Clashmealcon Caves: Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry

Abstract

Clashmealcon Caves:Civil War History and Memory under Siege in North Kerry Gavin Foster (bio) In Dunfort's cave they took their stand, the last in Ireland's rights,Three days and nights with rapid fire they nobly held the fight,Till worn out without relief, they did at length give o'erAnd they gave their lives for Ireland down by the Shannon shore.1 The Irish Civil War of 1922–23 was a conflict of great consequence both for the national revolution that it terminated and for the new state that it inaugurated. The deadly divisions that appeared within Ireland's independence movement over the Treaty with Britain touched on profound questions concerning the principles and ideals of the recent revolution. Yet in the ensuing "war of friends" the opposing sides waged an often brutal but mismatched and highly localized fight inflected by animosities and allegiances from the recent revolution as well as from older divisions and frictions in Irish society. In the patchy geography of mostly low-level rural violence, no part of the country stands out more than County Kerry, where the IRA guerrilla war and the Irish Free State counterinsurgency were waged "more extensively and bitterly … than anywhere."2 Kerry is widely associated with the worst horrors of the Civil War, frequently summed up in one word: Ballyseedy, the site of a March 1923 massacre of eight republicans by their Free State captors. The first and largest [End Page 250] of several closely timed reprisals for an IRA trap-mine at Knocknagashel, Ballyseedy was the crescendo of a broader pattern of brutal state violence in the infamous Kerry command, the timing and scale of which was shaped by the intensity and duration of IRA resistance in the field. While Ballyseedy shocked and demoralized republicans in Kerry, it did not quite spell the end of the IRA's weakening campaign there. Following the "last major [civil-war] action" in Kerry in early April at Derrynafeena on the Iveragh Peninsula, the effective collapse of the republican campaign came a little over a month after Ballyseedy at a place on the north Kerry coast called Clashmealcon.3 The "siege at Clashmealcon caves" in mid-April 1923 would prove to be the "last, epic struggle" of the local republican resistance, followed a few weeks later by the decision of the anti-Treaty IRA leadership to abandon its armed campaign.4 Over the course of this small-scale but dramatic three-day siege three IRA Volunteers and two National Army soldiers lost their lives, with the execution of three surviving republicans occurring shortly afterward. The events of the siege were widely reported and became "seared deep in the folk memory of County Kerry" and the republican movement beyond.5 Refracting key dynamics of civil-war violence in Kerry, and associated with an extensive tradition of remembrance, the siege at Clashmealcon and its fraught memory over the last century invite deeper micro-historical attention. As with other controversial killings by Free State forces in County Kerry, the canonical account of the "last stand"6 of the small flying column led by Timothy "Aero" Lyons was provided by the republican activist, movement historian, and writer Dorothy Macardle in her often-reprinted 1924 booklet Tragedies of Kerry.7 Macardle's [End Page 251] short but evocative narratives of republican martyrdom at Clashmealcon, Ballyseedy, and other sites of state violence in Kerry have functioned as canonical texts on which most retellings rely heavily, though with Macardle's accounts often abridged, embellished, or garbled. Commemorative publications, local histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, and more recently websites centered on Irish republican history and politics often reproduce lines from Macardle's accounts verbatim and usually without citation. Rather than simple plagiarism, this imitative tendency suggests a mnemonic dynamic within the republican tradition whereby later sources chronicling sacrifices in the republican cause adhere closely to the original master account, repeating specific phrases word-for-word in an almost scriptural manner. Yet because she did not personally witness these harrowing incidents in Kerry and was an "outsider" from Dundalk in the east, Macardle inevitably got a few details wrong, a matter discussed below.8 Given her...