Belfast pogroms – did Michael Collins betray the North's Catholics?

April 20 2013 04:01 AM

In an engaging search for his roots, Kieran Glennon finds his family history inextricably entwined in a national revolution and a sectarian struggle in Belfast, bringing him into murkier waters than he might have expected and raising as many questions for him as it settles.

Tom Glennon, his grandfather, joined the IRA in Belfast as a teenager in 1920 and rose rapidly in the admittedly depleted ranks. Captured by the British before the Truce, he escaped from internment in the Curragh in a refuse lorry, subsequently took the pro-Treaty side, joined the newly formed National Army with the rank of Colonel, fought in a bitter Civil War in Donegal and Kerry, stayed on to earn a pension before emigrating to Australia, married there and returned to Ireland where he lived out his life as a storeman and closed the book on his military and revolutionary activities.

A strange feature is his concealment from his infant son that the mother he thought had died in childbirth in Australia had survived to return to Ireland and was buried in Co Clare. One has to wonder why.

The story of the pre-Truce IRA in the North, and the dilemmas faced by those presented with the bitter choices of the Treaty (or the versions of the Treaty presented by protagonists in the South) is an under-researched field, and this account does not add much to the pioneering work of McDermott and Lynch. But he does illuminate the basis on which most of the Northern activists went with Collins, mainly on his assurance that they would be looked after and that the terms of the Treaty could be set aside.

On this account, Collins is even more duplicitous than most other accounts of the period would allow – prepared to breach the Treaty to supply arms to fighters in the North, as a defence against attacks on Catholics, indeed, but also to preserve unity in the South and divert dissidents by presenting them with a common enemy in the North, and also to keep the Northern Division on-side in the Treaty debate and prevent their joining the Irregulars.

In Glennon's account there is more than a hint of betrayal in this and in Aiken's failure to support the Belfast men, and also an eerie foreshadowing of the actions of some Fianna Fáil ministers in 1969.

His recounting of the savage sectarian conflict commonly known as the Belfast pogrom records a less one-sided aggression than contemporary accounts, or indeed the Catholic race-memory. It is a clear indication of the deep scars that this terrible period left on the Catholic psyche, and a prime reason for the recall and legitimisation of the Provos when that community again came under attack in 1969.

Kieran Glennon does his best to rescue his grandfather from a history he had himself preferred to forget, and he faces up honestly to the possibility that not everything in war, especially civil war, is idealistic and pure.

Where was Grandpa, for example, when three former colleagues were executed in Doe Castle, and was he about at Ballyseedy and other outrages in Kerry? The big question is why he clammed-up, particularly about his military career, under which many old soldiers in many wars wish to draw a line – but also about the domestic circumstances of the death of a young wife.

Kevin Glennon has rescued much family history in an act of piety, but he has also recalled a particularly vicious period in Belfast that has left its mark on the city, and on the sense of abandonment by the South of the Northern Catholic and nationalist community which has not gone away – in either sense, and the continuing inability of the Southern polity either to come to terms with the problem, or to detach fully from it. This is a book that shines a light into quite a few dark corners.