Southern Discomfort

Like the romanticised republicans of Sean Keating’s famous painting, the handsome stranger who turned up at Dervla Murphy’s door one day in 1944 (Irishman’s Diary, May 25th), was a “man of the south”.

He could not have been one of the real-life gunmen featured in the 1922 portrait because, among other reasons, he was only four years old at that time. But a generation later, he had risen to be a senior figure in what remained of the IRA.

And as fate would have it, the murder for which he was on the run when the Murphys briefly sheltered him had happened next door to where Keating and his family by then lived, in South Co Dublin. Among the eye-witnesses was the painter’s 12-year-old son, Justin, a future Government minister.

The victim of the shooting, Det Sgt Denis “Dinny” O’Brien, had just left his house in semi-rural Rathfarnham, on the morning of September 9th, 1942.

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He was driving down the avenue, on the way to work at Dublin Castle, when two or three men wearing trench-coats and caps – just as in the painting of 20 years before – opened fire from a nearby field.

A young Justin Keating, “less than twenty yards away and frozen by surprise and fear”, watched the rest. “In my full sight,” he later recorded in his diaries, “a man stood up with what I now know was a submachine gun”.

The detective died in fusillade that followed. But he was still breathing when his wife, who had heard the shots and ran down the drive, whispered the Act of Contrition in his ear. Cradling his body, she saw the attackers escape by bicycle.

On a list of eight suspects published by the Garda, with a £5,000 reward offered for information leading to conviction, Charlie Kerins – later to be Dervla Murphy’s house-guest – was number two.

Number one was his fellow Kerryman Michael Quille, who when arrested and tried, took the unusual step of recognising the court and acquiring a high-powered counsel, Sean MacBride.

It worked for Quille. MacBride successfully argued that his client was in Belfast on the day of the murder, which should have undermined the credibility of the investigation in general.

But when Kerins was also picked up later, in Rathmines, months after his stay with the Murphys, he did not recognise the court.

And although there was little direct evidence except his fingerprint on the saddle of a bike abandoned at the murder scene, there was enough of the circumstantial kind to satisfy the military tribunal that decided his fate.

Born in January 1918, Kerins had grown up in a Free State that he also refused to recognise. He joined the IRA in the late 1930s, in time for what some historians have called the “second civil war”.

By then, Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil were in power and, with the added pressure of trying to preserve wartime neutrality, proved almost as ruthless as their predecessors in cracking down on former allies.

Det Sgt O’Brien was typical of the new reality. An ex-IRA man himself, who had fought in the 1916 Rising and then against the Treaty, he joined the Garda Síochána only in 1933, becoming one of the special branch “Broy Harriers” and battling with the Blueshirts before turning his attentions to the militant hold-outs of republicanism.

Thanks in large part to his convert’s zeal, the IRA in general were on the run by the time Kerins got involved. Hence the latter’s rapid rise through the ranks.

As arrests and executions took a toll, the organisation went through seven chiefs of staff in two years. It was Kerin’s turn in late 1942, when he was still only 24.

The “tall, broad-shouldered and handsome” young man idealised by a teenage Dervla Murphy is somewhat at contrast with the figure described on the “wanted” posters, who was said to be: “5ft 6/7; 8 stone, [of] erect carriage [and] slight build.”

But his plight, including doubts as to the fairness of his trial, attracted plenty of other sympathisers. Dan Spring, father of a future tánaiste, was among the Kerry TDs thrown out of the Dáil for protests against the execution.

The Government suppressed telegrams appealing for clemency and even broke up a rosary vigil. It was a time of no mercy. And the crackdown worked, for a while anyway. With Kerins’s death, de Valera successfully drew a line under militant republicanism. At least until another generation had a go, to equally doomed effect, in the late 1950s.