Redressing the imbalance as Battle of Tralee brought to book
Kerry’s entire record during the Black and Tan War consisted of the shooting of an unfortunate British soldier on the morning of the truce, General Eoin O’Duffy declared in 1933. Of course, this was a blatant distortion.
Tim Horgan’s Dying for the Cause: Kerry’s Republican Dead, published last week, examines the deaths of more than 140 Kerry Republicans in the struggle for Irish independence. The book is not a history of the struggle so much as a look at the lives of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
The most senior former British Army officer killed in Ireland during the conflict was Commandant General Philip A Holmes, who was killed in an ambush at Toureengarriv, about 11km from Castleisland, Co Kerry. The largest attack on the British Army in Ireland was undertaken at Headford near Killarney, and events in Tralee made international news during the first two weeks of November 1920, probably the most notorious month of the conflict.
It began with the execution of Kevin Barry in Mountjoy Jail. IRA headquarters ordered that there should be general attacks on British forces all over the country over the previous weekend. Tadhg Kennedy, the intelligence officer for the Kerry No 1 Brigade, personally brought the order to Kerry. At the last moment, however, headquarters rescinded the order, but nobody notified Kennedy, so the Kerry Brigade went off on its own.
Over the weekend, the IRA killed eight policemen and wounded 10 others in the brigade area. The Black and Tans retaliated by shutting Tralee for the next nine days. Shops, factories, and schools were not allowed to open. Anybody who ventured out of their homes did so at the risk of their own lives.
Even though it was the week of the American Presidential and Congressional elections, events in Tralee made the front page of the New York Times on four different days and the front page of the Montreal Gazette on five occasions during the siege. Moreover, questions were raised in the House of Commons about what was happening in Tralee on four different days during the siege, which was finally lifted on November 10.
Two days later, there was a further incident in Ballymacelligott, a few miles outside Tralee. The Black and Tans and RIC stopped at the local creamery, midway between Tralee and Castleisland. Some IRA members in the creamery at the time made a dash to escape. The Black and Tans opened fire and hit four of the men, killing two.
The Black and Tans then set fire to the creamery and left. About a dozen IRA men came on the scene. “We heard the shooting and saw the lorries depart,” Tom McEllistrim recalled.
They summoned a doctor from Tralee to treat the wounded. As he was treating them, a convoy of Auxiliaries approached from Castleisland. A shot, fired to warn of the approach of the Auxiliaries, sparked a brief firefight.
“We had only six rifles in action,” McEllistrim explained, “but two of our party, armed with rifles, who had left the creamery yard five minutes earlier, came to our aid and opened fire from a little hill on the Auxiliaries at 300 yards range.”
Fearing they were driving into a trap, the officer in charge of the Auxiliaries ordered his men to turn their lorries, and the convoy headed back to Castle-island. The Auxiliaries had been escorting four cars carrying journalists and a movie camera crew. They had filmed an Armistice Day parade in Dungarvan the previous day and were heading for Tralee, possibly to show that life there was back to normal in the aftermath of the recent siege of the town.
“Knowing of the existence of a band of between 200 and 300 members of the Republican Army in this vicinity, we kept a keen look-out, as we travelled,” wrote Clifford Hutchingson of the Yorkshire Post. On seeing men rushing for the shelter of ditches as the cars approached, the Auxiliaries stopped and opened fire.
“Only one sentry, myself and two cinema operators remained on the roadside,” Hutchingson said. They rigged up their movie camera, “and coolly began taking pictures at no small danger”, according to Hutchingson. “The bullets were whizzing around. Three bullets ripped past me, as I was getting out of the car, and two more before I had got to the side of the road.”
The cameramen claimed this was the first live terrorist ambush ever filmed. Instead of the dozen or so men, Hutchingson estimated the attacking party was about 70 strong. “The engagement was the fiercest and probably the largest scale of any fight between Crown forces and the Volunteers,” Dublin Castle announced in a press release.
The British later described the confrontation as the Battle of Tralee. Pathé Gazette showed a supposed film of the engagement, but it was doctored with faked scenes staged on Vico Road on the outskirts of Dublin. One still photograph taken during filming has become an kind of iconic photograph of the struggle. The film was quickly exposed as a fake because of a distinctive lamppost in the background.
It seemed confusion over this bogus Battle of Tralee, fought out on Vico Road, prompted historians to dismiss the events in Tralee that had received extensive international publicity the previous week. Tim Horgan’s new book on the Republicans killed in Kerry helps to redress the imbalance.
It was ironic that, in the week that this book was launched, Vico Road was back in the news, with Vincent Browne filmed poking around Gorse Hill and trying to peep into one of the houses.
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