Our history loses nothing in the telling
Against that backdrop, through the decades, I see clearly again the face and form of a little old Tipperary veteran named Timmy Crowe.
I have never forgotten, and never will, our chat on a spring day outside his home in Soloheadbeg in Co Tipperary.
That townland, you may recall, was the site of the very first ambush of the series that eventually led through blood and terror to the establishment of our Republic.
It was some time in the 1970s that our meeting happened.
Tim Crowe, then one of the few surviving veterans of the ambush which really began the war against the Black and Tans, was, I recall, very frail and small, but still a sharply formidable man.
I remember, on seeing his pallor, thinking that he was perhaps in the final stages of an attack by a lethal disease which we cared not to name back then.
I had been led to his doorstep through contact with his Dublin-based nephew, who was then one of my work colleagues.
As a schoolboy, I had avidly read Dan Breen’s book My Fight For Irish Freedom, which dealt with the Soloheadbeg ambush along the same slightly glorified lines as much of the current coverage of the era.
That is inevitable, I suppose; history, like fishermen’s tales, loses nothing in the telling, after all.
Tim Crowe’s recall of the ambush, though, was shockingly different.
The pure and somewhat shocking truth yet again.
There was nothing glorious at all, quite honestly, about what happened on the road to the quarry in Soloheadbeg, that January afternoon in 1919.
Timmy told it to me the way it was. He did not have any agenda.
He said that the two RIC constables escorting the horse and cart bringing a load of gelignite to the quarry were named McDonnell and O’Connell, and both reached for the rifles on their shoulders when challenged by the IRA ambush party behind the ditch.
So they were fired upon, and fell.
Tim said the most powerful weapon the IRA party had was Dan Breen’s revolver, but it jammed before it fired a shot, and he remembered Breen cursing as he tried to free it.
By the time he cleared the weapon, the two constables were downed, but Breen still fired shots, he said, into their bodies on the quarry road.
His story was a lot starker and probably closer to the truth than what I had read in the book.
It kinda shocked me. The truth can do that.
Timmy explained, for example, that the bodies of the RIC men began to swell up after they were shot, and it was very hard to remove their ammunition belts, for that reason.
The purpose of the ambush, factually, had been to seize the gelignite and the weapons and ammunition for future operations against the Black and Tans and the police.
And the ambush, which had not been sanctioned by IRA leaders in Dublin, took place on the very day on which the first Dáil sat, the same Dáil which is now heading into another electoral renewal process. Another chapter in our history begins.
Is it not intriguing that, as the new electoral battle begins this week, once again, especially through the Lowry situation, there is a Tipperary dimension overhanging the outcome in a few weeks time, virtually a century after that first ambush around a cartload of gelignite, all those bullets and bombs ago?
To conclude this week on a lighter but equally factual note, can I inform ye that I was visited this week by a good friend from Paradise, who told me the story of a 40-year-old pig who has high status in Paradise, despite the fact that he spends the most of his time nowadays in the pub and, totally illegally, continues to smoke constantly within.
Much more on that, after the election...
