Eight Republican Prisoners Are Executed by Use of a Mine at Ball Seedy, Co. Kerry

March 1923 saw a series of notorious incidents in Kerry, where 23 Republican prisoners were killed in the field (and another five judicially executed) in just four weeks.

Five Free State soldiers were killed by a booby trap bomb, and another seriously injured, while searching a Republican dugout at the village of Knocknagoshel, County Kerry, on 6 March 1923. Three of those killed were natives of the county, and the two others were members of the Dublin Guard. This constituted the largest loss of life in a single event for the Free State forces since the Battle of Dublin at the start of the civil war in June 1922.

The next day, the local Free State commander in Kerry authorised the use of Republican prisoners to “clear mined roads”. Irish Free State Army General Officer Commanding (G.O.C) of the Kerry Division, Major General Paddy Daly justified the measure as “the only alternative left to us to prevent the wholesale slaughter of our men”

That night, 6/7 March, nine Republican prisoners who had previously been tortured, with bones broken with hammers, were taken from Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee to Ballyseedy crossroads and tied to a land mine which was detonated, after which the survivors were machine-gunned.

One of the prisoners, Stephen Fuller, was blown to safety by the blast of the explosion.

He was taken in at the nearby home of Michael and Hannah Curran. They cared for him and although he was badly injured, he survived - Fuller later became a Fianna Fáil TD.

The Free State troops in nearby Tralee had prepared nine coffins, unaware of Fuller’s escape, and the Dublin Guard released nine names to the press, the fabrication hastily changed when they realised their mistake.

There was a riot when the bodies were brought back to Tralee, where the enraged relatives of the killed prisoners broke open the coffins in an effort to identify their dead