An Irish Diary

The accidental death of an insurrectionist – Frank McNally on Ireland’s other Troubles

While the Troubles were considered a terrible aberration, the road carnage seemed to be tolerated as a regrettable but inevitable result of progress

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Tue Apr 9 2019 - 17:40

Beside the Islandbridge gate of Phoenix Park, a plaque in the wall commemorates the death nearby of an Old IRA man, Lieut Thomas McGrane. I have passed it many times with a glance, usually while running or cycling, and assumed him to have been killed in action during the Troubles.

But stopping to read it recently, I noted the date – September 1949 – and that he had died “accidentally”. So I looked it up in the Irish Times archives and, sure enough, the story was there, via a subsequent court case for manslaughter.

The dead man – a veteran of the Howth gun running and Jacob’s garrison in Easter Week – had been on a motorbike, turning into the park, when he was hit by a car and killed instantly. Skid marks suggested the vehicle pushed his bike for “29 feet”, before stopping, although elsewhere, blaming his own panic, the driver is quoted as saying he had continued for “40 yards”.

A police doctor who examined the accused afterwards testified that “he smelled of alcohol and his speech was slightly thick”. The court also heard from a Garda inspector that, asked if he had been drinking, the driver replied: “Yes, I had two glasses of whiskey and a gin and tonic water. What has that to do with it?”

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In a second report, the defendant was further quoted as saying that he had had only two drinks that day, both gin-and-tonics, “in Chapelizod about five minutes before the accident”.

This, and the evidence of a clergyman who attended the scene and thought the driver sober, must have swayed the verdict.

The doctor said “it would not have been possible” for drink taken five minutes beforehand to affect the man’s driving.

The jury appears to have agreed, taking only 10 minutes to find him not guilty.

I will try to remember this case the next time anyone complains in my presence about modern “health and safety gone mad”. In the meantime, reading about the death of that Old IRA man (actually he was only 50) struck a disturbing chord with memories from my own childhood, two decades and more later.

For someone who grew to adulthood in a Border town during the 1970s and 1980s, I was conditioned by the nightly news then to think that guns and bombs were the biggest risk to our life and limb. In some parts of the North, they were.

But where most of us lived at that time, if you were going to die violently, it was far more likely to be at the hands of a drunk or reckless car driver.

It wasn't until 1969 – the year the modern Troubles started– that Ireland adopted the revolutionary idea of breathalysing motorists for the first time. I don't remember this being done much in the decade following, however, or even the decade after that.

I do remember cars being driven, sometimes in daylight, in a manner clearly suggestive of inebriation. And whether caused by drink or not, the number of road deaths, already horrendous in 1969, continued climbing throughout the 1970s, coinciding with the worst years of the Troubles but far exceeding them in toll.

The difference was that while the Troubles were considered a terrible aberration, on which vast amounts of political energy were rightfully spent, the road carnage seemed to be tolerated as a regrettable but inevitable result of progress.

The car was Ireland’s devil’s bargain, which was getting ever more affordable, and faster, at rates far in excess of the necessary road improvements or legal reforms.

The worst year of the Troubles – 1972 when 479 people died – was also the worst on Irish roads, with more than a thousand fatalities (640 in the Republic, and 372 in Northern Ireland ). But after a lull of a few years, it peaked again towards the end of the 1970s. Only then came the long, slow decline.

Those statistics were felt even in my Leaving Cert class.  Of 20 students who left school when I did, two (that I know of) did not live to be 30. One was a victim of the Troubles, the other of a car. I suspect the latter was more in keeping with the grim average.

Vast improvements in road safety have been made in the years since, and drunk driving especially is nothing like it once was.

Maybe the general incompatibility of cars and cyclists, using the same road space, is a bigger problem now, especially in Dublin.

Near the McGrane plaque, by the way, at the same park gate, is a more recent and haunting monument: a “ghost bicycle”, erected in memory of a cyclist who died there in 2017.

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