1916 (32 page)

In that he took part in an armed rebellion and in waging war against His Majesty the King, such act being prejudicial to the Defence of the Realm and being done with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy.
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When proceedings got underway he found himself faced with a raft of evidence presented by the policemen and soldiers who had been involved in the gun battle – none of which, however connected Kent to the death of Head Constable Rowe or proved that he had even fired a single shot. Unrepresented by counsel he asked only nine questions in cross-examination, offered a mere seventy one words in a rebuttal statement, and was not permitted to call witnesses to speak on his behalf.

It was also clear that none of the Kent brothers had been involved in what by any stretch of the imagination could be called an armed rebellion. They had neither heard of nor seen the Proclamation of the Republic, and they were certainly not waging a war or assisting the enemy (in this case Germany). In fact the events of Easter Week had completely passed them by. By the time they were arrested Pearse had surrendered in Dublin and MacCurtain had negotiated the agreement in Cork. Therefore if the Kents were ‘guilty’ of anything it was nothing more than following MacNeill’s order of 19 April (cited above) to prevent themselves from being forcibly disarmed – which in this context might have amounted at most to causing an affray or engaging in violent disorder. Accordingly, the charge as presented against Thomas Kent made no sense whatever, especially given that his brother William was acquitted and both of them had been in the same place at the same time in exactly the same circumstances. This begs
the question why one was found guilty and one was not – and the answer is obvious.

In the summer of 1915 Thomas Kent had become closely involved with Terrence MacSwiney in arranging public meetings to attract new Volunteers. He was also well known to the RIC, having disrupted a number of British army recruitment meetings, and by Easter 1916 he had become a commandant in the Galtee Battalion. Aged fifty one, he was sentenced to death on 4 May 1916, not for his actions at Bawnard, because there is no evidence in his court martial documentation to suggest that he did anything except surrender. He was sentenced to death because of who he was and because of the leadership position he held within the Volunteer movement. In Dublin General Maxwell wanted to make an example of the Volunteer leadership and Thomas Kent was another convenient scapegoat.
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He paid for Maxwell’s policy with his life, but the charges against him remain unproven. Thomas Kent was not guilty as charged at his court martial and the documentary evidence that survives leaves this matter in no doubt whatsoever.

I
NCARCERATION

The death of Thomas Kent was not the end of the matter. While he was being court martialled large numbers of Volunteers were being rounded up and also locked behind bars in the Detention Barracks. In fact most of them were woken from their sleep on the morning of 9 May by the volley of shots that terminated Kent’s life. Captain Michael Leahy, the officer commanding the Cobh Company, later recalled that in an effort to find out where he and other officers from his unit had hidden their weapons:

We were told the same fate [as Kent’s] would be ours. Another argument that was used to get us to give up our rifles was telling us that the Cork men had given up theirs and that none of them had been arrested. Why should we hold out? … [However] we continued to refuse to give any information.
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In fact Crown forces had been busy arresting Volunteers all over Cork city and county since 2 May, and although MacCurtain remained at large he was powerless to intervene. He later recalled the anguish of seeing his fellow Volunteers being taken into custody and not being able to do anything about it:

It was a wretched business that week to be looking at them and hundreds of boys arrested by them. Often I said to myself that it was a great pity that I myself had not been kept in jail when I was there instead of looking at those fine men tied up by them and being brought from every part of the country.
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Eventually MacCurtain was also apprehended when, at 7.15pm on the evening of 11 May, the RIC raided his home at 40 Thomas Davis Street and re-arrested him:

Siobhan, my wife’s sister, started to cry when I was leaving the house but Eilís (my wife) did not say a word. She did not want to put any trouble on me along with what I had already and she told me to have courage. This was a great help to me. I kissed Siobhan and Síle and Tomas Óg who was in the cot and went with the peelers … I was put in the Detention Barracks … I was searched and everything I had was taken from me except for the copy of the
Imitation of Christ
that I had in English, it was a very small little book and a great comfort to me – I was put into the cell … Eilís gave me a glass of milk before I left the house and I was not hungry … After all the work I was very tired … I put the board on the floor of my cell and went to sleep.
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The following morning he got his first real taste of prison life when a bell awoke him at 6am in order that he and the other prisoners could wash themselves before breakfast and commencement of the daily routine:

I was given a mug of some stuff at 8 o’clock and a piece of bread – I think the drink was a mixture of chocolate and cocoa – immediately I had that breakfast eaten a solder came to the door to me and said ‘Do not be afraid of anyone here but raise your head and look them between the two eyes.’ That encouraged me and lifted the spirit in me and I did so … We were all let out in the air from 11 to 12 o’clock and a guard of soldiers around us. We would be walking around after one another – about six feet apart and we would not be allowed to say a word to one another. We got a dinner which was not too bad altogether and what we got for breakfast we got again in the evening for supper. We had another ‘in the air’ between four and five o’clock … it was in the yard in which we used to walk that Tomás Ceannt was buried after he was shot.
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By now 140 members of the Cork Brigade were incarcerated in the Detention Barracks where they remained in complete ignorance of their fate for three weeks.

Then, on the evening of 21 May, they were told to be ‘ready for road’ the following morning. At 7.30am the Volunteers of the Cork Brigade,
together with men from other units who had been locked up in Cork, were all handcuffed together in pairs and marched off under military escort to the Great Southern and Western Railway station on the Lower Glanmire Road. They whistled and sang as they marched down Military Hill, through St Luke’s Cross, and down Grattan Hill to the station where a large crowd of terrified relatives and friends had gathered. Amid chaotic scenes of anguish and distress the military escort would not permit any contact between the Volunteers and their families and instead herded the captives on board a train bound for Dublin where they were detained in Richmond Barracks.

At this stage fifteen rebel leaders had been executed and a public outcry had begun to reverberate throughout the country. Afraid of alienating the nationalist population of Ireland and aware of pubic opinion in America, the British government decided to stop the executions and intern the rebels in Britain instead. MacCurtain and many of the men under his command left Richmond Barracks on 1 June and, as a sign of the shift in public opinion that was then taking place, they were cheered as they marched through the streets of Dublin to board a cattle ship at the North Wall that would take them into exile.

Upon arrival in Britain they were divided into two groups – one being sent to Wakefield Detention Barracks and the other to Knutsford prison. Later that month MacCurtain, MacSwiney and a number of other Cork Volunteers from both locations were transferred to an interment camp in north Wales at a place called Frongoch.
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It was here, in a rat-infested former distillery, which until recently had been used to house German prisoners of war, that the Irish internees established their ‘university of revolution’, with classes soon commencing in Irish history, language and culture. More importantly, it was here that the Volunteers from the Cork Brigade came together with people like Michael Collins, and began a detailed analysis of the failure of the rebellion.

On 11 July MacCurtain was transferred to Reading gaol, where he remained haunted by what had happened and by the perception of his own personal failure. After many long, lonely hours of deliberation he finally reached a conclusion and confided it to his diary:

it is nearly five months ago now and it is many a turn I have had since, and my judgement in the matter is that we could not have done otherwise than we did.
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Nevertheless, the failure of the Cork Brigade of Irish Volunteers to take part in the Easter Rising continued to be the cause of much concern at local and national level. Donal Óg O’Callagahan’s statement that the brigade had been led by ‘three incompetent men in a state of blue funk’ represented the view of a militant minority in Cork, while a general concern remained amongst the surviving leaders of both the IRB and Irish Volunteers.
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Accordingly, after the Volunteers returned to Ireland in 1917, MacCurtain and other senior brigade officers requested Volunteer headquarters to hold an inquiry into their activities during Easter Week.
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A court of inquiry consisting of Cathal Brugha, Diarmuid Lynch and Con Collins convened in Cork and interviewed MacCurtain and other Volunteer officers throughout the city and county. The IRB also held its own inquiry and both found that no blame was attributable to the Cork Brigade, as ‘it was impossible for them to do anything in the circumstances’.
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E
VALUATION OF THE BRIGADE COMMANDER

Taken in the context of the time, cognisant of the conflicting orders he received, and recognising the parallel chains of command within which he was forced to operate, it is our firm view that both MacCurtain’s own personal evaluation of his leadership and the findings of the two inquiries are correct. In his capacity as commander of the Cork Brigade of Volunteers, MacCurtain could not, and should not, have done anything other than what he did.

The fact that MacCurtain received nine different and conflicting orders within three weeks was intolerable and a situation within which no competent military commander could have been expected to operate successfully.

Furthermore, the absence of a formal written military operational order proved critical. MacCurtain had no clear mission statement. There was no definable higher commander’s intent and no meaningful planning guidance was offered. There was no clear identifiable concept of operations, no serious logistics planning had been undertaken, and the members of the Cork Brigade did not possess sufficient arms and ammunition to mount any meaningful military operations. Furthermore, there was no reserve of arms, ammunition, or equipment other than what might have been landed from the
Aud
, but there was no advance knowledge of whether these stocks were even compatible with the rifles they already possessed.

Kept in abject ignorance of the IRB’s real intentions until the very last moment, had MacCurtain chosen to commit his brigade against a credible, competent and far superior military force it is distinctly possible that neither he nor many of his colleagues would have survived – and those who did would in all probability have been promptly executed. The fate of Thomas Kent, for what would have amounted to a significantly lesser offence, adequately proves this point.

Instead, by making a realistic evaluation of the circumstances within which he found himself, recognising his military limitations, and identifying the capability of his enemy, MacCurtain conducted a proper military estimate of the situation and then made the correct military decision. By having the self-confidence to make that hard choice he displayed solid leadership and sound judgment, and preserved his force intact and available for future operations.

M
AIN LESSONS LEARNED

The main lesson that Tomás MacCurtain learned from his experience at Easter 1916 was that secret societies were no longer relevant in the quest for Irish freedom. The IRB had deceived and manipulated the Volunteer movement in order to push that quest in a particular direction, which ultimately had probably more to do with making a valiant blood-sacrifice than waging a competent military campaign with some prospect of success.