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Written by John McCullagh
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Sunday, 20 February 2005 |
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My grandfather was present at the great Aeridheacht cultural festival in Cullyhanna on Sunday 6 June 1920. It was an occasion of local rejoicing and celebration and a welcome relief from the stresses of the fraught political situation in the country.
 GPO Dublin It was a momentous time for the world reeling after the slaughter of the Great War, and for Ireland, with its own War of Independence drawing to a bloody close. The general election here had returned a great majority of Sinn Fein representatives and elected bodies all over the country, including areas earmarked in that year’s Better Government of Ireland Act for inclusion in Northern Ireland, were pledging their support for the (First) Dáil in Dublin. In South Armagh, Frank Aiken, commander of the Fourth Northern Division of the IRA and an elected member of Newry Rural District Council moved the motion that was enthusiastically adopted. Crossmaglen Rural District would vote on the motion in nine days’ time. As that day’s festivities drew to a close, the detachment of RIC men supervising proceedings came under sustained gunfire. A number fell, one grievously wounded. Two local men were hit also and Peter Charles McCreesh later died of his wounds, as did Sergeant Holland, a native Corkman, married to a Belfast woman, who lived with their five children in the Crossmaglen Barracks. Bleeding profusely, the latter asked, ‘What will my poor wife and children do?’ Before his death in Dundalk hospital the following Wednesday, he forgave the man who shot him and asked his wife to do likewise. Just a few days later Sergeant Patrick Hearty of Crossmaglen, shot dead in an ambush in Limerick, was brought home for burial in Creggan Churchyard near his home village. The inquests on Holland and McCreesh, carried out by the coroner John F Small, returned open verdicts. Though Head Constable Gallagher of Dundalk testified that Sergeant Holland had told him just before his death, that he had been able to return fire and hit his assailant several times in the stomach, this testimony aimed against McCreesh was rejected. McCreesh had been shot in the back. On 15 June the Dáil Ēireann motion came before Crossmaglen Rural District Council and was resoundingly defeated. Its people were Nationalist, certainly, but not yet Republican. Not when their own were being gunned down. |
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