The Civil War in Kerry was more bitter, divisive and prolonged than most of the rest of the country. It was inevitable, therefore, that those divisions would come to a head during election campaigns and often spilled over into violence.
In this extract from my book, From Bullets to Ballots: Politics and Electioneering in Post-Civil War Kerry, 1923-33, I look at some of the violence which erupted in Kerry during the two general elections of 1927
During an address by Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Kerry, Fionán Lynch, in Cahersiveen shortly before the June 1927 general election, there were shouts of ‘Up the Republic’ and Gardaí were forced to baton charge the ‘warring sections.’
In Ballymacelligott, the local creamery manager, John Byrne, a close ally of Fianna Fáil TD, Tom McEllistrim, was tried for assaulting one of his suppliers on the morning of polling: he is alleged to have accused his supplier of planning to ‘vote for King George to-day.’ The judge suggested that Byrne was trying to make himself the ‘Mussolini of Ballymacelligott.’
Meanwhile, in the days before the June poll, a Fianna Fáil organiser who had been dispatched to Kerry for the campaign was assaulted on two occasions in Dingle and Tralee. P.J. Tuohy, who was also General Secretary of the Irish Fisherman’s Association, claimed that the former incident had been witnessed by Austin Stack TD and that subsequently, in the Central Hotel in Tralee, he was beaten by the same man, and five others, in the hotel foyer. Tuohy was bitten on the ear and required stitches to his nose.
When the matter came before the District Court, it was alleged that Fianna Fáil had published a pamphlet detailing the injuries Tuohy had sustained and the State Solicitor suggested the legal action was motivated by ‘the interests of a political organisation.’ The motivation for the assaults were not clear. However, a political charge was laid at the door of the Minister for Fisheries, Fionán Lynch who, it was alleged, was trying to have Tuohy removed from his role as a spokesperson for fishermen because of ‘criticism of his department.’
A Fianna Fáil meeting in Knocknagoshel in September 1927, just a few days before polling, descended into chaos. It was perhaps no coincidence that the party was holding its election rally just a short distance from where the Knocknagoshel trip mine incident had claimed the lives of five Free State soldiers in March 1923.
The speakers included P.J. Touhy, the Fianna Fáil organiser from Dublin who had been assaulted in a Tralee hotel during the June campaign, John Murphy, a former MP for Kerry, and Eamon Horan, a former brigadier-general in the National Army and a candidate for the Clann Éireann party in the June 1927 election. Clann Éireann has just been disbanded and had declared its support for Fianna Fáil.
From the moment the meeting opened, the local Garda superintendent, J.J. McNulty, who brandished his gun, ‘kept up a running stream of interruptions and heckling directed towards the speakers’ in an attempt to provoke a breach of the peace.
Eamon Horan launched a verbal attack on the Garda Commissioner, Eoin O’Duffy and said that the gardaí, as ‘renegades of the State’ deserved ‘the same fate as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries.’
Following further exchanges, Horan, Tuohy and Murphy were arrested: Horan was charged with treason under the new Public Safety Act (1927) – the first such application of the legislation in Kerry – while Murphy and Tuohy were accused of conspiracy. The cases against all three foundered.
The Senate heard calls for a ‘censure’ of the Executive the way the case was prosecuted as it proved the government could ‘do what it liked’ under the provisions of the Public Safety Act.
“From Bullets to Ballots: Politics and Electioneering in Post-Civil War Kerry, 1923-33” is available in all good bookshops and from UCD Press at Title Detail: From Bullets To Ballots by Owen O’Shea
