AN IRISH TALE.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

County Roscommon, in western Ireland, is a flat, inland farm region that somewhat resembles a prettier version of Kansas. Though its name is much less familiar to Americans than those of its neighbors - counties Sligo, Galway and Mayo - Roscommon nevertheless produced the likes of actress Maureen O'Sullivan; the Chieftains' flute player Matt Molloy; and Oscar Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde.

It also produced a man named Ned Hegarty, the great uncle of Eugene writer Kathy Hegarty Thorne. Therein hangs a tale.

In 1992, Thorne and her husband, Lew, traveled to Roscommon in search of her family roots. All she knew at the time was that her grandfather, Peter Joseph Hegarty, had emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century. She set out to discover where he had come from and whether she might have living relatives.

She didn't. Not a one of her grandfather's nine siblings produced a family. Three died young of tuberculosis. Two were killed in the United States. Only one ever married, and had no children.

But a decade after beginning her research, Thorne has uncovered far more than she ever bargained for. As she began digging into her family history, Thorne discovered that Ned Hegarty, her grandfather's brother, was a key local player in the Irish nationalist struggles that freed the country from England in the early 20th century.

He was, in fact, a leader in the Roscommon Volunteers, a secret volunteer organization dedicated to Irish freedom from Britain. The Volunteers were incorporated into the fledgling Irish Republican Army, which emerged during Ireland's war of independence from England in 1919-21.

And as she and her husband traveled each year to Ireland and talked to old-timers there, Thorne began to realize that even though hundreds of Roscommon men and women took part in the Irish battle for independence, few people in Roscommon today understood what their ancestors had done.

The veil of secrecy that surrounded the Irish Republican Army's beginnings still concealed Roscommon's memory of itself, and the community was in danger of losing touch with its own past.

So, being a writer, she decided to write a book.

"People don't want to talk about the IRA," she says. "They sure as heck don't want to talk about the civil war. This is not taught in the schools there." (The civil war she refers to was a bitter Irish-on-Irish battle between radical separatists and moderates who accepted an English treaty. The period is captured in the 1996 movie "Michael Collins," starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts.)

"The civil war period was so ugly," Lew Thorne says. "Nobody knew who the spies were - who did what to whom. It put a bad feeling of uncertainty into people's lives."

By patiently interviewing several hundred people in Ireland and combing attics and archives for long-buried and sometimes secret records of the rebellion, Thorne has pieced together an extensive account of Roscommon's role in the uprising against the English and the Irish civil war that followed. She is currently negotiating with a publisher to bring out her 700-page manuscript, which she's titled "They Put the Flag a-Flyin'.'

The first half of the book is an account of the Irish struggle to overturn seven centuries of English domination and the Irish civil war that followed.

The second half is a list of every single IRA member from Roscommon who fought in those days - all 2,000 of them - including who they were and what they did in battle, date by date and ambush by ambush.

You can read, for example, of Owen Cull, 4th Battalion North Roscommon, brother of Seamus and Michael: "In March of 1921 he was arrested by the Black and Tans (a ruthless force assembled from ex-soldiers by the English) and charged with the murder of the ... constables at the Keadue ambush. He was beaten, all of his teeth broken off by rifle butts, and taken to Boyle Barracks. He was sentenced by court martial to death."

Or of Richard Murray, an armorer. Looking back on his life in 1940, he said, "My work for the IRA was so heavy from 1919 onwards that I had to completely neglect my means of livelihood and when eventually released from jail, my health was undermined, my foot where wounded periodically breaking into a running sore, so that even now I am not fit to undertake the ordinary work of my trade."

"Nobody has done this," Thorne said. "First, it takes way too much time for anyone to do this. Second, you couldn't have printed this list as recently as 20 years ago and lived to tell about it."

Kathy and Lew Thorne are an odd pair to become chroniclers of a complex guerrilla war half a world and nearly a century away. They live in a comfortable home in south Eugene. He's a businessman and a co-founder of the Oregon Masters Track & Field Club. She's a former schoolteacher who has published two books, one a history of a community theater in Kansas City and the other about the Oregon Trail.

But once she starts talking about the men of the Roscommon Volunteers, her voice crackles with enthusiasm and her eyes well up with tears.

This complicated tale of secretive battles waged so long ago has propelled her to spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of her life to trace.

It wasn't always going to be a war story. When Thorne and her husband first arrived in Roscommon and began turning up records of her grandfather, she proposed to write a simple history of County Roscommon.

But a publisher who looked at her 300-page manuscript had a suggestion. The county history was nice, he said, though it might sell better in the United States than in Ireland. But the real passion in her story was the 100 or so pages she had written about the battle for independence. Could she turn that segment into a book on its own?

Thorne fought her own battles to turn the 100 pages into 700. There was a dearth of records of the early fighters. "This is the start of the Irish Republican Army," she said. "They didn't exactly keep records. They didn't sign up and get paid."

But, she discovered, there were some accounts to be found. In the 1930s, the Irish government offered pensions to independence fighters, and local lists were made of men who received payments.

In the southern part of the county, she found a history teacher who had a pile of pension records kept by a local brigade commander. The hand-written notes list the dates of military actions and the names of men who fought in them. She photocopied them all.

Then, in the north, she tracked down the grandson of another official. In the man's attic, she found a similar list of men, dates and actions.

Thorne visited graveyards and copied parish registries. She read every book she could find on Irish history. Lew Thorne took photographs at each stop. Kathy Thorne located reunion photographs of the aging Volunteers and took them door to door, asking for names to go with faces.

And she began to develop a clear portrait of her great uncle, Ned Hegarty, a tragic figure of a man whose life was marked by struggle.

Hegarty, adjutant of the Roscommon 2nd Battalion, was nicknamed "Chief," from his days as chief of the Republican Police for the Sinn Fein Courts in 1919-22.

He was a brooding figure in the community's memory. "Everyone told me about my great uncle, walking his fields with his thumbs tucked under his suspenders, wondering, 'What went wrong?' '

Thorne finds deep parallels between the IRA struggles she's documented and other unconventional wars, such as the battles now being waged against the American military in Iraq. The Irish finally won their independence, she says, when they stopped fighting the conventional war they had lost for centuries and became guerrillas.

"What would I tell President Bush?" she says of Iraq. "Don't underestimate them. We've got a fine military, very well trained in war making - and very little trained in peace making."

In the end, Thorne says, it was England's brutal treatment of the Irish that turned her colonial subjects into hardened fighters.

"I know some of these men," she says. "I never met them. They are long since dead. But I have read their words. And I have a tremendous respect for these men who gave everything and gained nothing for themselves. They risked it all, for independence."

CAPTION(S):

Ned Hegarty helped lead the Roscommon Volunteers. A photo from 1922 shows the 1st Battalion North Roscommon Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, whose struggles have been documented by Kathy Thorne. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Kathy Thorne is writing "They Put the Flag a-Flyin'." Her huband, Lew Thorne, took photos for the book. F i c t i o n C o n t e s t Kathy Thorne (right) talks to a resident of County Roscommon. Thorne had stopped at a cemetery to look for a gravestone as part of her research for the book she is writing about the role of the Roscommon Volunteers in the nationalist uprising against the English and the Irish civil war that followed. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard