Dan Breen and the IRA by Joe Ambrose Page B

were holding our country in subjection. The moral aspect of such a decision has been talked about since and we have been branded as murderers, both by the enemy and even by some of our own people, but I want it to be understood that the pros and cons were thoroughly weighed up in discussions between Treacy and myself and, to put it in a nutshell, we felt that we were merely continuing the active war for the establishment of the Irish Republic that had begun on Easter Monday, 1916. We felt there was grave danger that the Volunteer organisation would disintegrate and was disintegrating into a purely political body … and we wished to get it back to its original purpose … We also decided that we would not leave the country as had been the usual practice, but that, having carried out this act of war, we would continue to live in the country in defiance of the British authorities … The only regret we had, following the ambush, was that there were only two policemen in it instead of the six we expected, because we felt that six dead policemen would have impressed the country more than a mere two.’
    In My Fight for Irish Freedom , which appeared while many of those involved in the ambush were still alive and while Breen was an active politician, he chose his words more prudently: ‘We would have preferred to avoid bloodshed but they were inflexible.’
    Witnesses later claimed to have seen a cart being driven furiously by two masked men with a third in the back. As Breen put it in My Fight for Irish Freedom , their ‘career of real excitement’ had just begun.

6 – Soloheadbeg: Reactions and Consequences
    Rewards of £1,000 for the capture of Breen and the others were quickly offered. Wanted posters featuring photographs of Breen were displayed outside RIC barracks all over the country and descriptions of Breen, Hogan, Robinson and Treacy were printed in the RIC’s Hue and Cry .
    Joost Augusteijn says that the RIC were so spooked by the killings that they suddenly perceived threats and enemies all over the place. ‘Everywhere it is pervaded with young men who show hostility to any form of control,’ the south Tipperary RIC county inspector reported in January. ‘Imbued with Sinn Féin propaganda and possessed of arms and ammunition, they are a danger to the community.’ In April 1919, the RIC reported that seventy per cent of the people were ‘in sympathy with the attackers’.
    Paddy O’Dwyer boasted: ‘Whilst I was purchasing a newspaper in a shop in Hollyford the following day [22 January], two RIC men came to the door and stood there. One of them appeared to be taking a keen interest in me and was looking me up and down. Opening the newspaper, I read aloud, with assumed amusement, the story which it carried of the shooting of the constables at Soloheadbeg on the previous day. The policemen remained at the door listening and as I wanted to give them the impression that I was in no way perturbed by their presence, I then read out the leading article, which, in no uncertain terms, condemned the shooting. Any suspicions which the RIC men may have entertained of my connection with the affair were apparently allayed, for when a friend called me I left the shop without being in any way molested by them.’
    Lord French, the lord lieutenant who enjoyed almost dictatorial powers at the height of the Tan War, famously said that the mere commission of the Soloheadbeg crime had dealt a severe blow to the Sinn Féin organisation.
    An tÓglach , the organ of the Volunteers, edited by Piaras Béaslaí – a close confidante of Michael Collins who’d been intimately involved in drafting the constitution of the first dáil – weighed in behind the attackers. On 31 January, the paper stated that Volunteers were justified in ‘treating the armed forces of the enemy – whether soldiers or policemen – exactly as a national army would