KERINS MEMORIAL UNVEILED – DAMAGED BY 26-COUNTY AGENTS

In Dublin, Cork and Belfast there were parades and ceremonies. At Drumboe, Stranorlar, Co Donegal the oration was given by Jack Brady of Dublin, a former Curragh internee.

In Tralee, Co Kerry a militant parade took place through the town to Cathair Áhandsome memorial in the form of a flattish obelisk was unveiled to his memory.

Sculpted by Leo Broe and Son the fine granite monument over twelve feet high had three marble plaques attached to its front. The principal one of these had a representation of the Kerry martyr carved in bas-relief.

Beneath this on another plaque was engraved in bold lettering the following inscription:

“This memorial was erected, Easter 1947, in proud memory of Charles Kerins, Chief of Staff, Irish Republican Army, who, in Mountjoy Jail, Dublin, on 1st December 1944 bravely suffered death at the hands of the British imperial hangman.”

“ ‘The memories of 800 years he made them all his own,
Till shame became a victor’s wreath and the gallows tree a throne.’
— Brian O’Higgins

“Fuil na Laochra, síol na Saoirse.”

The 50th anniversary commemoration booklet of Charlie Kerins’s death contains a number of interesting photographs of the memorial unveiling, including one of Tom Kerins, Charlie’s father with Seán McCool of Donegal, who travelled to Tralee for the occasion.

Another shows the newly unveiled memorial with several wreaths placed against it. Those pictured standing beside the monument are listed as Mick Sullivan (Tailor), Ballygarron, The Spa; Stephen (Sticker) Hanlon, Michael (Guikes) Moran, George Rice and a son of the sculptor Leo Broe.

However, the coercion of the 1940s in the 26 Counties was not over, as shall be seen. The Fianna Fáil regime would not allow its victims to be honoured publicly as in Tralee at Easter 1947.

There had been no let up during 1946. In England no Irish political prisoners had been released except on expiration of sentence. The Prevention of Violence Act 1939 had its annual renewal.

Stormont still held its quota of sentenced prisoners in A-Wing, Crumlin Road jail, Belfast. Five Republicans were on blanket protest in Portlaoise while Pat Shannon was held on his own in Mountjoy.

Leinster House had ordered the Ardee Street arrests in Dublin in March 1946 and the subsequent jailings by the Military Tribunal. Seán McCaughey had died on hunger and thirst strike in May.

Harry White had been kidnapped across the Border in co-operation with the RUC in October, sentenced to death in December, reprieved and sent to Portlaoise for 12 years in February 1947. Resurgence, launched as a new monthly Republican magazine in May was banned in December.

There had been no relaxation indeed and Republican Kerry had reasserted itself in unmistakable terms at Easter. Six weeks later the Fianna Fáil Administration at Leinster House struck back.

On the night of May 18, 1947 their armed agents were in Tralee, having travelled that day from Dublin. Armed with lump hammers and coal chisels they proceeded under cover of darkness to the recently-erected Charlie Kerins memorial at Cathair Áine.

There they forcibly removed from the monument the plaque bearing the inscription which told of their masters’ infamy. They took it away and 50 years later it has not been recovered.

Another plaque now replaces that plundered by 26-County State action. It reads: “This plaque replaces that which was erected at Easter 1947 and forcibly removed during the night of the 18th May 1947.

“It re-dedicates this monument to Charles Kerins hanged for the Irish Republic in Mountjoy gaol on the 1st of December 1944. “Let his epitaph like Emmett’s remain unwritten until Ireland is free.”

The 26-County State under Fianna Fáil pointed the way to the British Forces of Occupation when it came to defacing or destruction of memorials to those who died for Ireland.

There was no sensational plot. On April 12 in the early morning strong Special Branch units raided the homes of the former German internees. Some were actually dragged out of bed and all taken to Mountjoy jail.

While the 200 or so interned at the Curragh had been repatriated to Germany in July and August 1945, those who had come to the 26 Counties as agents continued to be held in the small prison at Athlone military barracks. They had been moved there following the escape of Gunther Schuetz alias Hans Marschner from Mountjoy in 1942.

“This detention centre,” wrote Hermann Goertz, the most famous of the ten agents, “was miserably small and old. During the British occupation it was a military prison. Its twelve cells had normally been used for locking up soldiers for a few days for drunkenness and other minor offences against military discipline.”

Perhaps these were the cells where General Tom Maguire and five other Republicans were held overnight in January 1923 before the secret execution and burial in the barracks of the five the following morning.

On September 10, 1946 an official of the Dublin Department of Justice visited the ten German internees in Athlone barracks and told them they were to be given the right of asylum in the 26 Counties. They were immediately given “leave from camp” until 11pm that night.

Lieutenant Schuetz recalls in Enno Stephan’s Spies in Ireland: “Sergeant Power received instructions to pay us and half an hour later we were all sitting in the beer shops in Athlone having a good drink.

“Our release excited tremendous interest in the town. Crowds of curious citizens besieged us and accompanied us back to our prison that night. The next day we received countless invitations.

The internees moved to Dublin and tried to make a living there. Goertz lived with his friends, the sisters Bridie and Mary Farrell – two of the group known as “the angry old ladies”.

In February 1947 he became Secretary of “Saor an Leanbh – Save the German Children Fund”, an Irish relief organisation for German children.

Schuetz started a successful business in surplus British war materials and married an Irish nurse Una Mackey whom he had courted while in Athlone. The others either went into business or found friends or relatives who took them in.

Only one, Walter Simon, returned to Germany in the winter of 1946. Stephan relates: “Everyone admired his courage, but Simon reckoned – and he was proved right – that nothing much could happen to him. After a few weeks in British camps with the usual interrogations, he was again free.”

All the men arrested in April 1946 fought the deportation order in the courts. Only one, Werner Unland, with an address at 46 Merrion Square, Dublin was successful.

A German business man living in England and married to an Englishwoman he had fled to Dublin at the outbreak of WWII. He had never been active as an agent in Ireland but Schuetz had corresponded with him and so he was arrested and imprisoned.

Goertz and Schuetz were given deferment and parole to wind up their personal and business affairs. Henry Obéd, an Indian who had lived in Antwerp, Belgium where he had owned a pet shop and dealt in Indian spices, had disappeared and no further interest was taken in him.

Four of the Germans were flown out from Baldonnell in a US Air Force plane to Frankfurt in Germany. Later Gunther Schuetz who had to leave his Irish wife behind went under escort to Frankfurt also.

But sad and tragic was the fate of Dr Hermann Goertz, who ranked as Major and was sent to Ireland as German High Command Liaison Officer to the IRA in May 1940. The outcome in his case will be dealt with next month in this series.

(More next month. Refs. 50th Anniversary Commemoration Booklet of Charlie Kerins’s Execution, 1994 and Spies in Ireland by Enno Stephan, published Four Square Books, 1965.)