AN ARCHIVE PAGE from this newspaper had a transforming effect on a certain elderly reader shortly before her death in March 2008, writes DONAL MCMAHON
My mother’s father, Thomas Enright, died when she was just over 15 months old. An only child, she then lost her mother when she was 10. She grew up with cousins on her mother’s side in Listowel, Co Kerry, and was sent to boarding school in Sligo.
When she asked about her father, all she could find out was that he had been shot during the Troubles. She eventually married and had a family who, in turn, grew up ignorant about their grandfather. Life’s busy years passed until my mother reached her 80s and the ever-nearing prospect of life’s end. She was left still with all the old unanswered questions about her father. She knew he had served with the British army in the first World War but after that there was a blank. (I discovered after her death that in fact he had served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force.) Had he been shot because he had joined the Black and Tans, she wondered for the umpteenth time.
Faced for all her growing years with alarmed looks and embarrassed silence, she had learned not to ask any more awkward questions. It looked like she would carry her ignorance to the grave.
One day in the office, on a whim, I keyed my grandfather’s name into the search-box for the archives of this newspaper, just to see whether something might turn up. And yes, four references appeared, three for Friday, December 16th, 1921, and one for the following day. Thomas Enright, RIC, had been shot dead in Kilmallock on Wednesday, December 14th, 1921. This took place at a turning point in Irish history. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had been signed eight days previously and was to be ratified by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the English parliament two days later on December 16th, the day the sergeant’s remains were being taken by train from Limerick back to his native Listowel. The News Summary (p.4), mentions, in succession, the debate in the English parliament, Sir James Craig’s letter to Lloyd George “declining to enter the Irish Free State”, the ongoing discussions in the Dáil, and “A Policeman was killed and another wounded by armed men in Kilmallock on Wednesday night”.
I had, of course, passed on to my mother the benefits of my reading of such researchers on the RIC as Jim Herlihy and Richard Abbott, but I knew that reading a page from the newspaper of the time would make a far greater impression than any secondary sources. I brought her out an enlarged, laminated copy of page 5 of the issue for December 16th, drawing her attention to the section entitled “Policeman Murdered” in the middle of reports of the ongoing peace talks in Dublin and London.
And so, one Sunday in mid-February 2008, this frail 87-year-old set to reading out loud, word by slow word with the aid of a magnifying glass, the account of the shooting dead of her father when she was a baby: “A shocking outrage was committed at Kilmallock, Co Limerick, on Wednesday evening, when Sergeant Enright, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Thurles, was shot dead, and Constable Timoney was wounded. The sergeant and the constable travelled to Kilmallock on Tuesday in order to attend a coursing meeting, at which the former had entered two dogs. They wore plain clothes. On Wednesday night they visited the hotel where the draw was made for the following day’s coursing. They left the establishment shortly after 11 o’clock, and as soon as they appeared on the street a volley of revolver shots was fired at them by a group of men, who were standing near the post-office. The shots were fired at close range, and Sergeant Enright was killed instantaneously. Constable Timoney received no fewer than five wounds, but it is hoped that they will not prove fatal. [. . .] The late Sergeant Enright, who was 28 years of age [in fact, he was 31], was a native of Listowel. He held a commission [by promotion] in the Army during the war, and was married.”
It is quite possible that reading this account of her father’s death brought some sort of closure to his long-perplexed only child, Ina, preparing her in some obscure way for her own departure 15 days later to meet him in the next world.
Happily, we now have an Ireland where it is possible at last to break the silence surrounding those who served in the police and army of pre-independence times, allowing my mother to find out the truth about her father in the end and me – writing as I do here a kind of post-script to the report of his killing in the very newspaper that carried it long before I was born – to claim and even salute a grandfather. The people who shot him were not to know, or any of the reporters of the time either, that he carried a tattoo on his right arm: “Erin go Bragh”.
Christmas 1921 must have been a truly awful one for that policeman’s widow and her baby. And Christmases equally awful were to be the lot of so many as the unfinished business of that time continued during the Civil War and, decades later, in the North. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” says Hamlet. We can only pray, around this Christmas time, that this divinity is continuing to take all that is “rough-hewn” and chaotic in our lives and in the events of history, shaping it into some final (who knows?) happy ending.