The folowing article appeared in The
Scottish Socialist Voice (9th
Samhain/
November 2007)
The Last Soldier
by
Ken Ferguson
Dan Keating, who was the last surviving republican soldier of
Ireland's epic
War of Independence of 1919-21, has died aged 105.
Keating, who died in his native
Kerry on 3 October, refused to recognise the legitimacy of any
Irish government,
North or
South, maintaining his loyalty to the all
Ireland Republic proclaimed on the steps of
Dublin's
GPO in
Easter Week 1916.
Across the decades Keating watched successive fissures in the republican movement from
Michael Collins to
Gerry Adams veer from the path set out in 1916, but remained committed to the view that the Easter Week republic existed and continued to need to be defended.
At the time of his death Keating was Patron of
Republican Sinn Fein (
RSF), the party led by
Ruairi O Bradaigh from which the
Sinn Fein of Gerry Adams and
Martin McGuinness split in
1986, to take up seats in the Dublin parliament.
Speaking to the
BBC last March, he described the
Northern peace process as "a joke", adding:
"All the talk you hear these days is of peace. But there will never be peace until the people of the 32 counties elect one parliament without
British interference."
Keating was born on a small farm near Castlemaine in Kerry in 1902. The family was well respected for its active role in attacking landlords' agents
and defending the rights of tenant farmers.
He joined the youth wing of the
IRA at 14 while working a in
Tralee, and moved on to the adult movement in
1920 as the War of Independence flared and he took part in a series of fire-fights and ambushes. He always refused to comment on whether he had killed, saying:
"When you are involved in an ambush with a crowd of men, you wouldn't know who killed who."
In common with the vast majority of the Kerry IRA, he rejected the partition
Treaty of
1921.
The majority of the anti-Treaty forces left, mainly for
America, after losing the
Civil War. But Keating stayed, found work as a barman in Dublin and became a leader of the Bar
Workers' Union.
He took his first drink at the age of 55 as an expression of disgust at the
Pioneer Total Abstinence Association's "treachery" in refusing to oppose longer hours for pub workers.
Kept under constant surveillance by the
Irish Special Branch, he served stretches in prison, and in de
Valera's internment camp at the Curragh, and spent a year in
London during
World War Two trying to organise a bombing campaign.
He returned to live in Kerry in the
1960s with his late wife
Mary, whom he had met in the visiting room of
Mountjoy Prison, and remained active in republican politics.
"He had opinions about everything until he drew his last breath," says one RSF figure, "especially about football and hurling."
He died in his native county still refusing the pension from the
Dublin government which was due to all war of independence veterans on the grounds that the Irish government was not, he still insisted, legitimate.
- published: 19 Oct 2011
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