Galway In Days Gone By

1921

Connemara shootout

From five a.m. till four p.m., when reinforcements arrived, a fierce battle raged on Saturday at Kilmilkin, five miles beyond Maam, Connemara, on the Leenane road. On the one side was a cycling patrol of fourteen policemen, pinned to the open road, and practically without cover except what some of them managed to secure by lying in a stream; on the other an unknown number of the I.R.A. concealed in prepared positions in the hills fourteen hundred feet above the police, and within three hundred yards’ rifle range of them.

Constable John Boylan, R.I.C., a native of County Leitrim, was shot dead a few hours after the fight opened. His last words to his companions were, “I’m hit. They have the range of the road. Do the best you can.” He leaves five little children, whose mother died a year ago.

Sergeant Hanley received two bullet wounds to the leg. In a dash for reinforcements on the running-board of a motor-car, Constable Ruttledge received a bullet wound in the arm fired from a range of about eight hundred yards.

The patrol left Oughterard at three a.m. in motor lorries. Near Leenane, they continued the journey on bicycles to escape observation. Their mission was to search the house of Mr. Pádraic O’Maille, M.P. for Connemara, where a flying column of the I.R.A. was believed, according to the official statement, to be in hiding.

Approaching the house about five a.m. they say smoke issuing from it, and a door open and close. They were dwelling in twos twenty yards apart. As they turned to the road to approach the dwelling, which is three hundred yards from the main highway, shots rang out.

The leading sergeant hurled himself off his bicycle, and took cover behind a tree-stump, and subsequently behind a small mound of turf. Men fled from O’Malley’s house and took up positions that had, it is said, been prepared on the hills at the back.

From here a steady fire was maintained for hours, the police reserving their ammunition and relying whenever their opportunity offered. At noon, Fr. Cunningham, the Catholic curate of Leenane, motored into the midst of the fight to succour the police. The official report alleges that he was fired upon while tending to the wounded. Our Connemara correspondent states that he was allowed to attend to the wounded sergeant. He remained under cover with the police until the end of the fight, and received the thanks of the Divisional Commissioner.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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