Outside Mrs O’Bryan found a large party of Ballybor shop-boys, some of them wearing black masks, led by four strange gunmen. This party had arrived in Cloghleagh about an hour before, and had at once proceeded to picket all roads leading to and from the barracks, and every unfortunate countryman or woman they met making their way along the roads was at once seized by the pickets, taken to the barrack-yard, and there placed face inwards against the wall with their hands on top of their heads.
As soon as the O’Bryan family had been hustled into the road, the gunmen threw paraffin and petrol on the thatch of the barracks, set it alight, and in a very short time the building was a charred ruin. They then mounted their bicycles and rode off into the night, leaving the unfortunate O’Bryans to shift for themselves.
Leaving her family huddled under a hedge, the mother tried to get into two neighbouring houses; but the blighting curse of the I.R.A. was on her and hers, and not a house would even open its door, let alone take them in. In the end she saw that it was hopeless, and returning to her children, did her best to keep them warm with her own body and the few blankets she had managed to bring out of the barracks. And here they spent the night like the beasts of the fields.
Next morning some countryman, braver than the rest, brought word to the Ballybor Barracks of the burning at Cloghleagh, and Sergeant O’Bryan arrived on the scene to find his wife and family perished and starving. Such is the mercy of the I.R.A. for the little children of the R.I.C.
O’Bryan took his family back to Ballybor Barracks, where they were fed and warmed; but in Ireland nowadays a police barracks is no place for little children and women, and before night they must leave. In vain the sergeant tried to find lodgings; he might as well have tried to swim the Atlantic. Every door was slammed in his face directly he made his appeal. But the good Samaritan is not yet extinct in Ireland, and at last the sergeant found a refuge for his family in the empty gardener’s lodge of Ballybor House.
While being turned out of Cloghleagh Barracks, Mrs O’Bryan had recognised two of the incendiaries, who had taken their masks off, as two prominent Sinn Fein shop-boys of Ballybor, afterwards telling her husband their names—Martin Walsh and Peter Lynch—and the sergeant never forgot them.