Dan Keating

Oct 10 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

YOU could say he was a charming old man in his tweed cap, a relic of the old Ireland of peat fires and muddy fields; keen-eyed, sharp-featured and quite loquacious in the right company.

But he was also a killer, the last of the men sung about in Dominic Behan’s lyric to Dublin in the Green – “where the helmets glisten in the sun, where the bayonets flash and the rifles crash to the echo of the Thompson Gun”.

And when they laid his ancient bones in the ground at Killtallagh Cemetery, County Kerry, the clay on his coffin closed a period of history.

The passion of Dan Keating was that Ireland should be united.

So, in his later years, he saw young Irish men and women thrive in a vibrant modern economy, while the sacred, patriotic places of the Irish rebellion became tourist attractions.

It has never been easy for the uninvolved to distinguish between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, and Keating was central to that dilemma.

The eldest of seven children born on a small farm near Castlemaine, County Kerry, his political conscience was not stirred greatly until the British hanged the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916.

At the time, he was a trainee barman in Tralee, but he joined the youth wing of the Irish Republican Army.

He was soon taking part in ambushes against the British Army. Early in 1921, he was in a skirmish in which five members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were killed. Shortly before that year’s truce between the British Army and the IRA, he was involved in a gunfight in which four soldiers and five IRA men were killed. He was involved in other actions against the Black and Tans.

Keating was on the losing side in the civil war between the Irish Free State and the IRA, during which he was imprisoned for seven months.

In the Second World War, he took part in the IRA bombing campaign in London, which many of his own countrymen regarded as treacherous.

More peacefully, Keating, a widower, was a grand Gaelic footballer and a fine barman, but he supported the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign of the 1970s and never accepted a divided Ireland, even refusing a state pension. He was patron of Republican Sinn Fein.

Dan Keating, Irish republican; born January 2, 1902, died October 2, 2007