Ballymacandy: The Story of a Kerry Ambush

by Owen O'Shea

Overview

On 1 June 1921, at the height of Ireland’s War of Independence, a cycling patrol of members of the RIC was ambushed by members of the IRA at Ballymacandy, between Milltown and Castlemaine in County Kerry. After an hour of fighting, four police officers lay dead and another died a day later, among them a father of nine children.

The group of IRA assailants included some of the most high-profile figures in Ireland’s ‘Tan War,’ men like Dan Keating, Jack Flynn, Dan Mulvihill, Billy Myles, and Johnny Connor, but also lesser-known figures, including members of the local Cumann na mBan. Their actions were condemned from the pulpit and an official enquiry tried to discredit the local doctor who tended to the dying men.

This book comes on the centenary of an ambush that continues to resonate in its community and in a county in which the battle with Crown forces was more virulent and violent than most. Drawing on newly published witness statements and previously unpublished official records, Ballymacandy details what happened to the five men who died and those who led the attack against them, and sets the incident against the backdrop of the wider revolutionary struggle in the county.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785373879
Publisher:	Irish Academic Press
Publication date:	06/07/2021
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.45(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Owen O’Shea, from Milltown, Co. Kerry, is a historian and author of several books on history and politics in his native county. A former press adviser to the Labour Party and a journalist for many years, he is the author of Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry’s Political Dynasties (2011) and co-author of A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium (Merrion Press, 2018). He was co-editor of a history of Kerry and the Easter Rising in 2016. He currently works as Media, Communications and Customer Relations Officer with Kerry County Council and is an Irish Research Council-funded PhD student at University College Dublin, researching electioneering and politics in Kerry in the decade after the Civil War.

Table of Contents

Foreword Dr Mary McAuliffe vii

Preface 1

Prologue - Salve Regina 5

1 'A rough and dangerous task' 13

2 'We were nearly stone mad…half crazy' 24

3 'Take up the cudgel…to remedy this unfortunate village' 37

4 'Fairyland' 52

5 'Our state gets worse' 64

6 'The Hut' 72

7 'We rode on…carrying our revolvers in our hands' 81

8 'He would not turn off his road for any Shinner' 98

9 'Blood was slowly trickling from his left ear' 112

10 'Guilty of wilful murder' 127

11 'This ambush ought not to have occurred' 140

12 'What Dev did in Boland's Mills, Jack Flynn did at Ballymacandy' 155

13 'Honesty is the best of policy' 166

Postscript - "They are the fellows that put us here' 182

Appendix I List of participants in the Ballymacandy Ambush, 1 June 1921 188

Appendix II Members of Milltown District Council of Cumann na mBan, July 1921 194

Acknowledgements 196

Endnotes 199

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

'Colourful details help to lift Owen O’Shea’s reconstruction of the Ballymacandy gunfight well above your average local history ... O’Shea does a fine job of uncovering the story’s lesser-known tangents ... Meticulously researched and soberly written.' —Sunday Business Post

'This is local history at its best: clearly written and cliché free, painstakingly researched, a useful index, a really clear map, interesting photos and placing the ambush in the context of Irish history at the time and its aftermath.' —Books Ireland

From the Publisher