The last RIC casualty of the War of Independence in 1921

By Donal McMahon

In December a hundred years ago the War of Independence was finally coming to an end.

On Saturday 17th December 1921 this newspaper carried reports of two events that took place the previous Wednesday, placed side by side under the headlines: ‘Historic Dáil Meeting / Ireland’s Fate in the Balance’ and ‘Southern Sensations / Sergt. Enright Shot Dead’.

The meeting held to debate the terms of the Treaty signed in London on the 6th was of the highest significance for the nation then and remains so for us today. As for the shooting, while it also had national significance as a serious infringement of the Truce right in the middle of the peace talks, it was, on a personal level, tragic news for that policeman’s family and descendants. I told ‘The Story of a Thurles RIC Man’ in this paper ten years ago (28 December 2011). What I wish to do now – and am very grateful for the opportunity to do so – is focus, in chronological order, on three killings that took place in 1921 connected with that sergeant, two in Thurles and the third in Kilmallock.

It was in Kilmallock on 14 December 1921 that Sergeant Enright was killed, the last member of the RIC to be shot dead in twenty-six-county Ireland. I write, as his grandson, to find peace for myself and make peace with others.

Thomas Enright was born on a small farm in Listowel on 21 December 1889, the eldest of ten children of a second marriage who all emigrated, mostly to America, he to Canada. He found work with the Canadian Pacific railway and ended up in Vancouver. When World War I broke out, he enlisted with the 29th Vancouver Battalion. He was wounded at the battle of the Somme in September 1916.

After being wounded a second time during fierce trench fighting in the early morning of the 21 August 1917, when the Canadians launched an attack on Hill 70, near Lens, in north-east France, he was invalided back to Canada and spent the remainder of the war recovering in a TB sanatorium near Vancouver. There he met a nurse, Mary White, a near neighbour of his from Bedford, Listowel, and they were married in August 1918. The couple returned to Ireland in July 1919.

To put in the balance against the criticism he came in for later on, rightly or wrongly, back in Ireland, there is the character witness who testified as follows when Enright was court-martialled in June 1916 for disobeying the order of a superior officer: ‘Corporal Enright’s character is very good. He is an excellent N.C.O. [non-commissioned officer]. He has been picked for important work in the trenches, raiding parties and patrols.’ He was later to move up the ranks to second lieutenant. He had come through the most terrible of ordeals to earn himself credit as a highly conscientious and disciplined private and officer.
Alas, Thomas Enright came home from one war only to find himself embroiled in another. He who left Ireland in 1910 for lack of work, what kind of work could he hope to find now in a country racked by agitation and, after Soloheadbeg, the ever-increasing use of arms?

The RIC had been declared outcasts by De Valera in the Dáil on 10 April 1919: ‘They must be shown and made feel how base are the functions they perform and how vile is the position they occupy.... They will understand how utterly the people of Ireland loathe both themselves and their calling.’ From January 1920 the RIC had to be reinforced by recruits from England, unemployed veterans of World War I, who as the ‘Black and Tans’, were soon made to feel even more base and vile.

In the absence of any documents that would tell us what his motives were, may I propose a way of interpreting Enright’s controversial decision to join the RIC in April 1920? Given his military experience in World War I, he may very well have seen a valuable role for himself as an intermediary between the new RIC ex-soldier recruits from England (and, later, the officer recruits, the Auxiliaries) and the ‘old RIC’ Irishmen they would be working alongside. He would liaise between the Irish and the English, guiding and reining in these last when necessary. After all, hadn’t he been a sergeant and lieutenant looking after his men?

Above: Thomas Enright and Mary White, August 1918 in Nelson, British Columbia (Courtesy McMahon family)

In August, with the imminent birth of a baby very likely uppermost in his mind, he took on the more specialized role of Defence of Barracks Sergeant. Finally, in January 1921, he ‘reattested’ to become a regular RIC sergeant, whose testimony at the Petty Court sessions in Thurles, where he was stationed, was regularly reported in this newspaper, the one his grandson is now writing for a hundred years later.

From 1920 on, Tipperary was drawn deeper and deeper into a nightmare of tit-for-tat killing, as RIC ‘reprisal’ followed IRA ‘outrage’ (e.g. the killing of Constable Luke Finnegan on 20 January 1920). One particularly horrifying example took place on the night of 10 March 1921.

Two local men, soldiers in WWI, were shot on the 7th on the orders of the Commanding Officer, 2nd Tipperary Brigade, James Leahy, on suspicion of passing on information to the RIC which, in the view of the local battalion and Leahy, led to the death of an IRA Volunteer. After the bodies were discovered on the 9th, the RIC raided late that night and into the following morning the houses of several republican activists in the town and, in reprisal, shot dead Laurence Hickey and William Loughnane.

Leahy described the first shooting as follows in his Witness Statement for the Bureau of Military History on 3 July 1956:
Five masked and armed policemen raided the house of Larry Hickey, publican, [25] Main St., Thurles, when they found the owner in bed. He was ordered out in his night attire and when he reached the head of the stairs he was tripped and thrown downstairs by an R.I.C. man named Jackson. In the fall, Hickey's neck was broken and he was in great pain at the foot of the stairs when Sergeant Enright, who was in charge of the raiders, shot him dead, to put an end to his agony. Hickey was a well-known republican in Thurles, and a detailed account of his shooting was given to me during the Truce period by Sergeant Enright himself.

Here then, is the first killing Thomas Enright is implicated in. How and where was the account given? Who suggested a meeting? Or did they just bump into each other by chance? In that case, who spoke to whom first, instead of passing by with the usual steely glare? Leahy doesn’t say but just sticks to the bare facts, as was his right. Next, how are we to interpret this text, given that Leahy reports later in the statement that the ‘notorious’ Enright was completely untrustworthy, mentioning how he even used to put on a Tipperary accent to get people to open up for him?

I will offer my own interpretation, if I may. Sgt. Enright, the intermediary, had obviously lost control of his men here. Given his experience in WWI of seeing wounded soldiers crying out to be relieved of unbearable pain, he carried out a ‘mercy killing’ of poor Laurence Hickey. What motivated him to tell James Leahy of this, the two being such deadly enemies? Knowing that he had to live from now on (and find acceptance as best he could) among the Irish people, Enright, no doubt out of a desire for self-preservation but also out of a need for forgiveness, wished to come clean about this horrible killing.

Above: Laurence and Catherine Hickey (Courtesy John Hickey)

Seán Hogan offers another interpretation on page 27 of a Centenary Booklet written by Neville O’Connell and Seán Hogan (War, Truce and Treaty in an Irish Town – Thurles in 1921) and launched at the unveiling of a plaque to Michael (Mixey) O’Connell outside 24 Liberty Square on 14th August this year. The context is our third killing here, i.e. that of Enright in Kilmallock.

While Leahy is generally regarded as a reliable witness, his statement is silent on the question of his personal involvement in the IRA operation to kill Enright. The question comes to mind if, in making their witness statements decades after the events involved, IRA witnesses may sometimes be justifying the killings they were involved in by portraying the victims in a negative light? Is Enright’s fate in Kilmallock being retrospectively justified by linking him with the Hickey killing, as well as the grenade attack on the trainload of prisoners at Thurles [see second killing below]? The circumstances where Leahy states it was Enright himself who said he shot Laurence Hickey in Thurles (they met in a pub during the Truce), while very possible, seem strange.

After the death of his first wife, Laurence Hickey married again in August 1920. In March 1921, his wife was six months pregnant. Thomas Enright married in August 1918, and in March 1921 was father of a six-month-old girl. The allegiances were different, unfortunately, but the sorrow was the same. Both children, Laurence and Catherine (who lost her mother in 1931 when she was ten), were deeply affected for the rest of their lives by the loss of their respective parents. The writer too, since discovering, only in late middle age, that his grandfather had shot Laurence Hickey that night, has borne the weight of guilt that such an act inevitably passes on to the descendants.

The second killing Thomas Enright is implicated in is that of Declan Horton (also written as Hurton), who died on the 16th December, aged 31. Following the signing of the Treaty on the 6th, IRA prisoners were freed and began to return home by train. When the train bound for Cork pulled into Thurles at around 7 p.m. on Friday 9th, a bomb or grenade was thrown, injuring Declan Horton, who died later in hospital. He had served with the Irish Guards regiment in WWI and had joined the Volunteers on being demobilized in March 1919.

This incident made the headlines in all the newspapers as a serious violation of the Truce. The two Treaty Liaison Officers for Tipperary came to investigate. John (Sean) Sharkey gives an account of their investigation in his Witness Statement, saying that ‘our information was that the bomb had been thrown by a Sergeant Enright of the R.I.C. and that it had been thrown from the bridge over the railway near Thurles Station’.

The Witness Statement of Maurice Meade (East Limerick Brigade) mentions this train bombing as justification for the shooting of the person held accountable for it by him and his accomplices, i.e. Thomas Enright: ‘[He] was particularly active and bitter against our men, on one occasion bombing some of our captured men. For this we decided he should pay the death penalty.’
How was the judgment of guilt contained in this ‘information’ arrived at? Did someone witness Enright throwing the explosive from the bridge? Some accounts mention fog signals being let off in order to create a smoke screen for the attack but fog signals for railways are devices used to warn an incoming train of some unexpected hazard and they release a sound of detonation, not a fog.

In recent years, several writers have looked closely at the evidence linking Thomas Enright to this attack and found themselves puzzled as to why, on the evidence available so far, it should be pinned on him. For example, Seán Hogan is of the opinion that ‘it is not clear how his name came to be associated with the grenade attack on the train’ (Centenary Booklet, p.22), while Neville O’Connell drew my attention to a very significant piece of evidence that a defence counsel, had there been any, would certainly have used at the time.

James (Jimmie) Kennedy was involved in the nationalist movement since 1916. As Intelligence Officer for the Second Tipperary Brigade, from 12 September 1921 to 10 January 1922 he kept a notebook (now in the Source library, Thurles) of intelligence reports that came in. On Monday 12th December, he wrote a report on Friday’s station bombing, stating that ‘the bridge had been cleared by RIC just prior to arrival of train’ and noting that ‘from where the bomb is likely to have been thrown there is a very good escape to the RIC barracks’. The finger of suspicion thus points to the RIC but there is no mention of any definite suspect.

So, while Sharkey came to Thurles from Clonmel on the night of the incident (‘It was late when we got to Thurles and the town was in complete darkness’) and identified the culprit very quickly (‘a Sergeant Enright’), Kennedy, the man on the spot, was not in a position three days after the incident to name anyone at all. How could Sharkey be so definite so quickly?
His incrimination of Enright, which all historians have relied on so far, is surely open to question.

Kennedy has an entry for Wednesday, 30 th November all about Thomas Enright:
The I/O [Intelligence Officer] of No.1 B n was at camp in Laurel Lodge [near today’s
Anner Hotel] on Wednesday when, hearing noise, he came to the door and, seeing Sergt. Enright with other police, he held them up with [a] revolver and said he would not allow them pass into the house. Enright asked how many men were in and was told ‘quite a number’. He said he wanted Patrick Gorman. ‘I am he,’ answered the other. The business then was done and consisted in giving Gorman a summons for driving motor without permit. Enright began to talk about the hard times gone by and hoped there would be no more trouble, and bewailed the use of physical force, lauded John Redmond and constitutionalism, and said he noted a return to constitutional etc. until Gorman said he was busy.

We have here a second report of a conversation with Sergeant Enright. Is it not likely that, if any bomb was to be thrown just nine days later, it would not be by someone like Enright with so much, even his life, at stake? Kennedy reports on the 6 th January that ‘Sgts Cahill and Jackson left this morning’, and adds, ‘they were very active members of [a] murder gang and are particularly bad’. Is it not more likely that one of these threw it?

In any event, Thomas Enright was going to pay the price, whether for the first killing (admitted), the second (not proven) or the sum of his ‘notorious’ misdeeds. Maurice Meade’s WS quoted above continues thus: ‘No opportunity to carry this out [i.e. the death penalty] had arisen until the Truce occurred but when we saw him at the coursing match, even though the Truce was then in operation, we agreed to shoot him and we did so that night.’ Below is the account of that shooting given in this newspaper:

A short note to add to the Star’s report. One of Enright’s two dogs (named after his wife or his daughter?), Bedford Lass, was – of all the disastrous twists of fate! – drawn against Political Duchess entered under the name ‘Shawn Forde’. Now Seán Forde, an alias for Tomás Malone, was Vice-Commandant of the East Limerick Brigade. He led the attack on Kilmallock RIC barracks on 27-28 May 1920. Back in Kilmallock now and going with his dog to the slips, who does he see as owner of Bedford Lass? Not ‘P. White’, as written in the programme (Enright’s brother-in-law in Listowel), but Enright himself in plain clothes! What thoughts might such a discovery have set off in his mind? Did he, once again and for one last time, revert to his old ways of rounding up volunteers, this time to ambush Enright? ‘We agreed,’ says Meade, ‘we’ meaning those who found themselves fortuitously (or designedly?) there that day (including men from Leahy’s Second Tipperary Brigade?), a day originally meant for carefree leisure but, suddenly, with hatred revived again, now wholly given over to the plotting of murder.
Thomas Enright was buried on Saturday 17th. ‘At noon on Saturday, after High Mass and Office at St Mary’s Parish Church, Listowel, the funeral of the late Sergeant Thomas Enright, a native of Bedford, Listowel and who had been shot dead at Kilmallock on Wednesday night, took place to the local cemetery. [. . .] The funeral was largely composed of police, who fired a volley of shots over the grave’ (Irish Examiner, 21st December).

The settlement he had hoped for – with the ‘hard times gone by’– had come too late for him. The terms of the Treaty were ratified the day before by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the English Parliament and were to be ratified by a slender majority in the Dáil on the 7th January. His grave lies opposite a republican plot on the other side of a pathway. Every time I visit him there, I include in my thoughts and prayers those others across the way.

Ever since I came to know my grandfather’s sad story, Thurles has, I’m afraid, been a town whose very name held – how could it not? – negative associations for me. His bad reputation, it seems, had been handed down through the generations.
The good tailor Jack Ryan (b.1894) recalls ‘the infamous Sgt. Enright, a proper dog who used bate [sic] the people in the streets for nothing at all. [. . .] Sure he got what he richly deserved when he was shot during the Truce’ (in ‘Reminiscences of Thurles’, recorded 1982). All I can say is that when someone is ‘loathed’ by the people as they were urged to do by De Valera, how can he not return some of the treatment he is receiving? How can he prevent rage occasionally erupting when he is accepted nowhere? He who had been an exile abroad found himself doubly exiled on his return, as a WWI soldier and as a policeman.

Late last year, Neville O’Connell, great-grandson of Michael (Mixey) O’Connell, contacted me on the subject of an article he was writing for the 2021 edition of the Tipperary Historical Journal, entitled ‘Midnight Murders: The Royal Irish Constabulary Reprisals in Thurles, 10 March 1921’. He wished to include my grandfather in the article. And so began several weeks of email exchanges, where each tried to appreciate the other’s viewpoint.

If I may put it like this, we had our very own Treaty negotiations, sometimes on the brink of collapse. But we stuck with it and arrived finally at a position where each of us respected and indeed made room for the other’s sincere opinion. Neville also made contact with Laurence Hickey’s grandson, John. And so it came to pass that I introduced myself to him as grandson of the person who had killed his grandfather.

I was invited to the launch of the Centenary Booklet and, as a result, began to feel more at ease in Thurles. After the unveiling of the plaque, there was a remembrance ceremony by the Suir beside the library. Seán Hogan kindly allowed me to speak, which I did, unrehearsed. It all seemed to come pouring out. I asked people to please not condemn Thomas Enright, that he doubtlessly, given the terrible tensions of the time, did things he must have regretted; that war and killing raised the biggest question of all – the meaning of life and its direction; that there was – that there had to be – something working itself out with us and through us towards some final meaning; that, when this came, we would, all of us together, see, in retrospect, where the long wandering road of history had all the time been secretly leading, and know for the first time that a good God had always been there at the end of that road, waiting. We then cast our fuchsia flowers into the river in memory of our loved ones.

John Hickey went home that evening by train with his son Dónal. We walked to the station, the murder scene. I thanked John for his kindness and understanding and said how sorry I was for what my grandfather had done to his. Then Neville, my wife and I walked back to the Square, following the path my grandfather must so often have taken when out on patrol with his men a hundred years ago, always on the look-out for trouble, always feeling himself a hated figure.

I walked that path now at peace with myself and with others, grateful for having been able to talk about him in Thurles that day and be listened to with respect.