Sir,—I could not help noticing that in the otherwise excellent article about the famous Soloheadbeg (County Tipperary) ambush of January 1919 in the spring 1997 issue of History Ireland that Kevin Haddick Flynn (amongst others) is still claiming that this was the first action of the War of Independence. Not so. A flag must be raised for the ‘men of the mouth of the glen’ who have been all but erased from most accounts of the period. For it was there, near Béala Ghleanna, between Ballyvourney and Balingeary in West Cork, that seven men from ‘D’Company, successfully ambushed a party of Crown forces (RIC) and carried away two magazine Lee-Met for carbines, two slings of .303 with fifty rounds therein, among other gear expropriated on that historic day—8 July 1918, six months before Soloheadbeg. The boys decamped nearby at the Fairy Lake where the Fenian Michael Downey lay hidden during an earlier phase of the same struggle. The original seven involved were: Captain Jonny Lynch (Béala Ghleanna), Tadgh and Cíarián Twomey (Turín Dubh), Jer Shea (Ballingeary), Dan McSweeney, James Moynihan and Neilus Reilly. All this took place near Rénanirree and the Pass of Céiminagh where the noble people of the same townlands put the Redcoats to flight during the Tithe War of the 1830s.
This of course takes nothing at all from the gallant sons of Tipperary and their renowned day of Soloheadbeg, but if only for historical exactness alone the men of the mouth of the glen are entitled to their place on the platform for first among firsts.—Yours etc.,
JER O’LEARY
North Strand
Dublin 3