Massacre in West Cork (16 page)

Donal O’Flynn explained that Thomas Hornibrook was well liked and respected in the area, and was seen as a good neighbour. On the Sunday before his disappearance he had been paid nine pounds to convert the watchman’s hut at Athnowen church into a bicycle shed. He was also a ‘bit of a vet’, and employed three people until his death. One of these was John Lucey, who worked on the farm. The cook was a woman from Macroom, whose name he could not recall (she was Margaret Cronin). On the morning of 25 April Herbert Woods went with Samuel and Thomas Hornibrook to get the train in Killumney. However, just as they reached the village, they saw the train crossing the railway bridge and so returned up the hill to wait for the next day.

That evening Michael O’Neill called with his friends to Killumney to find a car to take them back to Bandon. While there they had a couple of drinks and then after midnight walked up the hill to the Hornibrooks to borrow Mr Hornibrook’s car. O’Neill was shot and carried down the hill to the main road (where his monument is now) and died there. Some of his friends gathered up the younger members of the local company and told them to watch the house. Donal O’Flynn refered to them as ‘scouts’ and clarified this to mean the Fianna, who were the youth wing of the IRA. The Hornibrooks had two to three hours after the shooting before the IRA had organised itself, and they could have gone to the Manchester Regiment in Ballincollig for protection in that time.

The IRA commandant in Ovens, Lieutenant Michael O’Regan, had given Thomas Hornibrook a gun to protect himself from agrarian agitators and would have intervened if he had known of the incident, but when it happened he was asleep more than three kilometres away on the other side of the parish. The first he knew of the incident was hours after the Hornibrooks had been taken away.

Donal O’Flynn stated that while Charlie O’Donoghue attempted to arrest the three men ‘there was a mêlée’ and Woods and the Hornibrooks were ‘abused and kicked’. Herbert Woods ‘had his nose broken by a blow from a rifle butt and it was practically hanging off’.
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They were court-martialled at Ballygroman, forced into the Hornibrooks’ own car and taken to ‘the College’ in Templemartin. They were held there before their execution. His source for this is the nephew of one of the firing party who took him to ‘the College’ to show him where it is. It is the same building identified by Seán Crowley. They were driven back east, where a grave was dug for them. Thomas Hornibrook threw his stick into it, saying ‘Fire away.’ He was ‘defiant to the last’.
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On the following Sunday at second mass (noon) in Ovens, Michael O’Regan overheard some locals discussing a raid on the Hornibrooks’ house. Initially locals had been afraid to approach the house. O’Regan went to the house and ‘if you had taken a wardrobe he [O’Regan] made you put it back’, so was ‘not popular with the people of the locality’.
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Some of the items taken were an oak table and six chairs, the sink and the silver service.
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With the exception of Margaret Cronin’s evidence, there is no way of knowing which, if any, of these stories are true unless some of those involved left evidence or acknowledged their part in the disappearance of the Hornibrooks, or if the men’s bodies are recovered. All the stories are based on local oral history and there are no verifiable documents to back up the claims.
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However, these stories are far more grounded in the facts of real people in the locality than any other versions, and there is a logical cause and sequence of events. Too many people in Scarriff saw the three men after their arrest for these to be dismissed. Seán Crowley’s story suggests that the Hornibrooks were openly court-martialled, held as prisoners at Templemartin and executed in the general Newcestown area. In my interview with Crowley, he explained his sources were direct family members of the people mentioned in the story and that he had no doubt as to the accuracy of their information. Donal O’Flynn’s story agrees with Nora Lynch’s story about having to borrow the car to get home, and confirms her comment that John Lucey worked for Hornibrook and was an eyewitness to the events.
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While some of the details of the rumours are different, they all place the events in the same localities of Ballygroman, Templemartin, Scarriff and Newcestown for the location of the Woods/Hornibrooks trial and execution. Donal O’Flynn alone says the trial was at Ballygroman, the imprisonment at Scarriff and the execution somewhere else. Clearly either Seán Crowley or Donal O’Flynn is mistaken about the location of the graves. O’Flynn suggests the men were driven east and executed, while Crowley suggests they were buried in the general area of Newcestown. The O’Halloran and O’Flynn stories are the most savage versions of the story that are told, and if the men in Lynch’s Forge/Good’s were the Hornibrook family (and it would incredible if they were not) then it seems like a straightforward revenge killing.
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While the execution of Woods possibly had justification, the Hornibrooks did not shoot Michael O’Neill and should not have been harmed. However, if they defended their home as vigorously as they had done during the arms raid of 1919, then, in the minds of the men who laid siege to the house for two-and-a-half-hours, they became complicit in the killing of Michael O’Neill. When I suggested that the killing of the three men was straightforward revenge to Donal O’Flynn, he stated that they were killed after an IRA court-martial because Herbert Woods had shot Michael O’Neill. However, the IRA had set up its police force (the Irish Republican Police) to ensure court judgements were enforced and fair procedures were followed. The accused had no benefit of counsel, Charlie O’Donoghue was witness and judge, clearly no defence was allowed and there was no right of appeal.

A number of weeks after the disappearances, Alice Hodder, from Fountainstown in Cork, wrote to her mother, parts of her letter giving a graphic account of what is rumoured to have happened:

The murderers returned and caught Woods, tried him by mock court martial, and sentenced him to be hanged. The brothers of the dead man then ‘got at him’ as they say in this country and gouged his eyes out while he was still alive and then hanged him. I believe they also caught the uncle and aunt but I haven’t heard what happened to them. The comment of all the country people around here, where the Woods lived in the summer and to whom the Woods were always generous and open-handed while here, was ‘That will bring Mrs Wood’s head down a bit’. As a matter of fact I believe Mrs Woods is a gentle retiring sort of woman – Does that not show the spirit of the people who are outwardly civil? Needless to say the Woods are Protestants.
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Much of Hodder’s account seems to be based on the
Morning Post
reports of the incident, but as the
Southern Star
also reported the parliamentary question about the disappearances, she may have obtained the information from there.
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It should be remembered that Edward Woods said he had been ordered out of Cork city by the IRA as an alleged spy in June 1921 – before the Truce – having been caught up in allegations that he was part of the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’ which included Blemens, Beale and Nicholson.
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If the IRA had a report from the person they had watching the Hornibrooks’ house that a person called Woods was staying there, then it is possible that it was assumed Edward Woods was staying there. This would be a reasonable explanation for Tadg O’Sullivan, Quartermaster of the IRA at Bandon, to order the Irish Republican Police to visit the Hornibrook house early in the morning on business, but in that case the men would have been armed. If Edward was expected it would explain later confusion about who was in the house.

Finally, we must turn to the previously overlooked evidence of Michael O’Donoghue from Cappoquin, who was an engineering student in University College Cork and became an engineering officer for the Cork City Brigade (his father had been a member of the RIC before retiring to Waterford, and his brother remained a member of the force throughout the War of Independence). His BMH witness statement confirms some of the details provided by the local historians in the only known comment from inside the anti-Treaty IRA. While he was not in Bandon at the time of the killings, he found out what happened from the people who had carried out the killings:

Poor Mick O’Neill: A grand chivalrous warrior of the I.R.A. Less than two months later, he called at the house of a British loyalist, named Hornibrook, to get help for a broken-down motor. As he knocked on the door, he was treacherously shot dead without the slightest warning by a hidden hand from inside the house. The I.R.A. in Bandon were alerted. The house was surrounded. Under threat of bombing and burning, the inmates surrendered. Three men, Old Hornibrook, his son and son-in-law, a Captain Woods. The latter, a British Secret Service agent, confessed to firing the fatal shot. Why? God alone knows. None of the three knew O’Neill, or he them. Probably Woods got scared at seeing the strange young man in I.R.A. attire knocking, thought he was cornered and fired at him in a panic.
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Is Michael O’Donoghue’s version of events any more credible than any other? He gets some of the details wrong, which is unsurprising as he was not there, but this is the only evidence we have from the side of the killers. The second part of his comments, linking the Ballygroman and Dunmanway killings, is far more important as it provides a motive for the Dunmanway shootings (and will be discussed further in Chapter 7).

Ultimately, the reader will have to decide for themselves how much of the ‘evidence’ presented in this chapter is to be believed. However, there is other information to be considered that may help the reader come to a firm conclusion: the Free State investigation of the Ballygroman events.

Over the following months, at the insistence of Matilda Woods, who was desperate to find out what had happened to her family, the Free State government initiated an investigation into the killings at Ballygroman. Matilda was initially moved to make inquiries by an
Irish Times
report on Thursday 27 April that ‘it is understood that a member of the Hornibrook family had been arrested’ for shooting Commandant Michael O’Neill.
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What Matilda discovered concerned her deeply and she wrote to the Dublin government for the first time about the incident on 1 May 1922 from ‘Glenbrae’.
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However, the Free State investigation was hampered by the other, more important events that were happening at this time.

On 14 April 1922 the occupation of the Four Courts in Dublin by 300 armed men set in motion the train of events that led to the Irish Civil War, which officially broke out on 28 June when Free State troops shelled the building. Among the thirty-two prisoners taken in this initial phase of the operation was Commandant Tom Barry of the West Cork IRA, who had tried to join his anti-Treaty comrades, disguised as a nurse. A suspicious Free State officer had unmasked him.

During the time of the Hornibrook and Dunmanway killings, the leadership of the pro- and anti-Treaty IRA, including Tom Hales, leader of the Bandon Brigade, had been in Dublin trying to hammer out a compromise on the Treaty, which was then rejected by the Four Courts garrison and de Valera. This compromise would have averted civil war and allowed the Treaty to be voted on in a plebiscite.
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On rejection of their compromise much of West Cork chose the anti-Treaty side. This only made any investigation by the Free State of the killings in this area more complicated.

On 5 May the Department of Home Affairs of Dáil Éireann wrote to the Adjutant General of the army asking him to ‘furnish your observations on the attached copy of a letter from Mrs M. W. Woods relative to the arrest on the 26th ultimo of her father’. On 9 May the department wrote again asking for information following a ‘further urgent inquiry’ from Mrs Woods. On 20 May Matilda wrote again looking for information, saying, ‘I am nearly distracted going from post to pillar looking for information & nobody will give me any. I went to the local authorities here, and wrote to Bandon. They have ignored my letters …’. On 24 May the department wrote a brusque letter to the Adjutant General demanding ‘forthwith … a report showing the result of your investigations in this case. It is obviously the Minister’s duty to give all the information available in the matter to Mrs Woods immediately.’ On 8 June the department wrote again, with no result, and on 13 June Wynne & Wynne solicitors wrote to the department on behalf of Matilda, asking for information. This letter, which confirms that Matilda, at least, had spent the previous two months trying to find information about her missing family and was still living in ‘Glenbrae’ at this time, was forwarded to the Adjutant General on 17 June, noting that the department had written on 5, 9 and 24 May with reminders on 9 and 24 May without success or reply.

A week later Brigadier-General Richard Colvin, a Conservative MP, raised questions about the case in the House of Commons, and the details were reported in the
Southern Star
on 3 June 1922. The full details of what happened are presented in the newspaper’s report. Neither Colvin nor Mr F. Wood, who replied for the government, held out any hope for the missing men, with Wood stating that ‘having regard to the time which had elapsed since they were kidnapped … it must be presumed that they were dead’.
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The case was again raised on 26 June during Irish Office questions by Lieutenant Colonel Archer Shee, who called for British government intervention.
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