Longford history and the Forgotten Men of the Irish Revolution

One hundred years - on January 27, 1926 - eleven IRA men disembarked from the Glasgow ferry at Dublin’s North Wall. Two days earlier, the men were released from Peterhead Jail in north-east Scotland following negotiations between the British and Irish Free State governments.

The circumstances of their incarceration can be traced back to events four years earlier following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. After the Treaty was signed in December 1921, the IRA were breaking up into pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions in early 1922 and Michael Collins was anxious to prevent division within the IRA and enable both sides to unite.

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To do this, Collins approved a secret campaign of violence against the newly established six-county state of Northern Ireland using the IRA to destabilise the northern state but also bringing both pro Treaty and anti-Treaty Pro IRA factions to unite around a cause thus preventing a split in the republican ranks.

The establishment of an IRA Ulster Northern Command under the leadership of Frank Aiken, with Longford’s Sean MacEoin as his deputy, resulted in the initiation of a border campaign from January to June 1922 against crown forces by both factions.

Among the more serious operations was a co-ordinated kidnap raid of prominent unionists organised by the Northern Command in response to the threatened execution of republican prisoners at Derry Jail. These raids on the night of 7-8 February involved the deployment of IRA units from Longford, Leitrim and Armagh into Fermanagh and Tyrone. While the raids proved successful in the Tyrone area, where the IRA kidnapped twenty-one local unionists, the IRA raiders in Fermanagh were not successful.

A speedy deployment of RUC B Special forces resulted in the capture of a group of IRA men including Frank Reilly from Ballinamuck, William Reilly from Longford town and Joe Lee from Killoe. The Longford men were part of a thirteen-man raiding party from the IRA’s Midlands Division under the command of Tipperary native Commandant Sean McCurtain, a friend of Sean MacEoin who was directing the border campaign for Collins. While in the midlands, MacCurtain directed operations from Stafford’s Hotel in Longford which MacEoin’s used as his base in 1922.

MacEoin himself also led a separate raiding party across the border that night and kidnapped prominent Unionist Ivan Carson before escaping across the border into Co. Cavan.

At their trial in Enniskillen on March 13, 1922, all the defendants refused to recognise the court, and asserted that their actions were politically motivated. The court heard that the men were travelling in several cars and were found in possession of arms and explosives when stopped by the police. Before sentencing the defendants to ten-year prison terms, Justice Wilson rejected the pleas that their actions were politically motivated adding that ‘a crime was a crime whether it was committed by a politician, a saint or a butter merchant’.

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After their convictions, the men were brought to Derry jail but were transferred to Peterhead Prison in north-east Scotland in August 1922. By then the Irish civil war was raging in the newly established Irish Free State which saw the deaths of nearly 1,500 people including many prominent leaders from both the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty sides including Michael Collins, Harry Boland, Arthur Griffith and Liam Mellows.

Following the end of the civil war in May 1923, anti-Treaty prisoners were eventually released by the Free State government but IRA men who were jailed in Northern Ireland, including the Peterhead prisoners remained incarcerated. Opened in 1888, Peterhead Prison was Scotland’s only convict prison designed for hard labour. Notorious for its harsh conditions, prisoners laboured in a nearby granite quarry and endured overcrowded, freezing cells and minimal sanitation. Each day, the prisoners were brought between the prison and the quarry where they broke stones with seven- and fourteen-pound hammers.

Recalling the conditions, Leitrim republican Berney Sweeney stated that ‘no one could appreciate how we were treated there. When our comrades would be taken out for a beating, as happened frequently, we would not recognise them when they would return’.

From the outset, the issue of the Peterhead prisoners was raised in discussions between the Free State and the Northern Ireland governments. When one of the prisoners Sean McCurtain was elected to the Dail to represent the people of Tipperary in August 1923, the government was urged to have the prisoners released but to no avail. In December 1923, President of the Executive Council W.T. Cosgrove told the Dail that ‘representations had been made on several occasions regarding the release of Mr McCurtain, but so far, I regret to say, they have not met with success’. Despite the release of Eamon de Valera as the last anti-Treaty prisoner jailed in the Free State in 1924, the Peterhead men remained in jail in Scotland under the harshest of conditions.

Eventually the release of the prisoners came about because of a tripartite agreement on December 3 1925 between the British, Irish and Northern governments following the report of the Boundary Commission. The Report of the Commission, on which nationalist hopes for a readjustment of the Border rested, revealed that little change to the Border would happen which was a major diplomatic defeat for the Free State Government. James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland conceded to defer any decision on prisoner release to the British who ordered the release of some 33 prisoners, among them the ‘Peterhead men’ on 25 January 1926.

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During their four years of their imprisonment, as these young men endured a daily regime of hard labour under the harshest of prison conditions, life at home in Ireland returned to normal. While Sean McCurtain received a huge reception on his arrival in Nenagh, no public celebrations marked the return of the Longford men or their comrades in nearby Leitrim.

News of their release, their sacrifice and long prison terms scarcely merited any footnote in newspaper coverage in the period. Sadly, two of the Peterhead prisoners, John Kiernan from Newtowngore in Co Leitrim and Dubliner Sean Flood died in the years following their release. Two of the Peterhead men, Ballinamuck's Frank Reilly and Joe Reynolds from Kiltubrid in Co Leitrim emigrated to the USA in search of a new life. One hundred years after their release, perhaps the time has come to remember the forgotten men of the Irish Revolution.