The man could really speak, and held his audience spellbound while he unfolded the Irish Eldorado of the future; but through all his speech ran the one idea to kill, always to kill those in a higher station of life than his listeners. To finish with he called upon them to start with the police, to shoot them like the dogs they were, and when they were gone the rest would be easy.
Sergeant M’Grath had been detailed to attend the meeting to take down in shorthand any speeches which might require explaining afterwards, but until O’Kelly started to preach the doctrine of Lenin he had not opened his notebook.
The sergeant had served in most parts of Ireland, but O’Kelly’s speech and brogue puzzled him: the man spoke like an Englishman trying to imitate the Irish brogue, but with a thickness of speech which the sergeant could not place. Nor could he place the shape of O’Kelly’s head, a round bullet-shaped one with a high narrow forehead and coarse black hair.
He duly reported O’Kelly’s speech to the D.I., who endeavoured to find out where the man came from, but failed to get any definite information. One rumour said that O’Kelly came from Cork, another from America, and yet a third that he was a native of Castleport. So the only thing to do was to arrest the man and then try to identify him; but O’Kelly had completely disappeared.
Nothing further appears to have been heard of O’Kelly in Ireland during 1919, but the following year an itinerant lecturer on beekeeping turned up in Co. Donegal, who bore a strong resemblance to Lenin’s disciple. This man’s practice was to give a short lecture on bees in school-houses, and then to launch forth into pure Bolshevism—a complete waste of time on the average Donegal peasant. Next he was heard of in Belfast, where he was lucky to escape a violent death at the hands of some infuriated shipyard workers.
In May 1920 the Transport Union in Ballybor began suddenly to give Blake a lot of trouble—cases of men being dragged out of their beds at night and forced with a loaded gun at their heads to join the Union steadily increased.
Several landlords who employed a good many men were threatened that, if they did not pay a higher wage than the maximum laid down by law, all their men would be called out and that they would in addition be boycotted. And any who refused at once had their hayricks burnt and their cattle injured.