revenge killing in Kerry had already been established well before he took over from Murphy.

Nevertheless, it is true that from the start, O’Daly exhibited a new hardness. Whereas Murphy had chosen to reverse his decision to authorise executions in December, on January 20, 1923, not long after he took over command, O’Daly had four anti-Treaty prisoners executed by firing squad in Tralee.

Under the harsh new legislation, the prisoners were sentenced to death on O’Daly’s authority just the day before, without any meaningful trial, in retaliation for the IRA’s destruction of a railway bridge, which caused a train crash and the death of two railway workers.

By the end of 1922, the pro-Treaty troops, having been reinforced substantially, believed that they were getting on top of the anti-Treaty guerrillas in both Cork and Kerry. 

There was a brief flare-up of activity led by Tom Barry, whose column captured the towns of Ballineen and Enniskeane in December 1922 and assaulted Millstreet, jointly with Kerry units, in January 1923. In general though, by the new year, the guerrillas in Cork and Kerry had been reduced to a fugitive existence, mostly in remote and mountainous areas.

Nevertheless, the war stubbornly refused to end. Kerry, in particular, was one of the few locations where, by spring 1923, anti-Treaty units were still capable of large operations.

Kerry’s ‘terror month’

On March 5, for example, a large party of anti-Treatyites attempted an assault on Caherciveen, leading to an all-day fight at Gurrane in which at least three National Army and two anti-Treaty IRA combatants were killed. 

It was perhaps the frustration of the National Army at this continued and, from their point of view, futile resistance that led to a ghastly series of atrocities in Kerry in March 1923.

The day after the fight at Gurrane came an incident which was to set off the worst series of reprisals, not only in Kerry but in the whole Civil War. Six National Army soldiers, led by Dublin Guard captains, Michael Dunne and Edward Stapleton, guided by a local Kerry officer Cadet Pat O’Connor, working on information gleaned from an informant, searched a field near Knocknagoshel for an IRA dugout.

When they attempted to open the hiding place they triggered a trap mine which blew five of them (including the three officers) to pieces and grievously injured a sixth, blowing off his legs.

Paddy O’Daly, once the commander of Michael Collins’ IRA Squad, was now head of the Kerry Command. 

Both Dunne and Stapleton, he noted in his report of the Knocknagoshel incident, had “brilliant pre-Truce [War of Independence] records” in the IRA in Dublin, the latter in the Active Service Unit there. Their killing by a “cowardly trick” of the ‘irregulars’, to his mindset, demanded revenge.

O’Daly afterwards issued an order that in future “all mines will be lifted and all dumps cleared by Irregular prisoners”. This was in fact cover for a series of premeditated reprisals. 

The following day, eight prisoners were taken from Ballymullen barracks in Tralee to Ballyseedy crossroads, where it was claimed that they were tasked with clearing a mined barricade, which subsequently exploded, killing all eight.

In fact, one prisoner  — Stephen Fuller — survived, miraculously thrown clear by the blast, to tell the truth of the incident. The prisoners, all from IRA Kerry Number One Brigade, had been tied around a mine assembled by the pro-Treaty troops which was then detonated. 

It was, it is now clear, revenge for the bomb at Knocknagoshel.

Over the following days, further massacres were carried out of prisoners from Kerry Two Brigade at Countess Bridge near Killarney where four prisoners were killed and finally at Caherciveen where five men from Kerry Three Brigade were blown up, this time having first been shot in the legs to stop any from escaping.

Several more anti-Treaty prisoners were shot in the following days and by the end of March, the army claimed to have killed 34 Irregulars in that month in Co Kerry.

Though some died in combat, most were killed in the series of reprisals that followed the bomb at Knocknagoshel.

According to National Army officer Niall Harrington, who resigned over the incidents but later was tasked with undertaking an investigation into them, the atrocities were planned by General Officer Commanding Kerry, Paddy O’Daly, and Intelligence Officer David Nelligan.

This was never acknowledged by army command, whose chief Richard Mulcahy exonerated O’Daly. When it emerged that Stephen Fuller had survived the blast at Ballyseedy, and was telling of what had happened there, the army reported that “it is stated that he [Fuller] has now become insane”.

Local republican Patrick Allman posted notices in Tralee repudiating that the mines that had killed prisoners had been laid by anti-Treatyites, stating “Kerry knows the truth”. 

The army reported on “disgraceful scenes” in the town when the mutilated bodies of the dead from Ballyseedy were handed back to relatives. 

The military coffins were smashed by the incensed relatives who transferred the remains of their loved ones to their own coffins. As they did this, the army band struck up ‘Ragtime’, a jaunty tune, to taunt them.

The horrors of March 1923 would come to define the memory of the Civil War in Kerry.

Cork

While Co Cork had nothing like the same intensity of reprisals as Kerry, and indeed lethal violence dropped sharply there in 1923 compared to 1922, nor was it without brutality in the final months of the conflict.

On February 3, 1923, in what was in some ways a precursor of the mine atrocities in Kerry, the National Army rounded up both prisoners and local civilians at Newcestown and ordered them to remove a road barricade that contained an IRA trigger mine. The mine duly exploded, killing one anti-Treaty prisoner and two civilians and injured seven more.

On the other side, the anti-Treaty IRA in Cork responded to the one execution that was carried out there with reprisal against civilians accused of being Free State supporters. 

After the execution of William Healy of Donoughmore, who was shot by firing squad on March 13, 1923, at Cork County Prison, the local anti-Treatyites shot two civilians: William Goff Beale, a Quaker, whose cousin was a judge, was shot dead in Cork City “by two men saying it was reprisal for the executions”. 

The following day, Ben McCarthy, aged 16, of Bantry, was taken from his home by four armed men and shot dead, with the notice “convicted spy” fixed on his body, “shot as a reprisal for our four comrades executed this week”.

They also burned many homes of pro-Treaty supporters, targeting among others Mary Collins Powell, the sister of Michael Collins, and also targeted theatres and cinemas in Cork City, which they forbade to open “in a time of national mourning”.

The bitter end

The anti-Treaty guerrilla campaign began to disintegrate in April 1923, with the death in the Knockmealdown mountains of their leader Liam Lynch, which was followed by an order by new IRA chief of staff Frank Aiken to cease fire and then to “dump arms”.

By this time also, some 12,000 anti-Treatyites languished in prisoners and internment camps and in Cork and Kerry their final mountain strongholds along the county border were finally being penetrated by pro-Treaty
troops.

There was a final incident in Kerry, however, that would come to symbolise the merciless conclusion of the conflict there. 

An anti-Treaty column led by Tim ‘Aero’ Lyons was trapped in a cave at Clashmeacon on April 16, 1923. After a siege in which two National Army soldiers and three guerrillas, including Lyons himself, were killed, the latter reputedly was offered a rope to lift him to safety which was then cut by the pro-Treaty troops; the remaining three column members surrendered.

One of them was Reginald Hathaway, an Englishman who had deserted from the British Army in 1921 and then the National Army before finally ending up in the ranks of the anti-Treaty IRA. 

According to army reports, he had already surrendered once, by this point “signing the form” pledging not to bear arms against government troops, but had afterwards rejoined Lyons’ column. This time there would be no mercy for him. 

Hathaway volunteered to point out the remaining IRA dug outs in the area leading to several arrests. But despite this, he along with the two other men captured at Clashmeacon were executed by firing squad in Tralee on April 26.

Out of about 70 anti-Treatyites killed in Kerry in the Civil War, at least 41 were either executed or killed while prisoners. By contrast in Cork, only 11 out of about 65 deaths on the anti-Treaty side were due to execution, formal or summary. On the other side, nearly 200 National Army soldiers lost their lives in Cork and Kerry. Between the two counties, roughly 50 civilians also fell victim to the conflict between the summers of 1922 and 1923.

Paddy O’Daly, the author of the worst of the National Army’s excesses in Kerry, was never punished for them. He was, however, eventually forced out of the army in 1924 for his role in the assault on two young women in Kenmare late in 1923.

It was “a dastardly outrage”, the army later wrote, in language which may hide a number of sins.

It appears surprising that the Civil War, a conflict between Irish republican former comrades, eventually provided such savage violence and such bitter memories. 

A closer look, however, at the atrocities on the ground, particularly in Kerry, shows how the war developed its own bitter momentum. This helps to explain why it produced such unforgiving political and social enmities in the following years.