THE late RM Smyllie writing in An Irishman’s Diary many years ago recalled that the first time he saw the then minister for lands Seán Moylan was during what he described as “the classically boring debates at Earlsfort Terrace in the winter of 1921/22 when the Anglo Irish Treaty was being discussed”. He referred to him as a “sensation” but not of the right kind: Seán Moylan took the republican side you understand. During the Troubles, wrote Smyllie, Moylan was the uncrowned king of north Cork and was a fearless guerrilla leader in his day.
As a young child I was unaware of my grandfather Moylan’s historical past. Indeed what I remember most about the many visits to my grandparents were the opportunities I had to observe the comings and goings of an adult world in a political household of the 1950s. Two sitting rooms were permanently in use, with fires roaring up the chimneys in the winter. The back room was my grandfather’s domain and off limits to young children. Here, among books and papers, visitors were ushered in; or, working in ordered silence detached from the hubbub next door, he wrote his speeches, read reports and contemplated the issues of the Dáil. The rest of the family occupied the front room and we, his grandchildren, played on the floor while the adults dissected the newspaper stories of the day in a spirit of tolerant enquiry.
From our low vantage point, the picture on the wall facing the fireplace was very large indeed. What we noticed most was the stern look on the men’s faces and the guns they held which bore a remarkable resemblance to the Lee Enfield rifle propped up beside my grandfather’s chair.
Some years later, while waiting for my lift home from school, I wandered into what was then called the Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square. On the walls of the gallery hung an exhibition of Seán Keating's work, including a very large version of the painting I knew from my grandparent's house. On the brass plate of the frame, I read: 1921, An IRA Column, by Seán Keating RHA. The work was on loan from Áras an Uachtaráin. It never struck me to ask how or why it was there, as my teenage interests had more to do with boys, lipstick, and rock 'n' roll than with art history.
Rolling on the years, I had an opportunity to see the picture from my childhood again. It had shrunk from the enormous proportions of my young memory to more manageable dimensions, but it still intrigued me. Driven by curiosity, I set out to examine the family papers in an effort to piece together the story of the men in the painting whose faces were carved from the mountain. I wondered what the artist had made of these hard-bitten Volunteers who all came from families with a long tradition of resistance to British rule, rebels with a cause and a history of insurrection. One was my grandmother’s first cousin, another would marry my grand-aunt, and the man in the foreground, centre-stage, with his binoculars raised, was Seán Moylan, my grandfather.
Keating painted 1921, An IRA Columnand Men of the Southat the end of the War of Independence. The Volunteers who posed for him were billeted at the Clarence Hotel overlooking the Liffey and walked to his studio on Kildare Street where their presence, not to mention their guns, caused much anxiety to the porter at the Metropolitan School of Art. As the Treaty negotiations continued, Moylan was uneasy about appearing in Men of the Southbecause he did not want to be identified by British Intelligence. In his place, Keating inserted a strapping young man with the physique and manner of a war leader and this picture of "The Boys" now hangs in the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork.
Moylan's thoughts on the men from north Cork and the circumstances surrounding the painting of 1921, An IRA Columnand Men of the Southwere recorded for the Bureau of Military History in 1951 and the file also contains some lively correspondence from Seán Keating. After the Treaty, he made an application for leave of absence from the School of Art in order to paint a series of pictures of the people and events of those years, the proposed paintings to be the property of the Department of Education. All he wanted was his salary of £2 a week but his request was turned down. Thirty years later, Seán Moylan would himself become Minister for Education but by then many of the Volunteers had gone to their just rewards. With a dollop of irony, Keating wrote that as the time for doing anything to perpetrate the physical aspect of the heroes had almost past, he had no doubt that the proposals contained in his application of 1922 would now receive the most favourable consideration from the department.
During the Civil War, Moylan fought on the republican side and was spirited out of Ireland in November 1922 on a mission to raise funds in America. En route, he married his fiancée Nora Murphy who was teaching in England but the written records are tantalisingly silent on their wartime courtship. We can infer that her instructions from Seán were: burn all letters.
The outcome of the Civil War was a bitter blow for the Volunteers who sat for Seán Keating's painting in the autumn of 1921 and for them the next 10 years would be spent in the wilderness. Seán Moylan stood for Fianna Fáil in the 1932 general election and played his part in the foundation of a modern Ireland. Seán Keating was destined to meet some of the Volunteers again when, years later, he visited Kiskeam north Cork to take preliminary drawings for Republican Court, a painting that now hangs in the officer's mess at Collins Barracks, Cork.
The relationship between painter and subject endured throughout the years. When they first met in 1921 in the studio on Kildare Street, Moylan and Keating found common ground, they both spoke Irish with a natural fluency, sharing a strong cultural bond and a republican outlook. They would remain firm friends throughout their lives.
On May 16th, 1957, Éamon de Valera appointed Seán Moylan minister for agriculture. On the same date in 1921 he had been captured by the Gloucestershire regiment. He was tried at Victoria Barracks in Cork on the charge of levying war against the king and was saved from certain death by the efforts of a Mallow solicitor Barry Sullivan and an English-born barrister Albert Wood KC who was last mentioned in this Diary on December 15th, 1945.
Seán Moylan – Rebel Leader is published by Mercier Press, Cork