Public commentary in recent weeks has focused on remembering and reconciling gruesome anti-Treaty and National Army violence, including in Co Kerry, during the Irish Civil War. Controversial attacks on civilian women by both sides in the war also occurred.
Flossie and Jessie McCarthy, the daughters of the local doctor in Kenmare, who was pro-Treaty, were sexually policed, punished and brutally attacked on Saturday, June 2nd, 1923.
Three masked and armed men purported to be members of the National Army raided Dr Randall McCarthy’s home at Inchlough, Kenmare. His daughters Jessie and Flossie were pulled from their beds into the garden, and Sam Browne belts were used to harshly beat and flog them. As well as being assaulted, heavy motor oil was poured over their heads and faces. Dousing of hair with dirty motor oil or cart grease was a known toxic formula which results in hair falling out and is akin to painful “tarring”.
Two investigations were undertaken, one by the Civic Guard (Garda Síochána) and one by a Dublin military court of enquiry. Both recommended court proceedings. After the intervention of Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy, and the President of the Executive Council, WT Cosgrave, however, neither investigation was acted upon.
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The Bureau of Military History witness statement of Judge-Advocate General Cahir Davitt (son of Michael Davitt, leader of the Land League) provides further details. In terms of assessing whether violence against women including sexual crimes was considered a problem in the National Army during the Civil War, it is very clear that Davitt, Mulcahy, WT Cosgrave, Eoin O’Duffy and other members of the Executive were addressing at least one other attack by National Army officers in Foxford, Co Mayo (the Margaret Doherty case) as well as the assault on Flossie and Jessie McCarthy, at the same time.
The Doherty court-martial file of July 1923 contains correspondence implicating Mulcahy, Davitt and O’Duffy in discussions about whether to investigate three officers “under a cloud”. In his witness statement, Davitt states that in June 1923 he met the Adjutant General, Gearóid O’Sullivan. He was handed a file, with O’Sullivan stating: “This is the worst yet”. The file contained details of the attack by “Dublin Guard officers” on the two young women on the night of June 2nd, 1923, including a statement by both women.
[ Bloodbath to whitewash: the Civil War crimes of Paddy O’DalyOpens in new window ]
The name of the alleged perpetrator/s is redacted on the online version of Cahir Davitt’s witness statement. According to Padraig Ó Caoimhe, however, the assailants were identified as Major-General Paddy O’Daly, Captain Ed Flood and Captain Jim Clark of the National Army. O’Daly was a former member of Michael Collins’ Squad and, according to Dominic Price, a revolver found in the garden was declared as his. Bill Bailey, a member of the National Army army in the Tralee area, in an Ernie O’Malley Kerry interview further alleged that the women were raped, though no objective evidence is provided:
“Dr McCarthy’s daughters at Kenmare 2 young fellows (Doctor, Cumann na nGaedheal) round Kenmare doing a line; nice girls, 2 young officers, Harrington and Higgins, Superintendent in Guards, son of Tim Harrington. That appeared to enrage Daly, Hancock and Flood. At 2 [a.m.], 3 men left barracks in Kenmare, went to McCarthy’s house, attacked girls, said they raped them. Stories of throwing tar on them. Next morning Hancock and Higgins were arrested for the rape, under close arrest. There was a court of Inquiry. Sentry on duty said 2 men left; Gen. O’Daly, Capt. Eddy Flood, Comdt Hancock and one of the ... girls said she could identify 1 man for she cut his lip and identify his goggles with fur torn on one. They contained Flood’s initials and his lip was torn.”
Captain Niall C Harrington, one of the senior officers, was said to be involved in a relationship with one of the McCarthy sisters. Those who gave evidence pointing to Major General O’Daly in the enquiry were controversially placed under arrest on a six-month-old charge. Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs, who was exercised by the case, stated in a letter to the President, WT Cosgrave: “I cannot accept the position that any political exigencies could excuse us in condoning an outrage of that kind ... I regret that steps were not taken to verify one very important statement ie that Lieut Flood (who left for Dublin on leave the morning after the outrage) had scrape marks about his face.”
Both the Doherty and McCarthy cases involved well-planned, local and targeted violent attacks on women by masked National Army perpetrators in the night, in the period May to June 1923. And both incidents resulted in flawed justice and incomplete investigations, directed from the top echelons of government, more concerned with protecting the reputation of the army. Ryle Dwyer has stated there was no doubt that O’Daly covered up the Kenmare incident “… with a staged military inquiry that was a figurative whitewash.” The reputational fallout for the pro-Treaty Executive of a close associate of Collins being charged with such an assault on two young women was potentially very damaging.
O’Daly and others (including Ernest Blythe who referred to the women as a “trouple [ or couple] of tarts” in his Bureau of Military History witness statement) denied the charge and appeared to blame the two female victims for their attack in appallingly sexist and victim-blaming terms, suggesting they had consorted with British army officers before the truce two years previously and that one had “jilted” an Irish Army officer. The implication being they were “asking for it” because they turned down an Irish officer or that this kind of sexual policing attack on such women was justifiable or to be expected?
The sexual policing and social control of women by inflicting gendered and sexualised practices, such as forced hair cutting with additional violence inflicted, was widespread in the Irish revolution and numerous cases are documented in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Women could be and in some cases were physically, psychologically and/or sexually punished or disciplined if considered to be cavorting with “the wrong men”.
The act of forcibly removing hair in warfare, in itself, was a historically established attack on women’s sexuality, marking women out as whores or prostitutes, for instance, in many wars. Coercive hair removal including with substances was humiliating and, as was the case in the Kenmare incident, it often involved a horrific beating, flogging or other harsh attack and injuries that had consequences for those targeted.
The incident in Kenmare caused discord in the Irish Free State. Cahir Davitt, as the senior legal officer of the National Army, recommended that Major-General O’Daly be court-martialled. Mulcahy, however, could not support this action against a senior National Army commander considered by him to have an accomplished record despite accusations he was responsible for one of the worst Civil War massacres in Ballyseedy, Co Kerry in which eight anti-Treaty soldiers were killed having been tied to an exploding device.
The conclusion of Attorney General Hugh Kennedy, that the evidence was not strong enough, perturbed Davitt and O’Higgins. Further sexism, “slut-shaming” and victim-blaming is evident in this case as are assumptions about social class. According to Jason Knirck, in dismissing the women’s testimony, Kennedy informed the Executive Council that the women were “not city people and their mentality as witnesses and generally must be considered in the light of their own history and environment”.
He belittled the two young women as a “Catholic bourgeoisie of rural social climbers with ‘British leanings’ and found it ‘humiliating to have to confess’ that British officers associated easily with such ‘girls of this social stratum ... Officers of the National Army have been in many cases the butt for people of this kind.” The only individuals at the “butt” of anything untoward in this case were the two women viciously attacked. Kennedy’s interpretation represented sexist attitudes that were strongly evident in the judicial hierarchy and cabinet of the new State.
Such assaults and attacks on women in the Irish Civil War were widely known about locally and in high politics. The covering up and non-prosecution of notably horrific cases of gender-based violence is clearly one important aspect of how the nascent Irish State was consolidating. Women were ultimately afforded a very marginal public role in Ireland in subsequent years and sexual and gender-based violence continued to persist.
WT Cosgrave wrote to Dr McCarthy, the father of the two young women, suggesting that he had the option of trying to prosecute the three officers through the civilian courts. For women deeply traumatised, embarrassed, very badly injured or aware of the clear steps made to cover up such attacks and thwart an investigation or trial, this would not have been an easy option, however.
Another woman attacked in 1922, Eileen Mary Warburton Biggs, was too badly injured to testify in Nenagh but her 1926 compensation claim highlights the deep private shame she and her family felt about what had happened. The protection of perpetrators and the shaming of victims is a recurring theme.
The McCarthy sisters were never called to a trial and a civil case was further said to have been hampered by the lack of an independent medical opinion. A culture of impunity for perpetrators of such violence in the new State ensured nobody was ever prosecuted by law for any of these horrific crimes of war. Women may have died in smaller numbers than men in the Irish Civil War but such transgressive violence and the associated lack of justice caused immense hurt, injury and trauma to individual victims and their families including in subsequent generations. In the context of a shocking report, in 2023, on the treatment of women in the Irish defence forces, the State might now reconsider this 100 years later? Anything less is agreed amnesia.
Professor Linda Connolly is the author of Sexual Violence in the Irish Civil War: A Forgotten War Crime?
