Sean Moylan: Rebel Leader
By Aideen Carroll
(Mercier Press, €19.99)
Joe Carroll
There was no glamour about being an IRA fighter during the War of Independence, even if some accounts later portrayed a romantic, gun-toting life played out before a hero-worshipping local community. This biography of an IRA leader from North Cork lucidly describes the hardships and fear that made up more of life on the run than the intermittent military engagements.
Sean Moylan's account of his guerrilla days has much in common with those of Ernie O'Malley, Tom Barry, Dan Breen and Florence O'Donoghue, to mention the best known. His matter-of-fact style with which events are recalled rings true. The hours, even days spent lying in wet ditches in wait for British patrols that often never materialised; trying to keep morale high among young men, even boys, who knew capture could mean torture and a good chance of a firing squad; being constantly hunted and the fear of betrayal - Moylan tells it like it really was.
His grand-daughter, Aideen Carroll, took over the telling of Moylan's life from his son, Rick, who died before he could finish it. But Moylan had written his own account, later given to the Bureau of Military History, parts of which she skilfully incorporates into this biography.
Enhanced
Moylan's own account has been published separately as his ''autobiography'' but in this book, his account is valuably enhanced by research into contemporary newspaper reports, and from the files of the British regiments, like the Gloucesters, who wanted him dead or alive.
When Moylan succeeded Liam Lynch as O/C of Cork North Brigade, he became a prime target and something of a bogeyman for the British forces in Co. Cork. In the end they found him asleep on top of a ditch where he had collapsed exhausted as the hunt for him closed in. He would almost certainly have faced the firing squad in Cork's Victoria Barracks as had 14 of his IRA comrades, but several factors helped save his life (including questions in the House of Commons from the father of Tony Wedgewood Benn over a writ of habeas corpus).
Later Moylan took the anti-Treaty side and was one of the senior leaders of the Republican forces in a civil war he detested. He was now in poor health. Liam Lynch sent him to the United States to raise money and get guns, thus saving him again from likely execution, this time by his countrymen.
Intelligent man
The rest of Moylan's life is tame by comparison but should not be underrated. As an intelligent man, he saw no use in continuing with armed struggle, joined Fianna Fáil and was a TD for Cork North 1932 to 1957 when he lost his seat. But he made political history when the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, appointed him Minister for Agriculture from the Seanad.
The author gives a brief assessment of Moylan's earlier ministerial terms in the Department of Lands and in Education where with limited resources he introduced needed reforms especially in vocational training.
Fully to understand the early decades of independence, one has to encounter, now in books, the men who made the transition from IRA volunteer to politics, with for the most part a genuine patriotism. Sean Moylan was such a one.
