Sergeant O’Bryan was as fine a type of the R.I.C. as you would meet in half a dozen baronies: of magnificent physique, great courage, full of tact, and with the perfect manners of a true Irishman.
At the end of 1918 O’Bryan found himself sergeant in charge of Cloghleagh Barracks, a comfortable thatched house close to the shores of Lough Moyra, and distant about four miles from Ballybor.
While at Cloghleagh his principal work consisted of trying to put down the making of poteen, which was carried on extensively by the inhabitants of two small islands at the south end of the lake; otherwise the sergeant was on the best of terms with all the people of the district, who often appealed to him for advice and help. And as O’Bryan was a keen fisherman, he often managed to combine business with sport while out in the police boat.
Soon after Blake became D.I. at Ballybor, orders were received from the County Inspector to evacuate Cloghleagh Barracks, and 177for O’Bryan and his men to proceed to Ballybor Barracks. As the country round Cloghleagh had as yet shown no hostility towards the police, and as it was hard to get a house in any town, O’Bryan asked and obtained leave for his young wife and family to remain on at Cloghleagh Barracks; and here, not long after the sergeant had gone, the youngest O’Bryan was born.
Two days afterwards, on a wet winter’s evening, there came a knock at the barracks door, and when Mrs O’Bryan asked who was there, a man’s voice bade her open in the name of the I.R.A. Obeying, she found two masked men, who covered her with revolvers, and told her they would give her five minutes to clear out of the barracks before they set it on fire.
Mrs O’Bryan had seven children, the eldest about ten years and the youngest two days old, most of whom were in bed by this time. As fast as she could she roused and dressed the children; but the five minutes soon passed, and the men entered and bundled the whole family, some of the children only half clothed, out into the wet and cold of a winter’s night.
Outside Mrs O’Bryan found a large party of Ballybor shop-boys, some of them wearing black masks, led by four strange gunmen. This party had arrived in Cloghleagh about an hour before, and had at once proceeded to picket all roads leading to and from the barracks, and every unfortunate countryman or woman they met making their way along the 178roads was at once seized by the pickets, taken to the barrack-yard, and there placed face inwards against the wall with their hands on top of their heads.
As soon as the O’Bryan family had been hustled into the road, the gunmen threw paraffin and petrol on the thatch of the barracks, set it alight, and in a very short time the building was a charred ruin. They then mounted their bicycles and rode off into the night, leaving the unfortunate O’Bryans to shift for themselves.
Leaving her family huddled under a hedge, the mother tried to get into two neighbouring houses; but the blighting curse of the I.R.A. was on her and hers, and not a house would even open its door, let alone take them in. In the end she saw that it was hopeless, and returning to her children, did her best to keep them warm with her own body and the few blankets she had managed to bring out of the barracks. And here they spent the night like the beasts of the fields.
Next morning some countryman, braver than the rest, brought word to the Ballybor Barracks of the burning at Cloghleagh, and Sergeant O’Bryan arrived on the scene to find his wife and family perished and starving. Such is the mercy of the I.R.A. for the little children of the R.I.C.
O’Bryan took his family back to Ballybor Barracks, where they were fed and warmed; but in Ireland nowadays a police barracks is no place for little children and women, and 179before night they must leave. In vain the sergeant tried to find lodgings; he might as well have tried to swim the Atlantic. Every door was slammed in his face directly he made his appeal. But the good Samaritan is not yet extinct in Ireland, and at last the sergeant found a refuge for his family in the empty gardener’s lodge of Ballybor House.
While being turned out of Cloghleagh Barracks, Mrs O’Bryan had recognised two of the incendiaries, who had taken their masks off, as two prominent Sinn Fein shop-boys of Ballybor, afterwards telling her husband their names—Martin Walsh and Peter Lynch—and the sergeant never forgot them.
On a glorious June day Blake was leaning over the parapet of the lower bridge crossing the Owenmore river in Ballybor, watching the fishermen hauling in a net full of silvery grilse, and wishing that he could accept an invitation to fish at Ardcumber. After a time his eye wandered to a fleet of boats below the bridge, some anchored, while others were attached to mooring buoys. From force of habit he started to count them, and on finding that there were no less than thirty-seven, he began to make out their total carrying capacity, which roughly came to the high figure of three hundred.
On the following Sunday he happened to be crossing the same bridge at about ten in the morning, and stopped to look at three boats, packed with young men, a few carrying fishing-rods, starting off down the river. The fishing-rods were there right enough, but something 180seemed wrong; the men looked too purposeful, and, moreover, eight or nine young men in a boat with a couple of rods is an unusual sight.
Blake watched the boats disappearing fast down the river, and wondered what would be the right word to substitute for fishing. After a while he realised that there was not a boat left on the river, and, further, that if all the boats had carried as many passengers as the three he had just seen start, over three hundred young men from Ballybor had gone a-fishing that Sunday morning, the majority of whom, if not all of them, were shop-boys, the most dangerous element in the town.
The barracks commanded a good view of the reach of the river where the boats were usually moored, and next Sunday at an early hour Blake told off Sergeant O’Bryan with a pair of field-glasses to report how many boats and how many men went out a-fishing. At eleven o’clock the sergeant reported that, as usual, all the thirty-seven boats had started, carrying two hundred and fifty young men, and that among them he had recognised most of the prominent Sinn Fein shop-boys of the town. But he did not add that he had seen Walsh and Lynch.
Five miles below Ballybor the Owenmore river, from being roughly two hundred yards wide, suddenly becomes an inland sea, with a width of over three miles and a length of a mile. Between this inland water and the open sea runs a long narrow range of sand-hills, 181commonly known as Seal Island, nearly three miles long and with an average width of four hundred yards.
Blake came to the conclusion that the fishing expeditions every Sunday must be connected with this lonely island; but except for drilling—and sand-dunes did not seem a suitable place for a parade—he could think of nothing to which this island would lend itself. Moreover, he knew that if he tried to find out what was going on by observing from the mainland, he would be spotted and the alarm given, and that if he tried to approach the island in a boat from the seaside the fishermen from Dooncarra would give him away.
In the end it was settled to wait until the following Sunday, when Sergeant O’Bryan made his way across country before daylight and hid himself in the tower of an old abbey on the shore of the inland sea, from which the greater part of Seal Island was visible. On the Sunday night he returned to barracks, and reported that the “fishermen” had all landed at the little pier on the south side of the island, left a small guard over the boats, and made their way into the sand-hills, where they were hidden from his view. Some time afterwards, muffled intermittent rifle-fire started, and continued at intervals for several hours, after which the “fishermen” returned to their boats, and rowed back leisurely to Ballybor on the flood tide.
But before Blake could tackle the mystery of Seal Island, he had to turn his attention 182to a flying column of the I.R.A. which was reported to be making its way towards Ballybor. On the Sunday evening when O’Bryan returned from the old abbey, word was brought in by a Loyalist that the flying column had been seen that day in the Ballyrick mountains, and had taken up its quarters in the empty house of Mr Padraig O’Faherty, member of Dail Eireann for the Ballybor country, who had been for some time past an unwilling guest of the British Government somewhere in England.
Padraig O’Faherty’s house was (advisably was) situated in the middle of a desolate valley in the mountains twenty miles from Ballyrick and the same distance from Ballybor, and could only be approached by a bog road, which winds through mountains and moors without passing a single human habitation for the last eight miles. Moreover, there was not a tree within fifteen miles of the house, so that any attempt at surprise, or even attack, during the day-time was out of the question. At the first sight of a Crossley—and they had a three-mile view of the road both ways from the house—the flying column would simply dissolve into the mountains, probably to reappear the next day attacking a police barrack fifty miles the other side of Ballybor. A good example of the kind of problem the R.I.C. has to solve daily in the wild parts of the west.
That night Blake left Ballybor with an advance-guard of police on bicycles, and making a detour of the town, timed himself to 183arrive at O’Faherty’s house just before daylight, having arranged that Jones should follow in the Crossleys with his platoon of Blankshires and as many police as could be spared.
Arriving too soon, they hid their bicycles in some high heather near the road, and as soon as it was light enough took up positions at different points round the house, so that every avenue of escape would be swept by their rifle-fire, and waited for the main body to arrive.
As the sky became light, smoke could be seen rising from some of the chimneys, a suspicious sign at that hour of the morning, and s............