Dan Breen and the IRA Read Online Free Page B

the gloomy Arbour Hill prison where he witnessed the execution and burial of men who were his friends and comrades.
    In a memoir of his incarceration he described what he saw in the prison yard: ‘At one end a huge trench was dug … the full length of the end of the yard. A very small portion of the upper end of this grave, for grave it was, had been filled in. Under this filling lay the corpses of Pearse, MacDermott and the rest … who had been shot. Full boxes of quicklime were thrown on the ground nearby. There were a few empty ones there also, the contents of which had been doubtlessly thrown upon the dead bodies of my friends and fellow Volunteers of a few days ago.’
    McCan was subsequently sent to Frongoch interment camp, a university for the revolution about to happen. When he got back to Tipperary the first thing he did was re-start Irish language classes. He played an active role in setting up branches of Sinn Féin in Clonmel, Rosegreen, Killenaule, Tipperary and Carrick-on-Suir.
    By December 1917, he was encouraging boycotts against state institutions like crown courts and the RIC. He called on people to turn to republican alternatives and emphasised the ultimate necessity of violence.
    On 19 May 1918, McCan was arrested for his part in the fabricated German Plot and jailed in England. He was one of the large number of Sinn Féin MPs elected in 1918 – his constituency was east Tipperary – who were unable to attend the meeting of the first dáil because they were incarcerated. In prison he contracted the flu bug then sweeping through Europe and died in March 1919. His funeral, a choreographed political affair, was one of the events which restored the fortunes of the embryonic IRA after Soloheadbeg. Michael Collins and Harry Boland* were just two of the republican luminaries who participated in the Dublin end of the funeral at the pro-cathedral – an occasion said to have been attended by 10,000 mourners.

3 – Séamus Robinson arrives in Tipperary, 1917–19
    In the years immediately before the War of Independence, young people in Ireland enjoyed new freedoms, both socially and politically. New ways of life were emerging all over Europe. The old order was collapsing, undermined by the traumas of the Great War. The men and women who fought the War of Independence enjoyed music, dancing, movies, late night shin-digs and situations in which three was a crowd. Many narratives of the Third Tipperary Brigade find them departing from dances at 4 a.m., having discussions in bars, leaving cinemas, or eagerly roaming the countryside – day and night.
    James Malone, theoretically an Irish teacher in Tipperary in 1917, nurtured the cultural and social changes which went hand in hand with an emergent militancy. ‘I spent one night per week in each place,’ he told Uinseann MacEoin. ‘There was an Irish class from eight to nine-thirty, a céilí from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty and I drilled the Volunteers for an hour after that. There were classes for the schoolchildren in the evenings. I spent the day travelling the countryside, trying to set up new branches or representing the Volunteers or the Brotherhood. Some branch held a big céilí every Sunday night, as a rule and in the fine weather there was a feis somewhere on a Sunday. Well known speakers from Dublin and from other places attended the feises for the purpose of exhorting the people.’
    Patrick ‘Lacken’ Ryan, a man subsequently remembered in memoirs by Ernie O’Malley and Dan Breen, described the early days of Volunteer organising: ‘On a night in the early summer of 1917 I attended a meeting which was held in a place called Downey’s Barn at Cramps Castle, Fethard. This meeting was called for the purpose of organising an Irish Volunteer company in Fethard and district … The meeting itself was a small one, as for obvious reasons only a selected number of men were