Dan Breen and the IRA Read Online Free

the RIC … had become aware of 380 Irish Volunteers in five units … one in Ballagh under Eamon O’Dwyer, one under Pierce McCan around Cashel, one in Fethard, one in Clonmel under Frank Drohan and one near Tipperary town under Seán Treacy.’ None of these men saw the coming revolution through to its conclusion. Treacy and McCan died, and Drohan and O’Duibhir eventually withdrew from the fray, dismayed by the realities of guerrilla warfare.
    The RIC talked in their reports of a local farmer – O’Duibhir – who had contacts with Dublin and who was busy organising malcontents into some sort of separatist movement. O’Duibhir (1883–1963) was a burly, complex, good-humoured man valued throughout his area, busy putting the Sinn Féin policy of economic autonomy into practice. He sold insurance on behalf of Irish insurance companies, encouraging people who sought cover to withdraw their business from the then-dominant English firms. By 1916, O’Duibhir, a farmer/entrepreneur, more prosperous than most other leaders of the nascent south Tipperary IRA, was county centre for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). There were thirty-two such individuals in the country, one for each county. The county centre’s job was to recruit suitable new members, to organise the spread of IRB branches throughout the county, and to encourage the infiltration of other “Irish Ireland” organisations by IRB members.
    The IRB – a secret society disapproved of by the catholic church and by many republicans – was the lineal successor to the clandestine fenians. The fenians’ 1867 rebellion had been a dismal failure, but surviving old fenians – like Roscarbery’s O’Donovan Rossa and Tipperary’s John O’Leary – had a profound influence on the 1916 leaders and on young IRA organisers like Breen and Treacy. Between 1908 and 1914, the IRB revived itself and was the chief organising force behind the 1916 Rising. It subsequently infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. Michael Collins became its leader in 1919. Their oath asserted:
    â€˜In the presence of God, I, … , do solemnly swear that I will do my utmost to establish the independence of Ireland and that I will bear true allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the government of the Irish Republic and implicitly obey the constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and all my superior officers and that I will preserve inviolable the secrets of the organisation.’
    It was Seán Treacy who administered this oath to Dan Breen. Breen later quit the IRB when they attempted to rein in his activities. Ernie O’Malley – never a member – afterwards accused the IRB of undermining the ideal of the republic.
    O’Duibhir said that his interest in separatist thinking had been awakened early in the century by Irish language lessons in the Weekly Freeman’s Journal . The learning of Irish, in chronic decline all over rural Ireland, suggested to thoughtful men like O’Duibhir that they belonged to a place which was culturally unlike England.
    Through a locally organised Irish class he came to know a lot of like-minded individuals. In 1908, they started a Sinn Féin club in the parish. Politically and openly, these people eventually involved themselves in the anti-ranch campaign, the anti-conscription movement and in the broad range of farmers’ concerns.
    The November 1913 trip to Munster by IRB man Seán Mac Dermott – which had such a profound effect on Breen – is often mentioned as the event which triggered the start of covert paramilitary action in south Tipperary. He spoke at the Tivoli Hall in Tipperary town. Seán Fitzpatrick – later in the flying columns with Dinny Lacey and Dan Breen – talked of a speech which ‘aroused the dormant, but by no means dead, national spirit of the townspeople … a shot in the