The Bloodied Field

Croke Park. Sunday 21 November 1920

Michael Foley

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788492294
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Colonialismo e post-colonialismo

On the morning of 21 November 1920, Jane Boyle walked to Sunday Mass in the church where she would be married five days later. That afternoon she went with her fiancé to watch Tipperary and Dublin play a Gaelic football match at Croke Park. Across the cityfourteen men lay dead in their beds after a synchronised IRA attack designed to cripple British intelligence services in Ireland. Trucks of police and military rumbled through the city streets as hundreds of people clamoured at the metal gates of Dublin Castle seeking refuge. Some of them were headed for Croke Park.

Award-winning journalist and author Michael Foley recounts the extraordinary story of Bloody Sunday in Croke Park and the 90 seconds of shooting that changedIreland forever. In a deeply intimate portrait he tells for the first time the stories of those killed, the police and militarypersonnel whowere in Croke Park that day, and the families left shattered in its aftermath, all against the backdrop of a fierce conflict that stretched from the streets of Dublin and the hedgerows of Tipperary to the halls of Westminster.

Updated with new information and photographs.

43

Part I

44

Politics and War, 1918–1920

45

Chapter 1

The Boy with the Penny Package

TIPPERARY, 1860–1919

The first Hogans settle in Grangemockler. Patrick Hogan raises a family of footballers and rebels. Mick Hogan inherits a farm as the sky darkens over the country.

GRANGEMOCKLER, TIPPERARY, JANUARY 1919

The dark mornings in Aughvaneen were bitten with cold. Mick Hogan’s days were reset to the winter clock. The cows were in and the fields were empty. He sliced the heads off turnips to feed the animals. He dug potatoes. He skimmed the top grass and soil from a stretch of ground and dug a shallow trench to store mangold beets as animal fodder. When winter really took hold he collected the beets from beneath the soil and chopped them up.

Some days he hacked back briars and brambles from the ditches. He cleared leaves and mud from the small drains that bordered 46his fields so the spring rainwater would flow better when it came. When the sun came out Mick did some ploughing, gently guiding the horse and plough in straight lines, stepping over the heftiest chunks of earth, leaving them to nature. A winter’s frost would break them down to nothing.

Winter farming demanded patience. It made him accept the limitations of what could be done and wait for the weather to turn again in favour of the land. Ploughing was slow and hard when frost turned the ground to concrete until the beginning of spring. It was a strange thing about this place: when it got cold in nearby places, it snowed in Aughvaneen. When the weather felt milder everywhere else, there was a chill in the air around Hogan’s farm. The coach drivers travelling between Dublin and Cork swore the road between Ninemilehouse and Grangemockler was the coldest stretch of them all. Reason enough to stop in the village for a hot toddy.

Home was a neat cottage with a kitchen and parlour, two bedrooms and a loft beneath a thatched roof, set against a clean, cobbled yard. It was barely twenty years after the Famine when Mick’s grandfather Dan Hogan came across a few fields from Hardbog to take on the farm a mile from Grangemockler. Their front door faced away from the road and the village. Little humps of countryside enveloped the cottage on all sides. A string of houses stretched out along the roadside protected it further from view. Tyrrell’s place was first. The Healys were next door. Power’s farm began at the end of Hogan’s yard. The farm fanned out around the house for seventy acres, stretching to the invisible border between Tipperary and Kilkenny. Some of the land was wet and boggy. Most of it fed their cows and provided a good living. 47

When Dan died in 1886 his son Patrick continued the work on the farm. He married Margaret in 1894. Dan jnr was born the following year. Michael came in 1896. Kattie was born in 1901, followed by Tom in 1903. Margaret and Paddy came next and Mary was born in 1909. Two other daughters died. They mourned the children, placed them in God’s hands and concentrated on the living.

The farm held its own through every season. One day a man in town was taking pictures. Patrick Hogan stood for a portrait. His eyes were dark and stern, almost entirely hidden beneath the shade cast by the rim of his bowler hat. His moustache was thick and black and perfectly trimmed. He wore a fine morning suit with a perfectly starched collar and a white shirt. He hung the picture on the wall of the parlour at home, a monument to the good health of his farm and his family, and the prosperity that allowed him to engage the services of this photographer.

His children went to the small village school in Grangemockler where the pupils packed tightly into a couple of rooms. The infant class would gather around a fireplace or sit on the floor, slate boards on their laps, chalk in their hands. An older boy would guide each child’s hand in turn as they copied letters from a chart. When the slate was full they would spit on it, wipe the slate clean, and begin again.

There were benches for half the pupils. The rest gathered in circles and semicircles chalked on the floor. In the middle of the circle the teacher would pivot around to face each child as they recited and read. For the semicircles, he erected a blackboard on an easel in front of them near the end wall.

At the top of the room Maurice Browne, the schoolmaster, sat on a high stool, his bearded chin supported by his left hand, elbow on 48the desk. Although the school was always noisy and bright, Master Browne was strict. Boys were punished for mitching or missing homework, being late for roll call, telling lies, throwing stones, or anything else that fell into his definition of mischief.

On Mick Hogan’s first day at school, his mother, Margaret, took him down to the village. Master Browne appointed his own son, Maurice jnr, to be Hogan’s minder for the day. ‘Mick looked lonely and bewildered,’ wrote Browne in his memoir. ‘Soon his eyes filled with tears. He cried out with trembling underlip: “Want to go home to see Da.” This refrain he kept up for some time like a robin redbreast, not varying his note.’

Maurice tried to amuse him with marbles and a ball-frame. Mick kept sobbing. He opened a book and showed him pictures: Baa Baa Black Sheep, the old blind harper with his poor dog Tray. None of them staunched his tears.

‘Home to see Da,’ Mick said.

Master Browne’s wife, Kate, ran a shop in the village. An outing seemed the only solution. Maurice jnr took Mick to visit and soon he was sampling sweets from every tin. As a special treat, Kate gave him a penny package; one in every five hundred penny packages contained a ticket that entitled the winner to a watch. Maurice saw Mick with his lucky dip, and wished it for himself.

As the tears dried up and school became a familiar part of his routine, Mick grew to be a bright scholar. Maurice Browne remained a friend. Maurice’s brother, John, was even closer to Mick, and for years after, Kate cared for Mick Hogan like a kindly aunt, keeping an eye on the boy with the penny package.

Mick’s brothers Tom and Dan had shown an academic potential 49that required a different kind of schooling. Word reached the Hogans of a progressive young teacher in nearby Windgap, versed in the latest methods of teaching maths, reading and English. The school was over the border in Kilkenny, five miles away by road but no distance from Hogan’s across the fields. Tom and Dan walked every day to Windgap and excelled at their studies. In time Tom would join the Christian Brothers. Dan earned a scholarship to fund his schooling and took exams to join the railway company. Perhaps they were wise to leave home: it wasn’t the country or the climate for crops. The corn just a few miles across the Kilkenny border in Callan always looked a different, healthier colour. Even the names of the townlands around Grangemockler suggested the land was harsh and infertile. Ballinruan: homestead of the moory place. Glenaskagh: glen of the whitethorn bushes. Cruan: hard place. Moin Cruadh: Hardbog. This was ground for grazing, not growing; small farms, not sprawling family ranches.

Off in the distance to the west, Slievenamon hill loomed over the village. When a storm assailed the mountain it always exerted the last of its temper on Grangemockler. In winter it hung like a white backdrop on the horizon; in summer the sun glinting against the heather draped the mountain in a blue-grey veil. Boys and girls talked every summer about climbing it. People judged the weather from the mood of the mountain. Con Feehan was the village weatherman. When Con was asked for his thoughts on the prospects of rain or sun, he would delay his answer until after he’d walked to where he could get a clear view of Slievenamon.

The countryside was everyone’s playground. The older boys in school went mitching along the River Lingaun, hiding in a small 50hut by the bank and catching trout by hand from the river or trapping them beneath the hollow rocks on the riverbed. They roasted the fish in a fireplace made from flat stones, and washed it down with the bottles of milk they brought to school every day.

When the boys got caught they faced Master Browne. One day he sent Mikey Tobin out to fetch him some sally twigs, his cruellest instruments of punishment. They were a brutal product of nature, scything through the air like a whip. The boys held out their hands and braced themselves. The twigs whistled through the air and smacked against their palms, but snapped harmlessly on impact. The Master tried another sally. It also broke. Before delivering them, Mikey Tobin had notched the branches with his penknife. Master Browne stifled a smile. There would be no punishment that day, but no more handy jobs for the favoured Mikey Tobin.

The rhythms of life were gentle and subtle through the seasons. Fr Phil Dooley was parish priest of the village. He was a tall, strong man, with a bright sense of humour and a contagious laugh. He wore thick-lensed glasses. Bushy mutton chops framed his face.

When he walked for a while he rested on a stout stick, blowing out his cheeks as he strolled along. He always had a bag of sweets for children and spent many hours visiting the sick. People often told the story of Fr Phil and one dying man. After many hours at his bedside, Phil made to leave. ‘Goodbye now, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you to the gates of Heaven.’ ‘Ah, Father Phil,’ the man replied, ‘don’t leave me at the gate.’

When it came to gathering hay, setting vegetables and slaughtering animals, people came together in haggards, farmyards and kitchens to help one another. Dan Meagher was the man who salted 51pigs. People knew him better as a footballer. As he worked, he often stopped to talk tactics and players. No one ever objected.

Nothing made Grangemockler buzz like football. Whether it was Tipperary or Grangemockler playing, the weeks before any big game were dominated by talk of the match. Every evening after the cows were driven home, milked and fed, boys and men would gather in the football field for practice. Every Sunday was dedicated to training and a match. The scene after mid-morning Mass was always the same: men quietly saying their prayers and eyeing the door, rushing home for potatoes, cabbage and pig’s head, then football.

Grangemockler were known as the ‘ass and cart’ team for the way their supporters guided their carts in convoy to big matches in Carrick-on-Suir and nearby Clonmel. An old song captured the sight.

One glorious fine morning on the thirteenth of May,

To the sweet town of Carrick they started away.

With horses and asses and good old Shank’s mare,

They went for to witness a great contest there.

Years before Mick Hogan’s time, players would set out for Clonmel and Carrick on foot and pick up a lift. In time wagonettes would charge players and supporters two shillings each for the round trip. Footballers occupied a special status in every house. One day Tom Cooney was walking back to Grangemockler after playing a game when the wonderful smell of bacon and turnips came floating over the ditch. He followed the smell across a field to a farmhouse and knocked on the door.

No one answered. He pushed the door open. A table was set out. 52He sat down by the fire, waiting for the people of the house to return so he could ask if he might join them for dinner. Steam seeped out from the pot of potatoes hanging over the fire. Time passed. No one came. Eventually the hunger overwhelmed him. As he finished his plate of food, a woman appeared at the front door. She was furious. The food was being readied for those who had been to Clonmel for the football. What would she tell them now? When Tom told her he played for Grangemockler, everything changed. She took his plate and filled it with more bacon, potatoes and turnip, and a jug of buttermilk to help everything down.

Every boy was reared on the legend of Tom Kiely from nearby Ballyneale. In 1904 Kiely had travelled to St Louis, Missouri, to compete in the Olympic decathlon. Britain had offered him a place on their team but he insisted on competing as an Irish athlete. He raised the money to travel by selling many of the prizes he had won in competition over the years. When he arrived, the Americans also wanted him for their team. Again, he declined. All ten events were staged on the same day and Kiely won gold. He was thirty-five years old, and returned home a hero.

Kiely also played football for Grangemockler. Although he had a great leap, Kiely rarely caught the ball but fisted it further than some could kick it. When Kiely returned from the Olympics, football was thriving in Grangemockler. Although hurling dominated most of Tipperary, Gaelic football was everything in the southern pocket of the county around Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. Grangemockler won five successive championships between 1903 and 1907. Of the twenty-one Tipperary county championships between 1900 and 1920, only Nenagh in north Tipperary and 53Loughmore-Castleiney near Thurles in the middle of the county had taken the title away from a club in the south.

Grangemockler and the neighbouring parishes of Fethard and Mullinahone shared thirteen championships out of twenty-one between 1900 and 1920. The hardest matches always came with their nearest neighbours. Those...