WHEN I was a boy I was brought to the unveiling of a memorial by the then president of Ireland, Seán T Ó Ceallaigh, to the men who carried out the ambush at Soloheadbeg in Co Tipperary on January 21st, 1919, writes MÁIRTÍN Mac CORMAIC
The ambush, in which two RIC men were killed by members of the Third Tipperary Brigade of the IRA, took place on the very same day that the first meeting of the First Dáil was held in the Mansion House.
The shots fired at Soloheadbeg on that early Tuesday afternoon are considered to have been the opening shots of the War of Independence which continued until the Truce in June 1921.
My father was the last survivor of the ambush, which was led by Dan Breen, later a Fianna Fáil TD for South Tipperary, Seán Treacy and Séamus Robinson.
When I attended the unveiling of the memorial in January 1950, there was no doubt in my young mind about the morality or otherwise of what happened at Soloheadbeg 31 years before.
I did not know then that the ambush was one of the most controversial of the whole War of Independence.
I did not realise that it had been condemned even by the leaders of the republican movement at the time, not to mention by the press or by the public.
After all, my father had taken part in it and he could do no wrong.
Anyway, the fact that the president of Ireland had carried out the unveiling gave it the official stamp of state approval.
The two RIC men who died were Constables James McDonnell, from Belmullet, Co Mayo and Patrick O’Connell, from Coachford, Co Cork.
McDonnell, who was aged about 50, was a widower with five children.
He was a native Irish speaker.
O’Connell was aged about 30 and was unmarried.
Both men were Catholics and were popular in the community in which they lived.
They were escorting a cart load of gelignite from Tipperary Military Barracks for blasting operations at Soloheadbeg quarry, about thee miles from Tipperary town.
Both were armed with loaded rifles.
They had almost reached the quarry when a group of armed and masked men jumped out from behind a fence and called on them to surrender.
They refused and were shot dead on the spot.
According to Breen in his book, My Fight for Irish Freedom, written shortly after the Civil War, the Volunteers expected that there would be an escort of six fully armed police and, if they put up resistance, “we had resolved not merely to capture the gelignite but also to shoot down the escort”.
He also said that their “only regret was that the escort had consisted of only two Peelers instead of six.
“If there had to be dead Peelers at all, six would have created a better impression than a mere two”.
That sounds really blood-thirsty now but it must be remembered that Breen wrote those words in different times and in a decade when life was far cheaper than it is today.
And I do not believe we should use today’s values to judge actions carried out when people’s outlook bore no comparison to how they think today.
Apart from my father, I got to know many of his comrades who took part in that ambush.
They were decent, hard-working men who loved their country and were willing to die for it.
You would not call them murderers unless you wanted to call Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonagh and Michael Collins murderers too.
They had no mandate either from the Dáil or from Volunteer headquarters for what they did on that day.
Not that authorisation from HQ would have made any difference.
My father often said later that if they had to wait for word from Dublin in those times of poor communications, “nothing would ever have been done”. The French Resistance, he said, did not wait for the all-clear from de Gaulle before firing a shot.
The facts that the two RIC men were popular, were Catholics and that one was an Irish speaker, were irrelevant to the Volunteers.
As far as they were concerned, they represented the Crown in Ireland and as such were the enemy.
But times have changed. England is no longer Ireland’s enemy.
It is time we remembered those members of the RIC who were also decent Irishmen but were on the other side.
The memorial at Soloheadbeg bears only the names of the men who carried out the ambush, including that of my father, Paddy McCormack.
I believe it is now time to add the names of James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell.
It might show that we have grown up at last.