The tragedy of the Civil War highlights the importance of compromise with political realities and political opponents in a democracy, former tánaiste Michael McDowell has told a commemoration honouring an anti-Treaty IRA leader shot dead in captivity by the National Army during the Civil War.
Currently a member of Seanad Éireann, Mr McDowell paid tribute to Comdt Sean O’Donoghue from Ballygiblin near Mitchelstown in north Cork who was a senior figure in the IRA in some of the most notable actions in the War of Independence and the Civil War in Cork between 1919 and 1923.
“We have come together today to commemorate the brave life and tragic death on September 28th, 1922 of Comdt Sean O’Donoghue of the 1st Battalion of First Cork Brigade of the IRA at the hands of fellow Irishmen who captured him in the course of a cruel and bloody Civil War.”
Mr McDowell recalled how O’Donoghue led the Cork City Active Service Unit in several engagements with British forces including an ambush at Dillon’s Cross which “resulted in the terrible revenge wreaked on the innocent people of Cork city in the burning of Cork on December 11th, 1920”.
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And he also recalled how after taking the anti-Treaty side, O’Donoghue played a major role in capturing a large consignment of British weapons in March 1922 when the anti-Treaty IRA commandeered the British naval ship Uponor and brought the guns ashore in Ballycotton.
Mr McDowell spoke of the tragedy of the Civil War that broke out in June 1922 between republicans on both sides who had fought together during the War of Independence, and he recalled how the split over the Treaty had a profound and tragic impact on his own family.
“My own uncle Brian Mac Neill, who also took the anti-Treaty side, was captured on Ben Bulben in Sligo by Free State soldiers and was immediately summarily executed without trial of any sort on the mountainside along with five captured colleagues including Seamus Devins TD.
“Brian was just 22 years old and his father, my grandfather, Eoin MacNeill was a minister in the provisional government and two of his brothers, with whom he had served in the 6th Battalion IRA, south Dublin, were then serving officers in the pro-Treaty National Army.”
He recalled that Sean O’Donoghue met a similar fate as his uncle just eight days later when he was captured by members of the National Army following an anti-Treaty IRA ambush of Free State forces near Dublin Hill in Cork and taken to a field where he was summarily executed.
O’Donoghue’s comrade, Seamus Collins, was seriously wounded but survived the shooting having been left for dead and he gave a vivid account of O’Donoghue’s brutal killing to a military court of inquiry but, as in his uncle’s case, the perpetrators were never made accountable, he said.
“One hundred years on, my reflection is that the Civil War in which these atrocious acts took place was a disastrous and wholly avoidable tragedy for the newly independent Ireland. Both sides killed and were killed; the National Army lost more men to the guns of their opponents than vice versa.”
Thanking the chairwoman of the Sean O’Donoghue Commemoration Committee, Fianna Fáil Cllr Deirdre O’Brien, for inviting him to unveil a memorial plaque to O’Donoghue in Ballygiblin, Mr McDowell said the lesson of the Civil War was clear – the ballot box must always decide matters in Irish political life.
“Democratic politics has been described variously as ‘the art of the possible’ or ‘the art of the compromise’. For me and for all democrats and for all genuine republicans, the practice of democratic politics is a solemn vocation that is the very antithesis of violence.
“Compromise with realities – and with each other – is never a dirty word in the true democrat’s political lexicon. Violence almost always begets further and worse violence. The ballot must always decide matters – not the bullet. Extremism has no place in our democracy.”
In honouring O’Donoghue’s bravery, people should pledge no Irish person should ever meet such a fate for want of “courage and determination to uphold the political values of our free democracy – that should be our grateful pledge – the sacrifice Sean O’Donoghue made deserves no less”.
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