In 1899 the ‘Tartar’ was bought by the Sligo Steam and Navigation Company and the Congested Districts Board. It was built in Glasgow in 1896 to transport herring from the fishing fleet in the Firth of Clyde to market. The Tartar had a crew of seven and was used as a ferry boat transporting sugar, meal, flour,cattle and pigs between Belmullet and Sligo. High shutters built up around the bulwarks made the Tartar resemble an ancient Spanish galleon, an impressive sight!
The ‘Tartar’ was under the control of the Freestate Army after escaping being commandeered by the British at the outbreak of the First World War.
The vessel was once stranded at Drumcliff and her commander Col. Alec McCabe remembered the captain lying on his back under the vessel as Republicans sprayed the crew with rifle fire. Hostilities between Republicans and Freestaters had officially come to an end the previous May, there was an uneasy peace. Six Republicans shot dead in cold blood on the Sligo Mountains the year before was not to be easily forgotten.
In August 1923 the steam powered gunboat ‘S.S. Tartar’ manned by Gardai and a group of the national Army patrolled Sligo Bay. Her crew had previously been captured and held by Republicans in a house near Raughley. Shortly afterwards, by way of retaliation, Raughley Coastguard station, held by ant-Government forces, was pounded by her deck-mounted field gun.
The Captain of the Tartar received information that the Brigadier General of the South Mayo Battalion of the I.R.A. – Sean Kilroy, had crossed by boat from Aughris to Lissadell, surveying all boat traffic he ordered the inception of a small craft owned and crewed by the Brady family that was returning from Cloonagh to Inishmurry. From the Tartar they boarded Brady’s boat and finding nothing during their search were about to disembark when a member of the crew from Rosses Point came up from below decks.
The man was immediately recognised as ‘The Yank’- Yank Kilfeather from Maugherow, who had fought in the War of Independence, an anti-treaty Republican. Between Cloonagh and Inishmurray the Tartar came along and ordered them to stop through a loudhailer. The boat was bringing empty poteen kegs from under Cloonagh, Yank Kilfeather and a few well-known I.R.A. men got a lift to the island to rest up for a while.
Burns and Kilfeather were hard men and wanted the sailing boat to make a run for it.
The Tartar fired once and Kilfeather said to keep going.
The Tartar fired again.
Michael Burns said “Stop, they won’t warn us again!”
Turning to Brady he said “Tell them you know nothing about us, we commandeered the boat”.
Brady ordered the immediate lowering of the sail, as he was at the helm and would have been the first to get shot. Pulling along side the Tartar to keep the boat from getting damaged Brady had to push the boat off with his foot, receiving rifle butts to his ribs from the Tartar ‘crew’.
Following the arrest, the gunboat proceeded to the island on a fruitless expedition to catch more Republicans The IRA men and the Brady brothers with their boat in tow, were brought to Sligo and jailed. The Republicans received a jail sentence. The Brady brothers were suspected but not proven to be willing participants in sheltering fugitives, and were allowed to return home, ending the only naval engagement to take place in Sligo Bay during the Civil War.