The Scariff Martyrs

War, Murder and Memory in East Clare

Tomás Mac Conmara

• Publisher: Mercier Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781781177259
• eBook ISBN: 9781781177266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

' This incredible book is very, very important'. Damien Dempsey 

In November 2008, Tomás Mac Conmara sat with a 105 five-year-old woman at a nursing home in Clare. While gently moving through her memories, he asked the east Clare native; 'Do you remember the time that four lads were killed on the Bridge of Killaloe?'. Almost immediately, the woman's countenance changed to deep outward sadness. Her recollection took him back to 17th November 1920, when news of the brutal death of four men, who became known as the Scariff Martyrs, was revealed to the local community. Late the previous night, on the bridge of Killaloe they were shot by British Forces, who claimed they had attempted to escape. Locals insisted they were murdered. A story remembered for 100 years is now fully told. 

This incident presents a remarkable confluence of dimensions. The young rebels committed to a cause. Their betrayal by a spy, their torture and evident refusal to betray comrades, the loneliness and liminal nature of their site of death on a bridge. The withholding of their dead bodies and their collective burial. All these dimensions bequeath a moment which carries an enduring quality that has reverberated across the generations and continues to strike a deep chord within the local landscape of memory in East Clare and beyond.

1

‘We should take off our hats’

Remembering the Scariff Martyrs

On 17 November 1921, a large crowd gradually emerged from St Flannan’s Roman Catholic church in Killaloe. The congregation, led by the clergy, slowly descended the steep hill leading towards the bridge of Killaloe. There, in deferential unison, a rosary was recited in Irish. After a hush fell on the assembled crowd, one man walked forward and with white paint made the sign of a cross on the north parapet of the bridge.1 Exactly a year earlier, Michael Daly, a twenty-four-year-old railway worker from Canal Bank, had crossed the bridge and noticed at that spot a sight that never left his memory:

I was going to work at 8.45 a.m. I could see blood from Danny Crowe’s gate as far as the point where the monument was later erected. There was brain matter with the blood. There was so much blood on the bridge that at first I thought a cow had been killed … I swept in all the blood with a sop of grass or hay to the side of the wall and I found a cap beside the wall with Brud McMahon’s name on it.2

In September 1922, Daly established a committee to raise funds for the erection of a monument at the site.3 Largely as a result of Daly’s efforts, the monument was erected just three years after the killings, making it one of the earliest republican monuments in the country.4 Costing £72, in November 1923 the ornate monument made by Matt Nihil, a republican stone cutter from Hill Road outside Killaloe town, was integrated into the ashlar limestone on the north parapet of bridge.5 As a small child, the late Jack Quigley from Killaloe was at the unveiling. At the age of ninety-two he told me:

I can remember being there with my mother when they were putting that monument on the bridge, ’Twas a big big do … I was very young anyway. We couldn’t get near it anyway. There was trains and all you know and a very big crowd and bands.6

Twelve months later, the county’s newspaper commented that the new monument had become a ‘centre of attraction’ in the town and recorded that ‘almost unceasingly visitors could be seen rapt in devout prayer’ at the site.7 Michael Daly emigrated to New York in August 1923 before its installation.8 Having returned in the 1930s, he took responsibility to ensure that a commemorative wreath adorned the site each year.9

By 1938, the monument was clearly an established feature of remembrance and nineteen pupils from Tuamgraney National School recorded its presence and function as part of their contributions to the Irish Folklore Commission’s School’s Folklore Scheme. If the pupils in Tuamgraney needed any encouragement to write about the Scariff Martyrs, they would get it from their principal, Waterford native and Irish language revivalist, Pádraig Ó Cadhla. Ó Cadhla, who was appointed principal in Tuamgraney in 1919, had befriended Michael ‘Brud’ McMahon due to their shared interest in the Irish language. When his first child Brigid was born, he chose McMahon as her godfather. It was love of the Irish language that nurtured another friendship, which resulted in the choice of the godfather for his second daughter, Maura: Conor Clune. Sadly, both McMahon and Clune were murdered within days of each other in November 1920.10

In 1938, pupils wrote of the common practice and social expectation that when passing the monument on Killaloe Bridge, ‘we should take off our hats and say a few prayers for those poor innocent boys’.11 Thirteen-year-old Brigid MacMahon was assured that; ‘in hundreds of years when we are dead and gone some child who will be passing will ask the story of that stone’.12 Brigid was the niece of Michael ‘Brud’ McMahon. Twelve-year-old James G. Minogue also contributed to the scheme and similarly determined that ‘children in hundreds of years’ time will be inquiring about that stone’.13 Minogue, who became a Roman Catholic priest, passed away in 2018. Seventy-six years after making the above determination, he told me in a recording in Limerick that the memory of the Scariff Martyrs had lost none of its potency.14

Whatever the exact occurrence on the bridge of Killaloe on that November night in 1920, from the moment news broke, the bridge took on a great significance for the people of Killaloe and of east Clare generally. A bridge with a practical and social function has since the night of the tragedy performed a third critical role: that of a landmark of memory, what the French historian, Pierre Norra, called a Lieux de Memoire.

Censoring Memory

While frequent commemorations were held at the bridge of Killaloe, evidence of a shift away from state involvement in republican commemorations emerged in a Dáil Éireann debate on 4 February 1942. Daniel McMenamin, a Fine Gael TD, asked Minister Frank Aiken ‘if the Censor stopped the publication of a paragraph stating that a ceremony attended by members of the Local Defence force had been held about the 17th November last in memory of four men who had been shot on the bridge of Killaloe in 1920’.15 The minister replied in the affirmative but did not elaborate on the reason. While official records indicate that permission had not been granted for participation, it is probable that the censorship related to the government’s move against the IRA.16 Over 1,000 IRA Volunteers were then interned in the Curragh Camp (known to republicans as Tintown), arrested under the Emergency Powers Act, which allowed for internment and executions.17

Despite the attempted censorship of the Killaloe com- ­memoration in 1941, the Clare Champion carried a report on 22 November on a commemoration held on the bridge of Killaloe the previous week. The paper reveals that the commemoration, held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Scariff Martyrs deaths, involved members of the Killaloe and Ballina Local Defence forces.18

The commemorations continued, regardless of censorship. On Easter Sunday 1949, a former IRA commandant of the East Clare Brigade stood on the bridge of Killaloe as he knew there was only one place to mark the occasion. Joe Clancy, a former British soldier and IRA commandant from Kil­kishen was then living in Killaloe and although the large crowd around knew Clancy, their instinct was to move back as he fired three shots into the air. Clancy had just delivered an oration at the site of the monument on Killaloe bridge. Clancy had known the men and spoke to them in the days before their capture and deaths. On that day, the Irish Republic was declared.19

On the bridge that day was John Fahy, who recounted his memories to me in 2019:

In 1949, the same year that the Republic of Ireland was declared, I was on the bridge when Joe Clancy held a commemoration to the four men. I remember him well pulling out a gun and we all scattered. He fired three shots into the air in memory of the Martyrs.20

From the early 1970s, following the death of Mike Daly, another Killaloe native continued the tradition of laying a wreath at the monument on Killaloe Bridge. Maeve Hayes accepted this responsibility from Nellie Grimes who like Mike Daly before her had laid the wreath for many years. Maeve told me how she was once approached by Nellie in the 1960s and asked to ‘put a few flowers on the bridge on the 16th of November’. That request led to a fifty-year commitment that Maeve annually honoured, even arr...

Table of contents

• Mungret College, Limerick – 23 January 1912
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 ‘We should take off our hats’
• 2 ‘For Generations there had been a Demand’
• 3 ‘Suffer, endure and fight’
• 4 ‘He got a slash hook and wanted to go out’
• 5 ‘The Boys Began to Fire’ Taking the War to the Crown
• 6 ‘Praying Hard that their Houses Wouldn’t be Burned’
• 7 ‘Sold and Traced’
• 8 ‘Without Clergy, Judge or Jury’
• 9 ‘If you were at their Funeral’
• 10 ‘The Day Will Come’
• 11 ‘Murder is Murder’
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• About the Publisher