Irish Republican Army

The Irish Republican Army is not given a continuous institutional history in the memoir; it emerges through scattered recollections, a recovered police file, and encounters with people connected to republican politics. Its most consequential presence is in the concealed past of the narrator’s father, who moved from three years in the IRA into the first intake of the new Garda Force. Other episodes complicate that trajectory: former IRA men are associated with a Ballinamore bank robbery, while a self-styled republican fundraiser is later seized by the IRA itself. Together these fragments make the organization part of a wider account of political violence, authority, and the uneasy passage from revolutionary conflict into state service.

The Father’s Hidden Service

For much of his childhood, the narrator knew little about his father’s early life or his part in the war. That silence is broken only after his father’s death, when the curator of the Garda Museum sends the narrator his complete Garda file. The most revealing item is the father’s own application form: under previous work experience, he entered three years in the IRA. The narrator had known that his father fought in the war, but not the details; the document allows him to reconstruct a route from the Latin School in Moyne, through the IRA, and into the newly formed Garda Force when the Civil War began. The organization’s place in this account is therefore disclosed retrospectively, through a state record that makes legible what family conversation had withheld.

The file gives a bare chronology, not a record of particular IRA operations. A family story supplies one vivid scene from the period when the father was on the run. Neighbours gathered to save hay for his mother because it was too dangerous for him to appear at the house. In the middle of the work, on a hot day above Lough Gowna, he arrived in a tailored suit, white shirt, tie, and new shoes. He took up a pitchfork and worked with the others until nightfall, leaving as suddenly as he had come. Even in the heat he did not remove his jacket or loosen his collar. The family remembered both the striking appearance and the curious discipline of the gesture: he joined dangerous manual work while maintaining the formal bearing of a young gentleman.

The adult narrator reads this anecdote alongside the archival record, not as proof of a specific deed but as a glimpse of how the father inhabited authority and self-presentation. He suspects that the IRA may have been his father’s happiest role, where a propensity for violence was tempered by cold calculation and self-preservation. That is the memoirist’s retrospective interpretation, not a documented account of the father’s motives or conduct. The distinction matters: the file establishes service, the family story supplies an image, and the narrator’s later judgment connects them without pretending that the missing history has been recovered in full.

Revolutionaries and the Ballinamore Robbery

A separate account places former IRA members in a postwar criminal episode. During the father’s stay of duty, the Doherty brothers robbed a bank in Ballinamore at gunpoint. The memoir identifies them as former IRA members who had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War. It pointedly describes the robbery as private enterprise, setting their armed pursuit of personal gain apart from the political history attached to their former affiliation.

When the IRA came looking for the proceeds, the brothers disappeared to America and did not return until the 1930s. On their return, they invested in dancehalls, bars, and large farms. Pat Doherty later boasted that he would personally throw out any man he admitted to his dancehall; the story presents the brothers’ subsequent local standing without treating their earlier violence as an isolated youthful episode. Their younger brother Jimmy, too young for the robbery and the journey to America, repeatedly burned down his own house for insurance money and later succeeded as a politician. The memoir thus follows several kinds of power—armed, commercial, and political—through one family, while leaving the exact circumstances of the IRA’s search for the robbery proceeds unstated.

The robbery also prompts the father to break his usual silence about the past. Speaking casually about the Dohertys, he says that if he had been armed on the day of the robbery, none of them would have left Ballinamore alive. The narrator believes him. The remark does not explain the father’s precise role in the response to the robbery, but it reveals the force with which he remembers the encounter and the ease with which state authority and personal violence coexist in his self-image. The IRA appears here not as an abstract political institution but as part of a local history in which old affiliations, armed threats, and later public respectability remain entangled.

Republican Display and Internal Punishment

The memoir offers another, markedly different glimpse of republican politics through Mr Kelly, a bookseller whose public identities do not sit comfortably together. At weekends he dressed as an officer of the Republican Army, complete with leggings and a cocked hat, and collected money in bars for the youth wing of Oglaigh na hEireann. The account describes his devout Catholicism, Republicanism, and racism alongside his pursuit of personal pleasure, presenting his political and religious commitments as roles he could maintain without acknowledging their contradictions.

Eventually, the IRA seized Mr Kelly, stripped him, tarred and feathered him, and tied him to a tractor in a field in the outer South Dublin suburbs. The incident appeared in the newspapers. After his release from hospital, he returned to his book barrow on Henry Street. Asked whether anyone had been arrested or whether a prosecution was imminent, he replied that the matter was being handled internally; he also complained that his captors had used car oil rather than real tar. The episode gives no account of the IRA’s reasons or procedures, and it does not establish Mr Kelly’s formal membership in the organization. What it does show is the contrast between his theatrical public display of republican allegiance and the IRA’s capacity to impose punishment beyond the ordinary channels of prosecution.

Memory, Authority, and Political Change

Across these episodes, the IRA is associated with different forms of participation: the father’s concealed service, the Doherty brothers’ wartime affiliation and later robbery, and Mr Kelly’s public republican performance followed by punishment at the hands of the organization. The memoir does not collapse these cases into one account of IRA practice. Instead, their differences expose a world in which political identity could persist alongside private ambition, criminal violence, public office, and local reputation.

The father’s transition from the IRA to the Garda Force gives the recollections their strongest institutional contrast. He entered state policing after the Civil War began, but his later career did not erase the earlier service; it became part of the history the narrator had to reconstruct from documents and family memory. The archival form records the transition tersely, while the hayfield anecdote makes it visible as a bodily performance: the on-the-run man in his suit, working until nightfall without surrendering his formal composure. The IRA therefore matters not only as a former affiliation but as one layer in the father’s continuing authority, a past he refused to discuss even as the memoir pieces it together from records, remembered stories, and the violence that surfaced around him.