demolishing the stairs. Ferguson, who was returning fire through a second-floor window, was knocked to the floor. Rubble from the ceiling fell in on him. As the RUC men recovered from the blast there was another lull, and again the IRA called for those inside to surrender.
Kavanagh was considering a frontal assault into the barracks when the RUC started firing again. Realizing that reinforcements were probably on the way, Charlie Murphy recommended that they withdraw. It had been twenty minutes of intense battle. Volunteers were tiring and it showed; their fire had slowed and was less organized. Kavanagh ordered the column back together and as two groups they took off along either side of the road. They had not gone far when an RUC Land Rover with its lights off appeared. They considered an ambush but instead allowed it to pass unmolested.
Behind them they left a wrecked police station. An RUC officer later overestimated that forty IRA volunteers were involved in the attack. Broken glass and debris were scattered inside and outside of the building Walls were pitted with bullet holes. Broken planks and twisted iron were in front; piping and wiring hung from the roof. A first-floor ceiling “dangled to the floor.” The second floor was a mess. A priest was called for Constable Scally, who was taken by ambulance to Fermanagh County Hospital in Enniskillen. He died en route from shock and bleeding. An autopsy showed that bullet fragments had severed his spinal cord and lacerated his spleen. He had been engaged to be married.
After the RUC Land Rover had passed, the column moved south toward their County Fermanagh base near the border. As they made their way into the hills at the foot of Slieve Rushen Mountain, they saw warning flares going off in the sky. Because they had withdrawn quickly, they were safely beyond the British Army and RUC cordon. Several men were tired, and Murphy wanted to stop and rest. Kavanagh pressed on, and the column spread out. Snow began to fall and it got colder. The mountain’s iron ore deposits rendered their compasses useless and they got lost and wandered about. They were cold and exhausted, and someone produced a bottle of Advocaat, a liqueur. Ó Brádaigh, true to his Pioneer Badge, had always been an abstainer, but he was persuaded to take a few drinks for medicinal purposes. They went straight to his head and he felt he was walking on air, to the amusement of his comrades. Finally getting their bearings, the group made their way up and over Slieve Rushen, missing their base and ending up in the Ballyconnell district of County Cavan. As they came down the mountain, they could see Gardai behind them on the mountainside, searching for them. Kavanagh, exhausted, was left in a friendly house. The column split into groups and sought refuge in other houses in the general area. It was a hit-or-miss proposition, and several volunteers were lucky and escaped arrest. Kavanagh, who was not so lucky, was arrested. So were Ó Brádaigh and his group.
Rainsoaked and covered with dust, Ó Brádaigh and five others ducked into a house in the tiny village of Clinty, about a mile from Ballyconnell. Gardai surrounded the house, saw the men inside, and entered through the back door. When a superintendent asked who was in charge, Ó Brádaigh said that he was and instructed the others to provide only their names and addresses. They had dumped their weapons and were unarmed, but Ó Brádaigh had a haversack that contained ammunition, a practice genade, and a copy of Cronin’s Notes on Guerrilla Wafare. They were put into police cars and taken to Ballyconnell police station. On the way, he quietly tossed the ammunition out of the car’s window, but the police spotted this, retrieved the ammunition, and then went through the haversack.
It was in the house that they learned of Constable Scally’s death. The civil and religious authorities, north and south, viewed the killing as murder. At the coroner’s inquest on the death, an RUC Inspector stated that the attack had achieved nothing and that it personified, quoting Robert Burns, “Man’s inhumanity to man.” Ó Brádaigh and his fellow volunteers had a different view. Scally was a victim in a war of national liberation. It was nothing personal against Scally; Ó Brádaigh, after thinking that a “bastard" (later identified as Constable Ferguson) was trying to shoot him, immediately recognized that the man had every right to shoot back. The IRA were soldiers fighting against British colonial interests in Ireland; Scally, as a uniformed and armed member of the state’s militarized police, directly supported those interests. As soldiers, they knew that eventually they would kill someone, just as some of them might be killed. It was what they had been training for. It was never clear who fired the fatal shot (the Bren and the rifles used the same ammunition), and the raiders collectively shared responsibility. In 1991, Joe Jackson interviewed Ó Brádaigh for the magazine Hot Press. Jackson asked Ó Brádaigh if he knew who fired the shot that hit Scally. Ó Brádaigh replied, “I’d say everyone who took part in the attack shared responsibility, not just the man who shot the bullet. It can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.” Scally was the first fatality of the campaign.
At the police station, Ó Brádaigh requested that his initial interview, with Garda Superintendent Kelly, be in Irish. Instead, the relevant section of the Offenses Against the State Act was read to him in English. He put his fingers to his ears. Kelly then used Irish to ask him to account for his activities. Replying in Irish, he refused to answer. According to Ó Brádaigh, Kelly took him into a separate room and asked for the whereabouts of other members of the column. He offered to bring them in off the mountain and, in the rain and sleet, have them driven home. He also offered to drop charges related to the items in the haversack if Ó Brádaigh provided information on the IRA volunteers still at large. Ó Brádaigh refused. A Special Branch inspector, Philip McMahon, arrived and also spoke to him privately, asking him to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of the column. Again he refused. At about 830 in the evening the seven prisoners were taken from the police station, placed into two police cars, and transported to the Bridewell Detention Centre in Dublin.
While Ó Brádaigh and his group were being interrogated in Cavan, Sein Garland, commanding officer of the Patrick Pearse Column, received information on the Derrylin raid. His column, which included Sein Scott and a young volunteer from Cork, Diithi O’Connell, had been unsuccessful in their attempts to ambush an RUC patrol. Garland decided to attack the RUC’s Brookeborough Barracks, also in County Fermanagh. On New Year’s Day they seized a truck and drove to the barracks. Like the IRA at Derrylin, they were armed with gelignite mines, machine guns, and rifles. Unlike Derrylin, this raid did not go well. The mines did not go off and the RUC return fire found its mark. Several volunteers, including Garland, were shot. The IRA withdrew in the truck and crossed a mountain back over the border into County Monaghan. Two of the wounded, Seán South and Feargal O’Hanlon, were dying. They were left in a farm shed in County Fermanagh and local people were asked to call a priest and a doctor. The other volunteers abandoned the truck and dumped their arms but were arrested on the morning of January 2, 1957. The wounded were sent to hospitals; the healthy were sent to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. South and O’Hanlon died in the barn and became legends.
In the popular imagination of Irish Nationalists, the tragedy of the raid at Brookeborough, where two IRA volunteers died, eclipsed the tragedy at Derrylin, where a member of the RUC died. South and O’Hanlon were immediately canonized as martyrs for the Republican cause. They were viewed as idealistic young men who died for something most Irish people wanted but were unwilling to sacrifice for. O’Hanlon, who was only 21 years old, was a prominent Irish-speaker and Gaelic footballer in Monaghan. South, who was eight years older, was from Limerick. He was known for his devotion to Catholicism and the Irish language. Each became the subject of a popular ballad: for South, “Sein South of Garryowen,” and for O’Hanlon, “The Patriot Game.” O’Hanlon was buried not far from where he died. South’s funeral procession, which traveled from Monaghan to Limerick via Dublin, affected thousands of people in the Twenty-Six Counties. In Dublin, the IRA staged a large rally with volunteers standing at attention beside the hearse. In Limerick, 50,000 people attended the ceremony.
The Derrylin prisoners-Kavanagh, Ó Brádaigh, Pat McGirl, Paddy Duffy, Joe Daly, Dermot Blake, and Leo Collins-spent New Year’s Day in solitary confinement in the Bridewell. The next day they appeared in Dublin District Court, dressed in a mix of military uniforms that included British Army battle dress, a British Army officer’s tunic, weatherproof jackets, and British Army and black berets. Each had a tricolor flash on his left sleeve. Because they
