Bookshelf – Books to remind us of terrible times in Ireland

BLOOD FOR BLOOD By William Henry MERCIER €14.99 MERCIER appear to be moving deeper into the history market of late, and the second publication of theirs to cross my desk in three weeks is Blood for Blood by the prolific Galway author William Henry. The subtitle tells it all:â€Ë†'The Black and Tan War in Galway'. Most of us over a certain age have some inherited family memory of those days. My father, who was born in 1916, told me of being turfed out of his bed as a child while soldiers â€â€ I don't know if they were regulars, Tans or Auxiliaries, searched under it. In the same raid his father's Sinn Féin membership card was hidden in a book on a shelf â€â€ the only one that did not fly open when it was swept to the floor by a searcher. He also told a story of a neighbour woman with a sharp tongue whose house was searched by a squad under a very well-spoken officer. When they were finished, she said 'There's one place you didn't look.' 'And where is that, madam?' asked the Brit. 'Up in the duck's arse!' she replied. Such a response could have been a death warrant in many of the cases described by William Henry. He has trawled the records to give a most comprehensive account of that terrible period between January 1919 and July 1921 when the British response to the IRA's guerilla tactics was a campaign of terror. Like a lion goaded by wasps, the Empire lashed out, often blindly, and its claws were sharp and fearsome. All the well-known incidents are re-told here: the merciless and savage killing of the Loughnane brothers of Shanaglish; the abduction and shooting of Fr Griffin in retaliation for the disappearance of the informer Joyce. But what this book does is chronicle the many other incidents, both fatal and merely bloody, which made life hell for people all over Co Galway. Practically every town and village of any size can be found in the index: from Abbeyknockmoy, Annaghdown, Athenry, through Dunmore, Glenamaddy, Menlo, Milltown, to Salthill, Tuam and Williamstown. People in all of them suffered beatings, burnings, and the bullet. Animals were shot in the fields; in one bizarre incident, 40 hens were taken during a raid, their heads left in the farmyard. No wonder that when the Treaty negotiations were going on in London, Lloyd George's threat of 'immediate and terrible war' carried weight. It is hard to understand the mentality of the anti-Treaty forces who subsequently plunged the country into civil war. Of course the Tan war was also a kind of civil war â€â€ most of the RIC men were Irish, and conflicted in their loyalties. In short, this book is an essential record of a terrible time.