The birth pangs of our modern Irish state

Birth is messy, and the birth pangs of our modern prosperous Irish State, now part of the EU, were very painful and very bloody. This was especially so in Tipperary. Now, a century after that birth, it is being recalled in a series of booklets issued by Tipperary Studies (Tipperary County Council Library Services), available free of charge at every public library in the county.

The current publication, a small booklet of 49 pages, is easily readable but viewed from the comfortable luxury of retrospection, it is not an easy read. These are the facts which, for some of us, may challenge perceptions and handed-down memories. Dying for Ireland may still have, as it had for me in my schooldays, an nobility and self- sacrifice wrapped in the glory of poetry and music. The reality of the parallel killing for Ireland, especially when the victims were fellow Irishmen, is different and chastening. And the facts are that the majority of victims in the earlier years of our “Troubles” were young Irish members of the RIC.

The publication “County Tipperary 1917-1921 - a history in documents” is the second in a triology. The first - “County Tipperary in 1916” has already been in circulation. The recently published - 1917-1921 - will be followed next year by an issue covering The Truce and the tragic Civil War period. The authors - Denis G. Marnane and Mary Guinan Darmody describe their work as not a written history but “rather a series of glimpses of people and events - a sequence of slides rather than a movie.” Their sources are located in documents, photographs and illustrations, nearly all contemporary, and now lodged in the county archives at The Source (Thurles), or in the Bureau of Military History.

Detailed histories of the period are covered in Sean Hogan’s “The Black and Tans in North Tippeary” published in 2013 and D.G. Marnane’s “The Third Brigade,” published 2018.

The current 1917-1921 publication has on its glossy cover a reproduction of a photograph of Dan Breen’s wedding in June 1921. Two very pretty smiling young women, his bride and her bridesmaid, attractively dressed in white, and wearing large Tara brooches look out at us from the photograph. His uniformed bestman, Sean Hogan, stands behind him, while he carries a Mauser Parabellum pistol spread out on his and his bride’s lap. At his wedding! But, perhaps this was an necessary apparatus since he was still on the run with a substantial reward on his head.

Columnist, Margaret Rossiter

Breen is credited with the opening of the final military phase of the Troubles when, accompanied by Sean Treacy, Seamus Robinson and others, he was involved in the then authorised and controversial Sologheadbeg Ambush in January 1919, during which two policemen, young Irishmen, were killed. This resulted in the government’s offer of £1,000 (worth £80,000 pounds in today’s money) for the capture of the ambushers. The result also was, according to the current publication, the designation of South Tipperary as a “Special Military Area,” and the consequent “disruption to life and business did nothing to help the government in the battle for hearts and minds. The social and economic dislocation of Mid-West Tipperary was severe.”

That unrest quickly spread to almost every corner of the county and the booklet records events at small places like Derrycastle, Toomevara, Golden and Casey’s Cross outside Nenagh.

Most of these events resulted in death - often inflicted in a close-up and personal encounter, so that by 1923 many hundreds of young Irishmen had lost their lives. Few of us who have lived through, and witnessed, the horror of terrorist conflict in Northern Ireland can now dismiss such loss of life as inevitable.

Could the perfidy of “Perfidious Albion,” already reneging on the promised Home Rule, have been challenged differently? Who is to know? Revolutions take on their own momentum. Could the French have foreseen, as they cheered around their own Parisian guillotine, that their revolution would influence the course of subsequent European history?

We, Irish citizens of today, have inherited our now thriving republic via a route of bloodshed and death. We may not like it but that is how it was. This little booklet (“County Tipperary 1917-1921”) helps us to understand a little better the trajectory of that route. Read it and make up your own mind. It is available, free of charge, at every library in the county.