Review: From Suir to Jarama

Liam Cahill is a quiet, thoughtful and considering man, writes Brian Byrne. I know that because he was so during my time in the RTE Newsroom through the 1980s. Variously the Industrial, Economics and Political Correspondent, he wore the titles lightly. He was old school journalist. He gathered the facts, placed them in context, and delivered the story making sure that he, as reporter, never eclipsed it.

Liam always stopped for a chat with whoever was in the newsroom, even with us lowly scruffs on the Radio 2 News desk when I moved there from the Radio 1 subs space. Apart from his work as a journalist, he was passionately interested in workers’ rights, the labour movement and trade unionism.

Neither of us stayed with RTE eventually, but over the decades since we have remained sporadically in touch, our paths intersecting occasionally in areas that included experimentation in internet news and blogging. Liam is also an author, his book Forgotten Revolution — The Limerick Soviet 1919 being the definitive work on an extraordinary two-week episode in that city at the beginning of the War of Independence.

All that preamble is by way of full disclosure when I’m looking at Liam Cahill’s latest book, From Suir to Jarama, which he was kind enough to send to me in advance of its publication this coming week. It also establishes his diligence in research before laying out a story.

This particular story is personal for him. And, I’d say, frustrating to some degree. It’s about the life and legacy of one Mossie Quinlan, killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 in the valley of the River Jarama outside Madrid. A place which became an ‘open air abattoir’ where many of the 15th International Brigade were slaughtered by the Fascists of General Franco.

I have to say that the Spanish Civil War kind of passed me by in my historical interests. But there was a very strong Irish involvement in the ‘Quinta Brigada’, a conglomerate of a variety of battalions of volunteers from various countries who headed to Spain to fight for democracy. Or to escape from their own home politics — many of the Irish there were veterans of the War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War. For the record, we in Kilcullen have such a connection in Frank Conroy, whose death in that war was commemorated in the Heritage Centre in the summer of 2019.

The Quinlan and Cahill families of Waterford were connected, and I can guess that the story of Mossie Quinlan has always been haunting quietly in the back of Liam Cahill’s mind. His hope, I suspect, was to ‘find’ Mossie and exorcise that haunting.

Mossie was one of five Waterford men who fought at Jarama, and he was the one among them killed and buried in a nearby town. He came from a family of business and politics, his grandfather Maurice having owned two butcher shops and who served as Alderman and also Mayor of Waterford as well as being a contemporary of then President of Sinn Fein Eamon de Valera.

Mossie was Liam Cahill’s mother’s first cousin. Liam as a boy remembers Mossie’s father, also Maurice, as a frequent visitor to the Cahill home during the 1950s, but he never spoke about the son who had died at Jarama some two decades before. Indeed, for some 70 years after Mossie’s death, he was only mentioned in ‘hushed voices’ within the family, perhaps because of a sense of shame that he had fought beside Communists against the Fascist threat. Not something considered appropriate for a son of Catholic and holy Ireland.

And here lies the frustration I suspect the journalist Liam Cahill felt in his chasing down of Mossie Quinlan’s life and death. With so little tangible lore in the family, he had to depend on external sources. Wider family, friends, the stories from some who travelled and fought with him. Along with sparse extracts from official documentation relating to a son of Waterford who fought and died in a foreign war on a foreign soil in the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade.

What Liam did gather was substantial detail of the prequel and sequel to the Battle of Jarama, and of the encounter itself. In presenting this, he tells the story around Mossie’s last 83 days, from the time he arrived in Spain from London until his death by sniper on 17 February 1937. Mossie himself hardly appears in the narrative, but we get the sense of what he must have been seeing, hearing, and feeling before that last moment. A last moment when, by various accounts, he was trying to rescue a fallen comrade.

In the book Liam gathers together what is known about Mossie growing up. A member of the Republican scouts Fianna Éireann, later joining the IRA. His membership of the Coffee House Lane Workers Study Group, and their subsequent abandonment of the IRA militarist positioning. Eventual emigration to London and from there to fighting in Spain. Some more detail, but not a lot before it would have to give way to conjecture.

The numbers killed at Jarama were horrific, a total of some 45,000 dead. Numbers which outpace comprehension. In From Suir to Jarama, Liam Cahill has brought that carnage into some perspective through his restoration of the memory of a second cousin who died before he was born.

It might be an imperfect perspective, given the distance in time and the paucity of direct information, but after reading this book we do have a decent sense of Mossie Quinlan. And a greater, and very accurate, sense of the times and happenings within which he lived and died, both in Ireland and Spain.

We feel the truth of the narrative, which is without embellishment or sensationalism, or judgement. A story laid out in its facts, in the way I always remember Liam Cahill doing as an RTE journalist. The book, which is short, is a service to history as much as it is to the memory of Mossie Quinlan.

From Suir to Jarama will be on sale locally in Woodbine Books, price €10..

(The Appendices in the book include extensive bibliographies and source references, a treasure chest of leads for anyone wishing to delve into Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War.)

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