In Tipperary town for former political adviser Martin Mansergh’s funeral, I made a short side-trip to see the Soloheadbeg monument, a grandiose affair just off the main road to Limerick.
But as it said there, this was not the actual site of the 1919 ambush. So I had to make a side-trip off the side-trip to see that, a mile or more away on a narrow back road.
That, too, has a monument, smaller but no less portentous. The plaque reads: “Erected in proud and loving memory and to the honour and exaltation of the volunteers of the Third Tipperary Brigade Irish Republican Army who fired the first shots in the War of Independence here on 21st January 1919 and eventually compelled the enemy to sue for a truce…”
Divorced of the historic importance it later acquired, was the original event worthy of pride? Not much, I would argue. It was the killing of two policemen, one a widowed father of five, who were armed, but clearly caught off guard by eight IRA men.
Cast a Cold Eye – Frank McNally on the monuments, republican and otherwise, of Tipperary
Our Man in Havana – Frank McNally on a forgotten Irishman honoured in Cuba
Charlie Tango – Frank McNally on revisiting the Charlie Hebdo massacre 10 years on
Mutual admiration: Anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass and his connections to Daniel O’Connell and Ireland
The officer commanding the ambush, Seamus Robinson, would later say that, in the event of only two police officers accompanying a cartload of gelignite to Solohead quarry, the plan was to give them a chance to surrender. Whereas if there were the more usual six officers, the increased danger would justify shooting first.
Dan Breen, now the most famous of the ambushers, disagreed. His account was disarmingly frank: “[Seán] Treacy had stated to me that the only way of starting a war was to kill someone, and we wanted to start a war, so we intended to kill ... The only regret that we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen in it, instead of the six we had expected.”
Breen and Robinson lived to loathe each other, although both were on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. Breen would also live to say that had he foreseen the Free State, or even the Republic he was serve for decades as a Fianna Fáil TD, he wouldn’t have bothered fighting.
Mind you, he was a complicated figure. He supported the Republicans in Spain and later led protests against the Vietnam War. But in between, he seems to have been enthusiast for nazism.
John S Monagan, an American who visited Breen’s home in Dublin in 1948 and wrote An Irishman’s Diary about it for this newspaper half a century later, found him a charming if mercurial personality who was on first-name terms with George Bernard Shaw but also had pictures of Adolf Hitler on the wall.
Of their conversation, Monagan summarised that Breen claimed to have “fought for freedom, but not for democracy”. Then again, the American also hinted that his host – who had been on the receiving end of nine bullets – might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
There are many monuments of republican interest in and around Tipperary. These include the gravestone of Christopher Emmet, grandfather of Robert, in St Mary’s Church, where the Mansergh funeral took place, and a statue of John O’Leary, the Fenian who, according to WB Yeats, had romantic Ireland buried with him.
But on the way home, in the nearby village of Golden, I was compelled to stop again by a bust of Thomas MacDonagh, erected amid the picturesque ruins of a medieval castle. The juxtaposition was weirdly dramatic. And the inscription is strange too, but without any of the triumphalism of the one at Soloheadbeg.
First it asks us to: “Proudly remember Thomas MacDonagh, Tipperaryman”, who “died like a prince on 3rd May, 1916”.
Then, in an exercise of poetic inclusiveness Martin Mansergh would have appreciated, it adds: “As you pass by, take heart from the nobility and sacrifice of men differing in racial origins who gallantly defended the flame of Irish freedom down the ages in this countryside. Cherish not least Norman forebears who raised this castle 700 golden years ago.”
The ruins are alongside a bridge over the Suir which, not so Suir at this point, splits into two and forms a small island before reuniting. This has inspired another, more recent monument alongside the castle. And there was a Norman involved in that too, it turned out.
Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella A River Runs through It, later a film by Robert Redford, deals in part with the violent death of the author’s brother but also with their shared love of fly-fishing, a motif through which the books wrestles with metaphysical questions.
The monument in Golden was originally suggested by a local angler, Owen Jackman. Jackman died before it was unveiled two years ago, so now it’s a monument to him, too.
The stoic inscription is from Maclean’s closing words: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
