sirenianshores

Of historical and personal interest is the news this week that the missing remains of an English soldier, shot by the IRA in the war of Independence, lies somewhere in a Kerry bog.

The belief is that the Tan’s body was brought to the bog after he had been kidnapped and shot by the IRA in Tralee, a hotbed of activity in the early 1920s.

Lixnaw man Michael O’Connell said the dead Tan was most likely brought to the bog in a cart and interred there, he maintained.

“However, a bog is no place to have a body,” he said. “If he was an Englishman, the body should be sent back to his people.”

If this is true, then his body deserves a speedy return to his kin for a proper burial.

The missing soldier had been a member of the ‘Black and Tans’ - one of the most despised units of the British army ever to set foot in Ireland. They were sent in to augment the Irish police force (fighting on the English side as the Royal Irish Constabulary/RIC) after the IRA’s attacks on them had drastically reduced their membership. They were known by the Irish people as the Black and Tan’s after their peculiarly mismatched uniform which consisted black/green tunics issued to the RIC and standard issue British army tan/khaki trousers.

The Tans had been recruited mostly from the ranks of British soldiers demobilized after WWI. The return to civilian life had been tough for many of these soldiers and the prospect of good wages and another chance to exercise their military skills proved to be a draw for many of them.

The major problem here was that by sending a bunch of soldiers, brutalized from their fighting in WWI to do what was effectively a policeman’s job (or peacekeeping in modern terms), they made a bad situation much worse. The IRA in the initial stages of the war, lacked widespread popular support among the Irish population. But after a year or so of terror from the Tan’s against the Irish civilian population, whoever hadn’t supported the IRA beforehand, had their minds made up for them by the Tan’s behavior. This gave the IRA the propaganda victory they required to sustain their campaign against the British.

It is understandable that for soldiers used to fighting in a conventional war, with clearly defined battlefields, their experience in Ireland proved incredibly frustrating. The IRA would launch ambushes and attacks on them and when the IRA melted away into the civilian population, it was the civilians who bore the brunch of the Tan’s terror in the IRA’s absence. The longer the war went on, the worse the more discipline and order within the ranks broke down.

By the war’s end, over half the Black and Tans had either been killed by the IRA or had resigned from the force.