Daring Force Tactics: The Assassination Attempt on Lord French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, December 1919

Doubtful Mercy

Life in Ireland turned a little more perilous on the 19^th December 1919, courtesy of a hail of bullets and bombs cast at the convoy of three cars approaching the Ashtown Gate of Phoenix Park, Dublin. On board the first was Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who was returning from a brief visit to the West and had arrived at Ashtown Station on the morning train. From there, the trio of cars picked him up, providing an armed police and military escort back to the Viceregal Lodge in a journey that normally would have taken no more than five uneventful minutes.

The Ashtown Gate of Phoenix Park, Dublin

The engagement was a brief one – “those who heard it are agreed that its duration would be about one minute,” reported the Irish Times – but fierce all the same. Detective Sergeant Hally, seated next to the chauffeur of the first vehicle, was struck in the hand, either by a bullet or bomb fragments, mangling his thumb and two fingers. The man at the wheel kept his nerve, however, and sped forward, passing out of range of their assailants. That the car received minimal damage – one hole to the rear and another through the driver’s window – attested to the wisdom of the decision not to stop and fight it out.

The second car, in contrast, was badly mauled, losing all its windows and taking over a dozen bullet shots to its body. Had there been anyone other than its driver inside, they would almost certainly have been similarly battered; as it was, the sole occupant escaped injury.[1]

Lord French’s car post-ambush, with a soldier pointing out a bullet-hole (source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/17069060140)

It was the third car that turned the tide when it caught up with the scene: open-topped, with six soldiers who opened fire at once, killing one of the assailants. Sergeant George Rumble later testified at the inquiry into the deceased about how he had pulled his firearm out at three of the ambushers who were behind a two-wheeled cart by the road.

Coroner: You aimed at one man?

Rumble: Yes, he was aiming at me with a revolver.

Coroner: What was the result?

Rumble: My shot made the gravel on the road at the man’s feet to fly around him. At the same time, he jumped and made out of sight. The other man (the second) was in the act of pulling the pin out of a bomb with his left hand, he having the bomb in his right.

Coroner: What did you do?

Rumble: I fired at him.

Coroner: What was the result?

Rumble: The man put up his arms and fell straight on his back.

Coroner: During this time, were there bullets flying around?

Rumble: Yes.

Coroner: Did one bullet pass close to your face?

Rumble: Yes, it burned my lip and smashed the windscreen.[2]

Dan Breen

The dead man was later identified as Martin Savage, a former resident of Knutsford Detention Barracks, imprisoned there due to his involvement in the 1916 Rising, three and a half years previously. The attacking party soon fled, some on bicycles down Navan Road, in the direction of the city, others running through a field, all the while hotly pursued by soldiers – at least, that is how it was reported. According to Dan Breen, reading this in the newspapers was enough to send him into fits of laughter as the soldiers in the third car had actually driven on to the cover of the Phoenix Park wall after their initial exchange of shots. And Breen would have been in a position to know, having been one of the three men positioned by the cart with Savage, during which he had also been hit – though in the leg, making him luckier than Savage at least.

What is certain is that Breen and the rest did not stick around, having disappeared by the time more soldiers and policemen from the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) arrived. They found, in addition to the slain man, a wounded Constable Michael O’Loughlin. Whatever happened to him had occurred before the ambush was sprung. He was immediately placed in the second of the cars which, as damaged as it was, remained intact enough to drive the constable to Steevens’ Hospital, Kilmainham.

Also of interest was the farmer’s cart Rumble had seen three of the assailants sheltering behind. It would appear that its intended use was to be pushed into the middle of the thoroughfare, only for Constable O’Loughlin to chance upon the party and their cart while on patrol, as unexpectedly for him as it was for them. Which was just as well for Lord French, for, as the Irish Times darkly noted, “had they blocked the road and stopped the cars, they would have had them virtually at their mercy.”[3]

‘The Head of an Alien Government’

Which almost certainly would have meant the end of the Lord Lieutenant. Whether the War of Independence had started earlier that year, at the Soloheadbeg ambush on the 21^st January 1919, or if it was just the latest stage in a process triggered by the Easter Week of 1916 – Savage, after all, had been a participant – is a matter of debate; what is clear is that the Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been looking at ways to escalate their armed campaign against British rule in Ireland for quite some time.

Cathal Brugha

Mick McDonnell had been in London in the autumn to assess the feasibility of wiping out the British Cabinet and any other targets of note (a strategy first mooted during the Conscription Crisis of the year before and which would later be revived in 1921 as the insurgency was reaching its zenith). After two weeks in the enemy capital, McDonnell returned to Dublin to report to Michael Collins, Richard Mulcahy, Cathal Brugha and other members of the IRA command. He recommended against the initiative as, other than the unlikelihood of catching the entire hit-list at once, anyone sent on the mission would not be coming back (though Brugha still seemed eager, that particular plan was quietly dropped). That was the same rationale against the next big idea, in November 1919: shooting Lord French while the Lord Lieutenant was taking the salute for the special victory parade in College Green, marking the one-year anniversary of the Armistice; meanwhile, IRA teams would be simultaneously striking the procession at different points.

When Dick McKee, while discussing this with McDonnell, asked for a choice of assassin – who, in theory, would snipe Lord French from a window in the adjacent Bank of Ireland, as if this was Dallas in 1963 – McDonnell could not provide one: the job was just too big. He eventually offered himself, despite knowing full well, as did McKee, that the mission would be a suicide one. “If I went down I would go down in glory,” was how McDonnell explained his thinking at the time. To his surprise – and probably relief – the scheme was cancelled the night before the parade as Brugha, a man not otherwise known for his moderation, “said the people would not stand for it” – civilian casualties, after all, would be hard to avoid.[4]

The Bank of Ireland on College Green, the proposed vantage point from which to snipe Lord French

Regardless, from that point, the Lord Lieutenant became the IRA’s number one target – “GHQ wanted Lord French executed at any cost,” as McDonnell put it.[5]

It was, Breen stressed, nothing personal: “Against the old soldier himself we had no personal spite, but he was the head of an alien Government that held our country in bondage.” Besides, there was the potentially priceless publicity to consider:

We knew that his death would arouse the world to take notice of our fight for freedom. His name was known throughout the civilised world. The Phoenix Park was as famous as Hyde Park. Think of the sensation that would be created when this man, a Field-Marshal in the British Army, head of the Irish Government, was shot dead at the gate of the Phoenix Park, in the capital of the country he was supposed to rule…The citizens of every country would sit up and say: ‘The men who have done this are no cowards. Ireland must have a grievance. What is it?’ That is the result on which we reckoned.[6]

Seán Treacy

In truth, Breen was more concerned about the inhabitants of his own country, finding them, to his dismay, to be ambivalent about the IRA’s recourse to violence. Soloheadbeg had been as much to kick-start the overdue war as about robbing gelignite when Breen, Seán Treacy and other Tipperary Volunteers waylaid the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) escort and shot dead the two constables present. That was what Breen and Treacy, as Quartermaster and Vice-Commandant of the South Tipperary IRA Brigade respectively, had agreed between them. Both were spending too much time behind bars on one charge or another for their liking; it was time, Treacy remarked, to stop being pushed around and do a bit of pushing back.[7]

Instead of the ‘risen people’ Breen had hoped for after Soloheadbeg, “many people, even former friends, branded us as murderers,” a fact that still rankled by the time he put pen to paper for his reminiscences. An otherwise sympathetic priest compared from the pulpit the Soloheadbeg culprits to the Biblical Cain, while a farmer who allowed Breen and some others into his house ordered them back out into the cold night as soon as he learned they were armed. Such was the pressure that Breen and Treacy, along with Séumas Robinson and Seán Hogan who had also been at Soloheadbeg, decided to chance the big city together.[8]

Left to right: Séumas Robinson, Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and Seán Hogan

Their proven willingness to risk their lives and liberty for the cause was co-opted into the cadre of gunmen that was forming in Dublin – what would become known as the Squad – and assigned to the task of assassinating the Lord Lieutenant. Which was easier ordered than done: the experienced soldier that he was, Lord French proved an elusive quarry, often changing his plans at the last moment to thwart his enemy’s, such as when Breen was assigned with others to Grattan Bridge one chilly November night, a grenade in hand to hurl at the Lord Lieutenant’s car when it passed on the way to a banquet in Trinity College.

Grattan Bridge, Dublin

As Lord French failed to appear, all Breen and his companions got for their troubles was wasted time and frigid fingers. The same nothing happened a fortnight later on the same bridge which Lord French was again supposed to cross and again did not. As they stood in the snow, pacing the length of the bridge, the Volunteers realised how they stood out like a sore (and cold) thumb and hastily departed – just in time to avoid the lorry-loads of British soldiers who descended on the scene, stopping and searching everyone in sight. It was an unpleasant reminder that, while the IRA was gradually winning the streets, via the murder of selected DMP officials, Dublin remained dangerously unpredictable – for everyone.[9]

Misleading Statements?

Piaras Béaslaí

However readable Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom is, it must, like any autobiography, be treated with a certain caution. Not all contemporaries were overly impressed by it; Breen’s suggestion that the quest to kill the Lord Lieutenant originated from discussions between him and his three Tipperary comrades, with the Dublin Volunteers following their lead, prompted Piaras Béaslaí to inform readers of his own work:

In view of misleading statements, made in a recent publication [Breen’s book was published in 1924, two years before Béaslaí’s in 1926], it is necessary to emphasis the fact that the projected attack on Lord French was the unanimous decision of G.H.Q., and that reports as to his plans and activities in the matter were regularly submitted by Collins to meetings of Headquarters.[10]

Another divergence is how the IRA learned of Lord French’s arrival in Ashtown Station on the 19^th December 1919. According to Breen, “our information had come from a trusted agent inside Dublin Castle” – one of the several DMP moles Collins had working for him, such as Eamon Broy, who was to identify himself (if indirectly) as the source in question:

Several times, amongst the items I gave Tommy Gay [his link with Collins] were particulars as to where Lord French would be the following day, but nothing ever happened. One night, meeting Tommy in the usual way, and having told him a few things, I mentioned casually that Lord French would be arriving at Ashtown Station at 1 p.m. on the following day. I thought no more about it.[11]

McDonnell and Vincent Byrne, both of whom were present at the ambush, told a different story, albeit with variations between them (each as part of their Bureau of Military History [BMH] Statements, composed decades afterwards, so such discrepancies are to be expected). According to Byrne, he was in a Sinn Féin club at North Summer Street when Paddy Sharkey, who was part of the same Dublin IRA company as he, casually mentioned his need to leave early that night: his father, as a railway guard, was due to go down to Roscommon “to bring ould French back to Dublin” the next morning, with Sharkey needed to prepare his lunch for then.

“Oh, is that so?” Byrne replied, and went to McDonnell’s house as soon as he could to report this inside scoop.

Members of the Squad (left to right): Mick McDonnell, Tom Keogh, Vincent Byrne, Paddy O’Daly and Jimmy Slattery

McDonnell was to tell a similar story, except that it was Tom Ennis, not Byrne, who overheard the railway guard’s son and that the original information was when Lord French would be leaving Dublin, not returning to it. “We organised a squad, went to Ashtown Cross, waiting there all night, and French did not turn up,” McDonnell recalled. “When dawn started to break in the morning we went home tired, sleepy and hungry, disgusted and disappointed.”

The information had been correct, it seems only that Lord French had enjoyed the party he was at in Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, so much that he stayed the night. McDonnell resolved to get their target on the return journey instead, and obtained the new schedule from the railway guard’s son (that the young man may have been putting his father in harm’s way did not seem to have occurred to him). When McDonnell received the phone-call from Tom Ennis on the morning of the 19^th December that the train due to carry the Lord Lieutenant was leaving Broadstone Station, he knew it was time to gather the men and get them into position at the chosen site of Ashtown Cross, between Ashtown Station and the Phoenix Park gate.

Ashtown Station (source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/26289859@N06/16840190943/in/photostream/)

“I was in charge of that ambush,” he wrote, a claim supported by Byrne, who was told by McDonnell, in the front-room of the latter’s home where the handpicked team assembled that day, to go out and bring back any grenades he could find in the nearest weapons’ dump.[12]

Constable O’Loughlin

Séumas Robinson

Breen did not specify who was in charge, preferring instead to focus on his own experiences during the ambush. Historian Diarmaid Ferriter commented on how his memoirs “seemed more to popularise him than to provide any real insight or detached analysis.” A harsh critique, perhaps, but Séumas Robinson, for one, came to resent Breen’s glory-hound tendencies, using his BMH Statement to accuse the other man of inflating his war record and IRA rank. As O/C of the South Tipperary Brigade, Robinson had been Breen’s commanding officer – but one would never guess from My Fight for Irish Freedom that Breen had had any such thing.[13]

Similarly bold, or brash, was his assertion that they could have taken the train to Frenchpark, overpowered its military guard and killed the Lord Lieutenant then and there, before escaping with similar ease. Considering the difficulties Breen would encounter during the actual attempt, this claim should perhaps not be looked into too closely (in contrast, Byrne said he was “no Robert Emmet”, as in suicidal, when an earlier plan to catch Lord French on the grounds of the Viceregal Lodge was broached to him).[14]

The first complication arose when Constable O’Loughlin chanced upon Breen, Savage and Keogh as they waited by the road, cart at the ready to push out. In a sign that the IRA insurgency was still in its fledgling stage, the policeman tried moving them along rather than assume any malign intent; to Breen’s exasperation, O’Loughlin somehow failed to notice the two revolvers he was carrying. The constable would be found injured at the scene, though not from any action of Breen’s; besides having “no desire to kill the unfortunate man”, a gunshot would almost certainly blow their cover.

Instead, it was a fourth Volunteer – unnamed in Breen’s book – who left the spot he had been assigned to and threw a grenade at Constable O’Loughlin. As this meant endangering Breen’s life as well, it can be assumed this was done in a fit of pique:

The policeman was struck on the head with the bomb which burst at my side without inflicting injury; but the force of the explosion threw us violently to the ground. The policeman was not seriously injured. We quickly recovered from the shock and had no time to bother about the policeman.

The Lord Lieutenant’s convoy was almost upon them. Had Breen, Savage and Keogh got the cart in place, instead of being delayed by O’Loughlin, they could have prevented the first of the cars – the one, as it turned out, Lord French was inside – from speeding past with only a few strikes able to be made against it.[15]

The interfering constable appeared in McDonnell’s and Byrne’s BMH Statements as well, though not with any great explanation as to what happened to him. “We thought of taking him but thought again it would hamper our positon or maybe give the alarm, then decided to leave him alone,” wrote McDonnell, attributing instead the failure of the cart strategy to Breen and the other two pushing it shaft-first, not the easier way of body-first McDonnell told them to do.[16]

In Byrne’s version, it was Breen, Keogh and McDonnell – not Breen, Keogh and Savage as Breen told it – who were moving the cart, only for it to become stuck in a dip by the side of the road. Constable O’Loughlin appeared and disappeared in Byrne’s narration just as mysteriously as in McDonnell’s, with the former saying only: “The policeman stood in the centre of the crossroads, as a traffic man. I suppose he was there to see that his Excellency would have a clear passage.”[17]

“RIC men looking for clues, and a DMP man standing at a spot where one of the bombs exploded.” (from the ‘Irish Independent’, 20nd December 1919)

Clearly, the ambush was a less-than-professional affair, and its various players had ample reason to omit or downplay certain aspects. As if Breen being almost killed by a ‘friendly’ bomb was not farcical enough, Seán Hogan fumbled one of his own, covering himself and Paddy O’Daly with dirt when it detonated between them. Had Hogan and O’Daly not thrown themselves to the ground in time, worse might have been inflicted. Michael Lynch was to blame the failure to kill the Lord Lieutenant on the grenades having overly long five-second fuses, when shorter ones for a second and a half would have been deadlier. Given the narrow escapes Breen, Hogan and O’Daly did have, however, the likeliest causalities would have been themselves.[18]

Exchanging Shots

Although too injured to appear at the subsequent inquiry, Constable O’Loughlin was able to make his side of the story known via a friend who repeated what the other man told him to the Irish Independent. According to O’Loughlin, he had been on duty at the crossroads, minding his own business, when a bomb passed over his shoulder, narrowly missing his head. “I did not know who threw, or if it was thrown at myself, because it was flung from behind,” the policeman said. “I had not noticed any suspicious-looking people around there. Everything appeared just as usual.”

“A civilian examining one of the hand grenades found after the attack” (from the ‘Irish Independent’, 20th December 1919)

Almost as if the first was a signal, more grenades were flung from a hedge on the roadside, while O’Loughlin heard the sound of several guns being fired; meanwhile, the first of the convoy cars was coming up the road. The constable was drawing his own weapon when the first bomb went off in front of him, albeit not to any great effect – to judge from all the accounts, IRA munitions-making skills was decidedly in the beginner’s stage – for O’Loughlin was still standing when he saw three men – described by the constable as being “all respectably dressed…not like labourers or in working clothes” – running towards him, guns in hand:

Before I could bring my revolver into action I got shot in the left foot. I was staggered and fell, and was just falling on the side of the road…The wound in my foot and the whole commotion of the shots and explosions all coming at once, must have stunned me, and I was dazed.[19]

The man who was to drive O’Loughlin to hospital, Corporal Appleton, had his own brush with death. As the man behind the wheel of the second car, as well as its sole occupant, he bore the brunt of the ambush. Two bullets struck the windscreen, followed by a bomb through the left-hand window, scattering fragments inside but leaving Appleton unscathed. As the Corporal stopped his car and looked out, he saw one of the attackers pointing a revolver at him with a cry of ‘hands up!’

Mr H.O. Holmes (Crown representative at inquiry): What did you do?

Appleton: I immediately fired a shot at him with my revolver. The escort car went by as I ducked down.

Holmes: How many shots did you fire at this man?

Appleton: About twelve. The revolver has six rounds, and I reloaded once.

Holmes: Did he fire back at you?

Appleton: Yes.

Holmes: How many shots did he fire?

Appleton: I could not say. We were exchanging shots, firing shot for shot till my ammunition was exhausted.

Holmes: What happened [to] him?

Appleton: He went clear round the corner [of a nearby building]. After my ammunition went, I had no more to defend myself with.[20]

This was a somewhat more heroic version than the one later provided by Byrne, in which Appleton – misnamed as ‘Applesby’ here – waved a white handkerchief in surrender.  “Blown to bits in his car,” he said when questioned about the Lord Lieutenant, which the Volunteers took at face value. Someone then suggested Appleton be killed, to which another replied: “Oh, it’s not him we wanted,” thus saving the Corporal’s life.[21]

McDonnell corroborates this somewhat, in that they captured the second car and its driver, finding to their disappointment only luggage inside, with no Lord French. The debate on Appleton’s life is not included, however. Breen is briefer, writing only that “we left the constable [O’Loughlin] and the driver [incorrectly named ‘McEvoy’] on the field of battle,” while the version provided by another participant, Joe Leonard, matches the initial newspaper reports of the would-be assassins fleeing after being confronted with the soldiers in the third car: “We had not much time to spare, remembering the fifty [actually six] soldiers advancing on us, so all we could do for Martin Savage was to whisper a prayer” and leave the scene.[22]

The Martin Savage Memorial, erected on the site of the ambush in 1948 by the National Graves Association

Aftermath

Other than Savage’s death, there were three main consequences to the attack on Lord French:

Sir John French, Lord French

One – New measures to stamp out the nascent rebellion were accelerated by the authorities. Throughout his military career, Lord French’s “touch had never been light or deft when matters of internal security was concerned,” as even a sympathetic biographer admits, and “his deep own sense of Irishness did nothing to help him see the Irish problem in anything but the starkest of blacks and whites”; his appointment to Lord Lieutenant being a sign in itself at how the British Government “was fast running out of options” in its handling of an increasingly turbulent country.[23]

As Dublin Castle hesitated between applying the carrot or the stick, Lord French was very much of the latter option, successfully urging the Cabinet to proscribe Sinn Féin in July 1919, though London balked at his request for the right to impose martial law – that is, until the failed attempt on his life convinced enough wavering minds in government. A month later, in January 1920, the British Army began assuming greater responsibility in Ireland, turning a policing matter into a more military one, and with Lord French taking the chance to sign as many internment warrants as he could get.[24]

Lord French inspecting RIC men on parade

Two – Sufficiently offended were the Dublin Volunteers at the coverage of the Irish Independent, with phrases such as “this dastardly attack”, that it was agreed by Richard Mulcahy, the IRA Chief of Staff, that action could be taken against it. Guided by the advice of one of their number, who worked in the linotype room of the newspaper, an IRA raiding party entered the Irish Independent’s building and dismantled its printing machinery, enough to lose it a day of sales. Worse could have occurred: some of the Volunteers were on their way to murder the editor when stopped near Parnell Square by one of their officers, Michael Lynch, who insisted on them waiting for orders from GHA before doing anything.[25]

Mulcahy was to refer to this almost three years later, in April 1922, before Dáil Éireann. Ireland was by then a very different place, politically speaking, with the Lord Lieutenant and the rest of Dublin Castle out and the formerly underground body of Irish representatives in – and wrestling with a very similar set of challenges. Instead of the Irish Independent, it was the Freeman’s Journal’s turn to be wrecked by the IRA – except, rather than having ordered it as before, Mulcahy was obliged to explain why brutalising a media outlet was not okay now when it had been permissible then.

The remnants of the Freeman’s Journal printing equipment, March 1922

“As far as any action against the Independent is concerned,” he told the Dáil, “that was taken in order to save life purely and simply.” Had Mulcahy not permitted the Volunteers that outlet, their anger might instead have been taken out on the newspaper staff, fatally so. The opposition in the Dáil scoffed at this but, going by Lynch’s account, Mulcahy was speaking the truth.[26]

Martin Savage

Three – As with Easter Week of 1916, the Ashtown Ambush was in execution a flop. While praising the “small handful of very brave men” behind it, Michael Lynch lamented how the operation had been “rushed into without proper military planning” and was to wonder what could have been done differently to save Savage’s life. However, again like Rising, the deed did much to publicise the policy of armed resistance to British rule – and showed there was a receptive audience.[27]

This was demonstrated at the inquiry into Savage’s death. After outlining the facts of the case, the Coroner urged the jury to find that the fatal shooting of Savage, in the act of pulling the pin out of a grenade he would then throw, was justifiable homicide on the part of the soldier responsible. Instead, after consulting among themselves for an hour, the jury members delivered a verdict coolly indifferent to the Coroner’s request, finding only “that Martin Savage met his death as a result of a bullet fired by a military escort at Ashtown Cross on the 19^th December.” What was more: “The jury beg to tender their sympathy to the relatives of the deceased.”[28]

A turning-point had been reached, Breen crowed:

The people were beginning to appraise the situation. In private many defended our standpoint. The great majority of our countrymen were taking their bearings. Some of them were shocked at the daring force-tactics but it was becoming obvious to all that we meant business and that it was their duty to stand by us.[29]

And while there is much in Breen’s book to put a question-mark over, on that particular point, when read alongside the jury’s verdict, he was probably more correct than not.

References

[1] Irish Times, 20/12/1919

[2] Ibid, 23/12/1919

[3] Ibid, 20/12/1919 ; Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), p. 95

[4] McDonnell, Michael (BMH / WS 225), pp. 3-5

[5] Ibid, p. 5

[6] Breen, p. 84

[7] Ibid, pp. 31, 34

[8] Ibid, pp. 40-1

[9] Ibid, pp. 82-3

[10] Ibid, p. 81 ; Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, Volume I (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008), p. 248

[11] Breen, p. 85 ; Broy, Eamon (BMH / WS 1280), p. 103

[12] Byrne, Vincent (BMH / WS 423), p. 16 ; McDonnell, p. 5

[13] Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923 (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2015), p. 30 ; Robinson, Séumas (BMH / WS 1721), pp. 127-9 (for more on Robinson’s and Breen’s chilly relationship, see A Bitter Brotherhood: The War of Words of Séumas Robinson

[14] Breen, p. 84 ; Byrne, p. 15

[15] Breen, pp. 87-8

[16] McDonnell, p. 6

[17] Byrne, pp. 17-8

[18] O’Daly, Paddy (BMH / WS 387), p. 21 ; Lynch, Michael (BMH / WS 511), p. 84

[19] Irish Independent, 22/12/1919

[20] Irish Times, 23/12/1919

[21] Byrne, pp. 189-9

[22] McDonnell, p. 7 ; Breen, p. 90 ; Leonard, Joe (BMH / WS 547), p. 7

[23] Holmes, Richard. The Little Field Marshal: A Life of Sir John French (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), p. 337

[24] Ibid, pp. 350, 354

[25] Lynch, pp. 87-8

[26] Dáil Éireann. Official Report (Dublin: Published by the Stationery Office, [1922]), p. 322

[27] Lynch, p. 84

[28] Irish Times, 23/12/1919

[29] Breen, p. 93

Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Independent

Irish Times

Books

Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 2008)

Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Dáil Éireann: Official Report (Dublin: Published by the Stationery Office, [1922?])

Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923 (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2015)

Holmes, Richard. The Little Field Marshal: A Life of Sir John French (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Broy, Eamon, WS 1280

Byrne, Vincent, WS 423

Leonard, Joe, WS 547

Lynch, Michael, WS 511

McDonnell, Michael, WS 225

O’Daly, Patrick, WS 387

Robinson, Séumas, WS 1721

A Cavan Field That is Forever Belfast: The Last Stand of an Ill-Fated Flying Column, May 1921

Showdown at Lappanduff

Proof that there was nowhere in Ireland entirely safe from the ongoing guerrilla war was abruptly demonstrated when the inhabitants of Lappanduff, in the parish of Drung, were awoken from their sleep in the early hours of the 8^th May 1921 by the sound of gunfire. Lappanduff was not normally a townland that could expect much in the way of excitement or even attention; even more remote was the farm of Mr John Brady, set on a mountainous piece of land that lay on the parish border and a mile away from the nearest road. In the corner of this farm was a slated, two-storey house, formerly tenanted by a labourer, when Mr Brady still actively farmed, but unoccupied as of late – that is, except for the group of young men who had taken up residence a few days before.

Cavan mountain

Not much was known about them, at least not by the Anglo-Celt, except – “from the meagre details available” – the men were strangers to the area, mostly hailing from Belfast, with two from Knockbridge parish, Co. Louth, and their ages ranged from nineteen to twenty-one years. One was dead by the time the newspaper went to print, and most of the rest captives, as their presence had not gone unnoticed by the authorities, who had sent lorryloads of Crown police and British soldiers to the farm.

When shots rang out:

The troops immediately took cover behind the rocks on the highland above, and some of the occupants of the house, it is stated, rushed from their beds and took up positions behind broken-down walls which adjoin the building. Daylight was just breaking, and as the battle developed the crack-crack of rifles resounding through the valleys were heard for miles round.

For two hours this firefight raged, so the Anglo-Celt estimated, until the farm occupants – or ‘civilians’ as the newspaper somewhat erroneously termed them – surrendered. By then, one had been wounded in the arm, along with a soldier, neither seriously; the sole fatality being identified as John McCartney from the Falls Road, Belfast. Upon examination of the farmhouse, an arsenal of respectable size and variety was discovered inside: Mills grenades, bombs, service rifles, pistols, ammunition and gelignite fuses, as well as the beds, food and clothing necessary for an extended stay. Clearly these were no mere ‘civilians’ and had come for more than just a visit.

For the most part, the Anglo-Celt had been discreet in its coverage. The facts were reported, with little speculation beyond. The only hint at why the supposed ‘civilians’ had been there in the first place was the inscription on the coffin plate for the deceased: John McCartney, Sectional Commandant, IRA.[1]

John McCartney (from his Military Service Pensions application, 1D65, p. 55)

‘In Great Dread’

Not all the Volunteers from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been killed or captured at Lappanduff. “One account states that the leader escaped,” read the Anglo-Celt, “whilst another is that five of the party succeeded in getting away.” The truth of the former report was confirmed two days later, on the 10^th May, when Joe McGee wrote to the rest of the Belfast IRA Brigade to report. McGee wisely refrained from signing his name, only as “O.C., Flying Column’, and revealing his location as “enemy under the impression I am wounded and are searching Cootehill district for me.”

McGee had arrived at Ballyhaise, Co. Cavan, on the 3^rd May, only five days before the disaster, along with six others from Belfast. The organiser from the IRA GHQ – nameless in the report, presumably also for security purposes – guided them to a safe-house until the rest of the flying column-to-be joined them. From Ballyhaise, the men went to Bunce to pick up the weapons stored for them, and then to Lappanduff, reaching it on the 5^th May. Initial impressions were not encouraging: the column had to be distributed to nearby friendly houses as the one intended for their sole use was not ready.

Also disappointing was the absence of the local Volunteers who were supposed to appear later that evening with more equipment. The base at least was finished, the work in doing so taking up most of the Belfast men’s time. They had enough light left for two hours of parading and practising with signalling and taking cover, before retiring for the night on the 7^th May.

An example of an IRA Flying Column

Sentries, of course, were posted and these awoke the rest at 4:50 am. British troops had been spotted lurking in another house close by, prompting the column to divide into three groups, one in the centre and the other two on either flank, each facing the threat. Rather than on McGee’s command, “this was done by the men themselves,” and though standing to fight would prove a grave mistake, “I believe they were under the impression they had only a small party to deal with.”

In fact, the Crown force numbered about three hundred and fifty, complete with ten lorries, so McGee later learned, against the seventeen men at Lappanduff. Also, it turned out that the enemy party first sighted had only been a decoy while the rest converged on the Irishmen’s hillside position from different angles. Compounding their woes was the breakdown in communication between their three sub-columns, each focused on its own separate struggle. McGee gave no indication in his report that he considered himself to be in any way responsible, despite his rank as O/C: “From the start no discipline was maintained.”

At first, the Volunteers held their own, one attempt by the enemy “to storm position on the right” being beaten and “forced to retire with I believe ten casualties” – this being a much more impressive (and suspect) tally than the one reported in the newspapers. All the same, the weight of numbers proved too much and when one of the three bands, consisting of four men, surrendered, the remaining pair were compelled “to break up and retire as best possible,” as McGee put it, though their best would prove not enough to save the column:

The entire parties were moving in different directions and were picked up by parties of enemy forces. I and two others managed to escape with our arms. As far as I can gather four of the column including myself are still free.

McGee finished his report with: “Awaiting further instructions from you,” although he could not have been under any illusion of accomplishing much from now on. Besides, “local Volunteers very very slow and do not seem to grasp anything at all,” he complained to Belfast. Nobody in the area had given the column any warning of the enemy’s approach, despite the lorries passing by their homes. This negligence might be explained by the hostages the British had rounded up in one of the vehicles – or it could be that the slow-witted Cavan IRA members McGee had encountered so far “are just typical of this sleepy place, and seem to hold enemy forces in great dread.”[2]

A Peculiar Position

McGee was venting his frustration but even Cavan Volunteers could be aware that there was something amiss in their branch of the IRA. “The position in Cavan was a peculiar one,” admitted Hugh Maguire, an officer in the IRA brigade there, blaming the central leadership in Dublin for the disarray:

I am at a loss to understand why our GHQ did not take some steps to put the organisation there on a better footing. There were eight or nine battalions in the county area. This was too big and too scattered an organisation to be controlled as one brigade and should have been organised into two brigades at least.

Instead, the Cavan IRA became a sprawling, unwieldy mess:

We could hardly have said to have a water-tight brigade organisation at any time, and when the original brigade organisation lapsed each battalion was an independent battalion coming directly under GHQ, Dublin, and for such a number of them in one county this was a pretty hopeless position.”[3]

Still, the Brigade continued to do its part in the war, such as the burning of Crosskeys police barracks, as per orders from GHQ, at Easter 1920 after its garrison had evacuated. Raids for arms were also conducted across the county near the end of the year, and though the work was simple – usually just by asking the owner for their firearm – the results were paltry: five or six shotguns and a few revolvers. Funds were raised via a house to house collection, which Maguire, as Brigade Quartermaster, and another officer took to Dublin in order to purchase more weapons from GHQ.

A burnt-out RIC barracks

“I understand that a consignment of some sorts was sent to us via Longford with a supply for that area,” Maguire was to recall, “but that the Longford Volunteers kept the whole lot for themselves…we never got any arms and our money was never returned to us either.” The central leadership seemed to hold scant expectation in general for Cavan, as a conversation Maguire had with Michael Collins and Gearóid O’Sullivan in Dublin would indicate:

Collins asked us what we were doing in the area and we told him we had no arms and that all we could do was trench roads and cut communications and generally disrupt British government measures. He told us to continue this sort of work.[4]

Success was had instead in the poaching of policing duties from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). By then the Dáil courts were up and running, as a counter to the British ones, and these required the arrest of suspects and their guarding during detention. All of this “threw a great strain on the Volunteers,” according to Maguire – the feeding of detainees alone was a constant headache – but, as a plus, “the people developed a sense of confidence in the Volunteers when they realised they were quite capable of maintaining law and order in the country.”[5]

Those expecting the sort of daring deeds and dramatic exploits popularised by the likes of Tom Barry, Dan Breen and Ernie O’Malley will be disappointed, but then they were always exceptional. In its low-key approach to the guerrilla war – to the point of being sedate – and focus on mundane, but essential, groundwork, Cavan was more representative of the country during the War of Independence than bigger, flashier places like Cork and Dublin.

Webley revolver, commonly used in the Irish War of Independence

Which is not to say the Cavan IRA entirely gave up on its ambitions for something bigger. Plans were laid to attack Ballyjamesduff RIC Barracks in December 1920; as with much else in Cavan during this period, bad fortune thwarted the attempt when the six riflemen who were intended to spearhead the assault failed to materialise on the night, forcing the rest of the Volunteers to cancel. Even as late as 1956, when Maguire was composing his Bureau of Military History (BMH) Statement, the reasons for this absence remained uncertain. One theory was that the six men had been injured in an accident, though Maguire believed, less charitably, that only three had bothered to show at their meeting-spot and then decided to go no further. And a third version is from Seán Sheridan, in his own BMH Statement, in which it was the guide intended to lead the six to the barracks who stood them up.[6]

The Facts(?) of the Case

Trying to make sense of the Lappanduff debacle is likewise complicated by its conflicting accounts; in each, the issue of blame was one that could be skirted around or laid on someone else but, either way, never fully ignored.

Crown policemen on a Crossly tender, a lorry commonly used by British forces in Ireland

Writing a day after McGee’s report to Belfast, on the 11^th May, Séamus McGoran, in his role as IRA organiser for Cavan, attempted to explain to his Chief of Staff in Dublin exactly what happened. McGoran did not say whether he had talked to McGee beforehand or read the latter’s report; nonetheless, it is probably not a coincidence that McGoran at the start exculpated the people near Lappanduff from the charge of negligence: the British had, prior to their attack, commandeered every house nearby to prevent their presence from being leaked to the column. Furthermore, the Cavan IRA had dug trenches across the roads leading to Lappanduff Mountain in order stymie any British lorries, only for the foe to conscript local labour to fill them up again.

“Our men fought splendidly under difficulties, but the mistake made was that they took up positions to fight a small force,” McGoran wrote, echoing (knowingly or not) what McGee had stated about the fatal mistake the column made. Thus the enemy were able to outflank the small band of Belfast men. A consolation, of sorts, was the price the British paid for their victory:

The enemy lost heavily. Their casualties are ten at the least, that is taken from an eye-witness who watched them carrying them away and he was in a position to see them all. We have had that verified from another source who saw them being brought into Cavan town.

At least, this is according to McGoran, his count of the Crown losses being quite higher – and suspiciously more impressive – than the sole injury reported in the press. Another silver lining in the cloud was psychological:

Though a material defeat I look upon the fight as a moral success. It had had a good effect on Cavan and I think will awaken the men to a sense of their duty. From that point of view I consider the introduction of the column justified.[7]

Richard Mulcahy

But the IRA Chief of Staff remained unmollified by the ‘glass half full’ arguments from McGoran. “While this must not magnify our defeats, or let them depress us, or let them weaken our will to see the present struggle through to the very end,” wrote Richard Mulcahy thirteen days later, on the 24^th May, “there is nothing to be gained by shutting our eyes to actual facts.” And facts were what Mulcahy was lacking: “Your own report is very unsatisfactory and it really gives me no details to go on, as to what the actual state of affairs in the neighbourhood was.”

A fuller report was thus ordered from McGoran, with particular attention to be given to two points:

1. The arrangements made for the security of the column on the night of the 7^th May, just prior to the engagement.
2. Any orders the column had had from its O/C about its disposition and what to do in the event of a surprise attack.

That the column had been evidently been found wanting on what to do, coupled with how the enemy had been able to advance so close to its position without detection, revealed to the Chief of Staff “a most appalling lack of training or neglige [sic – rest of word cut off from the page] which, in view of the fact that it involves the lives of men and the morale of the county generally, is criminal.”[8]

A Sense of Duty

McGoran must have taken this stern reprimand to heart, for he submitted a fuller report on the 6^th May, addressing both of Mulcahy’s demands for further information:

1. Security arrangements for the column: McGoran had given standing orders for roads leading to Lappanduff to be trenched and, if refilled, for them to be dug again. Upon hearing that the roads had indeed been filled by the British, McGoran assumed his orders would be adhered to and saw no need for further instructions. As they were not, the routes to Lappanduff were essentially left wide open.
2. About any orders given by the Column O/C in the event of a surprise attack: McGee had left no such instructions as he was waiting for the unit to become at full strength with the seven Cavan Volunteers due to join the thirteen Belfast men waiting at Lappanduff.

On the second point, McGoran conceded that he “would be responsible” as it was his role to organise the local aid to the column, “but I didn’t consider the absence of seven men would make a difference regarding his plans for a surprise attack” – thirteen could surely retreat as easily as twenty, McGoran had assumed. Another misjudgement McGoran took on himself was how he “didn’t expect that the presence of the column in the area would be detected so soon. I considered the neighbourhood safe enough.”[9]

IRA members in a field

McGoran also hastened to clarify to his Chief of Staff that he:

…didn’t mean to convey the idea that a defeat in itself had a good effect in Cavan but the fact that men from another part of the country had to be brought in to make a fight for them would surely waken them to a sense of their duty if they desired their county to take its rightful place in the fight for Ireland’s freedom.

In this, McGoran needed every bit of help he could find, given that there was:

…an idea still abroad among the men and people of Cavan that when they had first won East Cavan for a political party [the Sinn Féin by-election victory in June 1918] they had accomplished all that they should be asked of them for some time and it’s taking very hard work to get that idea cleared away.[10]

Amending this complacency had been why the Belfast column was brought over in the first place. Wanting to raise a local column, McGoran had applied for arms from both Dublin and Belfast; once again, the latter was less than interested in handing over valuable resources to a dead-end county, while the former only agreed on condition that Belfast men came over with Belfast arms.

Lee Enfield rifles, highly prized weapons by the IRA

Exactly why is unclear; after all, the Belfast IRA had more than enough fighting of its own to do, and columns operating in areas not their own was highly unorthodox, given the need to be familiar with their surroundings. Historian Jim McDermott (whose great-uncle was part of the column) offers the suggestion that the Belfast Volunteers hoped to gain experience in the use of rifles in an area that seemed, on the surface, safer than their own. Whatever the reason, McGoran was apparently less than happy at these terms but, seeing no better option, agreed, with a condition of his own: as soon as further weapons were gained, probably by looting from successful attacks and ambushes, the Belfast men would be phased out of the column and replaced with Cavan ones.[11]

‘A Very Bad Setback’

McGoran’s hopes for Cavan to stand on its own two feet would go unfulfilled, brigade morale by the time of the Truce in July 1921 being not “very robust” in Sheridan’s opinion. Instead of inspiring the Cavan IRA, “the Lappanduff affair was a very bad setback to the morale of the force.” Sheridan had his own idea for why the column had been caught, it being a simple matter of geography:

The position selected for the camp was a very bad one, to my mind. It was on top of a hill which stood up like a pimple on the surrounding countryside. The sides of the hill were rough and provided good cover for an encircling force.

Human error also played its poisonous part:

It is said that one of the column left the camp in the early morning of the 9^th with a tin can to fetch water from a well or stream and that the morning sun glinting on this can as he swung it around his head, telegraphed or signalled to the enemy forces that the place was occupied.

However, Sheridan also believed that the Belfast men had been without scouts or sentries which, now known from the newspaper reports and internal IRA memoranda, was not the case. Notably, he blamed, as well as the man with the tin can, the column for having “no liaison with the local Volunteers who would have been able to warn them of the enemy’s approach” – for all the difference that would have made, to go by McGoran’s report of the locals being detained and prevented from passing on any alarm.[12]

Cavan countryside

Sheridan was perhaps a little too quick to foist the blame on the outsiders and, besides, he had not been present at Lappanduff at the time. As one of the column, Seamus McKenna had. Interestingly, the tin can’s owner makes an appearance in his own version of events. While Sheridan portrays the unnamed individual in question as at least part of the reason why the column was discovered, he and his tin can, according to McKenna, were only noticed at the last minute, after the column sentries on Lappanduff had begun perceiving through the morning gloom the shadowy figures nearby:

At the time, one of our men, who had just gone off duty, came out with a can to draw water from a spring, about fifty yards from the house. It was getting somewhat brighter and, as this man saw the strangers, he whistled to them and waved his water can. Immediately a shot rang out, followed by another, and numerous figures were then seen moving around the foot of the hill.

“I raised the alarm,” wrote McKenna, who was with the watchmen at the time, “but most of our party had heard the shooting and were awakened.” McGee delegated responsibility for getting the Volunteers out of their billet and into position to McKenna, after which the column O/C would resume command. McKenna duly did so: “I saw that everyone was out of the house and ordered the men into firing position on the hillside.”[13]

The fight was on.

IRA members

A Few Observations

By the time McKenna composed his BMH Statement, written more than three decades later, in 1954, he had clearly given that day at Lappanduff much thought. “There a few observations I wish to make,” he wrote:

• Their presence had clearly been betrayed to the British.
• Such information must not have reached the enemy barracks until late in the previous day, as the RIC and Tans who fought and arrested them had the sloppily-dressed appearance of men just roused out of bed.
• The choice of area was a bad one, being both familiar to the authorities and containing inhabitants hostile to the IRA.
• While McKenna respected McGoran as a conscientious officer, the Cavan organiser had been amiss for not taking proper precautions such as posting scouts by the roads to Lappanduff.
• No attempts had been made in the meantime to identify the informer who McKenna believed had given away the column; if anything, the Cavan officers McKenna talked to about it preferred the idea that it was a Belfast man responsible.[14]

Needless to say, regarding the last point, McKenna found that suggestion rather insulting; nonetheless, he did concede that certain column members had not been as tight-lipped or as security-conscious as they should have been. The day before the disaster, on the 7^th May, McGee gave leave to three of his subordinates to visit a nearby pub. After some hours, the trio returned, mildly tipsy and, while otherwise none the worse for wear, McKenna had to wonder if the damage had already been done:

Being Saturday evening, there must have been quite a number of local men passing in and out of the pub during the three hours or more than the men spent there. The appearance and speech of the three identified them as city men and, even if there had been no indiscreet talk, the very presence of the men must have caused surprise, even to friendly disposed people. Two of the men…however, were anything but discreet and I have no doubt that their tongues wagged.

“I wonder who heard them that night!” McKenna added ruefully.[15]

Tom Fox, the Cavan IRA Quartermaster who was captured with the column, identified the culprit as “a local Protestant farmer” – the nearby Protestants in general being “completely hostile” in his unvarnished view (another reason, if so, why Lappanduff had been an unwise selection). Later that month in May, Patrick Briody was taken from his home in Mullahoran and riddled with bullets. ‘Spies and Informers, beware – IRA’ read the note left by the 60-year-old shoemaker’s body.

Historian Jim McDermott speculates that this may have been revenge for the column but – other than the considerable distance between Mullahoran and Lappanduff – neither Maguire nor Sheridan drew that connection when discussing Briody’s murder in their BMH Statements. If loose lips had indeed doomed the column, whether through carelessness or malice, then the deed went unavenged, in contrast to the usual bloody IRA purges post-defeat (such as the six civilians shot dead in the wake of the Clonmult ambush, Co Cork, in February 1921).[16]

But the biggest reason why the Belfast column failed might have lain inside or, more specifically, at its head. McKenna’s decision to wave a white handkerchief and surrender may have been understandable, outnumbered, outgunned and outmanoeuvred as he and the other Volunteers were, but that did not make it any less galling. Rubbing salt into the wound was when the English captain in charge held up a Sam Browne belt and told McKenna, with heavy sarcasm: “It’s a pity your C/O did not wait for the scrap.”[17]

An example of a Sam Browne belt (a leather belt with a supporting strap over the shoulder)

On Cavan’s Mountain

McKenna had last seen that particular item being strapped around the waist of his O/C as McGee stood in the doorway of their billet, readying himself while McKenna, as instructed, roused the rest of the Volunteers into their positions. Fighting on the mountainside was complicated by cover: good in some areas, too exposed for others, and as a result the men, already forced to spread out, drifted apart into separate pockets. Even so, the column was able to give a good account of itself, keeping up a steady enough pace of fire to hold the enemy at bay.

Had the Irishmen taken the chance, they could have crawled away and escaped, ready to fight another day but, as it was, McKenna kept waiting for McGee to reassert his authority as promised. When that did not happen, McKenna resorted to calling for McGee by his first name:

The echoes of my voice and of the shots were the only answer to my calling. I continued this calling, at intervals, for about an hour, I am sure, and my voice was heard all over the hillside. In fact, the enemy heard it and questioned us afterwards about it. Magee [sic] must have heard it before he cleared off – as he apparently did.

That the tell-tale Sam Browne belt was found five hundred yards away from the scene of battle confirmed to McKenna that his commanding officer was a coward as well as incompetent (although, of course, this is just one man’s opinion on another, and so must be treated with a certain caution). McKenna was transported with the rest to Cavan Military Barracks, then to his native Belfast, where he was housed in Crumlin Road Gaol. Due to the injuries of one of the other column members, their court-martial was delayed sufficiently until the Truce of July 1921 brought the War of Independence to a tentative pause.[18]

However ignominious the defeat, the prisoners could at least count surviving as among their blessings. John McCartney, of course, had not been so lucky. When the engagement started, McGee had dispatched him and a second man, McDermott, to the base of the mountain in case more soldiers advanced from there. The sun had almost risen in full when McKenna saw the pair racing back uphill in the direction of their comrades. The firing from the British intensified, and one of the two collapsed. His partner hesitated for a moment to look back at the other man before continuing his run, helpless to do anything else. It was not until the battle was over that the body could be retrieved, and death confirmed, and for McKenna to learn that it was McCartney and not McDermott who had fallen.[19]

Memorial to John / Seán McCartney in Belfast

It had not been McCartney’s first time in battle, having received an injury before, in the right hand – though the occasion then had been in France, as part of the British Army. Perhaps because of this former comradeship, or maybe due to the grit displayed by the column as a whole, the British garrison in Cavan Barracks treated the deceased with respect, saluting his hearse with rifle-fire as it left for the station. A second such gesture was made as McCartney’s father and brother, who had come to Cavan with a coffin, lifted their sorry load on board the next train back to Belfast. Following the cortége through the streets, passing closed businesses and drawn shutters, was a large crowd of civilians, along with the military escort, many of whom knelt on the railway platform as women from Cumann na mBan recited the rosary in Irish.[20]

McCartney’s name lived on, as cold comfort it may have been to his family. The author Brendan Behan was sitting in a pub on the Falls Road, Belfast, when he heard the song Belfast Graves for the first time. Among the more familiar names of Wolfe Tone and Joe McKelvey were a few other, less famous martyrs, including:

On Cavan’s mountain, Lappanduff,

Fought one with bravery,

Until the English soldiers killed,

Brave Seán McCartney.[21]

More on the song ‘Belfast Graves’ from ‘The Treason and Felony’ blog: https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/story-of-a-song-belfast-graves/

References

[1] Anglo-Celt, 14/05/1921

[2] Ibid ; University College Dublin (UCD), Richard Mulcahy Papers, P7/A/18, pp. 111-2

[3] Maguire, Hugh (BMH / WS 1387), pp. 20-1

[4] Ibid, pp. 11-12, 15-6

[5] Ibid, pp. 10-1

[6] Ibid, WS 1388, pp. 3-4 ; Sheridan, Seán (BMH / WS 1613), pp. 13-4

[7] UCD, Mulcahy Papers, P7/A/18, pp. 108-10

[8] Ibid, pp. 113-4

[9] Ibid, P/A/19, p. 51-4

[10] Ibid, p. 55

[11] Fox, Thomas (BMH / WS 365), pp. 9-10 ; McDermott, Jim. Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms, 1920-22 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2001), p. 81

[12] Sheridan, pp. 17-8

[13] McKenna, Seamus (BMH / WS 1016), p. 21

[14] Ibid, pp. 34-6

[15] Ibid, p. 20

[16] Fox, pp. 10, 12 ; McDermott, p. 82 ; see Anglo-Celt, 28/05/1921 for contemporary information about Briody’s death ; Maguire, p. 20 ; Sheridan, p. 18

[17] McKenna, pp. 25, 27

[18] Ibid, pp. 21-3, 28-9

[19] Ibid, pp. 21-2, 28

[20] Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘McCartney, John’ (1D65), p. 71 ; Anglo-Celt, 14/05/1921

[21] McDermott, p. 81

Bibliography

Newspaper

Anglo-Celt

Book

McDermott, Jim. Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms, 1920-22 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2001)

University College Dublin Archives

Richard Mulcahy Papers

Bureau of Military History Statements

Fox, Tom, WS 365

Maguire, Hugh, WS 1387

Maguire, Hugh, WS 1388

McKenna, Seamus, WS 1016

Sheridan, Seán, WS 1613

Military Service Pensions Collection

McCartney, John, 1D65

Before the Blue: Eoin O’Duffy and his Military Career in the Irish Revolution, 1920-2

A Model Everything

Eoin O’Duffy in a Free State uniform, 1922

With a year having passed since the end of the Civil War, Frank Aiken and Mary MacSwiney decided it was time to take stock of the national situation. After all, the former was Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the latter its Director of Publicity, putting much of the burden of reviving the defeated Republican cause on their shoulders. In an exchange of letters in April 1924, the future career prospects of an erstwhile comrade, now enemy, was examined: Eoin O’Duffy, who, MacSwiney believed, would make a more popular candidate for the Free State leadership than the other two likely contenders, Richard Mulcahy and Joe McGrath.

Besides O’Duffy’s current position as Commissioner for the Civic Guards and the evident success he was making of it:

I have heard it said that he is playing a very deep game; that he is idolised by his men; that he is considered a model Catholic and a model everything that he touches.

Despite the twinge of reluctant admiration in her description, MacSwiney assured Aiken that she was not swallowing any of it: “I believe he is extremely unscrupulous and personally I have rather grave doubts about the correctness of his Catholic ideas.”

As proof, MacSwiney told of a conversation she had had with O’Duffy in December 1921, in the vestibule of the National College, Dublin. Dáil Éireann was about to open for the debate on that most controversial of subjects: whether or not to ratify the Anglo-Irish Treaty. MacSwiney had already made it quite clear where she stood at an earlier, private session, that the agreement in question was nothing less than a grievous betrayal, and a spiritual one at that, of the Irish Republic.

National Concert Hall, Dublin (formerly the site of the National University and the venue for the Treaty debates, Dec. 1921 -Jan. 1922

Strong words, indeed, enough to bring O’Duffy – a supporter of the Treaty – to tears and, when he stood to speak next after MacSwiney, he openly wished he could have died before hearing such a thing. This made an impact of its own on onlookers, several of whom remonstrated to MacSwiney afterwards about her reducing a fine fellow like O’Duffy to his piteous state. In an attempt to keep their differences purely political, without straying into the personal, MacSwiney agreed to the one-on-one at the National College.

Mary MacSwiney

At the start of their talk, O’Duffy impressed her as “very straightforward, very frank and in earnest.” His earlier distress, he explained, had been less what had been said and more who had said it, given the respect he had for her martyred brother, Terence MacSwiney. “Now here comes the extraordinary part of it,” she told Aiken – O’Duffy claimed that while Terence was dying on his prison hunger-strike in late 1920, one of O’Duffy’s subordinates in the Monaghan IRA Brigade expressed the view that Terence’s fatal self-denial amounted to the mortal sin of suicide.

This was apparently too much for O’Duffy:

He assured me [MacSwiney] that he had taken that man out, had given him half an hour and had him shot as a traitor. This he said he told me to show me how much he reverenced Terry.

Much to O’Duffy’s surprise and consternation, MacSwiney was horrified at this, although she now had her doubts that any such thing occurred and wanted Aiken’s opinion; after all, the story, if true, might prove useful should O’Duffy take on a more public role in the Free State. When he wrote back in reply, Aiken was emphatic: “O’Duffy told you a lie.” There was indeed a Volunteer in the Monaghan IRA executed on O’Duffy’s orders but for an entirely different reason: the wretch had spilled secrets when arrested by British forces and consequentially, so Aiken heard, actually asked to be shot.[1]

‘A Stickler for Discipline’

Aiken did not name the deceased. Otherwise, he must have been quite well-informed about an area not his own (Aiken commanded the Newry IRA) as the details he provided MacSwiney with match those in other accounts of Patrick Larmer’s fate. James Sullivan had met Larmer – spelt ‘Larmour’ in Sullivan’s account – after the latter returned home to Rockcorry from Belfast Jail in April 1921. Larmer confessed to Sullivan and the other IRA officers present that, yes, he had talked to the authorities while imprisoned but about nothing not already known. This was evidently not good enough, for Larmer was arrested shortly afterwards for court-martial.

Guessing its likely verdict, Sullivan tried pleading for clemency but his Brigade O/C was implacable: “O’Duffy said it would be an example and a warning to others.”[2]

Ernest Blythe

Perhaps Sullivan should have not expected allowances made for extenuating circumstances; O’Duffy was, after all, “a stickler for discipline,” according to James McElduff. For some like Ernest Blythe, that was part of O’Duffy’s appeal, his reputation as a “strict, thoroughgoing, enterprising man” being what earned him his appointment to Commissioner of the Civic Guard in 1922. But this picture of O’Duffy as a martinet and a Bligh might not be the full one; while John McGahey was to recount a story similar to Sullivan’s regarding Larmer, his one portrayed his commander in a less harsh light:

I got a feeling that my pleadings were having the desired effect on O’Duffy when Dan Hogan [O’Duffy’s right-hand man] arrived on the scene and intervened in a manner most aggressive towards myself. I have felt that only for Hogan’s untimely arrival I could have succeeded in influencing O’Duffy to spare Larmer’s life.

“I failed,” McGahey concluded, something which troubled him for years afterwards.[3]

Dan Hogan, in the uniform of the Free State

Whatever the exact circumstances, and whoever was ultimately responsible, murdering those believed to be passing information to the enemy was part and parcel of the insurgency throughout the country. By the time the Truce came into effect in July 1921, five Crown policemen and two IRA members had been killed in Co. Monaghan – along with eight suspected spies. If the last seems disproportionate to the rest, then, for context, the Meath IRA Brigade ended its war with three dead policemen, three dead Volunteers and six executed ‘spies’. From elsewhere in West Cork, Tom Barry felt strongly enough to dedicate a chapter in his memoirs to this most thorny of topics. And few other acts in the War of Independence were as brazen or as vicious as when two Dublin IRA men shot a wounded man repeatedly in the head at close range after first removing him from Jervis Street Hospital on a stretcher.[4]

All the same, Monaghan saw its fair share of deeds that generally do not get included in the official commemorations. Larmer’s execution was unusual in that he was a Volunteer; generally, the IRA focused on outsiders in its spy hunts. Kate Carroll fitted that bill as a middle-aged spinster who eked out a living of sorts as an illicit poteen-maker. Though the sign left on her corpse in April 1921 marked her as a spy, the letter she wrote to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was to inform on other illegal distillers – her competition – not the IRA. Hugh Kerr suffered a particularly gruesome and prolonged end, being shot six times in different parts of his body; Hugh Duffy’s death was likewise gratuitous: beaten with a blunt object to the head, and his chin and chest riddled with what appeared to be buckshot.

As with Carroll, notices were left on the bodies of Kerr and Duffy to proclaim their crime of espionage. As for the truth of these allegations, we are, of course, dependent on the word of their killers.[5]

“One of the Most Daring Raids”

However harsh the war, no one in the Monahan IRA could claim they had not been warned; when O’Duffy addressed a gathering of prospective recruits on a Sunday afternoon in June 1918, at Wattlebridge, he made a point of saying that any of them unwilling to use force in their overthrow of British rule need not bother joining. “His words left a lasting impression on me and, I’m sure, on all present,” recalled Francis Tummon. Out of the twenty or so young men, “there were at least half a dozen who listened to O’Duffy on that Sunday afternoon but never joined the Volunteers.”[6]

Ernie O’Malley

By February 1920, the Monaghan Brigade had the strength and confidence to launch an attack on the RIC barracks at Ballytrain on the night of the 15^th. This was something of a milestone, being “the first barracks taken north of the Boyne,” as Ernie O’Malley noted. O’Malley had travelled to Monaghan as part of his duties as an IRA organiser, dispatched by the insurgency GHQ from Dublin to assist the various country units in their war, and may have been the mastermind behind the operation. “He was with us when the plans were made for the attack,” recalled Sullivan, although according to another participant, Philip Marron, the details had all been worked out “before O’Malley was informed of our plans.” Full credit, in Marron’s view, should go to the Monaghan Brigade Staff such as O’Duffy and Hogan.[7]

Either way, the assault went off smoothly, if that is quite the right term for something that involved blowing a hole through a wall. Before that climax, the six-strong garrison of Ballytrain Barracks had been roused from their beds at 2am by the sounds of glass shattering and dogs barking. Armed men – about one hundred and fifty, estimated by contemporary reportage – had broken into two nearby premises: a lock-up store next door, the barracks being part of a street of houses, and a grocer’s on the opposite side of the road. From these enveloping positions, the assailants fired shots at the barracks, with the defenders responding in kind.

Constables of the RIC

This exchange went on for three hours until “at 5 o’clock, the leader of the attacking party,” O’Duffy:

…demanded a surrender. The police replied by continuing to shoot. Immediately afterwards a terrific explosion was heard. The explosion, which destroyed the gable of the barracks, drove an iron bedstead and other articles through the two walls, wrecked half the building, and scattered sandbags, which were protecting the windows, all over the main road.

Wearing masks and carrying rifles, the Volunteers advanced to enter through the newly-made breach. Surrender was demanded and received. Despite the fighting having been “of the most desperate kind,” as the Irish Times reported, the victors were magnanimous. “I am glad that no life has been lost,” their unnamed leader was quoted as telling his prisoners.

As four policemen had been injured in the explosion, O’Duffy went out to inquire about getting a doctor, returning five minutes later to apologise for not having found one (the wounded men were instead taken to Carrickmacross Hospital). He also refused to touch the money one constable had on his possession and complimented another on the valour of the garrison’s defence. “One of the most daring raids for arms that has yet taken place in Ireland” was ending on a remarkably civilised and genial note – with O’Duffy setting the tone – a sign that, at this early stage of the IRA’s armed campaign, the savagery that would mark certain other incidents in Ireland had not yet taken root.

The gutted interior of Ballytrain RIC Barracks, 1920

Studying the scene afterwards in the clear light of day revealed the level of preparation that had gone into the operation:

The telegraph wires between Carrickmacross and Shercock were cut, trees were felled and placed across the roads leading to the village. On one road a disused house was pulled down and the stones thrown across the road. An iron gate was placed in the centre, making it impossible to pass.

As for what was left of the target:

The barrack presents every sign of a siege. The walls that remain standing are punctured with shots, partitions are smashed into match-wood, and the ceilings are falling in.[8]

Victory for the Monaghan Brigade and its commander had been total. O’Malley would later pay O’Duffy the compliment of being “energetic and commanding.” Notably, however, O’Malley would withhold from his memoirs the same sort of detailed write-up he would grant to similar operations in Tipperary and Cork in which he had taken part. The most he provided his readers about the capture of Ballytrain Barracks was seeing a policemen blown back through a partition by the blast; that, and a rather implausible story of him being stopped beforehand by a RIC pair while cycling to Ballytrain, forcing him to kick one and then punch out the other. O’Duffy mostly impressed him by the quality of his typed reports to Dublin (as opposed to the usual handwritten ones from other brigades); otherwise, Monaghan as a brigade did not warrant anything higher than “fair.”[9]

IRA members with rifles

And that was for public consumption. In the notes O’Malley made for the interviews he conducted years later, politeness and a measured tone could go out the window: “Monaghan people are a queer bloody people, but they are bloody thick.” Their IRA commander had “had a flair for organisation,” O’Malley conceded, “but not for fighting.” But then, O’Duffy had taken one side during the Civil War and O’Malley the other, making it probably not a coincidence that the latter neglected to include anyone from Monaghan for his interviews.[10]

The Coming Primadonna?

Notable also is the relish with which O’Malley recorded what some had to say about O’Duffy. “He talked like a mad chieftain at the meeting where the Division was formed,” Broddie Malone said. The division in question was the Fourth Western, an amalgamation of IRA brigades encompassing Connemara and parts of Mayo, in line with the GHQ policy of shifting the burdens of the war from individual brigades to the larger, newly-made divisions. The fighting had by then come to a halt, due to the Truce of July 1921, though few expected this lull to last. O’Duffy had attended the meeting on behalf of GHQ, as its Deputy Chief of Staff, but his contribution apparently left something to be desired.

“There wasn’t a man there who didn’t see through O’Duffy,” Michael Kilroy told O’Malley, echoing Malone. “We felt he was very vain, and it was evident in his speech.”[11]

Eoin O’Duffy, in the uniform of the Gardaí, post-1922

Both Malone and Kilroy, like O’Malley, were to take the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, and so hostility is perhaps to be expected from them (in other accounts, O’Duffy comes across as quite the persuasive orator), but his allies could also regard O’Duffy with a certain wariness, even apprehension. When discussing his war days with his son, Richard Mulcahy generally held fast to the principle of not saying anything about someone if he could not think of anything nice. “Oh, I always got on well with O’Duffy,” he said.

Richard Mulcahy

When probed further on the subject, however, Mulcahy admitted that while his fellow general “was a great man on paper, and he was a great man for going and doing a job…I say he was slightly a nerve [sic] character or touch of, never mind, people would say there was a touch of insanity in the family. Some kind of hysteria, nervous history.” In contrast to Mulcahy’s own phlegmatic personality, his Monaghan colleague “was a real primadonna. O’Duffy was a bit excitable and he had a streak in him that tended towards excitability.” Even Blythe, who paid due credit to what O’Duffy accomplished as Police Commissioner during a challenging time, came to resent the “excessive vanity” he soon found bubbling beneath the stolid exterior.[12]

Of course, if O’Duffy was so obviously “a peculiar mixture” – to use MacSwiney’s not-unbiased verdict – then he would never have risen as high as he did. Despite quarrelling with O’Duffy to the point of the other man trying to have him sacked from the Free State army, Paddy O’Connor “rather liked him,” finding O’Duffy “as friendly as be damned.” More – and perhaps most – importantly, “our friend thought the world of him,” O’Connor told O’Malley during an interview session.[13]

Michael Collins

That friend in question was Michael Collins. When he returned to Dublin from London in December 1921, having signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Corkonian, far from triumphant, was in a gloomy frame of mind. Dáil Éireann had yet to ratify the Treaty, and since President Éamon de Valera had announced his intention to oppose it, Collins could only conclude that the agreement, and the peace it brought, would fail. The only thing then to do, he told Batt O’Connor, was for him to go back to Cork, if and when war with Britain resumed. Better to fight in his native county than be hunted all over again in Dublin.

Alarmed at this talk, O’Connor tried persuading Collins to remain in the capital. He was needed there, O’Connor said. Collins would have none of it and, besides: “There is a coming man. He will take my place.” By this, he meant O’Duffy, as he clarified to O’Connor. High praise, indeed.[14]

The Delicate Plant of Irish Peace

Mark Sturgis

Collins was not the only one apprehensive about the future; Mark Sturgis, a leading official in Dublin Castle, noted O’Duffy’s nervous habit of picking apart matches as they sat in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin, to discuss the situation in the North. As the IRA liaison officer for Ulster, O’Duffy was tasked with ensuring that the tentative truce there between the Volunteers and British forces held. Sturgis had been curious to meet the man so suddenly prominent in the newspapers, finding him to be:

A clean cut direct fellow, not a bad sort at all, but, I guess, stupid and rather truculent. He seemed business like and on the whole reasonable and when he agreed with any point of mine said so at once without any gêne.”[15]

Not so congenial was the situation in the North, over which O’Duffy had every right to be stressed. Some cases were relatively minor, such as him returning stolen money to a bank in Maghera, Co. Derry, after the local IRA had tracked down the culprits in August 1921; others not so much. Always a powder keg, Belfast had deteriorated sufficiently for O’Duffy, after days of riots, shootings and deaths, to issue a statement, via a telegram to the media on the 1^st September:

… that after the refusal of the military and police to act, the situation on Wednesday morning [31^st August 1921] was such that he ordered the IRA to take action for the protection of Roman Catholics, as it was quite patent to everyone that the police authorities were conniving with the Orange mob.

Ruins in Belfast, 1922 – note the British soldiers to the side

Accordingly:

IRA snipers were placed at vantage points in the city, and in a few hours made their presence felt. Yesterday [1^st September], as a result of representations made to him, he ordered his troops to cease fire. He is keeping touch with General Tudor…and other authorities throughout the day in case of further developments.[16]

Seán Ó Muirthile (from An t-Óglách, 7th April 1923 (Vol. 1, No. 4)

This was more proactive – or provocative – an approach than had been intended for a liaison officer; elsewhere around the country, others in the role such as Michael Staines and Emmet Dalton were trying to smooth over disturbances and flare-ups, not add to them. Given the intermittent violence in the North and long-simmering sectarian tensions, however, O’Duffy’s outspoken aggression could be seen as understandable, at least to some of his colleagues. “When one comes to think if it, it was the speech of an Ulster Catholic who had grown up among the scenes of the bigoted fury of anti-Catholicism, and again one ought not to be too mercilessly criticised,” wrote Seán Ó Muirthile in his memoirs.[17]

Ó Muirthile was referring to a controversial address at a Sinn Féin rally in Armagh, on the 4^th September 1921, in which O’Duffy apparently threatened to ‘use the lead’ on recalcitrant Unionists. This was received as well as could be expected by the targets of his ire. “The Armagh speech…must go down as a Sinn Fein blunder, and an oratorical frost which retarded the growth of that delicate plant, Irish Peace,” read the Northern Standard on the 28^th October 1921. O’Duffy was by then attempting to backtrack, “to water down his famous Armagh speech” which “more than any declaration made by any one since the Truce came into being, has hardened the heart of one class of Irishman against the other,” but the Unionist newspaper was unconvinced:

His explanation does not seem to clear the air very well, and only forces one to the conclusion that at Armagh he spoke his mind well, if not wisely.[18]

In truth, certain Irish hearts had been hard enough for a while and would remain so. Speaking his mind again, wisely or otherwise, this time to the Dáil on the 4^th January 1922, O’Duffy declared that he knew “Ulster better than any man or woman in this Dáil because I have faced Ulster’s lead on more than one occasion with lead, and in those places where I was able to do it, I silenced them with lead.”[19]

This was more than idle boasting. Rosslea had seen little excitement during the War of Independence despite the presence of an RIC barracks and an IRA company; the former was evacuated and the latter contended itself with drills and training. Despite the village’s location in Co. Fermanagh, O’Duffy had had responsibility for its Volunteers – brigade lines not always adhering strictly to county ones – and was the one to first organise them in 1918. O’Duffy also wrote the order for the Belfast Boycott, warning all businesses against trading with Belfast-based ones as a protest against the ongoing sectarian violence there – which led to Rosslea’s own experience of intercommunal strife as the Unionist majority resisted this demand.

Ruined building at Rosslea, 1921 (from the ‘Monaghan County Museum’ facebook site, at https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2999985913402408&set=pcb.2999985960069070

The situation soon worsened, as shootings led to the burning of nearly all the Catholic-owned homes in the village in February 1921.  O’Duffy arrived four weeks later to discuss with the local IRA officers the next course of action, specifically whether Unionist houses should be razed in retaliation. Also in attendance was Frank Aiken; when the Newry commander expressed concern at the possible escalation, his Monaghan counterpart struck the table to emphasis his reply.

“When you hit them hard, they will not strike again,” O’Duffy said.[20]

Games of Bluff?

Despite their initial common interests, the relationship between these two leaders would, as with many others during this turbulent period, not end happily. Writing to MacSwiney in 1924, amidst the ashes of defeat, Aiken blamed many for the sorry state of affairs. Winston Churchill, for one, as the guiding hand of Britain’s malign interference, but the British statesman could never have succeeded in his mischief without the assistance of Irish stooges like O’Duffy and “the bitterness” the latter “bred and nurtured wherever it was possible.”[21]

Frank Aiken

Which was something of an oversimplification. O’Duffy had been as willing as anyone to resume the war with Britain when he met Aiken again at the end of September 1921. Aiken was by then the O/C of the Fourth Northern Division, giving him responsibility over the IRA in Armagh, South and West Down, North Louth and bits of Tyrone and Antrim, while O’Duffy was Deputy Chief of Staff. Though the Truce had come as a considerable surprise to Aiken when announced two months earlier, he assumed it would not be lasting long, a feeling seemingly confirmed when O’Duffy told him that GHQ had asked President de Valera to keep his negotiations in London going only until winter – for that, it was believed, is the most favourable season for the weaker side in a guerrilla campaign.[22]

Needless to say, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty threw all such considerations up in the air. Or did it? A céilé in Clones, Co. Monaghan, on the 6^th December 1921, provided the opportunity for Aiken, Joe McKelvey, Seán Mac Eoin and a number of other IRA officers from the North and the Midlands to meet and hear what GHQ, via O’Duffy, had to say. News of the Treaty’s signing had reached them that very morning, casting the men in a doleful mood.

Undeterred by this unpromising start:

O’Duffy assured us with great vehemence that the signing of the Treaty was only a trick; that he would never take that oath and that no one would [be] asked to take it. He told us that it had been signed with the approval of GHQ in order to get arms to continue the fight.

When Aiken expressed his fear that the Treaty would be something not so easy to remove or ignore once established, “O’Duffy again assured us that he would never dream of taking the oath to the British king or asking anyone to take it and that the sole object of signing the Treaty was to get arms.”[23]

Whether O’Duffy was stating GHQ policy or his own opinion is unknown, but he would repeat that line at future meetings in his canvassing of support for the new direction. Tom Maguire returned from a meeting in Dublin to report to the rest of the Second Western Division that Collins and O’Duffy had told him that:

They were only playing a game of bluff, that they did not intend to accept the Treaty at all, that their purpose in pretending to accept it was to get all the arms they could from the British and to get the British troops out of the country and when this had taken place, we would resume the fight. In other words, they would attack the British.

Maguire believed this, as did others in his Division. “Looking back it seems incredible that they would be gullible enough to swallow such statements,” bewailed one of the doubters when it was far too late.[24]

Gearóid O’Sullivan

Not all such efforts succeeded; the two Wexford brigades broke away from GHQ in their opposition to the Treaty, despite O’Duffy trying his best to dissuade them. At Enniscorthy, “O’Duffy made a very plausible speech in which he pointed out that the Army was still the official Army of the Republic and would remain so, and I had the impression that this was going down very well,” remembered Francis Carty. However, the next speaker, Gearóid O’Sullivan, the GHQ Adjutant-General, performed so badly by insulting the men and their past efforts at fighting that he “destroyed the effect created by the eloquence of O’Duffy.”[25]

Taking an Active Part

“There are people who are calling Mick Collins a traitor, who were under the bed when there was fighting to be done,” O’Duffy had told the others at Clones, a hint at how venomously personal everything was about to become. “From that night to the attack on the Four Courts, he worked like a fiend for the success of the Pro-Treaty party,” Aiken wrote. “He seemed gradually to forget the nation and to subordinate its interests to party interests, and, when talking of his opponents, he forgot all sense of justice and sometimes even truth.” There was regret as well as bitterness in this condemnation, for O’Duffy, whatever else Aiken thought of him, “was a strict organiser and one of the hardest workers in Ireland” – as demonstrated when the Civil War finally broke out.[26]

Anti-Treaty propaganda cartoon, by Grace Gifford, depicting Collins as a sellout

O’Duffy’s involvement was a brief one, enough for MacSwiney, in her 1924 correspondence with Aiken, to assume “that he took no actual part in it.” She was quickly put right in his reply: “From the 28^th June [1922] until he was transferred to the Civic Guard [September 1922] he certainly took an active part in the war.” More so, as Aiken told it, O’Duffy had been one of its prime instigators and Aiken should know, considering he had been present at one such example.

Liam Lynch

Despite his opposition to the Treaty, Aiken endeavoured to keep himself removed from the IRA schism. At first, both the anti and pro-Treaty factions respected this neutrality, enough for Aiken to play the honest broker – or at least try to. When the fighting at the Four Courts broke out, Aiken hastened to the next likely flashpoint of Limerick, where the two sides were eyeballing each other. A repeat of Dublin looked to be averted when Generals Liam Lynch and Michael Brennan agreed to withdraw their respective Republican and Free State troops from certain frontline posts and advance no further – until O’Duffy arrived to upset that applecart:

The next evening the Free State forces, without giving the promised notice to Liam Lynch, broke the truce and re-occupied the posts…I was with Liam in the New Barracks when I heard of this dishonourable action of Brennan and immediately went to his Headquarters.

Michael Brennan

“I can’t, Hogan is now in charge,” Brennan was reported to have said when Aiken demanded he pull back his men as previously agreed. As soon as O’Duffy had appeared, so Brennan explained to Aiken, he had called him up and another Free State general, Donal O’Hannigan, to upbraid them. There was to be no pussyfooting on O’Duffy’s watch and, to ensure that things got done, another commander, James Hogan, was appointed over Brennan’s and O’Hannigan’s heads. Aiken replied that this did not absolve Brennan of responsibility, and was equally withering when Brennan tried claiming the Pro-Treatyites were only reoccupying their posts as a precaution: “I told him that this was damn nonsense; that it was merely a matter of time until further fighting commenced.”

Two hours, as it turned out, was all that passed before the two armies were again at each other’s throats, just as Aiken predicted – and he knew exactly who to blame:

I think I have given you a good idea that O’Duffy forced the fighting in Limerick. Brennan and [O’]Hannigan, of course, were immediately responsible, but only for O’Duffy they would not have started, as Brennan said “I don’t see how serious fighting can take place here, our men have nothing against the other lads.”[27]

As with much else concerning O’Duffy, there might be more than meets the eye here. According to what they later told historian Calton Younger, Brennan and O’Hannigan had had only been playing for time until reinforcements arrived, with no intention of keeping to any deal with Lynch. Their deception worked – perhaps a little too well, for O’Duffy, who had previously talked of bluffs (in regards to the Treaty), seems to have been just as bluffed here as Lynch was, with results that were almost as disastrous.

Free State solders behind barricade

After the battle for Limerick was done and won, and the Anti-Treatyites compelled to withdraw from the city, O’Duffy assembled Brennan’s officers and warned them to make up their minds about which side they were on. Not for the first time, O’Duffy completely misread the room, leaving pleased with himself but with his audience close to mutiny. Brennan had to spend several hours soothing his officers’ offended sense of honour lest they make good on their threats to pack up and head for home. Let it never be said that O’Duffy ever gave anything less than his full attention, for better or for worse.[28]

References

[1] University College Dublin (UCD), Frank Aiken Papers, P104/1317

[2] Sullivan, James (BMH / WS 518), pp. 13-4

[3] MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), p. 134 ; Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), p. 178 ; McGahey, John (BMH / WS 740), pp. 14-5

[4] Dooley, Terence. Monaghan: The Irish Revolution, 1912-23 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), pp. 87, 92 ; Coogan, Oliver. Politics and War in Meath: 1913-1923 (Meath County Council, 2013), p. 188 ; Barry, Tom. Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), pp. 105-114 (chapter 16) ; Price, Dominic. We Bled Together: Michael Collins, the Squad and the Dublin Brigade (Cork: The Collins Press, 2017), p. 213

[5] Dooley, pp. 90-2

[6] Tummon, Francis (BMH / WS 820), p. 9

[7] O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013), p. 147 ; Sullivan, p. 6 ; Marron, Philip (BMH / WS 657), pp. 3-4

[8] Irish Times, 21/02/1920

[9] O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound, p. 147

[10] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by Aiken, Síobhra; Mac Bhloscaidh, Fearghal; Ó Duibhir, Liam and Ó Tuama Diarmuid) The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s Interviews with the Northern Divisions (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2018), pp. 4, 166-7

[11] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014), pp. 62, 194

[12] McGarry, Fearghal. Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 87, 107 ; Blythe, p. 178

[13] UCD, Frank Aiken Papers, P104/1317 ; McGarry, p. 373

[14] O’Connor, Batt. With Michael Collins in the Fight for Irish Independence (London: Peter Davies Ltd., 1929), pp. 181-2

[15] Sturgis, Mark (edited by Hopkinson, Michael) The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), pp. 218-9

[16] Irish Times, 26/08/1921 ; 02/09/1921

[17] UCD Archives, Richard Mulcahy Papers, P7a/209, p. 151

[18] Northern Standard, 28/10/1921

[19] ‘Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, signed in London on the 6^th December 1921: Sessions 14 December 1921 to 10 January 1922’ (accessed on the 11^th November 2022) CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts, p. 226

[20] Connolly, John T. (BMH / WS 598), pp. 2-6

[21] UCD, Aiken Papers, P104/1317

[22] Ibid, P104/1307, p. 2

[23] Ibid, p. 7

[24] Walsh, Richard (BMH / WS 400), pp. 167-8

[25] Carty, Francis (BMH / WS 1,040), pp. 28-9

[26] UCD, Aiken Papers, P104/1307, p. 10

[27] Ibid, P104/1317

[28] Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp. 370-2, 382-3

Bibliography

UCD Archives

Frank Aiken Papers

Richard Mulcahy Papers

Newspapers

Irish Times

Northern Standard

Bureau of Military History Statements

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Carty, Francis, WS 1,040

Connolly, John T., WS 598

Marron, Philip, WS 657

McGahey, John, WS 740

Sullivan, James, WS 518

Tummon, Francis, WS 820

Walsh, Richard, WS 400

Books

Barry, Tom. Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Coogan, Oliver. Politics and War in Meath 1913-1923 (Meath County Council, 2013)

Dooley, Terence. Monaghan: The Irish Revolution, 1912-23 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017)

Price, Dominic. We Bled Together: Michael Collins, the Squad and the Dublin Brigade (Cork: The Collins Press, 2017)

MacEoin, Uinseann. Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

McGarry, Fearghal. Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

O’Connor, Batt. With Michael Collins in the Fight for Irish Independence (London: Peter Davies Ltd., 1929)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by Aiken, Síobhra; Mac Bhloscaidh, Fearghal; Ó Duibhir, Liam and Ó Tuama Diarmuid) The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s Interviews with the Northern Divisions (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2018)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Keane, Vincent) The Men Will Talk to Me: Mayo Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014)

O’Malley, Ernie. On Another Man’s Wound (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013)

Sturgis, Mark (edited by Hopkinson, Michael) The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999)

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1982)

Online Resource

CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts

Conscious, Constituency, Country: The Political, Prison and Policing Career of Michael Staines, from Frongoch Camp to Civic Guard Mutiny, 1916-22

A Civilising Effect

War might have been ended in Ireland, or at least paused, by the Truce of July 1921, but that meant for Michael Staines an increased workload. No longer confined to sitting on the side-lines in prison, Staines was now the liaison officer on behalf of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with the British military authorities in both Co. Galway and his native Mayo. While he had his doubts that the ceasefire would hold for very long, Staines dutifully set forth from Dublin to Galway railway station and there to Eglinton Street Barracks to make the acquaintance of his British counterpart, Divisional Commissioner M.G. Cruise of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).

The Eglinton Street Barracks, Co. Galway (now demolished, more information here: https://www.facebook.com/279259995450132/posts/the-old-garda-barracks-on-eglinton-street-pic-from-galway-memories-it-was-built-/1956253691084079/

The scars from the past two and a half years of conflict were apparent almost as soon as Staines stepped off the train. The Railway Hotel he passed while leaving the station was adorned with barbed-wire loops, courtesy of its Auxiliary garrison – unsurprisingly, Staines refused Cruise’s offer of accommodation there. He preferred instead his usual venue in the county, Ballinasloe House at Salthill, despite its current boarded-up state from when a British patrol had smashed its windows a few months ago. But Staines was not to be deterred, arranging for every pane of glass to be replaced and Ballinasloe House reopened before the day was done.

Nor was he intimidated when drunken Auxiliaries came knocking roughly at Ballinasloe House, a few weeks later, in search of him:

I reported the matter to Mr. Cruise, and told him that if he allowed anything like it to happen again these men would have to be deported. This had a civilising effect and I was not troubled further by them.[1]

Michael Staines

Galway had been in need of a ‘civilising effect’ for quite a while, having suffered a large number of Crown reprisals during the guerrilla campaign. This was in contrast with neighbouring Mayo, despite it being similarly rebellious and how both counties had been under Cruise’s military authority. When Staines pointed out this difference to Cruise, the Divisional Commissioner replied: “We were afraid of the Mayo lads.”

Which must have stirred Staines’ heart to hear his people held in such dread regard by the enemy; indeed, he had already forwarded his gun to Mayo in preparation for his return when the Truce broke down, as he was sure it would. While he had spent the proceeding conflict either in Dublin or as a prisoner, next time would be served as part of a Mayo IRA Flying Column.[2]

That opportunity veered perilously close at least once, according to Seán Gibbons, who briefly worked alongside Staines in liaising duties: “By the beginning of October, 1921, the Truce seemed in great danger of breaking”; enough for Gibbons to rejoin the ranks of the Mayo IRA Brigade and for Staines’ recall to Dublin. His Galway office on University Road was closed accordingly. “The position was very delicate apparently for two or three weeks” before the heat died down and life resumed its prior state of ‘not at war, not quite at peace’.[3]

“Looking back on it, while I must say that the time in Galway was interesting for a week or two, I got tired of it rapidly, as there was not enough work to do,” Gibbons later wrote.[4]

Which would have been news to Staines. For him, it was one thing after another to delay the seemingly inevitable return to war and keep Galway on a relatively even keel. When trees were reported lain across the road at Kilmaine, apparently in preparation for an ambush – an IRA speciality – he and Cruise drove over together. After inspecting the suspicious site, the pair agreed that it was the recent storm to blame. A closer shave was at the Galway Town Hall, on the Sunday of the 2^nd October 1921, when shots were fired, a man was killed and the situation became, as Gibbons put it, very delicate.[5]

A Delicate Position

It says much about the state of Ireland at the time that the bullets – according to one witness – that came through the Town Hall window just before midnight, in between songs, were not considered sufficient to cancel the dance, held in aid of the Republican Prisoners’ Dependents’ Fund. Everyone threw themselves on the floor, some women doing so involuntarily upon fainting, and a panic was close to breaking out when the Volunteers of the IRA, who had been acting as door stewards, came in to quell it.

Evidently they were successful, for the dance was soon restarted. It was not until Cruise and Staines appeared together to request the postponement of any further activities, out of respect for the British Army officer who had been shot dead outside, that the revellers had any idea that anything more serious had occurred.

Lieutenant G.H. Souchon (from the Irish Times, 05/10/1921)

The deceased was Lieutenant G.H. Souchon, 17^th Lancers, a popular man with his fellow officers as well as the Galway townspeople, some of whom he would have known through his participation in the local boat club. “A pathetic coincidence is that the officer was to have retired from the Army last month,” noted the Irish Times, “but owing to some delay in the arrival of his papers his retirement was postponed.” Another victim that night was Temporary Constable Driver Barnes, wounded in the hip, gravely but not life-threateningly so.

Naturally, everyone had their own version of what happened – and where the responsibility lay. With an official inquiry pending, there were two theories, according to the Galway correspondent of the above newspaper:

It is alleged on the one hand that the origin of the trouble was an attempt on the part of some members of the Crown Forces to enter the building without payment, and, on the other hand, that members of the Crown Forces were held up by Republican police [IRA] and searched in the vicinity of the hall.

Either way, an already tense situation boiled over into violence, resulting in the firing of the gunshots, one of which struck Lieutenant Souchon as he drove by with colleagues:

He received the fatal shot in the forehead, almost between the eyes, and collapsed into the arms of a brother officer, who was sitting next to him in the back of the car.[6]

Meanwhile, Staines, Gibbons and the other guests at Ballinasloe House were abed and had been since eleven, as per the rules – the proprietor ran a tight establishment. Roused by some commotion, Gibbons got up to find Staines in the next room, already dressed and about to depart:

I asked him where he was going. He replied to the effect that he was going down to the Town Hall where an officer of the Dragoons had been shot, with the resultant danger to the Truce. I suggested that he should take me along with him, that I would be helpful on a journey of this nature, but he was just not in that particular frame of mind and said that perhaps it would be better if he saw Cruise himself and got an idea of the position generally for Headquarters.[7]

Joe Ring

Staines never mentions Gibbons in his own account, written thirty-three years later in 1954 as part of his Bureau of Military History (BMH) Statement. Joe Ring, in contrast, features prominently, perhaps because Ring had Staines’ respect while Gibbons did not. A fellow Mayo man and Staines’ assistant in liaising duties (later taking over from him when the latter was recalled to Dublin), Ring had previously fought in the Mayo IRA, most notably as commander at the Carrowkennedy Ambush in June 1921, where he had treated captured Auxiliaries chivalrously, providing the wounded with first-aid and allowing them to be removed for treatment. Such humanity had earned him the esteem of even the British forces in Galway.[8]

Who Knows?

At least, that’s how Staines told it.

Douglas V. Duff

As with much else in the period, what occurred exactly that night would be tussled over by conflicting sources. Douglas V. Duff wrote in his memoirs (published in 1934) about how his fellow Black-and-Tans streamed out of their Eglinton Street Barracks upon news of the shooting, some straight out of bed and in various states of dress. Coming across one man in a green uniform at the scene, and identifying him not only a ‘Shinner’ but one responsible for the deaths of several of their comrades, they dragged him to the back of the hall. An impromptu firing-squad was forming when the RIC Divisional Commander, in a dressing-gown, put himself between the Tans and the ‘Shinner’, daring the would-be executioners to shoot through him, causing them to back down and thereby saving the other man’s life.[9]

Though unnamed in Duff’s book, the heroic (and almost-self-sacrificing) Divisional Commander was probably Cruise. Whether the ‘Shinner’ who narrowly escaped death was supposed to be Ring or Staines is uncertain; unlike Ring, Staines had not seen active combat during the insurgency, instead serving in an administrative role as IRA Quartermaster in Dublin. He was, however, the one to be threatened when arriving, as Staines told it:

…at the Town Hall several Auxiliaries rushed at me with their revolvers, and two of them actually had their revolvers on my chest.

The saviour is this version was not Cruise but Ring, who:

…came in behind me with a gun in each hand. He covered the two British officers, saying, “Put down those guns or I’ll shoot”, and they put down the guns.

Ring had warned Staines at Ballinasloe House against coming in the police car that was waiting for them outside. Staines decided to do so anyway – while Ring came in a separate vehicle – which, according to Staines, allowed him to catch the other side in a ‘gotcha’ moment:

On the journey the car in which I was travelling was held up by Auxiliaries in Shop Street. It was held up because it was a police car. The Auxiliaries told the driver about the shooting and said they wanted to get out of Galway as quickly as possible to Lenaboy. In my hearing they admitted that they were the culprits who had done the shooting. Of course they did not know I was in the car.

Staines was able to use this inside information when finally meeting Cruise. The Divisional Commander was in a thunderous mood at Souchon’s death until Staines repeated what he had overheard in the car. Instantly contrite, Cruise threw his arms around Staines’ shoulder and accepted responsibility on behalf of the Crown forces in Galway, agreeing to Staines’ advice to withdraw them from the town that night before they made good on their threat to burn the town. At the subsequent inquest, “the British admitted that one of their D.I.s [District Inspectors] had done the shooting” under the mistaken impression that the car with Souchon in it was an IRA-owned one, according to Staines.[10]

Galway Town Theatre, formerly the Town Hall where the fatal fracas occured

The inquest in question, held two days after the shooting, on the 4^th October, had actually said no such thing, to go by contemporary coverage. As Staines had told Cruise beforehand that the witnesses the latter requested for the hearing would not attend, the only ones who did testify were Auxiliaries or Lancers. None of them, however, were able to provide a definite version of events; it is not even clear if Souchon’s death and the ruckus at the Town Hall were connected.

Initially, it was reported that the deceased had died in ‘the arms of a brother officer’; the Lancer who had been in the front seat at the time told of how he had not known Souchon was dead until arriving back at their camp at Earl’s Island and finding the blood-stained Lieutenant slumped in the backseat. He had been still alive when the car was stopped in Galway town by a police cordon, during which puffs of smoke and flashes of light were seen from the windows of a house before them. Three bullet holes were later found in the back of the car-hood, with the fatal shot believed to have gone through the back window to strike Souchon – which would rather contradict the insistent of the surviving passengers that the firing they witnessed had come from the front, not behind them.

IRA men posing for the camera

As for the fracas at the Town Hall, testimony depicted the IRA as the aggressors. A District Inspector was struck in the face when an argument with the Volunteers – in civilian dress but marked out by green ribbons in their coat button-holes – over their legal status as a police force turned violent. Shots were made as the RIC retreated from the scene, prompting return-fire and the arrival of Crown reinforcements who forced their way into the Town Hall. It was at that point Staines joined them. According to an unnamed “high official” of the RIC, the IRA liaison officer admitted that the breach of the Truce had been on the Irish side.[11]

‘A Highly Efficient Officer’

W.J. Brennan-Whitmore

Whichever version one chooses to believe (if any, given how self-serving each is), Staines emerges in all of them as cool-headed at a pinch. But then, he had had a lot of practice, such as during his stint as prisoner commandant in Frongoch Camp after the Easter Rising of 1916. When a “very difficult situation” occurred, he was able to handle it “with remarkable efficiency and tact”, as described by fellow resident W.J. Brennan-Whitmore.

The Camp Commandant – dubbed ‘Buckshot’ on account of him warning his charges that they would be met with buckshot should they risk an escape – had approached Staines with the idea of each of the sixteen huts in Frongoch having a leader appointed who would then provide a list of everyone inside. This was ostensibly for greater efficiency but Staines, suspecting it as a means of identifying whoever was liable for British military service, refused to cooperate. Even when threatened with withheld rations, Staines held his ground, retorting to ‘Buckshot’ that he would sooner be a corpse than a spy, which was what such a role amounted to.[12]

An attempt by the Frongoch authorities to force the issue with a roll-call flopped when 342 out of the 546 detainees stayed mum rather than respond to their names. For this, they were sent to internment without privileges but the point had been made, in no small part due to Staines, according to Brennan-Whitmore.[13]

“He was a highly efficient officer who earned the love and respect of every individual prisoner,” Brennan-Whitmore wrote. “Could I pay him a higher tribute?”[14]

Illustration of Frongoch Camp by Cathal MacDowall, a prisoner there.

Staines was released from Frongoch at the end of 1916. Despite continuing to play an active role in the Irish revolution, Staines would not see the inside of a prison again until the 6^th of December 1920, when a session of the Dublin Corporation at City Hall was interrupted by a squad of armed Auxiliaries. The roll book allowed the British officer in charge to know exactly who was present, and he was undeterred by the silence that met his call for a ‘Mr Staines’. It looked like he would have to arrest everyone in the room, he said out loud.

After that, an Auxiliary approached a man sitting in one of the back seats and asked his name.

Black-and-Tans searching Irish suspects

“Mr Staines,” came the answer. He was at once taken into custody. The officer went through the rest of the names in the roll book. By the time the Auxiliaries departed, six Dublin aldermen were accompanying them to jail.[15]

Staines would tell the story a little differently. The sole reason he had attended in the first place – for life was risky enough for the Quartermaster of the IRA Executive – was because a motion was about to be presented before Dublin Corporation that amounted to a vote of loyalty to the British Government. Which would not do at all and so Michaels Collins ordered Staines to oppose it. Staines stayed dumb as the British officer read out his name and it was only the glances in his direction from the rest of the Aldermen that gave him away.[16]

At least Staines could have the gratification of the story reaching not only the newspapers but the House of Commons, where Joe Devlin MP was sarcastically asking the Chief Secretary of Ireland if such arrests were supposed to make Ireland a more peaceful place. As justification, Sir Hamar Greenwood provided a quick summary of each detainee’s rebel CV:

Alderman Michael Staines, captain in the 1^st Dublin Battalion, Irish Republican Army, so-called ‘Minister of Trade and Commerce’ to ‘Dail Eireann,’ previously a tailor. He has been continuously ‘on the run’ since February last, and slept the night previous to his arrest in a hay shed. Hidden ammunition was found in his last permanent address. He is known to be a member of the Inner Circle of the Irish Republican Army Headquarters.[17]

“Staines is not what I expected,” Mark Sturgis, a senior administrator in Dublin Castle, wrote in his diary upon meeting him in October 1921. “I am told he is a cunning twister but he has the appearance of a good looking type of honest peasant – the dark Galway type, keen and straight forward but not foxy.” Staines was by then out of jail, freed as part of the Truce of July 1921, but the bulk of the prisoners continued to linger behind bars.

Irish prisoners at Ballykinlar Camp, Co. Dow

It was on their behalf that Staines and Fintan Murphy were meeting with Sturgis, to discuss their conditions and possible release. After appraising the two Sinn Féin representatives up close, Sturgis decided that, while Murphy was the more educated man, “on the whole Staines made a better impression on me.” Whether friend or foe, Staines seems to have had that effect on people.[18]

Sovereignty vs. Slavery

Regardless, the prisoners remained as such by the time Staines stood up to address Dáil Éireann on the 6^th January 1922. Since most of the session had been and would be “scenes of excitement, outbursts of passion and stormy protests” – not surprisingly, given how the debate was on that most emotive of topics, the Anglo-Irish Treaty – Staines promised he would be brief, for two reasons:[19]

The first is that I don’t want to import any bitterness into this discussion; I want to have the Dáil and the country united if possible, if they are not united I sincerely hope that no word or action of mine will be responsible for disunion.

As for the second:

There are two thousand Irishmen in Irish and English jails; they have got to stop there while we are talking and repeating the same things over and over again; there are forty-one of these men in jails in this Republic of Ireland under sentence of death. I don’t want, and I am sure these prisoners don’t want me to bring up their case here in order that it would decide the vote one way or another; I am speaking for myself; but anyway for their sakes I think we ought to hurry up and finish this debate.

With that said, Staines got to the question on everyone’s minds: yes, he was voting for the Treaty. In doing so, he was following his own accordance and the wishes of the inhabitants of Dublin North-West, who he represented as their TD, as well as that of the Irish people in general. Or, as he summed up, with a flair for alliteration: “My conscious, my constituency, my country.”

Michael Staines (left in the photo) and Eamonn Duggan (right) on their way to the Dáil, December 1921

Despite the worthy sentiment at the start, it did not take long for the bile to seep into his words as Staines picked at the apparent inconsistencies of the opposition. Had not President Éamon de Valera stated that anyone believing the Plenipotentiaries could return from London with a Republic expected them to do what a mighty army could not? And now de Valera was putting forward a document – the controversial ‘Document No. 2’ – of his own that was neither a Republic nor, unlike the Treaty, actually signed.

“Today the President made a statement in which he said he is going to stand by the Republic,” Staines said, rather snidely, to cries of ‘Shame!’ around the hall. “I am glad he is a Republican again, and I am very sorry he ever left the rock of the Republic.”

This was too much for the man in question to take lying down:

Éamon de Valera

De Valera: If that could be proved –

Staines: President de Valera will understand me, he will admit that I don’t want to say anything to hurt his feelings or the feelings of anyone in this House. We know each other a good many years. We have been always good friends, and I hope we will remain good friends to the end.

De Valera: Show where the document is inconsistent with the Republic.

Staines: First, as to your leaving the British Navy in possession of some ports.

De Valera: For five years.

Michael Colivet

It took an intervention by Michael Colivet, the TD for Limerick City-Limerick East, to cut off this particular thread: “In discussing the Treaty, we can’t keep to it [as in, Document No. 2].”

Staines continued with his arguments. What needed to be done now was whatever was best for the country and that was clearly, in Staines’ mind, the Treaty. What else was the other side – “I don’t know what side to call it” – suggesting? Did anyone think that if the President took four or five other Plenipotentiaries to Downing Street and started the negotiations all over again, a different or better result could be had? Would de Valera come back with a Republic on another go?

“He will not,” Staines said in yet another jab at the man whose feelings he professed to care about.

At least the end of the speech was on a pragmatic note. The Dáil had heard about all sorts of laws: international law, constitutional law and common law. But the only type Staines had ever really experienced, “as an ordinary common man” in Ireland, “was the law of force and the law of might.” With the withdrawal of the British Army and its replacement by an Irish one, it would seem that, for once, Irish people would have a chance at deciding what type of freedom they wanted. “I will vote for this Treaty because it stands for Irish freedom against English oppression,” he said as his finishing line, “and Irish sovereignty against English slavery.”[20]

The Dáil debates on the Treaty, 14th January 1922 (source: https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/dail-votes-for-historic-treaty-by-margin-of-just-seven-votes

Staines was but one speaker amongst many but his contribution was gratefully noted by some journalists, who were observing the proceedings, as “pleasantly brief. How we could wish to see the others follow their example.”[21]

Ruling in Hell or Serving in Heaven

Michael Collins

Another argument for the Treaty were the odds against the IRA should it resume its armed campaign. That the Truce had been agreed to in the first place was due to “the fact that the position of the fighting men was very precarious in view of the grave shortage of ammunition,” according to Staines. He did not state this at the time, perhaps wary of being seen as defeatist, and waited until 1954 to include it in his BMH Statement. That he was in prison for the last seven months of the conflict would raise the question of how informed he could be of IRA strength in July 1921; nonetheless, Staines believed that the paucity of munitions “very definitely influenced [Michael] Collins in his negotiations with the British” that led to the Treaty being signed.[22]

Staines said very little in his BMH Statement about the split following the Treaty and the resultant Civil War; needless to say, his stated wish during the Dáil debates for national unity to be maintained went unanswered. “Big numbers of people were delighted about the Treaty, but some of them turned the other way overnight,” was all he provided, the anger palpable and still raw even after three decades. “Somebody must have got after them.”[23]

When the acrimony of the Treaty debates bled out into the daily work of government, Staines was as guilty as anyone of adding to it. “I am very glad to see that here today Mr de Valera told us that the Dáil was a sovereign assembly,” he told the Dáil on the 27^th April 922, the sarcasm practically dripping from his words. “It is wonderful when people are in power how they delegate authority to themselves and, when they are not in power, how they try to take that authority away.”

Group photograph of TDs in January 1922

As catty as Staines sounded, he was raising a pertinent question: from where did the sovereignty of the Irish revolution – now the Irish state – derive? The Cabinet? The Dáil? Both had been used by the Opposition – by which Staines meant the TDs who had resisted the Treaty and still did – at different points, depending on whichever served at the time:

You all remember that the debate here on the Treaty all turned on the one point – that the Plenipotentiaries did not come back and report to the…Cabinet. Now we are told today that the Dáil is a sovereign assembly.

The cause of this apparent volte-face was the accusation from de Valera – now just Mr de Valera, having resigned as President – that Cabinet Ministers were acting without consideration and consultation of the Dáil. In truth, wherever predominance lay had never been determined in the three years since Dáil Éireann and its accompanying government formed in the Mansion House, Dublin, in January 1919. Too much had been happening, and the question too delicate for it to be confronted, let alone solved, but it did leave openings to be exploited in ways that Staines considered the height of hypocrisy:

Today we are told that the Dáil itself is the Government of the country. Of course it is, and of course it was. But when the Opposition was in power it was the Cabinet. They want it different today, because some people would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

Staines was evidently acquainted with Paradise Lost if he could quote from it. Several months had passed since the Plenipotentiaries returned with the Treaty and the wounds from the tooth-and-nail struggle over it remained raw and unhealed. Staines was unafraid to bare his to the Dáil, telling the assembly of how he had advised de Valera – back when they were still on civil terms – not to publish his famous letter urging the Irish people against the Treaty. Staines’ reasoning had been that, by doing so as a Cabinet member, the then-President was intruding into the prerogative of the elected assembly.

A meeting of Dáil Éireann in the Mansion House, Dublin

Staines had further advice to give, this time to his colleagues as a whole. “While we are coming here and squabbling for power, people are being slaughtered all over the county,” he warned. “Let the people decide and decide quickly, and let all this squabbling end. We are making a disgrace of ourselves.”[24]

Policing Woes

Eamon Duggan

As before, his advice went unheeded.

But then, Staines was not finding it easy to make himself heard, even with his promotion to Commissioner of the Civic Guard. Intended to replace the disbanded RIC, this new police force was troubled from the start, as the appointment of former RIC officers to senior positions bred resentment in the ranks. Other than the occasional, insubstantial remark from Eamonn Duggan, the Minister for External Affairs, the rest of the Cabinet were largely ignorant of the brewing tensions, assuming, as Ernest Blythe described:

…that it was one of those disputes that would settle itself as similar causes of agitation had settled themselves elsewhere. Then, suddenly, we were told that the bulk of the Civic Guard had mutinied and that they had chased certain of the higher officers, including Michael Staines…Joe Ring and others, out of the camp.[25]

To add insult to injury, the Civic Guard had only been in existence for a few weeks. With the finger of blame needing to be pointed: “According to the report that reached the Government, Staines behaved with singular ineptitude…All Ministers took the view that when Duggan and Staines knew that the situation was really threatening, they should have given a full report to the Government.”[26]

Rory O’Connor

‘Ineptitude’ might be a bit harsh, considering the hurdles Staines faced from the start. The anti-Treaty IRA was never anything but hostile to the fledgling police force; the Civic Guard was both unnecessary and tainted by its (alleged) acceptance of Black-and-Tans, Rory O’Connor told a journalist. What O’Connor did not add was that he was in secret contact with some of the recruits, who had been playing their employer false from the start and were only waiting for the chance to wreak havoc.[27]

And they did. Staines would indignantly learn, as he was campaigning to hold his parliamentary seat in the general election, that some of his supposed subordinates had left their Kildare Barracks on the 15^th June 1922 to post handbills around his Dublin constituency “containing baseless statements intended to injuriously affect my candidature as TD,” so he informed the later inquiry into the mutiny. Staines kept his seat but worse betrayal was to follow a mere two days later when Anti-Treatyites from the Four Courts, led by O’Connor, looted Kildare Barracks of its armoury. Adding insult to injury was how this had been done with the connivance of some of the garrison.[28]

Michael Staines and Thomas Murphy, campaigning together in June 1922 (source: https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/news-photo/sinn-feiners-michael-staines-and-thomas-murphy-in-dublin-news-photo/3421457)

Even without such saboteurs, it is unlikely that the Civic Guard would have gone off to a smooth start, if only for its use of former RIC men in positions of command. As many of the rank-and-file had been trying to kill Crown police personnel only months before as part of the IRA, this was a provocative arrangement. Staines defended it to the inquiry as both necessary – the former RIC men possessing “special qualifications for the posts to which they had been appointed” – and entirely proper, the credentials of the new officers being “satisfying to the Provisional Government” on account of them either having resigned from the RIC or worked as IRA moles within it.[29]

Separating the Sheep from the Goats

None of this was enough for the malcontents, however. But the villain of the piece, in Staines’ eyes, was his Assistant Commissioner, Paddy Brennan, whose unsanctioned absence from Kildare Barracks allowed the dissent to fester at the cost of them all:

I feel that throughout I have had insufficient support from officers who should have known that the weakness in my authority was the sure prelude to the disappearance of their own, and I think they have behaved most unfairly to the men in not explaining matters to them, and bringing them to a sense of their duty.[30]

That is, at least, one version. In reviewing the whole sorry affair, historian Brian McCarthy found more than enough blame to go around, from the arrogance and entitlement of the mutineers to the tone-deaf failure of the Provisional Government to anticipate the resentment the ex-RIC appointments would engender.

As for Staines, McCarthy is particularly damning in his verdict:

While his nationalist credentials as a 1916 veteran and Sinn Féin TD initially satisfied the recruits, he was not keen to take on the role and proved a weak leader. His lack of leadership skills quickly became evident and when threatened with a mutiny over the issue of RIC leadership in the new force, he effectively abandoned his position, fled from his base and Kildare Barracks and was consequently unable to regain control of the force.[31]

Ernest Blythe

Whether anyone else could have done better is debatable; Staines had at least tried to put his foot down on the parade ground on the 15^th May 1922, challenging anyone unwilling to obey orders to step forward. The assembled men did more than that, openly revolting and driving their Commissioner and his aides out of Kildare Barracks. A last-ditch attempt by Staines to restore order by calling in armoured military cars floundered when the army officer in charge refused to proceed any further; in this, Staines made the wrong call and the officer the right one, Blythe judged, as the last thing the Provisional Government needed was two of its own bodies at each other’s throats.

If Staines had needed reinforcements, the Cabinet agreed upon reviewing the debacle, he should have requested them “before he made any attempt to separate the sheep from the goats, and not to send for them after the mutiny had broken out.” The steady nerves and finesse Staines demonstrated throughout his IRA career had clearly deserted him at this last hurdle.[32]

While his policing tenure may have been short-lived and ignominious, there is one postscript of note. Staines remained as Commissioner until September 1922, enabling him to put the Civic Guard at the disposal of the Free State when the Four Courts were attacked in June 1922, triggering the Civil War. Armed policemen were placed accordingly around various government buildings in Merrion Square, Stephen’s Green, Kildare Street and other parts of Dublin, as well as elsewhere in the country where railway stations, bridges, culverts and communication centres needed guarding.

“The men were frequently under fire at their posts in the [Dublin] City and Suburbs, where such attacks and sniping were of nightly occurrence,” Staines told the Military Pensions Board in 1925.[33]

A sentry on duty during the Civil War

Staines was not recording this for the sake of posterity; whether the Civic Guard at the time could be counted as part of the ‘National Forces’ would make all the difference in the amount of money he could claim for his past services. This led to some debate on the Board – as someone pointed out, ‘not an unarmed force’ is not quite the same thing as an armed force – until it was decided that the police then did indeed come within the framework of the National Forces. Trust Staines to spin gold even out of straw of failure, ‘cunning twister’ that he was.[34]

References

[1] Staines, Michael (BMH / WS 944), pp. 25-6

[2] Ibid, pp. 25, 29-30

[3] Gibbons, Seán (BMH / WS 927), p. 56

[4] Ibid, p. 55

[5] Staines, pp. 26

[6] Irish Times, 04/10/1921

[7] Gibbons, p. 55

[8] Staines, pp. 25, 30

[9] Duff, Douglas V. Sword For Hire: The Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: John Murray, 1934), pp. 88-90

[10] Staines, pp. 27-8

[11] Irish Times, 05/10/1921

[12] Brennan-Whitmore, W.J. With the Irish in Frongoch (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013), pp. 28, 166-8

[13] Ibid, pp. 172-3

[14] Ibid. p. 82

[15] Irish Times, 11/12/1921

[16] Staines, p. 13

[17] Irish Times, 11/12/1921

[18] Sturgis, Mark (edited by Hopkinson, Michael) The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), p. 220

[19] De Burca, Padraig and Boyle, John F. Free State or Republic? (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), p. 57

[20] ‘Debate on the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, signed in London on the 6^th December 1921: Sessions 14 December 1921 to 10 January 1922’ (accessed on the 11^th March 2018) CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E900003-001/index.html, pp. 296-8

[21] De Burca and Boyle, p. 62

[22] Staines, pp. 24-5

[23] Ibid, p. 24

[24] Dáil Éireann. Official Report (Dublin: Published by the Stationery Office, [1922]), p. 302

[25] Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), p. 154

[26] Ibid, pp. 154-5

[27] McCarthy, Brian. The Civic Guard Mutiny (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012), pp. 79-80

[28] Ibid, pp. 124, 127-9

[29] Ibid, p. 142

[30] Ibid, p. 144

[31] Ibid, p. 210

[32] Blythe, pp. 154-5

[33] ‘Staines, Michael’ (Military Service Pensions Application, WS24SP6787), pp. 14, 98

[34] Ibid, WS24SPE7, pp. 39, 41

Bibliography

Books

Brennan-Whitmore. W.J.. With the Irish in Frongoch (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013)

Dáil Éireann: Official Report (Dublin: Published by the Stationery Office, [1922?])

De Burca, Padraig and Boyle, John F. Free State or Republic? (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002)

Duff, Douglas V. Sword for Hire: A Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: John Murray, 1934)

McCarthy, Brian. The Civic Guard Mutiny (Cork: Mercier Press, 2012)

Sturgis, Mark (edited by Hopkinson, Michael) The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Gibbons, Seán, WS 927

Staines, Michael, WS 944

Newspaper

Irish Times

Online Resource

CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts

Military Service Pensions Application

‘Staines, Michael’

Peculiar Organisations: British Counter-Insurgency and Intelligence in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence, 1920-1

Predator / Prey

It was the classic tale of The One That Got Away: sometime in 1921, Douglas V. Duff was walking along Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, Dublin, killing time before catching his train back to his post in Galway. Dressed as he was in civilian clothes, it was unlikely anyone gave Duff a second glance, which was just the way he preferred it, being uncomfortably aware that, as a constable in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and not just any constable but a Black-and-Tan at that, he was very much in enemy territory.

The Father Theobold Mathew statue in O’Connell Street, Dublin, close to where Duff had his encounter

Part of the British Empire the city may have been but Duff did not delude himself as to who its streets really belonged, nor did he harbour illusions about the risks Ireland had for men like him. Any doubts about the state of the country had been clarified when he stepped off the ship at the North Wall. Several Crossley tenders were waiting to take Duff and the other recruits to the Constabulary Depot in Phoenix Park but it was the four coffins, draped in Union Jacks, on the quays that drew his attention. All victims of ambushes, he was told.

Taking the hint, Duff behaved with suitable caution during his service in Ireland. Nonetheless, when his companion, a cadet in the Auxiliary Division, grabbed his arm and told him who he had just seen on Sackville Street, Duff felt anything but cautious:

Startled – thrilled – I looked and saw that it really was the man whose description hung on every Police Barracks wall in Ireland, together with the announcement that £10,000 was the reward for his capture, and we knew that the authorities cared very little if he were brought in alive or dead.

How often was one likely to see Michael Collins in broad daylight, strolling about town as if without a care in the world? The rebel leader remained blissfully oblivious as the two foes closed in from behind, not even appearing alarmed when the cadet took him by the shoulder and announced that he was under arrest. The only response Collins made was pointing to three men standing by some nearby hoardings. This trio would have been the very picture of idle loitering – that is, if not for the way they were intently watching the unfolding scene with their hands poised in their pockets.

The Big Fella

All it would take, Collins informed his two ‘captors’, was for him to raise his hand and the pair of them would be shot dead. Any help would not arrive until long after he was gone. Recognising discretion as the better part of valour, Duff and the cadet moved aside, allowing Collins to continue on his way with a cheery farewell of “Goodbye, boys.”

And so Duff lost his chance at fame and fortune – and yet, as a wise man by the time he penned his memoirs, he could appreciate his luck as he found it:

Chap-fallen though I felt at the time, I am very glad that I was not the means of capturing the gallant man who so chivalrously spared us, after we had run our heads so hard into the very jaws of the lion.

It is a good story – perhaps a little too good (Duff had a book to sell, after all). But Duff’s account is notable, other than being one of the few perspectives we have from a Black-and-Tan, in how little he glorifies his service in Ireland or tries to convince his reader that it was anything other than an ordeal.

Douglas V. Duff

Before his encounter with Collins, Duff had been delivering dispatches from Galway to Dublin Castle, an assignment he hated due to how nerve-racking he found the journey to the city. Alone and unarmed save for a small grenade Duff kept hidden underneath his train-seat (!), he was entirely at the mercy of whoever took an interest in him. The first time he was sent, his pistol had been confiscated en route at Streamstown Station, Co. Westmeath, by a ‘Shinner’ or Irish Republican Army (IRA) officer – and more might have been taken had Duff not convinced the Irishman that he was but a harmless tourist concerned for his safety.[1]

Enter the New Man

Ormonde Winter

Even senior members of British military personnel could have related to Duff’s stories of being waylaid and the impunity by which it was done. Close shaves had practically become a part of life and those at the very heart of the Crown counter-insurgency, like Ormonde Winter, were not immune.

Appointed Deputy Chief of Police in mid-1920 as a cover for his real role of Chief of the Combined Intelligence Services, Winter had a foreboding forecast of what awaited him when he entered his temporary headquarters at Park Lodge in Dublin. Sentries and barbed wire protected the building, as well as loop-holed steel shutters over the windows and guns at hand during mealtimes – the last precaution proving something of a liability when one of the stewards used one to shoot himself in a fit of depression – and this was during Winter’s first few weeks in Ireland![2]

Dublin Castle entrance (Palace Street Gate)

Moving out of Park Lodge and into the protection of Dublin Castle in early October 1920 allowed the Deputy Chief of Police/Chief of the Combined Intelligence Services a chance to build up the resources at his disposal, practically from scratch – almost two years had passed since the opening shots of the guerrilla campaign at Soloheadbeg in January 1919 and the British state was only just starting to get to grips with the challenge in its Irish backyard. Doing so was possible as India showed but the secret service there had taken years to turn into something competent and Winter, as an old colonial hand, doubted he had the luxury of time.[3]

Complicating his job was how the traditional source on Irish rebel doings was in short supply. “The Irishman’s appetite for gold had been replaced by a surfeit of terror,” as he put it in his memoirs.

Placard found on the body of a victim of an IRA murder

In the space of eight or nine months, Winter could procure only about sixty spies and most of these were dropped due to lack of results. One exception he had hopes in was Vincent Fovargue, a ‘turned’ IRA man whose ‘escape’ from detention Winter staged for the benefit of a good cover story. The would-be agent was later found shot dead on a golf course. Prisoner interrogations likewise proved a dead-end more often than not, since the prior British policy of blanket amnesties had left IRA detainees feeling they had little to fear from the threat of lengthy jail sentences.[4]

But Winter was a trier if nothing else and found another window into the insurgency: correspondence by the IRA leadership from and to their subordinates that the police and British military were liable to uncover in their raids. Of the ten sources of intelligence cited by Winter, from the age-old methods of informants and interrogations to more innovative attempts like listening devices and the reading of letters from gaol, he found captured paperwork to be far the most productive.[5]

Black-and-Tans searching Irish suspects

“It was fortunate that the Irish had an irresistible habit of keeping documents,” Winter gloated. In this, he was inadvertently aided by the IRA GHQ in its demands, issued in mid-1920, for any planned operations to be first submitted to Dublin in writing.  “Nonsensical, unnecessary and farcical,” was the opinion of one IRA officer on this high-risk insistence.[6]

‘The Wolves From the Lambs’

A policy was formulated accordingly by Winter:

Immediately after any raid, all documents were at once admitted by its personnel to a close scrutiny, epitomes completed, and copies made for distribution. Some idea of the amount of work involved may be gathered from the fact that in the Dublin District area from October 1920 to July 1921, 6,311 raids and searches were carried out, and over 12,000 epitomes of captured documents, some consisting of over 200 pages of foolscap, were circulated.

Tellingly, Winter had to stress to the police and soldiers involved the importance of collecting all documents, however minor at first glance, before they got the point. The British machine was only just grasping what it should have known at the start. Winter’s efforts paid off: a Central Raid Bureau was painstakingly formed, complete with a card index and photographic library, allowing Winter to finally get on top of the situation:

A list of all persons arrested was forwarded to me, and the duty devolved on me deciding who should be liberated, interned or prosecuted from the evidence available on the Raid Bureau. During a period of three months, 1,745 arrests were made in the Dublin District alone, in addition to large numbers from the outlying Counties, and so much of my time was spent in sorting out the wolves from the lambs.[7]

One would think that the Chief of the Combined Intelligence Services would have delegated such a time-consuming chore. Perhaps that says something about the resources the British state was willing (or not) to provide – or maybe more about Winter’s micromanaging. He was certainly a hands-on boss, such as on the 2^nd July 1921, when news of an IRA-related murder in the Irish midlands reached him. Deciding that this latest killing warranted his personal attention – and possibly to escape the confinement of Dublin Castle – Winter gave orders for a drive to the outskirts of the city. From there, an aeroplane would fly him as the quickest means of transport.

His car was turning left on Cork Hill, with Winter:

…seated on the near rear seat; and I was putting a cigarette in my mouth a shot rang out and a bullet hit my hand an inch below the junction of my thumb and forefinger, passed through my hand and made its exit two inches below my little finger, breaking no bones but severing an artery.

As if that was not enough: “Then came a hail of bullets from every direction.”

IRA members

Thanks to his gun and those of his armed escort, Winter was able to fight off the ambushers, even claiming credit in his memoirs for the slaying of one of them. His experience in hospital seems to have been equally as unpleasant as that of being shot, with a probe pushed through his wound, followed by a dose of antitetanic serum and several sleepless nights: “However, this enforced insomnia gave me plenty of time to ponder on Sinn Fein in general, and their activities in particular.”[8]

Winter does not inform his readers on whether he reached any sort of epiphany on this. A month and a half after his brush his death, the Truce of July 1921 came into effect and subsequently the Anglo-Irish Treaty. While Winter does not seem to altogether approve of this agreement, quoting Winston Churchill’s cutting remarks that “no British government in modern times has ever appeared to make so sudden and complete a reversal of policy”, he also did not sound too distraught about the end of his duties in Ireland.[9]

British troops departing from Dublin, 1922

‘The Heart and Soul of the Whole Conspiracy’

Winter’s narration of his time at the head of the British intelligence service in Ireland is a mix of the sensible and the silly. An example of the latter was the printing apparatus of the Irish Bulletin being seized and used to send out bogus and mocking pseudo-versions of that Republican organ. When it was made known that, from now on, all genuine issues would be known by a special stamp, Winter had that forged and added it to more of his ‘fake news’; amusing, maybe, but what difference was that really going to make?[10]

As an historic source, his book has its flaws. No one who suggests that it was the IRA who murdered Tomás Mac Curtain for his supposed wavering or that Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and Conor Clune were killed while assaulting their guards inside Dublin Castle (with a smuggled grenade, no less) can be read without the slightest raising of the brow. But Winter does clearly convey how the British counter-insurgency was not working on any sort of pre-approved system or formula, being instead an ad hoc, whatever-works-works process.[11]

As Winter was based in Dublin, his experiences and anecdotes tended to involve that city – perhaps a little too much so. At least one British Army source thought the Dublin location of senior policemen to have been problematic since it encouraged the officials to regard themselves as essentially city inspectors rather than seeing Ireland as the big picture.[12]

But then, Dublin was of vital importance, both for the Crown and the Irish insurgency:

Dublin was, and is, the heart and soul of the whole conspiracy. It was the principal military base for all Ireland, also the headquarters of the Viceroy and the Commander in Chief, as well as the site of large and important military stores of explosives and arms.[13]

Written sometime between the Truce of July 1921 and the signing of the Treaty in December, Record of the Rebellion was a review of the Army’s performance in Ireland. Volume IV, ‘Dublin District Historical Records’, dealt with the place in question specifically; after all, “the situation in Dublin was so unique that it was worth considering in some detail.”[14]

Much of the piece is concerned with the logistics of urban conflict, such as the right way of conducting a house-to-house search or how to fine-tune the hours of a city curfew. Regarding intelligence, Record divided the question of responsibility into four distinct periods:

1. 1. Performed by the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) until the end of 1919, when the IRA campaign of assassinations and intimidation proved too much for the DMP to continue.
   2. The military taking over in early 1920. Progress was limited at first, with the lone junior army officer in charge being “very limited [in what he could do] as he had no organised means of obtaining intelligence.” Personnel in general was scarce, with no intelligence officers higher than at a regimental level, and even these were largely working on their own initiative rather than as part of any overall strategy.
   3. Military intelligence services were reorganised, under a specially selected officer, known as the Special Branch. This worked directly for the army authorities, with brigade and battalion intelligence officers appointed, all of which allowed for a successful coordination between intelligence and ‘street level’ activities. While sources of knowledge remained limited, results overall were good.
   4. This arrangement came to an end in early 1921, when the Special Branch was transferred, with its records, to the Chief of Police, merging with Police Intelligence.

Special Branch was henceforward known as D Branch, headed by the Director of Police Intelligence (Winter, unnamed in the text), who ran what was now a part intelligence, part executive organisation.

‘Bloody Sunday’ in November 1920 was noted as a heavy blow. Several of the most promising intelligence officers had been lost, and the rest found their new headquarters at Dublin Castle and the Central Hotel to be as much constrictive as protective. Nonetheless, it is interesting that this coordinated massacre, often celebrated as the ‘smashing’ of British intelligence, only “temporarily paralysed” the Special Branch in the opinion of the Record.

Too Many Cooks over a Broth

Far more damaging to army intelligence was the internal interference, specifically its amalgamation with the police. This, as Record described in detail, was:

…a grave mistake. For personal reasons it was wholly unpopular among the personnel of the Special Branch, and unfortunately personal considerations can rarely be left out of account in questions connected with secret service. The organisation continue to work for the army, but was responsible to a new master, the Chief of Police, consequently the driving power behind the agents gradually diminished.

As a result, what had been a smoothly running machine became entangled in its gears:

Duplicate organisations both to check the police information and to act as a liaison became necessary. The result was delay in taking action, overlapping in work, and a registry created on the lines of compromise and satisfactory to neither military or police.

Neither intelligence nor executive but a mix of both, too self-contained and wilful for the Army’s liking, and overly reliant on enthusiastic amateurs for its members, D Branch was a poor fit for the Dublin war in the Record’s estimation: “A peculiar organisation, as secret services organisations generally are.” That anything was accomplished at all was more due to the talents of individuals than any structural strength:

If all intelligence and all operations in the city had been controlled from one office better results might have been achieved and a great deal of friction and irritation would certainly have been avoided.

Far from being wiped out by Bloody Sunday, there was more British intelligence branches than ever by 1921. Instead, the problem seemed to be there too many, or at least too much overlap in their respective spheres:

1. 1. D Branch, headed by the Chief of Police – Collating intelligence for Dublin District using informants/agents’ reports (both police and military), DMP reports and captured documents. Responsible for passing information to the below organisations.
   2. General Staff (British Army), Intelligence, Dublin District – Keeping the General Officer Commanding (GOC) updated as to the structure, tactics and intentions of the IRA. Intelligence provided from its own military sources as well as from D Branch.
   3. Raid Bureau, headed by the Chief of Police – Filing all reports on raids, as well as receiving captured documents and weapons.
   4. Registry, headed by the Chief of Police – registering information as it was obtained, and maintaining the personal files and cards on all suspects.[15]

Sir Warren Fisher

If it all looked complicated on paper, then, unsurprisingly, that is exactly how it was in practice. Not that the British state could say it was never warned; a report by Sir Warren Fisher in February 1921 called for an end of inter-branch infringements with the creation of a uniform command system in Dublin, nothing of which was done by the time the war came to a halt five months later in July.[16]

“There were at least three rival intelligence agencies employed by the British and as usual they were all jealous of one another,” remembered one senior DMP officer with a sigh.[17]

Inside Men

The root cause of this unseemly disarray, according to General Nevil Macready, the GOC for Ireland, was because the plan had been to use military intelligence in conjunction with the police system while the latter was being rebuilt:

Events proved, however, in the long run that it would have been better to have relied on a purely military organisation, to be placed at the service of the police, instead of attempting a dual organization, which, with the best of goodwill on both sides, never worked altogether smoothly owing to a diversity of system and the lack of unity in control.[18]

Sir Nevil Macready

In this, Macready echoed the analysis found in the Record. Considering how both the general’s memoirs and the Record were written by soldiers, it is unsurprising that the two texts often shared the same worldview. Neither, for example, had much time for the politicians back home – Macready bemoaned the fluctuating demands from Downing Street, and its inability to settle on either coercion and conciliation as the policy for Ireland, while the Record would point to “political considerations”, along with “legal technicalities” (like the Army’s lack of authority for summary executions), as the reasons for the failure to crush the insurgency.[19]

One notable divergence, however, is that Macready was fully aware of the IRA’s own intelligence system “which spread its tentacles throughout every grade of the population”, most notably in its informants positioned “throughout the police and Government offices in Dublin.” For all his disdain for everything Irish – much aired throughout his two-volume autobiography – Macready was astute enough to grasp the perils of employing the same demographic the enemy also drew from: “These men, mostly of the same social class as the rebels, were many of them in sympathy in Sinn Fein.”

In comparison, Record’s awareness of the problem seems to have been rather limited, putting the “continued leakage of information” down to “injudicious talking in some cases” as well as “deliberate treachery in others”, and even in the cases of the latter, suspicion fell no further than on clerical workers or repairmen working in barracks. Even at the time the Record was written, in late 1921, its authors should have known about the number of DMP officers who had been not so much leaking as pouring state secrets to Michael Collins – admittedly more of a police problem than an Army one, but a major cause, all the same, of why the British counter-insurgency struggled to contain, let alone defeat the IRA.[20]

Winter was even worse, making no reference at all in his memoirs to either David Neligan, Eamon Broy or James McNamara, all prominent DMP moles who had been working to undermine Winter’s intelligence system as arduously as he built it. Perhaps Winter found it too awkward to talk about, but this omission does lead to some curious blind spots in his narrative that might otherwise compliment British counter-intelligence, such as the arrest of Eileen McGrane, Collins’ private secretary. This not only came with a vanload of captured paperwork from her office – a major coup in itself – but led to Broy’s exposure when some of these catches were traced back to documents he had typed, a fact (ruefully) described by Broy in his own reminiscences but not in Winter’s.[21]

Eamon Broy (in the uniform of his later career in the Gardaí

Spilled secrets also snagged McNamara, though, in this case, it was largely his own fault. A dispatch to Dublin Castle, complaining about reports of American sailors handing weapons to the IRA, found its way into the eager hands of the Sinn Féin Publicity Bureau. Its publication provoked a diplomatic row between the United States and Britain but also gave McNamara away since he was the confidential clerk who had handled it. McNamara’s sacking and Broy’s imprisonment left Neligan as the last of the top DMP spies, much to his consternation.

“It set me wondering when my number would come up!” he wrote later.[22]

Spy Game

David Neligan

It never did. Neligan’s cover survived to the end of the War; indeed, his former superiors in Dublin Castle, still none the wiser, would express surprise at how quickly he obtained his new job in the Irish Provisional Government at the start of 1922. His insider status at the British headquarters allowed him access to the ‘G-man’s diary’, a large calf-bound tome with all the daily reports of DMP detectives recorded. While Neligan had a poor opinion on the type of updates – quantity over quality seems to have been the order of the day – “all the same there was always a danger a G-man might stumble on something, as they knew a lot of people.”

Similarly, whenever Neligan found himself in another police station in Dublin, he took the chance, if he could, to peruse the Occurrence Book that covered anything of note. One such nugget was the role of a certain army captain in the raid on the Exchange Hotel which saw the killing of John Lynch on the grounds that the Sinn Féin County Councillor had allegedly opened fire on the soldiers first with a revolver, a claim Neligan did not believe for a second: “Lynch was an elderly man who, though a sympathiser, was never in the army wing of Sinn Fein.” The captain’s name was passed on to Collins to add to the list of British secret servicemen in Dublin: come November 1920 and the man was among the dead of Bloody Sunday.[23]

Photo believed to be of the so-called ‘Cairo Gang’, consisting of British agents in Dublin,

There were, however, limits to what even a well-placed source like Neligan could provide. After taking a lunch break from his secret office in Mary Street, Collins decided on a hunch not to return, and fortunately so, for the place was searched later that day by Auxiliaries. Though they found nothing more incriminating than a fountain pen and a personal letter, it had been a close shave. Worse were the implications of the incident happening at all, according to Neligan:

This raid smelled of treachery and was certainly no fluke. Especially, as, some days earlier, they had raided next door to another secret office.

Despite Neligan being in the perfect place to root out this betrayal, “we never discovered the source of this information. It looked as if someone had betrayed him. It shook him at the time.” The strain was beginning to show on the famously daredevil Collins, his pale, careworn appearance shocking Neligan on one occasion in early 1921. IRA success at thwarting British spies had not been able to stem the problem altogether, as Neligan lamented: “So many worked for the British that it was impossible to counter all.”[24]

While Collins would remain at liberty until the Truce of 1921, not everyone would be so lucky. Eileen McGrane’s arrest and the loss of the documents in her keeping had been due to a “person of loyalist viewpoint”, according to Broy – whether anything was done about this grievous breach in security is not recorded by him. Another critical capture was that of Seán Mac Eoin, picked out from the train at Mullingar station by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Mac Eoin had been returning to his command area in Longford after reporting to GHQ in Dublin, the sort of journey that was as much a danger for country IRA officers as it was for soldiers on the other side like Duff.

Seán Mac Eoin

Mac Eoin’s presence in Dublin and itinerary back home had been leaked by a female acquaintance who he was using as a courier to the rest of the Longford IRA. The woman passed on the orders as instructed – and then went straight to her uncle, a retired RIC constable. At least, this is the conjecture on the part of Ann Farrington, the manager of the Crown Hotel in Dublin, who claimed to have seen Mac Eoin together with the unnamed woman in question.[25]

Regardless of the truth of this, the police team at Mullingar was unlikely to have been there by coincidence. Mac Eoin’s loss was a matter of considerable vexation to Collins, who ordered several attempts to rescue him (none of which succeeded), as well as a blow to the Longford IRA, who were never quite the same without their talented commander.[26]

Murder Gang?

Little wonder then that IRA Volunteers in Dublin sometimes grew a little highly-strung. The first time Dan Breen arrived in the city in early 1919 from Co. Tipperary, along with Seán Treacy, Seán Hogan and Séumas Robinson, they could walk around together freely and undisguised. This was despite all four being Ireland’s most wanted men from their role in the Soloheadbeg ambush. The DMP by that time had had a ‘live and let live’ attitude with the rebels, if they were not actively aiding their cause, and those policemen sent up from Tipperary were sensible enough to turn their heads should they chance upon any of the quartet.[27]

Left to right: Séumas Robinson, Seán Treacy, Dan Breen, Seán Hogan

As time went on, the pressures of being on the run began to get to Breen:

I was becoming obsessed with the idea that if I remained in Dublin my days were numbered. The British had touts and spotters everywhere. They had promised liberal rewards for information, at this time they were masking desperate attempts to restore their Secret Service and match it with ours.

Letters were opened in the post; hotel servants were bribed; an elaborate system of telephone-code was arranged for the touts and spotters. Is it surprising that in such circumstances I was often hard pressed to make my escape.[28]

It was not just paranoia. One of these escapes was from a tram near the city centre, when five plainclothes policemen stepped on board. Sitting on a three-seater bench at the rear of the upper half, just at the top of the stairs, Breen kept his cool as two of the newcomers sat on either side of him, while a third stood opposite, holding the railings. Knowing he was cornered, Breen continued to do nothing, as much for lack of options as anything. He was starting to relax as the tram passed through Parnell Street, thinking that perhaps the recognition had not been mutual, when he saw the pair seated next to him reaching for their hip-pockets.

Dublin trams

But Breen was quicker, pulling out his own revolver and chasing the trio down the stairs, following them as they jumped from the moving tram, into Dorset Street. Not wanting to risk a fire-fight, and conscious of enemy reinforcements that were liable to appear, Breen walked away, managing to lose his pursuers in the crowd of pedestrians.[29]

He would live to fight another day, having had a narrow escape from the ‘Murder Gang’, as he and other IRA men would know it by:

This group was composed of about fifteen RIC men from various parts of the country where the IRA were most active. Each had been attached to the political branch of the force in his own district for a number of years, and it was his business to know all the Volunteers in the neighbourhood. They were now on the lookout for country Volunteers in the streets of Dublin, and it was their business to murder them.[30]

From then on, Breen would make sure of not going anywhere unless in the company of Seán Treacy who was, like Breen, quick with a gun. Treacy would not survive the war, dying in a shootout on Talbot Street in October 1920. In the hours before, Breen had seen one of the policemen from the tram encounter trailing him and Treacy, presumably all the way to where the latter would be gunned down. When the body was brought to Dublin Castle, Winter was able to identify it with one of his photographs from his considerable collection.[31]

Crowd gathered around the bodies of Seán Treacy and three others killed in the shoot-out on Talbot Street, October 1920

Identification Squad?

As two men on opposing sides in a war, Breen and Winter probably would not have seen eye to eye on a lot of things. Winter’s depiction of this ‘Murder Gang’ in his own autobiographical output, however, does chime for the most part with Breen’s (albeit with a far less sinister name bestowed). With the DMP too intimidated (or compromised) to perform much in the way of intelligence work, and the IRA leaders in Dublin so far unknown to the authorities, Winter:

…asked [General Henry] Tudor [Police Advisor to Dublin Castle] for permission to form an “Identification Squad” under the leadership of a reliable Head Constable. These men were either old members of the Special Branch or experienced members of the local police, and two of these were selected from each county. Their duties were to wander the streets in twos or threes, attired in plain clothes. This led to a few arrests.[32]

Winter did not give his readers the name of this Head Constable, although he was, of course, aware of it, and would go on to write in support of Eugene Igoe’s pension application in 1922, emphasising “the Head Constable’s loyalty and devotion to duty and his quite exceptional danger.”[33]

Joe Howley

To be a member of the Crown forces in Ireland at this time was indeed a risk, although, to hear his enemies speak of Igoe, the danger was as much from him as to him. Charlie Dalton and the rest of Collins’ ‘Squad’ first became aware of Igoe and his group with the slaying of a Volunteer called Joe Howley, shot dead at Broadstone Station in January 1921. While the Squad had made assassination its speciality, repeating a Bloody Sunday on this new foe was complicated by members of the latter being not nearly as careless as the British officers gunned down on November 1920. Their walks across the city were intentionally varied, making tracking difficult, and the physical appearance of many, including Igoe’s, an unknown, prompting the Dublin IRA to invite Thomas Newell, a Volunteer from Galway who had known the Head Constable in his native county.

Dalton was alone in the Squad’s office on Crow Street when Newell rushed in to say he had aspied Igoe and his colleagues walking up Grafton Street, towards St Stephen’s Green. After sending instructions for the rest of the Squad, on ‘stand by’ in their other base at Upper Abbey Street, to assemble at St Stephen’s Green, Dalton went with Newell. His plan was to ambush the enemy on the west side of the square in the assumption they were heading to Harcourt Street Railway Station; instead, the two IRA pursuers found themselves surrounded by their intended targets on Grafton Street, near Weir’s jewellery store.

Weir’s Sons jewelry store, Grafton Street

The Igoe Gang had developed the technique of strolling along the streets in a loose, seemingly casual formation that could nonetheless regroup in strength, like the fingers of a clenching fist, when a Volunteer was chanced upon. This tactic worked a treat on Dalton and Newell, who were then escorted, quietly but firmly, to Dame Street and stood against a wall, a policeman on either side of both captives and far apart enough for them not to hear each other’s answers as Igoe questioned them in turn. Pedestrians meanwhile passed by, oblivious to the double interrogation going on and, in one version of Dalton’s story (he told the tale twice in his memoirs), he even spotted Vincent Byrne and other Squad members hurrying to the intended rendezvous spot.

Newell finally lost his temper and admitted who he was, giving the game away and ending their talk. Dalton was told to walk away and not look back; convinced that the policemen were still following him, he managed to move slowly until turning a corner, upon which he broke into a run and did not stop until reaching his father’s workplace in the city, practically collapsing as he stepped over its threshold. He recovered sufficiently to get back in touch with the rest of the Squad and though they returned to Dame Street, Igoe, Newell and the rest were already gone.

Members of the ‘Squad’

Dalton later heard that Newell had been shot – “riddled” as he put it – and badly wounded. So distressed was Dalton by the experience that he later refused an order to identify Igoe at a restaurant the Head Constable was said to be dining in – and this from a hardened killer who had pulled a trigger on Bloody Sunday. Despite the Igoe Gang now being the number one target for every Dublin-based IRA unit, “many abortive attempts were made, without the desired effect” and it remained “one of the most difficult and dangerous forces opposed to the IRA in Dublin” until the Truce.[34]

“I am sorry to say that this was the nearest we ever got to the Murder Gang,” said another Squad member, William James Stapleton, about Dalton’s and Newell’s failed venture to trap Igoe. “I think, if we have any disappointments I consider, this to all of us would be one of the major ones.”[35]

The Coup de Graces That Never Were?

However good they were at their job, whether as a ‘Murder Gang’ or ‘Identification Squad’, Igoe’s team was not enough to make a critical difference in the Dublin war; even Winter regarded its impact as more physiological than anything else: “No longer could the [IRA] leaders visit the city in safety.” That Winter believed, even by the time he penned his autobiography in 1955, that the IRA leadership were visitors to Dublin and not residents exposes a blind spot in his knowledge, and yet another damning indictment of the British counter-insurgency’s failure to fully grasp the nature of its challenge.[36]

British soldiers overlooking Dublin

Nonetheless, Winter’s tenure as Chief of the Combined Intelligence Services, from October 1920 to July 1921, saw a number of wins scored in Dublin:

• The location and death of Seán Treacy on October 1920.
• The location and capture of Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, Commandant and Vice Commandant of the Dublin IRA Brigade respectively, in November 1920.
• The identification of every Volunteer in a Dublin IRA company due to the interrogation of Vincent Fovargue.
• The unmasking of James MacNamara and Eamon Broy as IRA moles within the DMP.
• Raids on two of Collins’ personal intelligence offices as well as that of Mulcahy, resulting in the seizure of a cache of sensitive documents, including Sinn Féin and IRA codes.[37]

Major-General Gerald Boyd

Would all this have been enough had the war continued on past July 1921? Certain British sources assumed so. “Well, Jeune, I think we have broken the back of the movement now, don’t you?” Major-General Boyd, GOC of Dublin District, told intelligence officer Captain R.D. Jeune at the start of 1921. Jeune concurred, with an estimation of six more months before the victorious end.[38]

Unlike Jeune, the Record hedged its bets on an exact finish, but nonetheless believed that the Dublin IRA had been reduced to a shadow of its former self by the time of the Truce: “The coup de grace might have taken a little longer, but, given real power [emphasis in text], it was inevitable.” That this ‘real power’ had been constantly withheld was apparently the fault of politicians in Whitehall, not the Army’s. Yet, at the same time, the Record complained of its difficulty in identifying suspects, even important ones such as Collins and Mulcahy, both of whom had been arrested, twice and once respectively: “In all these cases no one was present who knew Collins or Mulcahy by sight, and they were released” – hardly the sign of a military machine on the verge of a breakthrough.[39]

On the other side of the question, could the IRA have continued on in Dublin? Even the best of its operatives were struggling with the mental pressures of life on the run – Dalton’s encounter with Igoe frayed his nerves enough to put him out of commission for weeks. And, as Assistant Director of Intelligence, Frank Thorton doubted that the insurgency in Dublin was sustainable for much longer, although he put that down to its paucity in weapons and ammunition rather than any skill or effort on the part of the British.

British soldiers and Irish civilians in Dublin

Such a shortage did not deter plans for a major operation, one to wipe out every enemy agent, Secret Service man, Auxiliary and Black-and-Tan in the city. To this end, the Dublin IRA Brigade was mobilised, along with the Squad and every other armed unit at hand, and the man put in positon, waiting for the allocated time to strike. With only half an hour left, instructions came through to stand down. Negotiations that would result in the Truce were due to commence, and jaw-jaw over war-war was now the order of the day.[40]

At least, this is according to Thorton, written at the end of his reminiscences. It was a good way to end his story, perhaps a little too good – another tale of The Ones That Got Away.

References

[1] Duff, Douglas V. Sword For Hire: The Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: John Murray, 1934), pp. 54, 78-81

[2] Winter, Ormonde. A Winter’s Tale: An Autobiography (London: The Richards Press, 1955), p. 289

[3] Ibid, p. 293

[4] Ibid, pp. 295, 300, 305-6

[5] Ibid, pp. 294-5

[6] Ibid, p. 303 ; Walsh, Richard (BMH / WS 400), p. 66

[7] Winter, pp. 304-5

[8] Winter, pp. 333-4

[9] Ibid, p. 342

[10] Ibid, pp. 307-8

[11] Ibid, pp. 291, 322-3

[12] Sheehan, William. Fighting for Dublin: The British Battle for Dublin, 1919-1921 (Cork: The Collins Press, 2007), p. 147

[13] Ibid, p. 79

[14] Ibid, p. 138

[15] Ibid, pp. 143-7

[16] Hittle, J.B.E. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War (Washington, DC: Potomic Books, 2011), p. 190

[17] Neligan, David. The Spy in the Castle (London: Prendeville Publishing Limited, 1999), p. 73

[18] Macready, Neil. Annals of an Active Life, Volume II (New York: George H. Dolan Company, 1925), pp. 462-3

[19] Ibid, p. 463 ; Sheehan. Fighting for Dublin, p. 79

[20] Ibid, pp. 463-4 ; Ibid, pp. 42-3

[21] Winter, p. 328 ; Broy, Eamon (BMH / WS 1280), pp. 105, 108

[22] Neligan, p. 130

[23] Ibid, pp. 106-7, 123, 154

[24] Ibid, pp. 146-7

[25] Broy, p. 105 ; Farrington, Ann (BMH / WS 749), pp. 4-5

[26] Stapleton, William James (BMH / WS 822), p. 51 (for an example of the attempts made to rescue Mac Eoin) ; McKeon, James (BMH / WS 436), p. 21 (on the state of the Longford IRA after Mac Eoin’s arrest)

[27] Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010), p. 78

[28] Ibid, p. 131

[29] Ibid, pp. 133-4

[30] Ibid, p. 131

[31] Ibid, 134-5, 137 ; Winter, p. 319

[32] Winter, pp. 337-8

[33] Hittle, p. 279

[34] Dalton, Charles. With the  Dublin Brigade: Espionage and Assassinations with Michael Collins’ Intelligence Unit (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014), pp. 152, 224-31

[35] Stapleton, p. 77

[36] Winter, p. 338

[37] Hittle, pp. 231-2

[38] Sheehan, William. British Voices from the Irish War of Independence, 1918-1921 (Cork: The Collins Press, 2005), p. 90

[39] Ibid. Fighting for Dublin, pp. 74, 80

[40] ‘Dalton, Charles’ (Military Service Pensions Application, DP/4), p. 101 ; Thorton, Frank (BMH / WS 615), pp. 59-60

Bibliography

Books

Breen, Dan. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Dalton, Charles. With the Dublin Brigade: Espionage and Assassination with Michael Collins’ Intelligence Unit (Cork: Mercier Press, 2014)

Duff, Douglas V. Sword For Hire: The Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: John Murray, 1934)

Hittle, J.B.E. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War (Washington, DC: Potomic Books, 2011)

Macready, Nevil. Annals of an Active Life, Volume II (New York: George H. Dolan Company, 1925)

Neligan, David. The Spy in the Castle (London: Prendeville Publishing Limited, 1999)

Sheehan, William. British Voices from the Irish War of Independence, 1918-1921 (Cork: The Collins Press, 2005)

Sheehan, William. Fighting for Dublin: The British Battle for Dublin, 1919-1921 (Cork: The Collins Press, 2007)

Winter, Ormonde. A Winter’s Tale: An Autobiography (London: The Richards Press, 1955)

Bureau of Military History Statements

Broy, Eamon, WS 1280

Farrington, Ann, WS 749

McKeon, James, WS 436

Stapleton, William James, WS 822

Thorton, Frank, WS 615

Walsh, Richard, WS 400

Military Service Pensions Application

‘Dalton, Charles’, DP/4

A Contention of Officialdoms: The Irish War of Independence in Co. Meath, 1920

In the Line of Duty

Death in Ireland in 1920 was never entirely far away, as shown on the 21^st July when a group of men driving through the town of Oldcastle, Co. Meath, were accosted by British soldiers. When the call to stop was ignored, shots were fired at the motorcar which kept going until it was out of sight and range. Reinforced by personnel of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the military subsequently combed the locality and found the vehicle, abandoned in a roadside field, its windows smashed and sea-green body perforated with bullets, including a large hole in the door beside the driver’s seat.

Oldcastle, Co. Meath

Even more ominously, blood was splattered inside. Pressing onwards, the search party came across a cabin, some four hundred yards from the derelict car, inside of which the body of a young man had been left. Cause of death was not hard to discern, what with the gaping wound over the left eye, opposite the jagged exit-hole behind the left ear, from which brain matter could be seen.

The victim was identified as 25-year-old Seamus Cogan, a resident of Ballinlough parish and an officer in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). As its Volunteers were embroiled in an insurgency against British rule in Ireland, Cogan’s demise was not unexpected, however sudden and shocking, another act of war in a country that had seen plenty already and with more to come.

What was unusual, perhaps, was the circumstances of Cogan’s last ride: killed while transporting a suspect detained for cattle-theft, the sort of law-and-order duties previously left to the British authorities. A session of Meath County Council caught something of this topsy-turvy situation when one attendee, after seconding the Chairman’s expression of sympathy for Cogan and his family:

…said it was a terrible state of affairs that the forces of the English Crown should shoot a man down when engaged in the work of detecting criminals and protecting property – work which these people were supposed to be engaged in, but in which they had signally failed.

Another participant, Seamus Finn, agreed with this sentiment, adding that the death, done as it was in the service of Ireland, was one Cogan would have preferred. A resolution was made for the tricoloured flag over the County Buildings, as was the norm these days, to be flown at half-mast in mourning. Though one dissenting voice declined on the grounds of this being too overly political act for his taste, the measure was acceded.

Other local government boards in Meath were of like mind, such as Dunshaughlin District Council in passing a resolution of its own, praising “the late Seamus Cogan, who was killed while performing his duties as a Peace Officer of the Republican Government.”[1]

Memorial to IRA dead, including Seamus Cogan, in Oldcastle, Co. Meath

Switching Gears

But there was more to Cogan and his duties than peacekeeping. As O/C of the 5^th (Oldcastle) Battalion – one of the six making up the Meath IRA Brigade – Cogan had presided over meetings to debate the latest step towards Irish freedom. Meath was in something of a transition between the old order and the new: the RIC had withdrawn from the smaller and more isolated of its outposts in order to concentrate in the larger barracks. While strategically sound, this did surrender much of the county to the IRA, which sealed its conquest by razing the abandoned buildings.

The remains of a burnt RIC barracks

Crossakiel RIC Barracks remained occupied and intact, however, and because this lay within the sphere of the 5^th Battalion, responsibility fell to Cogan and his officers. Since the enemy base had been reinforced with barbed-wire and barricades and its police garrison doubled, Crossakiel would not be an easy challenge and it was agreed to keep it under close surveillance, its comings and goings scrutinised and studied for any chink in the armour.

Special training for the eventual assault was also considered, while operation plans were submitted to the Brigade command. Cogan was helped in this by Seamus Finn, the Meath IRA Adjutant who would later pay tribute to him in the County Council chambers. As a hands-on officer:

I remained in the area for a couple of weeks and assisted in training the various companies and discussing the plans. It was obvious that the party to attack would need to be specially selected and be drawn from different companies, and during these weeks Cogan and I were spotting likely men to form this party or column…We had not formulated any definite plan when I had to leave the area but the foundation had been laid and it should not have taken us very long to complete the details.

Seamus Finn

While the spirit of the Volunteers was abundant, their tools were not, for it was decided by the Brigade leadership to postpone the idea on the grounds of insufficient munitions, at least until its next meeting, set for July 1920. “Just then we were forced to give all our attention to another phased activity,” Finn later wrote, this being the Local Government Elections in Meath and elsewhere throughout the country.[2]

The attention paid off…unless it was never needed to begin with, given the headlines of the Meath Chronicle:

MEATH SOLID FOR SINN FEIN.

NATIONAL CANDIDATES WIN EASILY.

HUGE MAJORITY ON ALL BOARDS.

GREAT SWEEP ON COUNTY COUNCIL.[3]

The various Rural Councils and Boards of Guardians for Navan, Kells, Trim, Slane, Dunshaughlin and elsewhere were now almost entirely in the hands of Sinn Féin members or, as the newspaper put it, “men pledged to the National cause.” Only in Trim was there anything like a competition, that between Seamus Finn and the Labour candidate, Mr Mathews. After both gained an equal number of votes, and a brief conversation between the two men, Mathews agreed to stand down; though, since he was supportive of Sinn Féin as well, it would have been a win either way.[4]

Pledging to the National Cause

Heading the Meath County Council was its newly-elected Chairman, Patrick Clinch, who set the tone at its annual meeting, on the 19^th June 1920, by informing his peers in his inaugural speech that:

They were living in very critical times, and no doubt they would have to play an important part in this, the last struggle for independence…They might have to make many sacrifices. Sacrifices had to be made before, and might have to be made again, but the object was a worthy one, and he did not think they need fear the future, as the prospect was a bright one. The country was never better and the people never more true, never more ready to make sacrifice and work for the cause of freedom.

Applause punctuated the speech, showing that the Chairman and the rest of the room were fully in accord. When Clinch followed up with a motion proposing that Meath County Council acknowledge the authority of Dáil Éireann as the sole legitimate one in Ireland, it was passed unanimously.[5]

Michael Collins

Not that the transition of Sinn Féin from outsiders to winners had been entirely seamless. Back in August 1919, a report was sent to Michael Collins by Seán Boylan, O/C of the Meath IRA Brigade. It complained of the “slackness in this Constituency” due to the “friction between the Volunteers and Sinn Fein” and the contempt the former displayed for the latter, seeing it merely as “constitutionalism” rather than a proper revolutionary force. A “good talking over” by Collins and his peers in the IRA GHQ for certain of their “rather juvenile and bumptious” officers was advised, and evidently whatever had been said stuck.[6]

“It is more important to get our people to refuse to recognise British local government than to attack their armed forces,” Collins later told Boylan. Though he would be hailed as ‘the man who won the war’, Collins was realistic enough to recognise the limitations of too narrow a focus.  If the aim of the revolution was Irish self-rule, then, at a local level, it had already succeeded in Meath; it was just a matter of making it stick.[7]

On the Case

Doing so involved taking over the British state in role as well as in name. When Fobertyn House, near Longwood, was robbed and vandalised, on the 23^rd May 1920, its owner, Captain de Stackpole, went straight to the Irish Volunteers in Trim with a list of his pilfered goods. The response came three days later:

A motor car containing Volunteer officers, and a member of men on bicycles, arrived at Longwood and approached four men, whom they conveyed to an unknown location.

Two more arrests were made the next day, after which stolen silverware was retrieved from its hiding place in a bog when one of the detainees confessed. Further goods were recovered when the Volunteers searched the home of another prisoner; the RIC, in contrast, had looked there before but found nothing. It was a propaganda coup for the Volunteers, especially when they refused reward money from a grateful Captain de Stackpole.[8]

“We are acting on behalf of the Irish Government and are Volunteers,” Boylan told Stackpole, according to the former’s recollections. “You ought to join us.”

Captain de Stackpole

When Stackpole expressed reservations, particularly about the use of political violence, Boylan pressed on: “You lost two brothers in the [First World] War; what benefit has it brought to Ireland?”

“My brothers fought for Ireland,” Stackpole replied.

“They fought for England.”

“I won’t discuss it further with you.”[9]

Clearly, then, there was still some way to go in fully winning hearts and minds. But progress had been made and not just with Stackpole, for word was rapidly getting around, according to the Meath Chronicle:

The successful tactics of the Volunteers in tracking down the burglaries is being widely spoken of throughout Meath and in Longwood district, where such robberies have become quite common of late, it is hoped that the moral victory of the Volunteers will obviate such occurrences in future.

While the culprit who confessed had been released, “the whereabouts of the other prisoners still remains a mystery.”[10]

In this, the Meath IRA had enlisted the services of Joe Lawless, an officer in the neighbouring Fingal Brigade and the owner of a garage off Lower Dorset Street, Dublin. Boylan first called in at the garage in November 1919 to ask for the use of the motorcars in the attack on Ballivor RIC Barracks; a request Lawless was happy to fulfil with the loan of two vehicles as well as his driving skills. He chauffeured the Meath Volunteers in one of the cars to Ballivor, where the police garrison was surprised and its arsenal ransacked. The captured guns and ammunition were loaded into the car and taken to Trim, where they were deposited, allowing Lawless to make his way back to Dublin.[11]

Ballivor RIC Barracks, Co. Meath (Freeman’s Journal, 4th November 1919)

Lawless was again happy to help when Boylan needed his aid in rounding up the criminal gang behind the Fobertyn robbery. For this second mission to Meath, Lawless chose the Reo truck he had recently purchased at Portobello Barracks. Designed for haulage work, the Reo could pass for an army lorry, Lawless thought, a useful guise in a country increasingly under military occupation.

Making Arrests

It was a fact evident even in quiet Longwood, as Lawless drove in with Boylan and the rest of the Volunteers assigned to the task:

I remember that the first thing that registered itself in my mind as I entered the town was the fact that there were two RIC men armed with revolvers in their belts walking towards us down the street with all the assurance of possession in their gait.  A hurried comment on this brought the further enlightenment from Boylan that the building which faced us at the far end of the street was the RIC barracks.

Despite these displays of dominance, the two policemen hurriedly retreated to their barracks – much to Lawless’ amusement – as the Reo stopped just off the main street, allowing its passengers to dash out, towards the pub where local Volunteers were waiting to identify the robbery perpetrators inside. The guilty men were thrown in the back of the truck, which Lawless then drove through the main street. This took them past the barracks, where the door and steel window-shutters were already closing, its occupants obviously fearing that their stronghold was the next to be attacked.

Longwood, Co. Meath

Lawless braced himself for a bullet to come through his windshield, but nothing did and then the Roe turned the corner, out of sight and range of the barracks. The Volunteers took the time to stop at the houses of the remaining suspects, who were likewise bundled on board. Lawless drove out of Longwood to Trim, dropping off Boylan and some of the Meath men, and continued on to Balheary, Fingal, as per Boylan’s instructions, where the prisoners would be held in an abandoned farmhouse by the Fingal IRA.[12]

Joe Lawless (from National Museum of Ireland)

Lawless did not linger in the area after depositing the miscreants, apparently never troubling himself to learn of their fates. According to Boylan, upon confessing their guilt, they “were stripped and flogged, receiving two cuts of a horse whip each, and compelled to work on a farm for three weeks, after which they were allowed to return home.”[13]

Which was a far brisker, rougher sort of justice than the Crown courts would have offered. But then, justice other than what the IRA provided was in short supply. Indeed, Boylan believed the RIC were in on the crime, or at least willing to leave it unsolved in the hope of the blame falling on the IRA. One of the thieves, by the name of Malone, admitted to Boylan that an RIC sergeant in Longwood had even advised him on the best way of disposing the stolen goods from Fobertyn House. Boylan had this confession written up and signed by Malone, with a copy sent to Collins and another for Captain de Stackpole, much to the latter’s amazement.[14]

Constables of the RIC

Of course, Malone may simply have been telling his interrogator what he wanted to hear. But it is certainly true that, save for some ineffectual searches, the RIC had been an irrelevance throughout this whole episode.

Murder Most Foul

The case of Fobertyn House had been a relatively simple, or at least bloodless, affair. Not so much was another, which began on the 10^th May 1920, when a 24-year-old Mark Clinton was shot at Rosemount while on the road with two horses. Coming upon the scene, his father took the wounded Mark to a nearby cottage where he died a few hours later, having bled out from two bullet-wounds: one on the right side of his chest and the other to the left of his back, the result of a single bullet tearing through the body, so ruled the coroner at the inquiry.

In his last, lingering moments, Mark had divulged to his father at his bedside that the assailants had numbered five; beyond that, he refused to give more, including their names, saying he forgave them. The only clue he offered was when asked if it had been British soldiers who were responsible: “No, I wish it was. It was our own neighbours.”[15]

Despite this vague response, it was not long before a guilty name was circulated – and a response made:

The arrest of Gordon was quietly and expeditiously carried out. He was tapped on the shoulder, and told he was wanted, and then taken out to a motor car in which his captors had arrived, and, bound and blindfolded, he was taken away to an unknown destination, likely to be “somewhere in Ireland.”

So reported the Meath Chronicle on the 26^th July, two months after Clinton’s death. Although nothing had been stated publicly, “the charge is assumed to be in connection with the murder of Mark Clinton… the facts of which are well within the public memory.” Gordon – no surname provided – had been in a pub in Navan when “some men, presumably Republican police” – as in, Volunteers – confronted him; the lack of resistance offered might have been born of confidence from his last brush with the law: he had just been acquitted in the Navan Crimes Court of illegal possession of a revolver found under the thatch of an outhouse adjacent to his residence.

Old Navan Courthouse

But that had been by the British system. As Gordon had just found out, there was a new sheriff in town. ACQUITED BY THE MAGISTRATES – APPREHENDED BY VOLUNTEERS as the Meath Chronicle put it succinctly.[16]

Boylan had that newspaper to thank, specifically Seán Hayes, one of its reporting staff, who told him of Gordon’s acquittal while the Meath O/C was in Navan, waiting for confirmation of the accused’s identity. A number of other suspects in Clinton’s death had already been rounded up and detained, first in a house near Kells and then in the basement of an old rectory at Salestown, Dunboyne, where the barred windows made it ideal as an improvised prison.

Let Justice Be Done

The reasons behind the murder were, according to Boylan, money and land:

Gordon received the sum of £2 for the shooting from a William Rogers, an ex-South African policeman, who had organised a band of terrorists to seize the land. The objective of the gang was to seize this land and divide it among their adherents.[17]

Boylan had called on Joe Lawless again for use of one of his garage vehicles – a truck or lorry, this time – and motoring skills in the transferal of the prisoners and their guards. Although not involved in the case otherwise, Lawless was able to provide a little more information on the motives at play:

The daily newspapers at the time characterized the murder of Clinton as a purely agrarian crime and it had, in fact, some significance, because Clinton, who farmed in the district, had taken over a farm from the Irish Land Commission which had claimed for division amongst certain local British ex-servicemen…the newspaper report of the crime shocked a public that had begun to get accustomed to daily reports of violent death in one form or another.[18]

As soon as Boylan heard that the man currently in court on the weapons charges was indeed Gordon, the last member of the gang sought after, he issued orders for the local Volunteers to patrol the roads leading in and out of town and to search the pubs until they found their man. The only gun available was a rusty .32 revolver but that was enough to secure Gordon’s cooperation, and he was driven – the ability to procure cars being a major element of the Meath Brigade’s insurgency – to join the rest of the prisoners in Salestown.

Unlike some other IRA O/Cs, Boylan enjoyed a good working relationship with the GHQ in Dublin. After journeying to the capital to consult with Michael Collins, he was able to secure the services of three officers in the Dublin Brigade – Dr Ted Kelly, John Joyce and Seán Dowling – to act as judges in the trial of the accused. The rest of the court was done mostly by Meath IRA officers: Seamus O’Higgins, Captain of the Trim Company, as Prosecution Counsel; Seamus Cogan, O/C of the 5^th Battalion in Meath, for the Defending Counsel; and the Clerk of Court being Peadar O’Brien, Vice O/C of the 4^th Battalion, Dublin.

Irish Volunteers/IRA members

Boylan stressed in his later account, written in 1957, that the Dubliners were brought in to provide impartiality, given the strong feelings Clinton’s murder had aroused in Meath. How fair the trial really was is, of course, impossible to determine; besides, no member of the impromptu court had legal training and so could only do their best to play the roles assigned to them. Conveniently, the prisoners made the job easier by spilling the beans; according to Boylan, Gordon “confessed to the crime and admitted attempted murder in two other cases and the burning of two homes.”[19]

Seamus Finn, who had helped transport the prisoners, was to tell a similar version:

All the evidence was heard and they were given every facility to prove their innocence but all of them, with one exception, a man who was the real ringleader, admitted their guilt and implicated the killer as the one who fired the shot. The leader eventually admitted his part in the affair too and the court passed sentence on them.[20]

Countess Markievicz

The penalty passed on Gordon was the capital one. Given the gravity of the situation, the matter was forwarded to Dublin for final approval. The underground Cabinet seemed to find the responsibility of life and death slightly daunting – Countess Markievicz, for one, argued for clemency – but since guilt had already been determined, and by the same type of courts the revolution was trying to promote, the conclusion was that the fledgling Irish state should live up to the authority it claimed and let justice be done.

“It was duly carried out, I understand,” Ernest Blythe later wrote.[21]

Carrying It Out

Boylan supervised Gordon’s execution. When the clergyman brought in for the condemned’s final moments made a plea for the sentence being commuted to exile from Ireland, Boylan retorted that Gordon would simply be back on the next ship home and with the names of his captors to give to the British authorities. Deportation was good enough for the rest of the gang, for periods varying from three to fifteen years, to be carried out at once by the Volunteers who escorted the miscreants in batches of three or four to Dublin before placing them on the next boat for Liverpool.[22]

Irish Volunteers/IRA members

Case closed. Once again, the contrast could not be clearer between the inertia of the Crown courts and the speed of the Republican system, especially considering how it entailed the mobilisation of a large number of men in the arrest, transportation and holding of another sizeable body. What is also extraordinary was, if not quite public, then how open the shadow justice system had been, enough for the Meath Chronicle to inform its readers how:

A courtmartial, constituted by six or seven officers, was held on Saturday [11^th June 1920], and the prisoners were examined. Certain statements were made by some of the prisoners. The court having concluded, the prisoners were again conducted to their place of detention.[23]

Nowhere was there any suggestion of the British authorities doing anything to stop or deter this. They were, for many intents and purposes, irrelevant.

Not that the insurgency had everything its own way, as the death of Seamus Cogan showed – the old order still had teeth with which to bite. “Cogan was a great loss to the brigade,” wrote Boylan. “He was one of our best officers and I felt his loss keenly.”[24]

Memorial to IRA dead, Oldcastle, Co. Meath

Nonetheless, Cogan was but one man, and a war remained to be fought. The RIC barracks at Crossakiel, that he and the rest of the 5^th Battalion had been planning to attack, fell less than a month after his death, in August 1920, albeit less dramatically than Cogan and his officers had envisioned. The garrison pulled out, and the Volunteers wasted no time: a mere few hours after the last of the policemen departed, about fifteen and twenty men appeared and burnt the deserted building to the ground.

The courthouse at the end of the barracks was also razed; the post office at the other end was not, however, in a sign that this was not wanton destruction but a calculated move. The raiders had carried revolvers during the process, with sentries posted on the roads leading into the village – precautions which, as it turned out, were unnecessary. British troops did not arrive on the scene until two days later, far, far too late.[25]

See also:

Capture the Castle: The War Against the Royal Irish Constabulary in Co. Meath, 1919-20

The Enemy/Friend of my Friend/Enemy is my ????: The Intelligence War in Co. Meath, 1920-1

References

[1] Meath Chronicle, 31/07/1920

[2] Finn, Seamus (BMH / WS 1060, Part III), pp. 2-5

[3] Meath Chronicle, 12/06/1920

[4] Ibid, 19/06/1920

[5] Ibid, 26/06/1920

[6] Military Archives – Cathal Brugha Barracks, Michael Collins Papers, ‘I.R.A. Meath Brigade, 1919. I.R.A. Typed and handwritten communications from Adjutant General [Michael Collins] to Seán Boylan, Commandant, Meath Brigade’, IE-MA-CP-02-13, p. 3

[7] Boylan, Seán (BMH / WS 1715), p. 37

[8] Meath Chronicle, 29/05/1920

[9] Boylan, p. 19

[10] Meath Chronicle, 29/05/1920

[11] Lawless, Joseph (BMH / WS 1043), pp. 314-6

[12] Ibid, pp. 320-4

[13] Boylan, p. 20

[14] Ibid, p. 18

[15] Meath Chronicle, 15/05/1920

[16] Ibid, 26/07/1920

[17] Boylan, pp. 20-1

[18] Lawless, pp. 324-5

[19] Boylan, pp. 22-3

[20] Finn, pp. 16-7

[21] Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), p. 123

[22] Boylan, pp. 24-5

[23] Meath Chronicle, 12/06/1920

[24] Boylan, p. 26

[25] Meath Chronicle, 14/08/1920

Bibliography

Newspaper

Meath Chronicle

Bureau of Military History Statements

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Boylan, Seán, WS 1715

Finn, Seamus, WS 1060

Lawless, Joseph, WS 1043

Military Archives – Cathal Brugha Barracks

Michael Collins Papers

Béal na Rashomon: Liam Deasy and His Multiple-Choice History of the Irish Revolution, 1920-74

“If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”

Moore, Alan and Bolland, Brian. The Killing Joke (1988)

‘For the Future of Ireland’

Liam Deasy

That a man was taken prisoner by Free State forces in Tincurry, Co. Tipperary, on the 18^th January 1923, was nothing remarkable in itself, what with the Civil War being on; what was noteworthy, however, was the POW’s identity and importance: Liam Deasy, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). As a parabellum revolver and twenty-one rounds of ammunition had been found on him, a court-martial was convened a week later, sentencing Deasy to death, as per Government law against possession of unauthorised firearms, a decree aimed specifically at anti-Treaty IRA combatants or ‘Irregulars’ like him.

And that would have been the end of him, another name on a growing list of Republican martyrs, except Deasy was not quite ready to join it. Upon his request for an interview with the enemy Commander-in-Chief, Richard Mulcahy – “for the future of Ireland,” Deasy was quoted as saying – the captive was transferred to Dublin, where, after further discussion, it was agreed for him to put his name to a communique announcing to the country:

I have undertaken, for the future of Ireland, to accept and aid in an immediate and unconditional surrender of all arms and men, and have signed the following statement: –

I accept, and I will aid in immediate and unconditional surrender of all arms and men, as required by General Mulcahy.

(Signed) LIAM DEASY[1]

Ernie O’Malley

This volte-face was met with shock and dismay from his colleagues. While sympathising with Deasy and his plight, Ernie O’Malley could not help but rail at the “rank indiscipline of it” in a letter to a friend, Sheila Humphreys, from Mountjoy Prison. It was not as if O’Malley could not relate, being a POW and under threat of execution himself, but he failed “to see what right prisoners have to attempt to force the hands of their comrades in the field; we are out of the fight and it does not matter what the enemy do to us.” Furthermore, there was the bigger picture to consider: what impact would news of Deasy’s submission have on the rest of the IRA?[2]

Almost a fortnight later, O’Malley would write again to Humphreys, announcing himself to be in a better mood, confident that the rank-and-file would remain true and stay the course. Nonetheless, the crack in the Republican lines made by Deasy was starting to widen: A signed statement from twelve POWs held in Limerick, claiming to represent six hundred others, asked for four of their number to be paroled in order to discuss with IRA senior officers still at large about a possible end to hostilities.[3]

Although no reference was made to Deasy, the timing seems too close to be entirely coincidental. Seventy detainees in Tralee, Co. Kerry, went even further in their own proclamation, not only citing Deasy by name but urging the remaining Anti-Treatyites to go beyond just considering peace:

We, the undersigned prisoners in Tralee Prison, approve of Liam Deasy’s actions in calling on his comrades for unconditional surrender, and we request a parole for delegates to interview our comrades in arms to advise them to surrender.

Some of these comrades-in-arms were no longer waiting to be advised. Eager to capitalise on its success in turning a high-ranking opponent into its mouthpiece, the Government had offered an olive-branch in the form of an amnesty to enemy combatants on condition that they surrender their weapons between the 8^th and 18^th February. Sixteen men were reported to have done so accordingly to Free State troops at Innistioge, Co. Kilkenny, with almost a dozen more in Limerick declaring by telegram their intention to hand in their arms. Slightly more complicated was the case of Michael Pierce, who stated his willingness to surrender the two flying columns he commanded in North Kerry, but also his uncertainty as to whether he could contact each of his subordinates in time. The amnesty deadline was extended by two days to accommodate him.[4]

IRA Flying Column

And then there were those prisoners, tried and convicted on a capital offence but willing, like Deasy, to sign declarations renouncing further hostilities on their part in return for a reprieve. By April, the number of these signatories was enough to sicken O’Malley, especially when he thought “of the gallant lads of 17 and 19 who faced death with such courage” in comparison. Adding further indignity, a visiting chaplain suggested that he follow Deasy’s example and publicly submit. O’Malley managed to keep himself composed until the padre had left and then vented his rage and frustration in the privacy of his cell.[5]

The Final Advance to Victory

And yet, as Deasy stressed in an accompanying letter, his call for surrender was not based on any change of heart, nor were his ideals as a Republican any different now than they had been at the start of the Civil War. Neither was it from a fear of defeat, since the Anti-Treatyites, in his opinion, could sustain their military campaign for years – and yet at what cost?

Our military position had not materially changed – if anything, it was stronger than at any time, sufficiently strong to prevent the Free State Government from functioning. Briefly both sides had ample strength to carry on for an indefinite period, the end of which would probably see no change on the respective position, but, undoubtedly would show a considerable weakening nationally.

With this unhappy situation before them, Republicans had to choose whether it would be better for their country and its freedom to:

1. Halt at this stage and prepare to fight the common foe again at the first opportunity.
2. To continue on as before, maybe for years, and leave only irreconcilable bitterness by the end.

Neither was ideal, Deasy admitted. The former option would “see the attempted reinforcing of Britain’s grip, not of course, as formerly; but even veiled, her influence in part will remain.” In the case of the latter, however, the aforementioned ‘common foe’ might not even bother with any veil if further hardship for Ireland led to “a cordial welcome by a section of our people to the return of England’s ‘protective forces’” and armed occupation all over again.

Anti-Treaty newsletter and cartoon

So Deasy was not quite appealing for peace as much as he was for breathing space before Round Two with Britain. Regardless of his current course of action, which he admitted “may appear inconsistent” to his stated views, he was at pains to present himself as a man, if not quite unembittered, then at least unbroken and most certainly unrepentant. The coarsening of the conflict, “retrograding from the path of warfare to that of a vendetta”, he blamed solely on the Free State in its execution of POWs; any harsh measures on the part of the IRA were purely a response to the enemy’s “policy of murder.”

Execution by firing-squad during the Civil War (presmably staged)

The times had been harsh, and they would grow harsher, but Deasy, concluding his letter on an incongruously triumphant note, was confident that:

To the Army of the Republic the ultimate aim will be a guide likewise to methods and the inspiration of those many brave comrades already fallen, and to whom we owe a duty, will strengthen our hand in the final advance to victory.[6]

Quite different, then, was the tone and text of the letter when printed in Deasy’s Civil War memoirs, Brother Against Brother, more than fifty years later:

My comrades when they view the whole outlook nationally, they will see the absolute urgency of bringing the present chapter to a close: if we conserve our forces the spirit of Ireland is saved. Our advance may be greatly impeded for a time but the freedom we desire will be achieved by, we hope, our united efforts again.[7]

Here, the letter is less defiant and more muted, even melancholic (the book’s title alone being indicative of its sadder-but-wiser author). No mention was made of wanting to wait for another war, only in ending the current one, which Deasy, unlike earlier, was willing to concede was being lost. That the IRA would last beyond the summer of 1923 was something he doubted, considering the setbacks the Republicans were already struggling with, as Deasy unflinchingly listed:

1. The increasing strength of the Free State army from recruitment.
2. The decrease in IRA strength due to constant arrests.
3. The defensive stance of IRA units in many areas and the decrease in fighting.
4. ‘War Weariness’ in general.
5. The failure to combat enemy propaganda leading to increased support for the Free State Government.
6. The overall situation created by executions, leading to a cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals.[8]

That his side might at least be partly responsible for the mess everyone was in had been more than Deasy was willing to openly discuss at the time.

A train derailed during the Irish Civil War

Intellectual Convictions?

Whether he was deliberately rewriting his words or honestly misremembering is another question and, while we can never know for sure, not everyone who knew him was always impressed at his truthfulness. As Tom Barry told historian Pádraig Ó Maidin in 1976, when  he last saw Deasy before his capture, a few days earlier in the Glen of Aherlow, the other had said not a word about ending the war, nor had he to any of the other IRA Executive members, as each confirmed when next they met as a body.[9]

Deasy himself had sounded almost chipper in a letter for O’Malley, as Deputy IRA Chief of Staff to the latter’s Acting Assistant Chief of Staff. “Generally, the position here is very satisfactory, particularly in the Cork and Kerry Brigades,” he wrote. “The people generally are becoming very favourable.” While Deasy did make mention of peace overtures, these were from the other side, by Free State officers such as Tom Ennis and Emmet Dalton. Deasy offered no comment, good or bad, on them, but his description of tactics being developed by the IRA against enemy-held towns and their satisfying results so far do not give the impression of a man yearning for peace, contrary to what he later claimed to have been.[10]

IRA members on Grafton Street, Dublin

In fairness, Deasy was writing in September 1922, before the situation turned truly dire for the Republicans, and Barry’s relationship with Deasy had plummeted by the time he talked to Ó Maidin (as we shall see). Others were more willing to see the best in Deasy, even if they had been on the opposing side.

“Deasy is the kind of person who wouldn’t be actuated by malice,” Lieutenant-General Costello told Richard Mulcahy as part of an interview the latter was conducting in May 1963. Such amiability only made the subject’s past behaviour all the more puzzling to Costello:

I can’t place Deasy’s opposition to the Treaty at all because he had no intellectual convictions against us; he certainly was not in favour of a civil war.

“I have never been able to understand what influenced him,” Costello concluded with a sigh.[11]

Liam Mellows

Deasy might not have disagreed on some of the above points. Back then, he had been among the cooler heads or ‘moderates’ on the IRA Executive, formed in the wake of the Treaty rift to take charge of the Republican forces. Perhaps he and his like-minded colleagues had been a little too reasonable for their own good; according to Deasy, a willingness to negotiate with their Free State counterparts, in the months leading up to the Civil War in 1922, had earned them the derision of hardliners like Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellows, who:

…could see no good in Michael Collins, Dick Mulcahy and Eoin O’Duffy. This distrust extended to Liam Lynch, Florence O’Donoghue, Frank Barrett and myself. We were regarded as being well intended but failing in our stand to maintain the Republic.

To Deasy, this was deeply unfair: “Although we were regarded as moderate, we felt that our policy was considered and meaningful.”[12]

A Well-Informed Man

At least some thought Deasy worth listening to. Todd Andrews had talked with him and a number of other West Cork IRA bigwigs, finding them to be:

…particularly well informed men with a deep knowledge of Irish history. Physically they were distinguished looking men…They had the quality of leadership. They were the kind of men I wished to see at the head of affairs in Ireland.[13]

Seán MacBride

Which came closer than Andrews knew of happening…until divisions within the IRA Executive proved as irreconcilable as the schism between the pro and anti-Treaty camps. At the disastrous IRA Convention of June 1922, the ‘hardliners’ stormed out of the gathering in protest at the proposal to heal the IRA breach with a reunited army. Seán MacBride, as a witness, identified Deasy, along with Liam Lynch, as among the movers behind this olive-branch.

Not that Deasy did not have a vested interest. Had a reformed Army come to pass, Deasy would have been poised to help shape future developments as joint Deputy Chief of Staff, with responsibility for General Training. But, since unity also meant “that the Republican Army be united and controlled by the Free State Army” – as MacBride put it – “in other words this meant they were ready to work the Treaty and thereby signify their acceptance of it,” it was little short of abject surrender in the eyes of Mellows and O’Connor. They much preferred the counter-suggestion by Tom Barry: that the Anti-Treatyites just restart the war with Britain then and there.[14]

Liam Lynch

Neither the hardliners nor moderates had their way, and the result was Deasy and Lynch waking up together in the Clarence Hotel, Dublin, on the 28^th June 1922, to the sound of Free State artillery pounding away at Republican positions. Both were too shocked to react or speak at first, sitting dumbfounded in their room before finally making their way outside to where civil war awaited. If Costello would struggle to understand what influenced Deasy, then perhaps the answer was nothing did, and that he was as swept up in events beyond his control as anyone.[15]

Whether this makes him sympathetic or contemptible is another matter. “It is my personal [emphasis in text] opinion that Liam Lynch and Liam Deasy were simply not up it,” Tom Kelleher later said about their performance. But neither, he conceded, was anyone else who was in charge.[16]

Gunmen taking aim during the Civil War

Béal na Bláth – Take 1

All of which still leaves the discrepancy between the letter Deasy wrote in 1923 and what he presented in Brother Against Brother. To put things in context, however, the book was published posthumously, after his death in August 1974, while still in its first draft stage and it is possible his revisions would have been closer to the original had he the chance.[17]

Florence O’Donoghue

Less easily explained are the differences between his depiction in Brother Against Brother of the ambush at Béal na Bláth in August 1922 that resulted in the slaying of Michael Collins – and that of another version, composed a decade before Deasy’s. What makes the latter particularly noteworthy is that Deasy had a hand in its making as well, being one of the seven men who met at the Metropole Hotel in Cork in February 1964. All were former officers in the Cork IRA and each had participated at Béal na Bláth on that fateful day, save Florence O’Donoghue, whose role in the group was as its secretary.

The reason for their reunion, as explained by O’Donoghue at the start of the resultant piece:

I was asked to be present to record what could be established as the truth and because I had been given an undertaking by Capt. Sean Feehan of the Mercier press that he would not publish Eoin Neeson’s book on the Civil War until we were satisfied that the part of it dealing with the death of Collins was in accordance with the facts.[18]

Few deaths have merited as much introspection as Collins’: the war hero cut down by a bullet after falling into a trap laid by his compatriots and leaving behind the eternal question of what he would or could have done further for Ireland had he lived. That he was a fellow Corkonian only rubbed further salt into the wounded pride of his ambushers, in “a sense of collective guilt from the death of Collins” as observed by Todd Andrews of his Cork colleagues in the IRA, and perhaps demonstrable in Tom Barry’s indignation at “the canard that the IRA plotted and planned Collins’ death in 1922 and in fact assassinated him.” The IRA party responsible did not even know Collins – “a great son of West Cork” – was in the convoy at the time, Barry insisted.[19]

Michael Collins

O’Donoghue did not attempt that particular argument but the same touchiness that Barry showed and Andrews observed can be detected in the work the seven men produced in the Metropole, even with the passing of forty-two years:

Statements which have been made to the effect that the Division and Cork No. 1 Brigade were aware of Collins’ intention to visit posts in Cork and that a general order was issued to kill him are without foundation and completely untrue. His presence in the South was known to the officers in the Division and of the 1^st and 3^rd Brigades only on the morning of 22^nd and no order had been issued by either of the commands. The ambush was decided on as part of the general policy of attacking Free State convoys.

In short: nothing personal. It was presumably to pre-empt any further statements ‘without foundation’ that might be found in historian Eoin Neeson’s book that the seven men had had their reunion. The Metropole Hotel document, the fruit of their collective recollections, is relatively short, focusing on the bare facts, at least as presented: the four officers in the Third Cork IRA Brigade who gathered at Béal na Bláth on the forenoon of the 22^nd August did so for the purpose of a routine brigade meeting. Although a Free State convoy had been spotted passing through the area on the previous night, that was not the intended subject of discussion, nor did it become so until late in the meeting, by which point the ambush party was already in place at Béal na Bláth in anticipation of the convoy returning by the same route. No instructions had given for them to do so, it seems, beyond the aforementioned policy of attacking the enemy whenever opportunity presented itself.

Last known photograph of Collins, about to leave Bandon for Cork, through Béal na Bláth, on the 22nd August 1922

The four officers – unspecified in the account – only came later on the scene to take command. The group, numbering between twenty and twenty-five, waited until deciding that the target was probably not going to appear. As the main section withdrew on foot, a rear-guard of ten lingered to clear the road, and while doing so they heard the sound of imminent vehicles: the convoy was coming after all:

They realised that the main party moving back towards [Béal na Bláth] cross-roads were in a ravine and in a very dangerous position. They could not have reached the cross-roads before the convoy overtook them.

To prevent this calamity, the rear-guard hurriedly took up position on the roadside and opened fire with rifles and revolvers on the incoming Free Staters. The two sides exchanged shots for twenty or thirty minutes before nightfall made further exertions impractical and the convoy broke away. The IRA suffered no losses and it was only later that they learnt the enemy had had one: Collins.

Should any doubt be left in the readers’ minds as to intent: “Conditions were such that it was not possible to get off an aimed shot.”

Portrait of Collins’ death, by W.S. Rogers

It should be noted that while the story of Béal na Bláth has been told by other sources, only in this one is the depiction of the ambush as self-defence to be found. Leadership on the scene seems to have been collective, with no one officer having the final say (and thus bearing the most responsibility). Although not the focus of the text, Deasy did merit a couple of mentions: that the decision to evacuate the ambush site had probably been his, and that when he had arrived at Béal na Bláth on the morning of the 22^nd, it had been in the company of Éamon de Valera.[20]

Béal na Bláth – Take 2

Éamon de Valera

On that last point, Deasy’s memoir was in accordance. The two leaders, the soldier and the politician, had met before in Garranereagh, Co. Kerry, where they talked about peace and its desirability, a subject close to de Valera’s heart, as it would be for Deasy’s as well. The latter was to claim that, even then, he agreed with de Valera’s assertion that, with the war dragging on, it was time to gracefully withdraw, except Deasy knew the IRA was still too confident to countenance anything short of victory.

The pair left the next morning, the 22^nd August, for Béal na Bláth, arriving in time to learn of that Collins had been sighted in his convoy. To de Valera’s question as to what would happen next, Deasy shared his guess that:

The men billed in this area…would consider this incursion into the area which was so predominantly Republican…as a challenge which they could not refuse to meet. I felt that an ambush would be prepared in case the convoy returned. De Valera then remarked that it would be a great pity if Collins were killed because he might be succeeded by a weaker man.

This is certainly more intimate information than offered in the 1964 Metropole document, though the two match in depicting the IRA unit responsible as fully capable of acting on their own initiative. Deasy’s book gives no clue as to his opinion at the time, nor of any effort on his part in encouraging or discouraging an attack on a high-ranking enemy general. The assumption that events were already in motion was apparently sufficient for him to return to Garranereagh, where he “attended to many urgent matters and weighed up the new situation in which we found ourselves” for the better part of the day.

We can assume from this that Deasy was not one of the four officers who met at Béal na Bláth while the ambush was being laid; indeed, he was at pains to distance himself from any such quartet, even complaining at how:

One writer states the four anti-Treaty officers, including Seán Lehane and myself, stayed at Joe Sullivan’s the night before the ambush…That is simply not true.

Tom Hales

Deasy is unclear as to whether such a meeting did not happen at all or just that he was not present. Only after his business in Garranereagh was done did Deasy travel again to Béal na Bláth. He arrived in time to find the would-be-ambushers in the process of withdrawing due to the likelihood of Collins taking a different route – much as in the 1964 account. Except that, in the earlier version, the decision to withdraw was probably made by Deasy (though it is not definite); furthermore, Deasy is listed as one of the ambush party. In Brother Against Brother, the withdrawal order was Tom Hales’, before Deasy had even arrived, with Deasy no more than a latecomer.

The point is explicitly made in the 1964 account that the ambush was triggered by the need of the rear-guard party to cover the rest from being overtaken by the sudden arrival of the convoy. However, according to Deasy, most of the team were already in a pub for ten minutes when they heard the first shots from the skirmish and dashed back in time to let off a few shots of their own before the convoy retreated. While the Metropole Hotel document seeks to distance the ambushers from their own ambush by means of self-defence, Deasy goes one further and places himself as barely on the scene at all. Deasy also contradicts the 1964 account’s insistence that the main party were exposed in a ravine and in danger of being cornered; according to him, they had already spent some minutes inside before the firing began.

Site of the ambush at Béal na Bláth

As the 1964 report was written by a committee of seven, it is impossible to know how much input Deasy had. Another question is whether he was purposely going against the earlier source for his own evasive benefit, was honestly remembering events differently than he had a decade earlier or had wanted to include his two cents from the start but been overruled by the six others in the Metropole. There are many overlaps in narrative between the two statements but also are significant differences in Deasy’s sole version and these were seemingly part of a similar desire to distance the subject from the same embarrassing event that had motivated the earlier account.

Michael Collins Monument at Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork

Deasy himself acknowledged the awkwardness of association with Ireland’s most infamous assassination (or war casualty if one prefers) when he spoke of how “a lot has been written about this ambush at Béal na Bláth by Irishmen who dramatised the action out of all proportion. Strangers also did not help in what they wrote, many of whom caused much pain.”[21]

Old Friends

Another ambush that stirred post hoc controversy was Kilmichael on the 28^th November 1920, when a force of eighteen Auxiliaries was nearly annihilated by the flying column of the West Cork IRA Brigade. Deasy was on familiar terms with the column and its commander, Tom Barry, accompanying it when not called away on staff work as Brigade Adjutant. It was while performing such duties in Crossbarry that Deasy missed the ambush, though he was able to use the testimony of one participant, Paddy O’Brien, in his narrative of the War of Independence, Towards Ireland Free.[22]

Published in mid-1973, the autobiography was considered provocative enough by Barry to write to the national newspapers about how:

Frankly, when I first glanced through the book I was puzzled at some of Deasy’s statements, but later I was angered at his presentation of events and his alleged informants. The omissions, of great importance were so vital to a true picture of what occurred that it was hard to understand.

While “individuals are all praised fulsomely and excessively,” Barry nonetheless saw cause to take the depiction of himself very personally:

A picture is given which denigrates the Flying Column, and if true, must show the Column Commander as a moron, incapable of commanding a single sniper, not to mention a flying column.[23]

It would appear, as one historian puts it, that “many of the tensions that had existed between the Brigade leadership since the War of Independence” had been brought to the surface.[24]

That assumes, of course, that these feelings had been bubbling away all this time. Yet the evidence otherwise suggests that, until Towards Ireland Free, the two men had been on good terms. After all, Deasy praised Barry lavishly in his memoir, as had Barry with Deasy in his own, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, printed twenty-four years earlier in 1949. Which was hardly surprising, given how extensively the pair worked together in the West Cork Brigade. Barry had found Deasy to be “a tower of strength” and not only “the best Brigade Adjutant in Ireland” but “one of the best Brigade O/Cs” when promoted to that position. For Deasy’s part, he extolled Barry’s “enthusiasm and dynamism that were astonishing”, combined with “a remarkable grasp of military psychology” and culminating in “something greater still: he was a leader of unsurpassed bravery.”[25]

All this was not just nostalgia on either man’s part. When Deasy, shortly after his release from prison in 1924, found himself accused of cowardice and treason by his IRA peers – who had not forgotten or forgiven his call for them to surrender – he chose Barry to defend him. It was a bold move, considering Barry had been only too eager the year before to let his own disgust be known. “We got a letter from Barry repudiating Deasy,” according to one contemporary, Charlie Browne, while another, Ted Sullivan, remembered Barry calling “2 or 3 meetings of the [1^st Southern] divisional Council to condemn Deasy for he hated Deasy like hell.”[26]

Tom Barry

‘Hated’ might be too strong a word, for at the court-martial in Dublin, January 1925, with Deasy’s life on the line, Barry argued for clemency, saying that enough blood had been spilled already. The appeal was not enough to stop Deasy being sentenced to death but Barry’s warning that anyone touching as much as a hair on the condemned man’s head would answer to him was enough for the verdict to be commuted to dismissal with ignominy from the IRA. Regardless of the disgrace, Deasy’s life had been saved, and the two comrades would keep in touch throughout the years, often meeting at funerals, commemorations and other social occurrences.[27]

Barry’s public vitriol at Deasy’s perceived slight was thus very personal, the anger of a betrayed friendship, and that feeling spilled out into the booklet he published as a sequel to his letter to the media. Titled The Reality of the Anglo-Irish War 1920-1921 in West Cork, with the pointed subtitle Refutations, Corrections and Comments on Liam Deasy’s Towards Ireland Free, the work went beyond the professional – one historical record set against another – to the personal with such spitefully worded phrases as ‘This disposes of one part of Deasy’s fairy tale’, ‘Deasy’s other hysterical statements’, ‘Deasy had the impertinence’ and ‘Deasy’s final chapter is equally incorrect’.[28]

‘Refutations, Corrections and Comments’

Given the mutual appreciation previously demonstrated by the two men, the reason for such a strong reaction on Barry’s part might not have been immediately obvious to readers. But, for Barry, it was the principle of the thing:

Deasy’s presentation of the engagement at Kilmichael and the training camp immediately prior to it, is another extraordinary portrayal of history. The training camp would appear to be like a scene from ‘Dad’s Army’ whilst the fight could be summed up as a galaxy of names and “we waited, Auxies came, we shooted and all dead.”

Barry knew O’Brien well enough to consider him a life-long friend. He never got the chance to ask O’Brien about what he told Deasy, for the other man had by then passed away. And so Barry could only:

…hope that Paddy and his family will understand. I have no alternative but to tear asunder Deasy’s published account of the fight itself, where the camp appears to be a joke and the fight one where no false surrender by the Auxiliaries occurred.

Michael McCarthy

There were various points addressed by Barry: O’Brien claimed to have taken over training while Barry was absent, a responsibility Barry said would have fallen instead to Michael McCarthy as Vice-Commandant; to O’Brien’s description of the column being divided into two for the ambush, Barry maintained that the unit marched to the site in three sections, one of which was halved in turn; O’Brien has Barry stepping onto the road after the driver of the first enemy lorry was killed in order to throw a Mills bomb into the back of the vehicle, an action which would have got the man in question shot by the other passengers, Barry retorted.

Much of these two differences can be attributed to the usual flaws and bedevilments in human memory. But, on the matter of the ‘false surrender’ that Barry referred to at the start, reconciliation is a lot harder. After the initial outburst of rifle-fire and explosives had wiped out the Auxiliaries on the first lorry, those on the second called out to surrender, causing – or luring – some of the column members to break cover and be shot down, including McCarthy. From then, the surviving IRA men were ordered to keep on firing until the rest of their enemies were safely dead.

Unfortunate, perhaps, but, in light of Irish clemency being so sorely abused, understandable – at least, that is how Barry told it.

Wreckage after the Kilmichael Ambush

O’Brien’s – and, by extension, Deasy’s – dog is one that did not bark in the night. Nowhere is any surrender, false or otherwise, mentioned, not even in passing, with the slaughter of the Auxiliaries presented as an act that was both remorseless and inevitable: “We then opened fire from their rear [of the second lorry] and they knew they were doomed.” This, Barry protested, presented him “as a blood-thirsty commander – who exterminated the Auxiliaries without reason” – which, hurtful enough as it was, slandered not only him but also “all the men who fought under my command in the Kilmichael victory.”[29]

Neither O’Brien nor Deasy had the chance to respond, for O’Brien was dead by the time of Barry’s booklet, as was – though Barry did not then know it – Deasy, who died on the 20^th August 1974. Anvil Books Ltd, as publisher, felt obliged to point out in its preface that it was not aware of Deasy’s waning health until after receiving Barry’s manuscript and had only been given the final page-proofs the day before Deasy expired.[30]

Nonetheless, the idea that a man was being kicked on his deathbed left a sour taste in the mouths of some, enough for Barry to publicly lament such a “despicable suggestion by one signatory.” For Barry’s was not the final word on the whole cause célébre. With Deasy not present to defend himself, fourteen other survivors of the West Cork IRA Brigade put their names to “a statement dissociating themselves from the contents of a booklet published recently by General Tom Barry” and describing Towards Ireland Free as “a very fair and complete account.”

Reunion of the surviving members of the West Cork Flying Column at the Kilmichael Ambush site, 1966, with Tom Barry (front centre)

Showing that you can take the man out of the army but not the army out of Tom Barry, his response was to pull out his war service and offer (threaten) to compare it with others’:

I am well aware that a number of [the signatories] are bedridden and even more aged and handicapped than I am myself, and it is far from my wish to name them and question their records and knowledge of the real history of the West Cork Brigade of the IRA.

With this display of faux sympathy done, Barry bared his teeth:

But, of course, I will do so if necessary…I am not in any way disparaging the records of some (and some only) of the signatories who gave splendid military service, but I am questioning their competence to agree or disagree with the over-all history of the events related in my booklet.

Tom Barry in later years

After all, “none of the signatories ever attended a GHQ or Divisional meeting, and, as far as I can recollect, only a couple ever even attended a Brigade Council meeting” – no small matter for a man who was still referred to in Ireland, even by critics, as ‘General.’ But even deference is no guarantee against disagreement, and Barry was reduced to telling people that while “I don’t think we should forget about” the past, “we should shut up about it” – the historian’s equivalent of taking one’s ball and going home.[31]

It was all rather undignified. At least one of the signatories, Dr Nudge Callanan, came to regret lending his name; after all, a photograph of Barry adorned the wall of his study. Adding to the confusion, it seems Callanan had not actually read Towards Ireland Free at the time, nor had at least two of the others. Perhaps they had just felt sorry for Deasy.[32]

It would not have been the first time.

Richard Mulcahy

Given the difficulties in remembering history and the trouble trying to do so could bring, it is fitting to end with what Deasy told Richard Mulcahy. The funeral of a mutual acquaintance in 1961 brought them together for the first time since a captive Deasy signed his way out of execution in 1923, almost four decades ago. Both were following the coffin when a third man casually introduced them, the reunion eliciting little more than nods of recognition. It took a second funeral for the two former foes to begin chatting. In the subsequent dialogues, the topic turned, inevitably, to past conflicts.

What should be done, Deasy said, was not for people on one side to point out the mistakes done by the other; instead, everyone should list the mistakes their own had made and then proceed from there.[33]

References

[1] Irish Times, 17/02/1923

[2] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), p. 359

[3] Ibid, p. 362 ; Irish Times, 17/02/1923

[4] Ibid, 24/02/1923

[5] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, pp. 360, 369

[6] Irish Times, 17/02/1923

[7] Deasy, Liam. Brother Against Brother (Cork: Mercier Press, 1998), p. 121

[8] Ibid, pp. 119-20

[9] Ryan, Meda. Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter (Douglas Village, Co. Cork: Mercier Press, 2005), p. 255

[10] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, p. 159

[11] University College Dublin Archives, Richard Mulcahy Papers, P7/b/181, p. 78

[12] Deasy, Brother Against Brother, p. 40

[13] Andrews, C.S. Dublin Made Me (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2001), p. 227

[14] O’Malley, ‘No Surrender Here!’, pp. 26, 491

[15] Deasy, Brother Against Brother, pp. 46-7

[16] MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), p. 230

[17] Ibid, p. 9

[18] Michael Collins: His Life and Times – Index: Appendix 1, Collins 22 Society (Accessed on 11/02/2022)

[19] Andrews, p. 313 ; Barry, Tom. Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press), 2010), pp. 182, 184

[20] Collins 22 Society

[21] Deasy, Brother Against Brother, pp. 76-80

[22] Deasy, Liam (edited by Chisholm, John E.) Towards Ireland Free: The West Cork Brigade in the War of Independence 1917-21 (Cork: Royal Carbery Books, 1973), pp. 168, 170

[23] Irish Times, 04/10/1973

[24] O’Malley, Ernie (edited by Bielenberg, Andy; Borgonovo, John and Óg Ó Ruairc, Pádraig) The Men Will Talk to Me: West Cork Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2015), p. 22

[25] Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, p. 17 ; Deasy, Towards Ireland Free, pp. 160, 165, 249

[26] Ryan, p. 256 ; O’Malley, West Cork Interviews, p. 160

[27] Ryan, pp. 271-2, 376

[28] Ibid, p. 372

[29] Barry, Tom. The Reality of the Anglo-Irish War 1920-1921 in West Work: Refutations, Corrections and Comments on Liam Deasy’s Towards Ireland Free (Tralee and Dublin: Anvil Books Ltd, 1974), pp. 13-6

[30] Ibid, p. 4

[31] Irish Times, 12/12/1974, 13/12/1974, 21/12/1974

[32] Ryan, p. 375

[33] Mulcahy Papers, P7/D/45

Bibliography

Newspaper

Irish Times

Books

Andrews, C.S. Dublin Made Me (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2001)

Barry, Tom. Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 2010)

Barry, Tom. The Reality of the Anglo-Irish War 1920-1921 in West Cork: Refutations, Corrections and Comments on Liam Deasy’s Towards Ireland Free (Tralee and Dublin: Anvil Books Ltd, 1974)

Deasy, Liam, Brother Against Brother (Cork: Mercier Press, 1998)

Deasy, Liam (edited by Chisholm, John E.) Towards Ireland Free: The West Cork Brigade in the War of Independence 1917-21 (Cork: Royal Carbery Books, 1973)

MacEoin, Uinseann. Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by O’Malley, Cormac K.H. and Dolan, Anne, introduction by Lee, J.J.) ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 1922-1924 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007)

O’Malley, Ernie (edited by Bielenberg, Andy; Borgonovo, John and Óg Ó Ruairc, Pádraig) The Men Will Talk to Me: West Cork Interviews by Ernie O’Malley (Cork: Mercier Press, 2015)

Ryan, Meda. Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter (Douglas Village, Co. Cork: Mercier Press, 2005)

University College Dublin Archives

Richard Mulcahy Papers

Online Source

Michael Collins: His Life and Times – Index: Appendix 1, Collins 22 Society (Accessed on 11/02/2022)

Stepping Forth into the Breach: The Irish Labour Party and its Decision to Contest the 1922 General Election

Up to the Neck in Politics

Principle or power? Righteousness or responsibility? These were the choices facing the two hundred and forty-five delegates at the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC), held inside the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on the 21^st February 1922. Either way, it was time to decide, Cathal O’Shannon, as acting Chairman, told the room, for they were looking at the likelihood of a general election within the next five to eight weeks, the third in four years. Labour had stayed out of the first in 1918, “in order that there might not be the least suspicion of a split in the ranks of those who were fighting on one field or another against the British Empire.”

But that had been then, and this was now, and the sundering they hoped to avoid had come after all. Which should not be Labour’s concern, said O’Shannon, as he urged his audience:

Not to think of the contending parties outside, Free Staters or Republicans, but to give their vote in their own interests, and to sacrifice even their personal opinions in order to reach a decision that, in the judgement of the Congress, would be best for the Labour Party and the Labour movement.

Easier said than done, of course, as O’Shannon acknowledged, for he knew he was talking to people “steeped up to the neck in politics” and with ideals they could not easily put to the side. Of course, the Labour Party had aspirations of its own, as made clear in a statement read out by Thomas Johnson, on behalf of its National Executive, that Labour should this time contest the election.[1]

After all:

Our ideal commonwealth – a Republic based upon co-operative labour and service – and not upon property and capital – is not to be attained through either party in the present Dáil. Neither the Republican Party nor the Free State Party stands for our conception of what Ireland’s future should be, nor our view of the place of Labour in the Commonwealth.[2]

The news was initially received well enough. George Nason, on behalf of the Cork Trade Council, seconded this decision in his belief that the time had come for the Labour Party to take its share of responsibility for the future of the country. Year after year, the Congress had met and passed resolution after resolution without a difference being made. Now it was time to make that difference.

Cissie Cahalan

Others thought it risked a difference of an unwanted nature. Immediately following Nason came the first objection, from Cissie Cahalan of the Irish Union of Distributive Workers and Clerks:

Cahalan: I move that the resolution is out of order because it definitely recognises the partition of the country.

O’Shannon: Your motion is not in order.

Cahalan: You passed a resolution at the last Congress that the Party was definitely opposed to Partition. Now you spring a resolution recognising Partition.

O’Shannon: The motion before Congress is perfectly in order.[3]

Abbey Theatre, interior

Sitting it Out?

As if it was as simple as that. In the years to come, others would look back at Labour’s participation in the Irish revolution and find it wanting, even those who otherwise shared its politics. “The Labour Party were a great disappointment,” said Nora Connolly, daughter of the 1916 signatory, with a sigh. “You could say that they just sat it out in their corner and did not take part.”

Nora Connolly

And this was from somebody who had joined Labour, shortly after the Civil War. Even if it was in part due to family heritage – “It had been founded by Daddy in 1912, so we thought that it was the proper place for us to go” – a certain sympathy or willingness to see the Labour Party’s point of view might have been expected. Instead, Connolly saw only selfishness in its self-regard: “All during the years of the struggle, they concentrated on building up the bureaucracy of the ITGWU [Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union]. That seemed to be all that mattered.” Worst of the offenders in Connolly’s eyes was William O’Brien, Secretary and powerhouse of the ITGWU, who, “took no part in the struggle worth speaking of. From now on, he applied himself to become solely a full-time trade union official.”[4]

Peadar O’Donnell was not quite so condemnatory, even if he too saw wasted potential in Labour and grave disappointment in its leaders: “I believed that Bill O’Brien and company would mobilise and move forward. I was horrified then, when I found out that they too supported the Treaty.”[5]

William O’Brien

All of which is something of a simplification on Connolly’s and O’Donnell’s parts. Life had not exactly been easy for O’Brien; he almost welcomed his arrest by the British authorities in March 1920 as the chance at a long-needed break from the all-demanding union commitments for which Connolly criticised him. Besides, Wormwood Scrubs looked benign enough compared to the conditions in which he had been imprisoned before: the first time in Bridewell Police Station, followed by Richmond Barracks, in mid-1913 for inflammatory speech, and later three months in Frongoch Camp due to his suspected role in Easter Week of 1916 Rising.[6]

In truth, O’Brien had not been actively involved in the Rising, though it was perhaps an easy mistake for the British authorities to make, given how he had had more than a passing knowledge of the event, having been at a certain meeting in 25 Parnell Square, Dublin, on the 9^th September 1914. Also present were Connolly, Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett and Arthur Griffith, among others, who agreed to start working towards an armed overthrow of British rule. Afterwards, O’Brien seems to have faded out of the picture as he only learnt of the upcoming putsch six days before Easter Sunday, and even then quite by chance, when Connolly told him to cancel a countryside trip O’Brien mentioned he was about to take.[7]

Joe McGrath

If O’Brien had done little more than dip his toe in the revolutionary water, then in Wormwood Scrubs he was determined not to sit back and put his feet up: news that a fellow Irish prisoner and union colleague, Joe McGrath, had been transferred to the less convenient accommodation of Brixton Prison prompted a hunger strike on the part of the politically-minded inmates, O’Brien included. Worsening health saw him moved under police guard to a nursing home, where he partook enough substance to keep himself going; any return to Wormwood Scrubs, however, and he would restart his self-starvation, O’Brien warned the prison governor.[8]

Upon his release two months later in May 1920, he returned to his duties at the ITGWU headquarters at Liberty Hall, where a member of the dockers’ section brought him a novel idea: the refusal of workers to handle British Army munitions due to be unloaded in Dublin. O’Brien took this to the rest of the Labour National Executive, who agreed: the subsequent strike lasted six months and disrupted British forces in Ireland enough to earn a mention in the memoirs of General Nevil Macready – a point of considerable pride for O’Brien.[9]

British soldiers guarding a train during the 1920 Munitions Strike

Little wonder, then, that O’Donnell, for all the subsequent let-downs, remembered how he and others had, at the time, considered O’Brien “as the Lenin of the Labour Movement.”[10]

Dan Breen

Labour had not participated in the strike alone, for Sinn Féin had contributed funds to help keep wages going. A Labour venture it remained, however, proof that it could retain its autonomy even as the country looked to Nationalism to deliver independence. O’Brien’s relations with individual Sinn Féin figures were a reflection of this: amiable but willing to say no, such as when Cathal Brugha proposed to him the mustering of the unemployed masses in Britain as allies should the ongoing Truce of late 1921 collapse. Highly implausible, O’Brien replied, to Brugha’s disappointment. Similarly, O’Brien resisted efforts by Dan Breen, also during the Truce, to fire a suspected British spy from his post as an ITGWU branch secretary in South Tipperary on the grounds that union regulations did not easily permit such a thing (Breen persisted, and the man was dropped, only to be reinstated when no one else proved capable of doing the job).[11]

Arthur Griffith

And, while O’Brien had known Arthur Griffith since 1899, that the trade unionist was then working for a newspaper, the Irish Peasant, in direct competition with the latter’s Sinn Féin was not an auspicious start. Nonetheless, the two future leaders were to stay cordial with each other as they moved, if not in the same circles, then at least in parallel lines as their respective brands of radicalism went from the national fringes into the political mainstream. Though the pair would never grow overly warm towards each other, at least O’Brien and Griffith avoided the sort of acrimony that so often split relationships in this period.[12]

Still, limits remained limits, as dryly noted by O’Brien in the February 1922 Congress, when a delegate asked if anyone on the National Executive had been offered a job in the new Irish government.

“We are all waiting for the offer,” replied William O’Brien, his wry response earning some laughter from the room and a pledge from O’Shannon:

O’Shannon: My personal opinion is that no member of the National Executive would accept a job under either the Provisional Government or the Dáil.

Delegate: Are you speaking for yourself or the whole Executive?

O’Shannon: The whole.[13]

In the Forefront, Behind the Scenes

Cathal O’Shannon

Much as she had done with O’Brien, Connolly dismissed O’Shannon as someone who “also took no part” in the revolution. Not so at the start, she conceded, as O’Shannon had been her father’s contact with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) when the Connolly family lived in Belfast. Amidst the confusion of Easter Week, he tried his best, first attempting to reach Belfast to rally rebellion and then arrested en route to Dublin.

“Having failed in that, he settled down as an editor of the Union Journal,” she concluded O’Shannon’s story dismissively.[14]

O’Donnell, again, was less stern in his judgement, praising O’Shannon as “a very good person, a brilliant person” who would have been ideal as James Connolly’s heir. The tragedy, in O’Donnell’s view, was that O’Shannon was too much under the sway of O’Brien to fulfil his potential.[15]

However, as O’Shannon told the Military Pensions Board, decades later in 1940, he had not only been his own man, but one very much to the forefront of the Irish struggle, helping – among other deeds – to flush out two enemy agents, including the notorious Timothy Quinlisk:

Timothy Quinlisk

Board Interviewer: Exposed two spies, afterwards executed. One was Quinlisk?

O’Shannon: Yes.

Board Interviewer: Was he caught in London or in Cork?

O’Shannon: Here in Ireland.

Board Interviewer: How did you manage to expose him?

O’Shannon: I had a friend who drew my attention to a suspicious character who approach him for employment and declared that he was an Irishman that had been in the British service and wanted to give his services to the IRA. My friend was suspicious of him and gave in a description of him. I conveyed the description to Mr John [sic – Joe] McGrath. He said he thought the description tallied. Some observation subsequently turned out that he was Quinlisk.

Quinlisk was found shot to death in Cork in February 1920, having failed to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on behalf of his British paymasters. O’Shannon could not recall the name of the second would-be mole, only that he had been a Dublin native whose uncovered subversion was also passed onto McGrath – a point-man for Collins – and ended with his murder in London.

Placard left by the body of a suspected spy in

It was all in a day’s work for O’Shannon, whose duties as an ITGWU organiser took him to Cork, Dublin and England, enabling him to cast a wide net on behalf of the insurgency:

O’Shannon: I established a kind of intelligence service between Michael Collins and some Hotel workers.

Board Interviewer: Were they members of the Transport Workers Union or whatever union you were organising?

O’Shannon: They were.[16]

Geáróid O’Sullivan

That is, if you believe O’Shannon. The Pension Board were not too sure if they did, noting that he “appears to have had somewhat intangible and elusive service, the value of which is extremely difficult to estimate.” Geáróid O’Sullivan definitely did not. “His story is a fabrication. Exposing Quinlisk – false!” the former IRA Adjutant General wrote on O’Shannon’s application papers. As if that remark was not scathing enough: “Collins hated the sight of him.”[17]

O’Shannon’s account does, however, chime with other statements about Collins’ interest in the Labour movement. Under his direction, and again with McGrath as a go-between, IRB activists in the various trade unions used their positions to agitate against any British or cross-channel links in favour of exclusively Irish-based bodies. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) fell victim to these machinations, in May 1920, when the Irish Engineering, Shipbuilding and Foundry Workers Trade Union (IESFTU) was formed, claiming 4,500 members from the ASE by the end of the year and leaving its parent body in Ireland with a diminished 1,762 by 1922.

Luke Kennedy

“We smashed up most of the English trades unions in Ireland at that time,” boasted Luke Kennedy, an electrician and IRB man, while another operative described their roles as being “republican agents within the trade union movement. This was regarded as very important work both by the [IRA] Army Council and the Dáil at the time.” The Labour leadership did not seem to have been consulted on this policy of union separatism to judge by how they were “not very favourable to us at all,” according to Kennedy. “As a matter of fact from the start of our union they accused us of being a political union and do so still” – which was hardly surprising, all things considered.

Of course, as with much about the period, things were not necessarily as clear-cut as that, for the ITGWU, as noted by historian Padraig Yeates, was still willing to work with the IESFTU on industrial and other matters. Either way, the IESFTU, and the IRB puppeteering behind it, were “indicative of Collins’s extraordinary ability to control and manipulate any group he saw as either a threat or a potential asset to his objectives.”[18]

Out for a Deal

Harry Boland

So what was Labour to the Irish Nationalist movement – a threat or an asset? Alternatively both, depending on who was asking. “We are all of us anxious to placate Labour as we know we all require their aid in matters of greater importance than the General Election,” Harry Boland told Brugha in a letter upon Labour’s agreement not to contest the 1918 General Election and thereby grant Sinn Féin a clear run. That Labour had considered the question at all was enough for Brugha to grumble that it was “a pity the Labour people have not the intelligence and patriotism to let their class claim wait until we have cleared out the enemy.”[19]

Sinn Féin would practically sweep the board for the Irish constituencies, setting the course for Ireland’s future – and relegating Labour to ‘always the bridesmaid, never the bride’, a placement it has struggled to escape ever since. Never one to miss a chance to point out how Labour missed a chance, Peadar O’Donnell was to argue that the Party:

…should have demanded their quota of seats, as part of the inheritance won for them by Connolly, but they neither had the willpower nor the calibre of women and men, necessary to demand and to fill these positions.[20]

Again, it was not quite as simple as that.

“Sinn Féin is out for a deal,” the journalist L.P. Byrne told Thomas Johnson, the ITGWU President, as early as December 1917. The horse-trading began in earnest the following year, in mid-August 1918, when Boland told the Sinn Féin Standing Committee, after talking with Labour representatives, that the other party was preparing to contest fifteen seats. As this would risk splitting the radical vote, Labour’s participation was thus a severe danger to Sinn Féin’s aspirations to national dominance.

Sinn Féin poster on a carriage during the general election of 1918

Faced with the withering of its dreams on the vine, Sinn Féin renewed attempts to find common ground with Labour. At one meeting, in September 1918, O’Brien, O’Shannon and Thomas Farren put forward to Boland and Robert Brennan not only their aim to contest as many as fifteen seats in Ireland – they wanted Sinn Féin to step back for Labour in four of the seven Dublin constituencies. With the country to win or lose, with or without a deal, the Sinn Féin Standing Committee offered to leave the Dublin seats clear as asked in return for Labour candidates taking a pledge to commit to an Irish Republic: Labour seats on a Sinn Féin platform, in other words.

Seán T. OKelly

That Sinn Féin was stooping to deals at all irked some of its own. “Sinn Féin is the dominant party,” declared Seán Forest at the party’s Ard Fheis on the 30^th-31^st of October 1918. “It is not for them to go to any section, but for that section to come to Sinn Féin.” More conciliatory was Seán T. O’Kelly, who announced at the same event how at least one Labour candidate was said to have already taken the pledge in readiness; nonetheless, O’Kelly wished the other group would “stand aside to allow the election to be fought on the clean issue of Ireland vs England.”

Which is exactly what happened. Labour had its own gathering two days after Sinn Féin’s, in which the National Executive announced its recommendation for Labour to withdraw from the election. The delegates voted in favour ninety-six to twenty-three. With the crisis having safely passed, Republican journals were suitably appreciative of Labour doing “the right thing at the right time” and waxed lyrical about the “natural bonds” which existed between them.[21]

It is easy to be wise after the fact, and Labour was to have a surplus of wisdom. To Frank Robbins, abstaining in 1918 was the result of “immaturity in its political policy and strategy”, due in part to having “a very small membership without any proper form of organisation.” And William O’Brien, who helped direct Labour Party policy as much as anyone, compared Sinn Féin – “a fully political organisation and the adherents of it were under the control or inspiration of their elected officials” – to Labour’s then-ramshackle nature as a coalition of trade unions, loosely under the authority of a National Executive whose members seldom convened.

The Labour National Executive, 1913, including Jim Larkin, James Connolly and William O’Brien

Labour, as Robbins and O’Brien both told it, was just not ready in 1918.[22]

Helena Molony

Four years passed and the question posed by the ILPTUC in February 1922 remained the same: was Labour ready?

Helena Moloney (Women Workers’ Union), for one, did not think so. Right after O’Shannon assured Cahalan that the motion to contest the election was in order, Moloney threatened to cut it off at the knees with one of her own: “That the Labour Party does not take part in the forthcoming election.”

Helena Molony

Her explanation as to why was brief and to the point: to do so would split Labour. No matter what programme the Party put before the electorate, the Treaty was the issue on everyone’s lips – whether to accept or not – and overriding all others. Instead “the objects of Labour and the Workers’ Republic could be achieved as through their organisation and their own efforts as through Parliamentarianism.”[23]

There was certainly no doubting Molony’s efforts, ever since the start of Easter Week or even, as she told the Military Pensions Board in 1936, some days before:

Board Interviewer: You were mobilised on Easter Sunday?

Molony: Technically yes, although as a matter of fact I spent three nights from Thursday sleeping in Liberty Hall, headquarters of the Army.

Board Interviewer:  You were on duty on Sunday anyhow?

Molony: Yes.

Board Interviewer: Then on Monday?

Molony: We started out at 12 o’clock and I believe our party was the first shot fired, the City Hall, at the Castle gate, but we subsequently occupied the City Hall.

Board Interviewer: You were captured on Monday evening?

Molony: Yes. Monday evening.

Board Interviewer: Taken prisoner?

Molony: Yes.[24]

If her role in the Rising had been for less than a day, and the enterprise itself a defeat, then Molony was far from dispirited. Instead, she threw herself into the subsequent fray to the extent that, when asked about it, she could:

…not remember a single day when I was not doing something, going down to election meetings, taking charge of meetings, publicity, elections and that sort of thing in these periods. It was all revolutionary periods. It was difficult to disentangle what was military and what was civil.[25]

The last line was a response to the interviewer’s dismissal of her running a food kitchen in Liberty Hall, during the shortages of 1918, on the grounds that it was non-military work. The distinction between the martial and the civilian was a very fine one indeed during this era and, even though Molony never fired a shot post-Rising, she was willing to assist others in doing so, in addition to the rest of her revolutionary curriculum vitae:

Board Interviewer: Assisting First Aid, procuring and concealing arms. Assisted in Belfast Boycott under Miss L. [Lily] Brennan’s instructions, continued acting as [Republican District] Justice [for Rathmines Area]?

Molony: Yes. Also, my rooms in Leeson Street [Dublin] were raided in some high time of the Tan regime, No. 4 Leeson Street, and arms found. My landlord was arrested. I was not at home. He was an old man and I wrote pleading for him and saying he did not know he had these things. I got an instruction from the military authorities to surrender them and tell them where more could be got and they would release the man.

Board Interviewer: Had you been in the habit of keeping arms during this period?

A Webley revolver, a gun typically used in the Irish War of Independence

Molony: Yes. I mean, I constantly had them to either pass on or to keep them in safety.

Board Interviewer: Were you in charge of a dump at that period?

Molony: Yes.

Board Interviewer: A small dump?

Kathleen Lynn

Molony: Always small. I do not think I ever had more than five or six at the outside, in my personal charge. Of course, there were numerous raids on the place where I lived. I lived for a period with Dr [Kathleen] Lynn, although I had rooms downtown. This is 1920-1. It was later that my apartments were used for publicity.

Board Interviewer: Your service was rendered both to the IRA and [Irish] Citizen Army?

Molony: Yes. They were in liaison. They worked in conjunction.

Board Interviewer: There was no difference as far as you were concerned?

Molony: No. Whoever was in charge or suitable for duty was simply called upon.[26]

Maybe it is unsurprising that Molony did not see parliamentarianism or seats in the Dáil as the be-end and end-all, given her range of tools used in the pursuit of a Workers’ Republic. What is surprising is that, unlike O’Shannon, she said nothing to the Pension Board about her trade union activism, despite it being, as with everything else she involved herself in, extensive. By February 1922, she was on the National Executive, albeit an outsider as much as an insider, given how she was seeking to overturn a major decision of that body.

It was an incongruity picked up by another like-minded delegate in the room, Walter Carpenter (International Union of Tailors and Tailoresses), who accused the National Executive of trying to deceive the rest of them: Molony’s dissension was proof enough that the leadership was not speaking with one voice, contrary to its claim.

“Practically,” insisted O’Shannon in response. Everyone else in the Executive was onboard. But, as ensuing debate showed, there was nothing ‘practically’ or sure about much.[27]

To be the Cockpit or in the Cockpit?

The two rallying points in the ILPTUC were the National Executive’s proposal and Molony’s amendment to it, both in direct opposition to each other. Although she was to say nothing else – at least, nothing recorded in the report – Molony had provided a hill to fight on for those resistant to the direction Labour was moving. Of the contributors to the debate, fifteen were for Molony’s amendment and against a Labour run, while fourteen supported the National Executive’s proposed grasp at electoral gain. As it turned out, a greater outspokenness on the part of the ‘nays’ did not equate to numbers for the final tally – when the talking was done and it was time to cast a vote, the ‘yeas’ carried the day, one hundred and four to forty-nine.[28]

In the meantime, a wide range of opinions, doubts and fears, hopes and aspirations were voiced, allowing a snapshot of Irish Labour at this pivotal time. As detailed by historian Niamh Puirséil, dissenters to the party’s electoral ambitions consisted of four different schools of thought:

• Those who felt that industrial issues more pressing, with parliamentarianism a distraction.
• Followers of the absent Jim Larkin objecting to anything the current leadership said.
• Revolutionary syndicates or communists who wanted to focus on factories and services rather than the compromises politics would entail.
• Republicans who wanted Sinn Féin to have a clear electoral run as before.[29]

Personal bonds may have been as motivating as ideology. Two of the delegates supporting Molony’s amendment were Helen Chenevix and Louie Bennett, both present on behalf of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU). Post-Civil War, the three would form a powerful triumvirate at the apex of their union, the success of which, disproportionate to its modest size, was attributed by historian Cullen Owens to the combined negotiating skills of this formidable feminine trio.[30]

Members of the IWWU outside Liberty Hall, Dublin

At the 1922 ILPTUC, Chenevix and Bennett set the tone for their future working relationship by weighing in on Molony’s behalf. Pointing to their British equivalent’s dismal record of overthrowing capitalism, Chenevix argued that only direct action could establish a Workers’ Commonwealth, while Bennett took a slightly more pragmatic line: since no more than a handful of their candidates were likely to be elected, they would still be in a poor position to influence the course of events.

Only when they actually held power could they take power, she said:

Politics were useless until the party had some grip of the economic powers of the country. Before they went into politics, they should have a stronger grip of these powers than they had at the present time.[31]

E.P. Hart (ITGWU) held a similar view. Any seats won would be so few “as to be useless”, capable only of uniting the two bigger Sinn Féin factions against Labour, isolated as it was by its lack of direction on the Treaty question. But Hart did not rule out politics for its own sake, only that “the time was not opportune for Labour to run candidates.” Mr Keyes (Limerick Trades Council) thought the same: their moment had not yet come. Any successful seats would most likely number enough to count on one hand, maybe two hands at the most, and at the cost of subverting Labour, for the Treaty question was just too big to ignore and too important for people not to have opinions on, opinions that were already dividing friend from friend.

“When the present issue was decided between Free Staters versus Republicans, then the time would come to launch their policy,” but, until then, Keyes:

…asked them to stand down, rally their forces in the interval, make the other parties aware of their contribution to the political campaign, so that, when the time came, they could call for the recognition Labour was entitled to.[32]

In other words, a repeat of 1918. Which, argued E. O’Carroll (Railway Clerks’ Association) with the wisdom of hindsight, had been a mistake. Had Labour entered the general election four years ago, the country would not be in its current disarray. Mr White (Wexford Trade Council) did not go quite that far – or back – but he did think it was time for Labour to assert itself and “not be made the cockpit by other political parties” like before. It was a frustration shared by Mr Anthony (Typographical Association), who sarcastically asked the other delegates how long they were going to wait. Far from it being the wrong time, as some insisted, Anthony believed “Labour had everything to gain and very little to lose by contesting.”[33]

Thomas Irwin (Plasterers’ Trade Union and Dublin Workers’ Council) was bold enough to envisage such an ‘everything to gain’ moment: should the votes fall evenly for both Pro and Anti-Treatyites, then Labour would be ideally situated to:

…hold the balance of power in the legislature assembly set up. If such a position arose, the Labour Party should preserve its independence and act in the Labour interests. The Party would be placed in the position of having to make a momentous decision.[34]

What the momentous decision could or should be, Irwin did not venture. The argument that the Treaty was too large an issue to sidestep were not entirely wrong; even O’Shannon, when he urged both adherents and opponents of the Anglo-Irish agreement in his audience to disregard such considerations – at least until they had finished deciding whether Labour would enter the election – must have known his request was a futile one. The National Executive had already made up its collective mind (sans Molony) to support the Treaty; at least, so said Mr Rooney (Clerical Workers’ Trade Union), who accused the body in question of lacking “the courage or manliness” to say so openly.[35]

Transforming the Republic

If the National Executive stood charged with dishonesty through omission, then the same could be said for the written minutes of the ILPTUC – the published, official version, anyway.

The Irish Labour History Society and Archives, Beggars Bush, Dublin

Two long galleys of an earlier, unedited draft lie amidst the papers of the Irish Labour History Society. A third is absent, covering the middle part of the February 1922 Congress, leaving us with only the first and third ends, but enough to compare “with the recommendations which were circulated in printed form to the delegates at the Special Congress,” at which point, as described by historian Charles McCarthy, “this document becomes interesting,” particularly in what did not make the cut.[36]

Post hoc, the memorandum reads at one point:

Labour ought to have its representatives in the forthcoming Parliament to work in Labour’s interests, to frustrate reactionary measures, and to use every occasion to hasten the process towards our ideal Workers’ Republic.[37]

However, revisions in blue pencil mark what had been there in the initial draft:

If the country decides to confirm the Treaty, Labour ought to have its representatives in the forthcoming Parliament to work in Labour’s interests, to frustrate reactionary measures, and to use every occasion to hasten the process towards our ideal Workers’ Republic. On the other hand, if the country by its vote [cancels? – illegible] the Treaty and elects a majority to proclaim anew the Republic, then again Labour ought to have its spokesmen in any assembly which may function as a parliament, having powers of government.[38]

A little further down, an entire passage – containing a dramatic line of speculation – had been excised:

In the event of the Labour Party being in the position that they hold the balance as between the two main contending parties, the Labour members shall vote for the re-election of the Republican Government [emphasis mine]. Such a contingency will have proved the existence of a deep and widespread revolutionary purpose amongst the mass of the people sufficient to carry the country forward a long way towards transforming the Republic into our ideal Workers’ Republic.[39]

While studiously neutral for the most part, the National Executive was willing to countenance, if faced with the fork in the road, swinging behind the Anti-Treatyites. This was despite, as McCarthy points out, it “clearly did not reflect the general view of the Labour movement, although there was a substantial minority on the Republican side.”[40]

Talk at the ILPTUC of a Treaty-induced schism was more than idle speculation, for Sinn Féin was already rent and torn, as was the IRA – irreconcilably so, as it turned out. Fears of the same disarray infecting Labour would explain why the otherwise Treaty-leaning National Executive was willing to make overtures to its Republican constituents, hinting at a future common goal for the purpose of gaining a current consensus for its electoral proposal. This only lasted as long as the Congress, however, hence the editing of the official report, “from what might be seen as a pro-Republican document to one that some delegates regarded as being pro-Treaty,” with the initial Republican temptations “judged too perilous” to be remembered.[41]

Walter Carpenter

Certainly, many of the 1922 ILPTUC delegates who disagreed with the Treaty proved as willing to defend the Republic in the subsequent conflict as they did in the previous one. Molony returned from Brussels at the start of the Civil War to aid the Anti-Treatyites in procuring weapons, harbouring combatants and contributing to their publicity department. And Walter Carpenter, a 1916 Rising participant who had been the first to speak in favour of Molony’s attempted stymying of Labour’s electoral prospects, joined the IRA in the Four Courts. There, he collected material for making munitions, laid mines outside the building and was later a prisoner with the rest of the garrison when they surrendered to the Free State. As with Molony, O’Brien and O’Shannon, Carpenter was prepared to fight for the Green at the same time as the Red, even when his comrades were not entirely his ideological cup of tea.

“He would not join the Volunteers because we were not holding a class war,” noted a member of the Military Pensions Board.[42]

Frank Robbins

Frank Robbins

Like Carpenter, Frank Robbins (ITGWU) had served with the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in the Easter Rising; in his case, as part of the St Stephen’s Green contingent, which saw him raising a tricolour over the College of Surgeons. Six years later, upon hearing of the ambush and death of Michael Collins in August 1922, Robbins came close to enlisting in the National Army; he had already been tempted with a captaincy, albeit one refused.[43]

Liam Mellows

He had had his fill of bloodshed, as had the country overall, he believed. Listening to Peter Flood, who had lost two brothers in the span of two years, speak of the need for young people to live for Ireland instead of dying for it moved Robbins greatly. In contrast, he found opponents of the Treaty to be dangerously cavalier about consequences. When Liam Mellows compared his fellow Republicans to engineers mapping out a new Ireland, Robbins retorted that good engineers would find ways around obstacles instead of careering straight into them.[44]

So what direction should Labour be heading in? Its National Executive wanted one way, via elections, Moloney’s amendment another. Both were wrong, Robbins told the 1922 ILPTUC. Though he concurred with the Executive otherwise, he did not believe parliamentary participation would benefit Labour, at least not for the moment, the main problem being that the party had yet to grasp the Treaty bull by the horns and announced whether it would support the deal or not.[45]

And so, as soon as Molony’s amendment was voted down, one hundred and fifteen votes to eighty-two, Robbins proposed a motion of his own, urging that:

This all-important question should be decided by a plebiscite, in order to ascertain the true feelings of the people on the Treaty, and having cleared the position, Labour should then take its place in the election.[46]

Presumably Robbins was counting on any plebiscite resulting in favour of the Treaty. Still, circumstances did not always permit him to follow through on his commitments. When the anti-Treaty IRA seized the buildings in Parnell Square, Dublin, in early 1922, they found Robbins and a number of other ICA personnel present at No. 35, the head office of the ITGWU. The Anti-Treatyites allowed the other faction to remain in return for food and an agreement to defend their section from any Free State attacks.[47]

IRA members outside a building they’ve occupied, early 1922

Conflicting opinions did not necessarily preclude mutual support, no more than overlapping sympathies guarantee healthy partnerships. Robbins would bemoan the lack of vision among his Labour colleagues and the failure to synergise their trade unionist aspirations with their nationalist convictions, continuing instead to see the two movements as separate strands. An example of this myopia was during the 1920 Municipal Elections, which saw – unlike the 1918 General one – a variety of radical candidates, such as Labour and assorted Independents, as well as Sinn Féin ones.

Labour election poster, 1920

Robbins thought it fitting for the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band to parade in support of Labour, since the group had always marched in lockstep with the ICA. When the idea was brought to the ICA Army Council, it decided that the Band should perform for all Republican candidates, such as Kathleen Lynn, who was standing for Sinn Féin despite her ICA membership, but not for Walter Carpenter, who was ‘only’ a Workers’ Republican man. It was apparently not enough to be Labour to be considered a Republican, much to Robbins’ chagrin.[48]

The Fintan Lalor band

An Abysmal Failure?

Notably, Robbins did not resent Sinn Féin for this relegation of Labour to second fiddle, instead casting blame on the ICA leadership and its utter inability to fill James Connolly’s shoes. As a compensation of sorts, according to Robbins:

It can be claimed with some justification that the trade union movement itself as well as individual trade unionists in their roles as members of the Volunteers to some extent made up for the abysmal failure of the Irish Citizen Army to play a significant role on behalf of the working class in the shaping of Irish independence during the crucial years of 1918 to 1921.[49]

Robbins did his best to be one of these said individual trade unionists. When an American shipment of arms landed off Dublin’s North Wall, dockers in the ITGWU ‘assisted’ in unloading the crates and emptying them of their revolvers, as Robbins told the Military Pensions Board in 1937:

Board Interviewer: How did you help in all this?

Robbins: Well, I had not very much to do beyond that of organising and I was receiving.

Board Interviewer: Was it the Transport Workers Union?

Robbins: There were members of the Transport Workers Union and because of my connection.

Board Interviewer: Because of your connection with the Transport Workers?

Robbins: No, the Citizen Army. I was one of the party that was working on the thing. We all had various kinds of jobs.

Board Interviewer: You didn’t take any part in taking the arms off?

Robbins: No.

Board Interviewer: But you had a part in taking the stuff?

Robbins: Yes, in taking the stuff and dumping it.[50]

ITGWU badge

The interviewer was perhaps struggling to sound impressed. The conversation became noticeably awkward when the topic turned to the Connolly Commemorations in June 1919, which saw the ICA clashing with Dublin policemen, wounding several of the latter who had tried to supress the banned event:

Board Interviewer: Connolly Commemoration, you had a conflict with the DMP [Dublin Metropolitan Police]?

Robbins: Yes, I think there was six or seven policemen shot that day, that evening. This was in June 1919.

Board Interviewer: Were you armed?

Robbins: Yes.

Board Interviewer: And you were shooting?

Robbins: Not at the actual time. I was there…

Board Interviewer: Did you have any actual conflict with the Black and Tans? Any fight with them or the military of the police during the time the Black and Tans were here?

Robbins: Yes, I gave you the instance in 1919.

Board Interviewer: There were no Black and Tans then?

Robbins: No.

Board Interviewer: In 1920 or 1921, did you have any fight with them?

Robbins: I cannot just remember. I just scribbled those notes down last night.[51]

Reading between the lines, the interviewer clearly believed that Robbins’ active service record left something to be desired.

Regardless, Robbins took pride in the surge of growth in his ITGWU, mirroring Sinn Féin’s, and if the two movements did not overlap as much as they could or, so Robbins thought, should, then relations were still friendly enough for the trade union and the IRA to share officers or branch halls, not to mention the use on occasion of Liberty Hall for clandestine Cabinet sessions of the underground Irish government. Once, in September 1919, Robbins was asked by an ITGWU colleague to keep an eye out for Michael Collins, who was due to arrive at Liberty Hall. Thanks to the warning of an impending raid, Collins decided against coming. No raid took place, as it happened, but better safe than sorry.[52]

ICA members on parade outside Liberty Hall,

‘A Splendid Substitute’

Robbins’ motion for a plebiscite on the Treaty dilemma appeared reasonable; after all, how could Labour, and the country, move on without knowing for sure which direction to go? Mr Magee (Irish Engineering Union) seconded the proposal and added an accompanying one of his own:

This all-important question should be decided by a plebiscite, in order to ascertain the true feelings of the people on the Treaty, and, having cleared the position, Labour should then take its place in the election.

Five more spoke up. Mr Campbell (Belfast) pointed out how the eighty-two delegates who had voted for Molony’s denial of a Labour electoral policy remained a formidable bloc out of the two hundred in the room – would it thus not be better to find a decision able to unify them into agreement with the rest? More tentative was Mr Cummins (Central Teachers’ Organisation), who thought the National Executive should gather opinions from trade unions across the country and then make a final, binding decision. Thomas Farren (ITGWU) dismissed Magee’s suggestion as ridiculous on the grounds that the National Executive lacked the means of conducting such a plebiscite, while Thomas Foran (ITGWU) wanted to pull out of the parliamentary process altogether – the inevitable falling out would not be worth the few paltry seats gained. And Mr Mullen doubted his area of Ballina, Co. Mayo, would deliver a Labour win anyway, since the farmers there were in the ascendant, having the numbers and the organisation. On the Ballina Municipal Council, for example, Labour had only three out of the twenty-four placements, and even these were negated by the other representatives ganging up on them.

A show of hands voted down Magee’s motion. The short time spent on debating it, compared to the length Molony’s merited, perhaps hinted that the mental engines in the hall were now running on fumes. Not so for P. Kelly (Postal Workers), who made a shot at keeping the Molony amendment alive by suggesting that it be returned to the National Executive for further consideration. This gained the surprising approval of Thomas Johnson – surprising because, as Johnson admitted, the amendment ran completely contrary to the National Executive’s proposition, of which he was the prime mover.

Thomas Johnson

The debate between political tools versus industrial action did not have to be a choice of one or the other, Johnson said. As a matter of fact, the National Executive, himself included, had more faith in the latter, while at the same time considering the former “as a splendid supplement and protection for industrial work.”[53]

Eoin O’Duffy

It was a characteristic move by Johnson, who could never quite stop giving the impression that he was on each side and nobody’s. In fairness, the men Johnson had to deal with as his political peers had a tendency to assume the worst in others, such as Eoin O’Duffy writing to Michael Collin, in the middle of the Civil War in August 1922, of his suspicion that “the Labour element and the Red Flaggers are at the back of all moves towards ‘Peace’, not for the sake of the country, but in their own interests.” These private motives were apparently nothing less than an armed takeover: “They realise that, if the Government can break the back of this revolt, any attempts at revolt, by labour, in future will be futile.”[54]

Conversely, Johnson’s leading of Labour into the Dáil proved his untrustworthiness in the eyes of the other side in the conflict. As the Free State implemented its policy of firing-squads for POWs, Liam Lynch warned Johnson in a letter, in November 1922, that since he was holding him as responsible as the Government, the anti-Treaty IRA would take “very drastic measures to protect our forces.”

Liam Lynch

Any doubt as to what these ‘drastic measures could mean would have been cleared up when Peadar O’Donnell’s future wife, Lile O’Donel, obtained a meeting with Johnson on the pretence of an interview. She then took the opportunity to inform Johnson that he would be the next to die in the event of her imprisoned sweetheart’s execution. As Johnson had no say in the Cabinet or its measures, it is unclear what Lile expected him to be doing, other than what he already was, namely using his time in the Dáil to condemn the shootings as a gross abuse of power. None of which absolved him in hardliner eyes, as Lynch admonished: “You, as spokesman, have given the approval of your Party to the present policy of the so-called Provisional government.”[55]

These were times when ‘those who are not with me are against me’ was the ruling assumption; Ernest Blythe would recall how Johnson “often irritated us a great deal by his insistence on debating a great variety of matters at considerable length” – as if that was not the point of the Dáil. Still, Blythe acknowledged this and Johnson’s service to the burgeoning democracy in providing a loyal opposition.

Otherwise:

If we had not been challenged and had not to make our case, many arguments against us would have been believed but, because of Mr Johnson’s opposition, we were put in a position to dispose of them.[56]

Not without reason, then, did the Anti-Treatyites turn their ire on Labour as Free State running dogs, wrecking the party’s head office in Dublin and making off with some of its equipment. And also not without reason, given the assassination of one pro-Treaty TD already in December 1922 and the wounding of another, did President W.T. Cosgrave offer Labour TDs the sanctuary of Buswell’s Hotel, conveniently near the Dáil, where other Free State representatives were housed under armed guard. Johnson declined, preferring to keep to his Rathmines residence and the daily commute to work even as the war raged on.[57]

“Johnson, while not an advocate of physical force,” wrote his ITGWU colleague, Robbins, “was certainly not lacking in moral courage” – nor of the physical sort, either.[58]

Thomas Johnson addressing a crowd

A Decision Finally Made

If Robbins had moved from a belief in force of arms to that of compromise, then Johnson could claim consistency: violence had always repelled him. He too had been in Dublin for the Rising, like others in Labour, but, unlike them, only as a spectator rather than a participant. Where some had beheld glory in those five days, Johnson observed only squalor. A walk into town from Drumcondra on Easter Friday turned into a tour of gun exchanges between British soldiers in the streets and Irish snipers from windows, with fires ablaze in different places at once. But the biggest impression made – to judge by the amount of description Johnson gave in his diary – was the impact on ordinary people, from the looters of wrecked shops on Upper Dorset Street to the “hundreds of men, well dressed, middle-class citizens” of Drumcondra buying up every item of food on sale and lugging them back home in sacks.[59]

The experience, so he told the Trade Union Congress at Sligo, four months later in August 1916, “cured me of any leanings I may ever have had towards the ideal of a ‘Nation in Arms’, if directed by a military caste.”[60]

O’Connell Street, Dublin, after the Rising

While nursing his own views, Johnson had taken the time to learn that of others on Easter Week, speaking to people from a range of backgrounds: labourers, shopkeepers and ‘better off clerks.’ Overall, public opinion, in Dublin at least:

Practically unanimously it is against the rebels, while compelled to admire the courage and resources of the young men and their leaders.[61]

Johnson would apply this same sort of constructive ambiguity upon the second great event in five years that ‘changed, changed utterly’ everything. The attitude of the National Executive at the ILPTUC in February 1922 was one of studied neutrality towards the Treaty: they were not responsible for it, it was no business or making of theirs, but there the deal stood, for better or for worse, and it was time to transition from one phase to the next.

Pro-Treaty poster, 1922

In truth, Johnson had favoured the Treaty from the start, even before its ratification in January 1922. Wary of the growing bitterness that emerged from the Dáil during its debates, followed by the widening splits within Sinn Féin and the IRA, Johnson kept his own counsel from his colleagues, at least initially. By the time of the ILPTUC a month later, Johnson, O’Brien, O’Shannon and most of the Labour leadership were in concord where the Treaty was concerned; even then, they moved cautiously, even subtly, whether tempting Republican-minded delegates with the possibility of bringing Labour on the side of the Anti-Treatyites or Johnson posing as all things to all men by approving of a motion to block a proposal he was behind. That Labour was to survive the coming disaster as an intact entity is perhaps a tribute to its deft handling by the leadership.[62]

Kelly’s motion was defeated by seventy-two votes against fifty-five, ensuring the final demise of Molony’s attempt to halt Labour’s march into the parliamentary process. Robbins’ motion for a plebiscite was next put to the room, the lack of further discussion necessitated by the late hour of the evening, and passed by a hundred and twenty-eight against twelve. Finally, Johnson’s motion from the start of the event, around which all debate had flowed, was favoured by one hundred and four to forty-nine, confirming Labour’s entry into the next general election.[63]

Election poster for Cathal O’Shannon in Louth-Meath, 1922

Thus concluded the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress of February 1922, and Labour’s role as a political party in deed as well as in name began. It was time to turn principles into power and take long-delayed responsibility for their righteousness.

References

[1] 28^th Annual Report 1922, Irish Trade Union Congress Annual Reports (Archives Exhibition by Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the National Archives of Ireland) (Accessed 28/09/2021), pp. 57-9

[2] Ibid, p. 62

[3] Ibid, p. 69

[4] MacEoin, Uinseann, Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980), pp. 209, 213

[5] Ibid, p. 24

[6] O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Forth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited, 1969), pp. 180, 83-6, 123, 137

[7] Ibid, pp. 270, 282

[8] Ibid, pp. 180-2, 186-7

[9] Ibid, pp. 194-7

[10] MacEoin, pp. 22-3

[11] O’Brien, pp. 158, 217-8

[12] Ibid, pp. 23, 196

[13] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 77

[14] MacEoin, pp. 203, 209

[15] Ibid, p. 23

[16] Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘O’Shannon, Cathal’ (MSP34REF21723), pp. 7-8

[17] Ibid. pp. 3, 16

[18] Yeates, Padraig, ‘Michael Collins’s ‘secret service unit’ in the trade union movement’, History Ireland (Issue 3, May/June 2014) (Accessed 28/09/2021)

[19] Fitzpatrick, David. Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 167-8

[20] MacEoin, p. 23

[21] Mitchell, Arthur. Labour in Irish Politics: 1890-1930 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1974), pp. 96-100

[22] Robbins. Frank. Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1977), p. 222 ; O’Brien, pp. 160-2

[23] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 69

[24] Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘Molony, Helena’ (MSP34REF11739), p. 21

[25] Ibid, p. 23

[26] Ibid, pp. 22-4

[27] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 73

[28] Ibid, p. 87

[29] Puirséil, Niamh. The Irish Labour Party: 1922-73 (Dublin: University College Dublin 2007), p. 10

[30] Regan, Nell. Helena Molony: 1883-1967 (Baldoyle, Co. Dublin: Arlen House, 2017), pp. 184-5

[31] 28^th Annual Report 1922, pp. 70, 78

[32] Ibid, pp. 71-2, 74

[33] Ibid, pp. 75, 77, 81

[34] Ibid, p. 76

[35] Ibid, pp. 81, 84

[36] McCarthy, Charles. ‘Document Study: Labour and the 1922 General Election’, Saothar 7 (1981: Journal of the Labour History Society), p. 115

[37] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 63

[38] McCarthy, p. 118

[39] Ibid

[40] Ibid, p. 120

[41] Ibid

[42] Molony, p. 25 ; Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘Carpenter, Walter’ (MSP34REF8789), p. 33

[43] Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 97

[44] Ibid, pp. 230, 234

[45] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 81

[46] Ibid, p. 84

[47] Military Service Pensions Collection, ‘Robbins, Frank’ (MSP34REF17899), pp. 26-7

[48] Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, pp. 207, 233

[49] Ibid, p. 217

[50] ‘Robbins’, p. 26

[51] Ibid, pp. 25-6

[52] Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, pp. 217-8

[53] 28^th Annual Report 1922, pp. 84-6

[54] Regan, John M. Myth and the Irish State (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2013), p. 132

[55] Gaughan, J. Anthony. Thomas Johnson: 1872-1963, First Leader of the Labour Party in Dáil Éireann (Mount Merrion, Co. Dublin: Kingdom Books, 1980), p. 215 p ; MacEoin, pp. 30-1

[56] Blythe, Ernest (BMH / WS 939), p. 165

[57] Gaughan, pp. 215, 217

[58] Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 220

[59] Gaughan, pp. 52-3

[60] Ibid, p. 57

[61] Ibid, p. 54

[62] McCarthy, p. 117

[63] 28^th Annual Report 1922, p. 87

Bibliography

Irish Trade Union Congress Annual Report

28^th Annual Report 1922, Irish Trade Union Congress Annual Reports (Archives Exhibition by Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the National Archives of Ireland) (Accessed 28/09/2021)

Books

Fitzpatrick, David. Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003)

Gaughan, J. Anthony. Thomas Johnson: 1872-1963, First Leader of the Labour Party in Dáil Éireann (Mount Merrion, Co. Dublin: Kingdom Books, 1980)

MacEoin, Uinseann. Survivors (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980)

Mitchell, Arthur. Labour in Irish Politics: 1890-1930 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1974)

O’Brien, William (as told to MacLysaght, Edward) Forth the Banners Go (Dublin: The Three Candles Limited, 1969)

Puirséil, Niamh. The Irish Labour Party: 1922-73 (Dublin: University College Dublin, 2007)

Regan, John M. Myth and the Irish State (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2013)

Regan, Nell. Helena Molony: 1883-1967 (Baldoyle, Co, Dublin: Arlen House, 2017)

Robbins, Frank. Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1977)

Military Service Pensions Collection

Carpenter, Walter, MSP34REF8789

Molony, Helena, MSP34REF11739

O’Shannon, Cathal, MSP34REF21723

Robbins, Frank, MSP34REF17899

Articles

McCarthy, Charles. ‘Document Study: Labour and the 1922 General Election’, Saothar 7 (1981: Journal of the Labour History Society)

Yeates, Padraig, ‘Michael Collins’s ‘secret service unit’ in the trade union movement’, History Ireland (Issue 3, May/June 2014) (Accessed 28/09/2021)

Bureau of Military History Statement

Blythe, Ernest, WS 939

Hanging by a Thread: Seán Mac Eoin and the Trial of his Life, 1921 (Part II)

A continuation of: Caught by a Whisker: Seán Mac Eoin and the Fight for his Life, 1921 (Part I)

The full details about what happened at Mountjoy Prison are very difficult to get. However, piecing together the scraps of information which people in the neighbourhood and people in touch with the prison staff are able to provide, it is possible to reconstruct a story of the sensational occurrence.

(Sunday Independent, 15^th May 1921)

A Rescue Launched

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) now had possession of the coveted transport. John McCaffrey and four other Volunteers climbed on board the armoured car and drove down the North Circular Road to pick up Joe Leonard and Emmet Dalton. As seasoned combatants, the pair would be spearheading the rescue of Seán Mac Eoin under the guise of British officers who had come to Mountjoy to transfer the prisoner. It was a daring performance, one which both men were suited for in their own separate ways, as Leonard described.

British Army armoured car in Dublin

Other than the khaki uniforms they wore and the military vehicle bringing them:

Emmet, having served as an officer in the British Army knew how to serve a prisoner removal order to the authorities, and I had served six months in Mountjoy Prison and had stood-to for the escape of twenty prisoners over the wall [in March 1919], and so knew the prison fairly well, and besides Emmet’s second uniform fitted me to perfection.

If Mac Eoin was in the Governor’s office as intended, then his liberators would be spared having to search for him. The final touch to the script was the IRA party who would present themselves at the prison entrance as soon as the metal-plated motor was inside with the intent of bamboozling the sentries into reopening.

Emmet Dalton

Dalton waved some official-looking papers at the iron gates, which yawned opened to receive them, closing behind with a clang. Two more gates parted in succession before the car, whose driver manoeuvred in a wide turn once across the inside yard until it was facing back to where it came. With a small advance, the car was ‘carelessly’ blocking the inner two gates from closing, leaving only the front one shut.

If onlookers thought this unusual or suspicious, they made no protest as two men in British uniforms strode over to the Governor’s office in a perfect imitation of Important People With Important Things To Do. All was proceeding like clockwork…until, instead of Governor Charles Munro alone at his desk, Leonard and Dalton found him with seven of his aides and the door closing behind them. Was this a trap? Had they been rumbled?

Except Munro was polite enough:

…receiving us very nicely until he mentioned that he must ring up the Castle for confirmation of the order to remove McKeon [alternative spelling]. I sprang up for the telephone and smashed it while Dalton held the staff at bay and then began tying the staff up with the hope of securing the master keys, when a cannonade of shots met our ears.

Something had definitely gone wrong. With nothing left to be done, Leonard and Dalton beat a hasty retreat from the office to the outside steps of the jail…and into bedlam.[1]

Mountjoy Prison

A Rescue Aborted

The other five men had been waiting with the car, expecting Leonard and Dalton to return with Mac Eoin between them, and for the second team outside to help distract the sentries on the wicket gate next to the main one.

“However, things did not work out according to plan,” recalled John McCaffrey:

…because the next thing I observed (having at this stage put my head outside the turret) was one of our two men producing revolvers and holding up the warders at the main gate.

Tom Kehoe

Seeing this commotion, a British soldier called on the visitors to halt. At the same time, he raised his rifle and fired, narrowly missing Tom Keogh, one of the other IRA men who had been standing beside the vehicle:

As he was getting ready to fire again Tom Keogh very slowly and deliberately pulled out his revolver and shot the sentry. He immediately stepped over, picked up the sentry’s rifle which had fallen to the ground and threw it on to the back of the car. He then climbed into the car.

More gunshots were coming down from a prison lookout post. Caffrey struggled to return fire with the machine-gun mounted on the top of the armoured car but could not raise it sufficiently high. It was then that Leonard and Dalton reappeared and not a moment too soon; even without Mac Eoin, it was time to go – that is, if they could manage even that.[2]

With more Tommies bearing on them, Leonard picked up the rifle from the downed soldier and:

…ordered the British military back, and on their refusal to obey, knelt down and threatened to fire on them – they seeing an officer kneeling in the firing position, broke and retired to their quarters, but the Police advanced from another position.

Joe Leonard

Leonard and Dalton leapt on board their ride and roared at the driver to step on it. The car drove through the front entrance, now ajar thanks to the team outside who were supposed to rush the gates as a diversion – and had done so perhaps a little too well, for the guards had drawn their guns and opened fire, wounding one assailant, attracting the attention of the rest of the prison, and forcing Leonard and Dalton to withdraw from the Governor’s office.[3]

Leaving No Stone Unturned

All things considered, it was miraculous that the IRA team escaped at all – but Mac Eoin remained under lock and key. He had arranged for an interview in the Governor’s chamber, where his rescuers were to find him, but a relief force of Auxiliaries had come earlier that morning. Procedure dictated that the inmates be confined to their cells for the newcomers to inspect for identification purposes. Mac Eoin’s protests about his impending interview were to no avail, and it was left for him to ruminate on another missed chance and for others to ask what that had been all about.[4]

“The object of this exploit, it is believed,” read the Irish Times, “was to release an important political prisoner.”[5]

Michael Noyk

Even after that failure, with the trial date drawing near, Michael Collins did not lose hope of an armed intervention, all the while preparing the legal defence – which, under the circumstances, would be very much a last-ditch effort. In this, he was assisted by Michael Noyk, a long-time legal advisor for the revolutionary movement. Charles Wyse-Powers would defend Mac Eoin in court, as per Noyk’s recommendation, but, when he took ill, Noyk arranged for Charles Bewley to take up the duty instead.[6]

The Mullingar IRA Brigade, meanwhile, was granted a chance to redeem itself. Mac Eoin’s arrest at Mullingar Railway Station could have been avoided if the local Volunteers had intervened as ordered – but there was no point crying over a lost opportunity when another presented itself. Since Mac Eoin’s prosecution hinged on witnesses, the simple solution was to kill them before they could step foot inside the courtroom.

The various Auxiliaries, Black-and-Tan and other policemen from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who had seen Mac Eoin in action, and earmarked to testify to that effect, were to pass through the Mullingar area to Dublin, so the tip-off went. Armed with an assortment of rifles, shotguns and revolvers, around fifty or sixty men from the Brigade mustered at Griffinstown, near Kinnegad, hiding behind the roadside fence or in some nearby ruins.

IRA Flying Column

That the turnout was as large as it was by Westmeath standards, and overseen by their Brigade O/C, showed that the Mullingar IRA was at last taking things seriously – until undone by their habitual incompetence when the mine laid on the route detonated prematurely, blowing a massive hole in the road as well as their chances, for surely the incoming convoy had heard. The would-be ambushers hastily withdrew, closing yet another window of opportunity for Mac Eoin – not that they need have bothered, for the information the Brigade had received was wrong, and the witnesses were coming by a different way, through Meath, by-passing Mullingar altogether.[7]

Insurgents elsewhere were feeling the strain. In Mac Eoin’s home county of Longford, “from the time Seán was arrested we did not seem to have the same ‘luck’ in our operations and the enemies [sic] morale had gone up,” recalled his brother, James. “They had become increasingly bold now, and were putting the pressure on very severely since they had got Seán behind the ‘bars’.” The loss of its commander had left the Longford Flying Column floundering, with no one able or willing to fill his shoes.[8]

Michael Collins

With a few weeks left to go, and options rapidly running out, Collins showed Noyk a plan of Dublin City Hall, where the court-martial was to take place, and asked if he could use his access to Mac Eoin, as part of his legal counsel, to smuggle in guns for him. When the time came, an armed Mac Eoin would be assisted in breaking out by Dublin IRA men posted at hand.

While he understood how important rescuing his friend was to Collins, Noyk had to point out that the likely security on the day – from armed guards in the court to machine-gun posts on the roofs outside – made escape a slim possibility. Always willing to temper emotion with logic, Collins conceded on that and dropped the idea. When Noyk saw Mac Eoin brought to the dock on the 14^th June 1921, cuffed and flanked by burly policemen who stayed by his side throughout the proceedings, he knew he had made the right call in dissuading any further breakout efforts.[9]

The view from the front steps of Dublin City Hall, where Mac Eoin’s trial was held, looking down Parliament Street

‘Feloniously, Wilfully and of Malice Aforethought’

The charge sheet was duly read out to the assembled court:

The Accused, John Joseph McKeon…a civilian, is charged with committing a crime within the meaning of Regulation 67 of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Regulations, that is to say, murder, in that he…on 7^th January 1921, feloniously, wilfully and of malice aforethought did kill and murder District Inspector [DI] Thomas McGrath.

When asked how he pleaded, Mac Eoin’s response went beyond a simple ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, as he made clear to refute the claim that he was a mere civilian:

As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army, I have committed no break either of national law or international law. I admit no offence and I plead not guilty.[10]

The case for the prosecution relied on two points of evidence: RIC witnesses who placed Mac Eoin at the scene of the crime and as its perpetrator, and his alleged confession when arrested in Mullingar. The first of the former, Sergeant Ryan, had been stationed in Ballinalee, Co Longford, at the time, and whose duties included accompanying DI McGrath and four other uniformed colleagues as they approached a lone house in the countryside on the 7^th January 1921.

Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary

As guided by the Counsel for the Prosecution, Ryan described how he was walking directly behind McGrath as the DI led the way:

Q: What happened?

A: When the Officer [McGrath] turned to step into the doorway, this man, John McKeon, flashed and shot him down in the gutter. He put out his hand like that [witness gestures] and shot him down. I had a full view of him.

Q: You saw the accused come to the doorway and present his revolver or automatic pistol and fire a shot?

A: Yes.

Q: About how far away would you be from the accused when he fired?

A: I would be about three feet from him,

Q: With the District Inspector between you and this man?

A: Yes.

Q: Have you ever seen this man before? I do not want you to tell us anything about where you saw him.

A: Yes, I had.

Q: Did you know this man by sight?

A: Yes, I knew the man well by sight.

Q: Is that the man, the accused there, who fired the shot?

A: Yes, that is the man.

Q: Have you any doubt about it?

A: No, no doubt at all.

Q: He fired one shot, you say, at the Inspector?

A: Yes.

Q: Was that all?

A: Yes.

Q: What happened to the Inspector?

A: He fell down dead in the gutter in my opinion; he never moved. He fell down on his face.[11]

A Dying Confession?

The second buttress in the prosecution’s case was the confession, as related by another police witness who had been present in Mullingar on the 2^nd March:

Mullingar Garda Station, formerly the RIC barracks where Seán Mac Eoin was taken after capture

Q: Tell us what happened after he was recaptured?

A: He was then taken into the Police Station and he asked for a priest and a doctor.

Q: Where was he wounded?

A: He was wounded in the breast.

Q: By a rifle shot?

A: By a rifle shot. He was taken in to the Police Station and he asked for a priest and a doctor, and they were brought and attended to him immediately.

Q: Did the doctor attend to him?

A: Yes, the doctor attended to him.

Q:  Did he dress the wounds?

A: Yes, he dressed the wounds.

Q: Did the priest see him?

A: He did. He then made the following statement to me and to all the other police who were present, but I took it down as I was the sergeant.

Q: He made a voluntary statement to you, then?

A: Yes, after the priest and the doctor had gone. Of course, he was apparently in a dying condition at the time.

Q: While the priest and the doctor were there, nothing happened?

A: No.

Q: It was not until after they had left that he made a statement?

A: That is so.

Q: Was he in bed?

A: No, he was sitting on a form near the window. He was then apparently in a dying condition.

Q: Tell us a little more about that.

A: He was very pale.

Q: Did he speak distinctly?

A: He spoke distinctly but in a weak voice.

Q: When the priest and the doctor had gone, did he say anything to you or to anybody who was there?

A: He said: “I shot DI McGrath.”[12]

‘Trust in God…’

A cynic might wonder why a man, dying or otherwise, would admit to a hanging offence in earshot of his mortal enemies and only after other witnesses had left. In any case, Mac Eoin and his legal allies had no delusions as to the odds of acquittal. While a capable lawyer, Bewley was hamstrung by how, as Noyk observed:

There was very little to defend in one sense. The only possible defence was that the night was dark and as there was a lot of indiscriminate shooting by the RIC themselves, one of their bullets might have hit Inspector McGrath who was in charge of the party.

However, when a prejudiced courtmartial, as in all the other cases, was functioning there was no possibility of that defence being successful though Mr Bewley made the most of what he could in that direction.[13]

Charles Bewley

Mac Eoin likewise acknowledged that Bewley did his best, even in what the former called a “queer, one-sided trial.” After all, the only witnesses Bewley could call to counteract the official version of McGrath’s death were Mac Eoin’s IRA comrades, who were hardly likely to enter a British court of law unless in chains. Though Bewley succeeded in pointing out discrepancies in the witness testimonies, “it was all talk, talk, talk, talk, and with one obvious result,” that being the inevitable pronouncement of death.

All that was left for Mac Eoin to do was go down fighting – one way or another.

The prosecution rested its case. Papers were shuffled and a few whispered words exchanged about the chamber. Bewley asked permission for his client to address the court, as well as the courtesy of his handcuffs being removed. Both requests were granted and Mac Eoin, after rubbing the stiffness out of his wrists as best he could, discreetly took out of his pocket one of the two slips of card, torn from a cigarette packet.

On each was written a different phrase. If Mac Eoin had been fatalistic upon his arrest – “I know I am for a firing-squad, anyway,” he was reported to have said – now he resorted to a gambler’s toss of the coin. Should the card he drew be the one that read ‘Trust in God, go ahead and do your best!’, then he would seize the revolver off the policeman beside him, firing in one hand while using the other arm to hold his captive as a human-shield.

All the while, Mac Eoin would somehow endeavour to reach the window, through which he would leap to freedom…that is, if he could avoid a broken leg from the thirty feet drop. And make it past the loops of barbed-wire across the outside steps. And not get cut down by a bullet at any point in the process. He would at least have the assistance of Collins’ rescue team, armed and ready in the Royal Exchange Hotel on Parliament Street, opposite Dublin City Hall – contrary to what Noyk believed, Collins was keeping that option open – but Mac Eoin did not rate his odds of success very highly at all.[14]

He might have had a better chance than he thought. Almost three decades later, Mac Eoin made the acquaintance of Noël Browne as part of the Inter-Party Government of 1948-1951. To Browne, his fellow Cabinet Minister was a “gentle peaceful man”, his warrior days long behind him – until Mac Eoin gave a practical demonstration on how to disarm someone by pinning Browne’s hand behind his back. Despite the twenty-two years’ difference between them, the younger Browne was helpless to break out.[15]

Seán Mac Eoin in later years

In any case, Mac Eoin drew the card with the words ‘Trust in God, have patience and wait!’ That was fate’s signal that he should accept things for the moment and stay put.[16]

‘…Have Patience and Wait’

Seán Mac Eoin

But, if he would have to endure proceedings stoically, then there was no reason to do so passively. “The closing stage of the trial before Court Martial in Dublin yesterday of John Joseph McKeon of Ballinalee,” reported the Evening Herald on the 15^th June 1921, “was marked by a remarkable speech by the accused from the dock.” The first draft had been smuggled out beforehand by Noyk and handed to Collins, who made some slight amendments before Noyk passed it back to his client on the morning of the trial. Otherwise, the words Mac Eoin delivered were his own.[17]

“Officers and gentlemen of the court-martial,” he began:

When you opened this court-martial this morning, I told you I was an officer of the Irish Republican Army and that, as such, claimed treatment as an officer. But, gentlemen, you are here to try me, not as an officer, but as a murderer. Why? Just because I took up arms in defence of my native land? The defence of one’s native land has ever been a privilege to the people of all nations.

As such, as a soldier, he had always abided by the rules of war, including fair treatment of all prisoners he had taken, some of whom would testify to the truth of that. In contrast had been the treatment meted out to him in Mullingar, when his captors had beaten him with rifle-butts.

I have no reason to disparage them in any way or to say anything that is not true, but they did that. I will not say that they did it according to their orders and I will not say that they did it without orders…I was called a murderer in the Day Room of the Barracks. Anyone can understand easily that when I went into the Day Room there was a hubbub – “McKeon the murderer is in.” Yes, but I say: “McKeon the man was in.”

When Mac Eoin had found himself cornered by Crown forces in a cottage in Ballinalee on the 7^th January 1921, five months ago, his intent had not been to kill DI McGrath, at least not specifically. Since there were two elderly ladies with him inside, Mac Eoin had had no wish to stand his ground and bring the war to them; instead, he charged out to meet his foes head-on, regardless of the numbers arrayed against him:

Fire was opened by both sides simultaneously. After the first exchange, I noticed that the officer [McGrath] had fallen and that his men were running away down the road. But I wish to emphasis that I fired at enemy forces, not at any particular individual.

McGrath, he explained, “had simply fallen in the fight” as a casualty of combat. It was an explanation, not an excuse. He was no murderer, as the people of Longford and his comrades-in-arms well knew, and he praised both, the former group for their confidence in him, and the latter for gallantry and loyalty, even in the face of overwhelming odds. As for his audience:

From you, I crave no mercy and no favour. I am an officer of the Irish Army and I merely claim the same right at your hands as you would have receive at mine had the fortunes of war reversed the positions. If you do not give me that right, and if you execute me instead, then there is one request that I make. It is that you give my dead body to my relatives so that my remains may be laid to rest amongst my own people.

At this, the speech came to its end. Back went on the handcuffs, and it was left to Bewley to step back in for the rest of his dogged defence.[18]

Clonfin Recollections

Strictly speaking, what Bewley introduced next was not evidence of his client’s innocence; if anything, they confirmed his military activities against Crown rule in Ireland – not that Mac Eoin had denied them. Bewley admitted as such, explaining that the witnesses he now called were as character references for the accused. It was an unorthodox approach, and even more so because the witnesses in question had been on the receiving end of the Clonfin Ambush, which Mac Eoin had led as the IRA Longford Flying Column commander, on the 2^nd February 1921.[19]

IRA Flying Column

And yet, as men like Cadet Smith took the stand, it was apparent that there was some truth to Mac Eoin’s claim to have followed battlefield decorum:

Bewley: Were you in the first or second lorry at the time of this ambush?

Smith: In the second.

Bewley: You saw the first lorry blown up in front of you?

Smith: I saw the mine go up.

Bewley:  And then your lorry was stopped?

Smith: Yes.

Bewley: Was fire then opened upon you?

Smith: Yes.

Bewley: After putting up a fight for some considerable time, I understand you surrendered?

Smith: Yes.

RIC patrol on Crossley Tenders

Bewley: Before you surrendered, did you hear him call on you to surrender or anything of that sort?

Smith: Several people called on us to surrender.

Bewley: There was no ill-treatment of any of you after the surrender?

Smith: No.

Bewley: After the surrender and you had been disarmed, did you speak to McKeon?

Smith: I spoke to McKeon. First of all, he shook hands with me and told me we had put up a good fight. After that, he left me and I went up to him again after a time and asked if I could go and get some water for some of our men who were wounded. He gave me permission to go and said he would send one of his men with us and I went with another cadet and got the water.

Bewley: Did you see any attempts at violence at any of your party?

Smith: We saw one of the men on the other side of the road hit Cadet Maddock across the face and also make a statement that he wanted to shoot us but McKeon stopped him.

Bewley: After a while, did you see McKeon doing anything for any of your wounded?

Smith: He attempted to help DI Taylor to bandage his wounds but he did not have time because the police arrived.

Bewley: He left because your reinforcements were coming up?

Smith: That is correct.

Bewley: Do you know whether he made any arrangements about your taking one of your lorries to go away in?

Smith: Yes, he said that we could have one of our lorries to take the dead and wounded away in and also that he would send a doctor along to us.

Wreckage of a British military vehicle at Kilmichael, Co, Cork, November 1920

The next witness, Cadet T.J. Wilford, corroborated Smith’s testimony, as part of which he recounted an exchange between the defendant and another of the Auxiliaries at Clonfin that day, called Keeble:

I heard [Keeble] say “Now you have killed three or four of our fellows and wounded several of them, are you going to take our lives as well?”, and McKeon said “No, I am going to let you go, and get your wounded away as best you can.

Perhaps it was just as well that the Mullingar Volunteers had failed to kill the witnesses. All that was left was the summing up of the respective counsels, though there was a brief diversion into theology when the Judge Advocate brought up how Mac Eoin had supposedly uttered an act of contrition into the ear of the fallen McGrath:

Judge: You will probably think that [from] the evidence that the District Inspector was dead before he could have done that is true. However, it may be what is a little difficult to understand is why this whispered act of contrition was necessary if the accused was engaged in an act of legitimate warfare as is alleged in this case.

Bewley: The act of contrition has a rather different signification.

Judge: I may be wrong. I am not a member of the Roman Catholic Church and I entirely withdraw it.

Bewley: If I might state it to the Court very shortly, an act of contrition is a sentiment of contrition for all the sins of his past life which a dying man would naturally wish to express personally, and if the dying man appears to be so weak that he would not be able to express it, any Catholic would consider it his duty to repeat the act of contrition into his ear, and if the  District Inspector assented to it, it would be the same as if he himself had expressed it.

Judge: You mean the accused is in this case saying something to the District Inspector which he thinks the District Inspector would himself have liked to express?

Bewley: Yes.

Judge: I entirely withdraw what I said.[20]

‘The Big Four’

Eamonn Duggan

Not withdrawn was the inevitable penalty for murder, as DI McGrath’s death remained as per British law, and Mac Eoin was duly sentenced to death. The day after, he was transferred to the condemned row in Mountjoy. Seeing Arthur Griffith, Michael Staines and Eamonn Duggan in the exercise-grounds outside his window, he threw out to them the paper notification of his sentence, folded up in a match-box, for them to retrieve.[21]

With word getting around of his impending fate, Mac Eoin could enjoy at least a certain celebrity as a member of the ‘Big Four’, whose cells adjoined each other’s. One half of the quartet, Mac Eoin and John Donnelly, were under sentence of death, while the other pair, Frank Carty and Christie Carberry, had had the distinction of lengthy jail terms bestowed on them.

Frank Carty

Donnelly’s trial had been two days before Mac Eoin’s for his part in an ambush on Brunswick Street, Dublin, during which he received four bullets and required two operations to survive. While in the prison yard together, Mac Eoin confided in Donnelly the latest scheme to get them out; when one had failed, another was grown, like the heads of the legendary Hydra. This time it was by the IRA engineers, tasked by an unabating Collins with tunnelling along the canal side of Mountjoy and into the yard. Complications arose, however, thwarting escape yet again, and though Mac Eoin assured Donnelly that other plans were in the Collins pipeline, the sand in the hourglass for both of the condemned was fast running down.

With nothing else to do, Mac Eoin:

…told me on exercise that one of the Chief Wardens, Mr Breslin, had smuggled in two revolvers, one for Mac Eoin and one for me, and on the morning that we were to be executed, we were to die fighting sooner than be hanged. We were just getting transferred to the condemned cells when the Truce [of 11^th July 1921] came in.[22]

Even with hostilities at a halt, Mac Eoin was not out of the fire quite yet. As a prequel to the peace talks in London, it was decreed that all elected representatives of Dáil Éireann who were under lock and key – totalling thirty-five TDs, scattered about in institutions like Mountjoy, Dundalk, Shrewsbury and Dartmoor Prisons, Ballykinlar and Curragh Camps, and Spike Island – be released in time to attend a Dáil session on the 16^th August 1921.

The men behind the wire at Ballykinlar Internment Camp

Not that anything in Ireland was ever quite so simple, for, in a pronouncement from Dublin Castle on the 6^th August:

His Majesty’s Government have decided that one member, J.J. McKeon, who has been convicted of murder, cannot be released.

What with all the ambushes, assassinations and gunplay dominating the headlines and history books, it is easy to forget that the War of Independence was as much a political as military one. Mac Eoin was TD for the Longford-Westmeath seat, a standing he had probably not given much thought to – the 16^th August was to be the first opening of the Dáil in a long, long while – but which reared up as one of utmost importance now.

In response to the caveat:

It was officially stated last night [7^th August 1921] on behalf of Dáil Éireann that there can be no meeting of Dáil Éireann until Commandant J.J. McKeon is released. It was added that the refusal to release him appears to indicate a desire on the part of the English Government to terminate the truce.

Further pronounced was how, unless Mac Eoin was freed within the next forty-eight hours, the Truce would indeed be considered null and void. Just when Mac Eoin, and Ireland as a whole, had been granted a respite, circumstances were conspiring to steal even that. With no Truce, the war would be resumed, and Mac Eoin’s sentence carried out, barring one of Collins’ attempts at playing Scarlet Pimpernel finally succeeding in the eleventh hour.[23]

Wit and Wisdom

David Lloyd George

Mac Eoin’s fate had already been of intense interest to figures on both sides of the Anglo-Irish divide, such as Frank Heming, Assistant Secretary to the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s office. According to a conversation with Mac Eoin in the Irish Embassy in London, in the very different time of 1938, Heming had already saved Mac Eoin’s before, in June 1921, when he was first scheduled to be hanged.

Recognising the spanner that Mac Eoin’s death would throw in the burgeoning peace talks, Heming went so far as to enter 10 Downing Street unannounced, to the back-garden, where David Lloyd George was trying to relax with his grandchild. More politics was the last thing a peevish Prime Minister wanted to spend his rare break discussing, but Heming persisted, so he recounted to Mac Eoin:

Mr Heming told me he was explaining in detail what he considered would be the reactions to my execution when at this point the grandchild caught the Prime Minister’s hand  and said, “Granddaddy! Come and play!”, to which he replied, “I cannot play now. I have to decide whether a man will live or die”, and that the child replied, “Let him live, Granddaddy! And come on and play!”; then Lloyd George turned to him, Heming, and said, “There is your answer! Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings comes the decision.”[24]

That is, if Lloyd George really allowed young children to decide state policy. A more hard-nosed analysis was provided by General Nevil Macready, commander of the British Army in Ireland, however little he liked the posting, loathing as he did the country and its convoluted ways. To him, the insurgency of the past three years had been nothing more than “an orgy of murder”, with culpability firmly on rebel shoulders.

Alfred Cope

Nonetheless, Macready kept himself objective when Alfred Cope, Assistant Under-Secretary for Ireland, came to seek his views on the Irish threats to refuse any further peace overtures should Mac Eoin not be freed. Why Mac Eoin should have been singled out in the first place, Macready did not know, putting it down to “some inscrutable reason” – one could imagine his eyes rolling to the heavens as he wrote this in his memoirs – of his civilian overseers in Westminster. In any case, he told Cope he would not protest Mac Eoin’s release, seeing it as a political rather than military responsibility. He repeated this answer when asked again, this time officially by his government.

Privately, Macready rather liked Mac Eoin, in so much as he liked anything Irish, having chatted with him a few times while the latter was recuperating in the King George V Military Hospital from the bullet-wound received in Mullingar. Mac Eoin was one of the few IRA men Macready had met possessive of a sense of humour, a distinction he shared with Collins. Hibernian humour was a subject on which Macready had much to say. “Although the Irish as a race are devoid of humour,” he advised, “it is essential to the peace of mind of anyone who has dealings with them.”

Sir Nevil Macready

The exception to the rule, Mac Eoin “struck me as a more cheery individual than most of his fellows,” who tended to be of a “fanatical, bitter cast of countenance,” as Macready found them.[25]

Mac Eoin’s wit was on display during a visit in Mountjoy by Canon Markey, a priest from back home in Longford. To the padre’s blasé assurances that everything would be alright, Mac Eoin retorted that he had never known of anyone dropped with a rope around their neck and being the better for it. But Canon Markey was a man of boundless faith, and repeated to the Doubting Thomas before him that Mac Eoin would indeed be fine.[26]

The Final Lap

And he was.

Finally released as demanded and advised, Mac Eoin was awarded a hero’s welcome in his native Longford, the first time he had been back since his fateful departure for Dublin in February 1921, six months ago. Over a hundred people were present on the 11^th August 1921, at his reception in St Mel’s College, Longford town. More crowds waited at Ballinalee as Mac Eoin drove there the following day to his home, accompanied by his mother and sister in the car, passing bonfires that lit up the morning darkness.

Statue of Seán Mac Eoin in Ballinalee, Co. Longford

Yet more multitudes pressed to watch as he travelled next to Bunlahy, Granard, Clonfin and then back to Ballinalee, in what “can only be described as a triumphal march,” according to the Irish Independent, during which Mac Eoin was often obliged:

…to descend from his motor to return the hearty welcome given him. Old women knelt down on bended knees as if in reverence to the great hero, whilst old men and children approached him with tear-dimmed eyes.[27]

Similarly appreciative were his fellow TDs and comrades-in-arms at the opening of Dáil Éireann in the Mansion House, Dublin, on the 16^th August 1921. When his turn came to stand and take the oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, it prompted a burst of applause. In his début as a political figure, Mac Eoin looked different to what many had been expecting of the famed guerrilla warrior but, then, so did many others, such as a boyish Collins and a delicate-seeming Richard Mulcahy.[28]

The Dáil meeting inside the Mansion House, Dublin

All three had previously attended another, more low-key meeting, one for the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. A long-time initiate in the secret fraternity, Mac Eoin was now elevated to its ruling council, as part of which he was directed by Collins, its president, to propose the election of Éamon de Valera for another presidency, that of the Irish Republic, at a parliamentary session on the 26^th August 1921. Though the ironic hindsight – given the schism between Mac Eoin and de Valera to come, centred around the issue of a very different type of oath of allegiance – would border on ridiculous, it was a great honour for Mac Eoin, and Collins clearly had big plans for the man on whose behalf he had spent so much time and effort.[29]

But it was not all business between the pair. As Mac Eoin told Brian Farrell in an interview for Radio Telefis Éireann, many years later, on the 24^th August 1962:

Brian Farrell

Farrell: [Collins] had the reputation in his play hours of being a very boisterous man. Did you ever have any contact with this apart from your initial contact?

Mac Eoin: Only once, the day I was released. When I met him at Vaughan’s Hotel he jumped from the top of the steps outside the hotel down on top of me and flattened me on Parnell Square. That was the affectionate way he had of greeting me.

Farrell: This sort of big boisterousness.

Mac Eoin: Yes, it was a loveable way.[30]

Michael Collins (third from left) posing with others, including Seán Mac Eoin (far right) in Free State army uniform

To be continued in: Shadows and Substance: Seán Mac Eoin and the Slide into Civil War, 1922

References

[1] Leonard, Joe (BMH / WS 547), pp. 16-9

[2] Caffrey, John Anthony (BMH / WS 569), p. 9

[3] Leonard, p. 19

[4] Mac Eoin, Seán (BMH / WS 1716, Part II), pp. 205-6

[5] Irish Times, 16/05/1921

[6] Noyk, Michael (BMH / WS 707), p. 82

[7] Flynn, Bartholomew (BMH / WS 1552), pp. 10-1

[8] McKeon, James (BMH / WS 436), p. 21

[9] Noyk, pp. 85-6

[10] Mac Eoin, Part I, p. 34

[11] Ibid, pp. 42-3

[12] Ibid, pp. 67-8

[13] Noyk, p. 85

[14] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 208-11

[15] Browne, Noël. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1986), p. 6

[16] Mac Eoin, Part II, p. 211

[17] Evening Herald, 15/06/1921 ; Noyk, p. 86

[18] Mac Eoin, Part I, pp. 109-11

[19] Ibid, p. 115

[20] Ibid, pp. 121-5

[21] Ibid, Part II, p. 212

[22] Donnelly, John (BMH / WS 626), pp. 4-5

[23] Irish Times, 08/09/1921

[24] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 215-6

[25] Macready, Nevil. Annals of an Active Life, Vol. II (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1924]), pp. 584-6, 604

[26] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 217-8

[27] Irish Independent, 13/08/1921

[28] Irish Times, 17/08/1921

[29] Ibid, 27/08/1921 ; Mac Eoin, Part II, p. 220

[30] University College Dublin Archives, Seán Mac Eoin Papers, P151/1852

Bibliography

Books

Browne, Noël. Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986)

Macready, Nevil. Annals of an Active Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1924])

Newspapers

Evening Herald

Irish / Sunday Independent

Irish Times

Bureau of Military History Statements

Caffrey, John Anthony, WS 569

Donnelly, John, WS 626

Flynn, Bartholomew, WS 1552

Leonard, Joe, WS 547

Mac Eoin, Seán, WS 1716

McKeon, James, WS 436

Noyk, Michael, WS 707

University College Dublin Archives

Seán Mac Eoin Papers

Caught by a Whisker: Seán Mac Eoin and the Fight for his Life, 1921 (Part I)

The Ride Back

Seán Mac Eoin

It was with a stroke of luck that the two passengers found an empty train carriage as the space and privacy allowed them to store their parcel on the luggage rack. The package was not one they would otherwise have treated so casually, given how it was full of ammunition. With that, the pair settled down to a leisurely return journey from Dublin to Co. Longford, where both of them – Seán Mac Eoin and James Brady – were active members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).[1]

It was on IRA business that Mac Eoin had visited Dublin, in response to the mailed orders of Cathal Brugha, the Minister for Defence for the underground rebel government. Mac Eoin was somewhat surprised – the Minister did not usually contact others directly – and not wholly thrilled at the summons, given how he was a hunted man, wanted by the British authorities in connection with a number of ambushes that he had led as O/C of the Longford IRA flying column.

In addition, there was the murder charge concerning a police officer, cut down by gunfire while investigating a house Mac Eoin and some others were in. If caught, he would almost certainly be executed. But Mac Eoin was a soldier, and soldiers follow orders, so he journeyed to the big city in the last week of February 1921, accompanied by Brady, who had served as a driver in one of the column’s ambushes.

IRA Flying Column

Following the directions he had been given, Mac Eoin went alone to the candle factory on Bachelor’s Walk that served as Brugha’s headquarters. The Minister got briskly down to business, cross-examining his guest on his military progress for the past year. Brugha was a thorough interrogator but Mac Eoin had taken the precaution of bringing a diary – the handwriting artfully indecipherable to all but himself – and was able to answer each of the questions posed to him.

Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin (today)

This took some time. When Brugha was finally done, he moved to the next item on his agenda. As Mac Eoin recalled:

He told me that his reason for asking me so many searching questions was a big one, that he wanted to take me away from the Longford work, and give me a far more difficult job – in London. How would I like that?

Choosing his words carefully, Mac Eoin replied that he would do whatever instructed. Liking or disliking was not a factor. Brugha appeared satisfied at this and proceeded to inform him that he was to undertake the most important mission so far in their war against Britain.[2]

Mission to London

Cathal Brugha

This was nothing less than the assassination of the entire British Cabinet. Fighting the Crown forces on Irish soil was all very well, Brugha explained, but would not in itself save Ireland. For every foe slain could simply be replaced, with the campaign of murder and arson continued in Ireland, and the people of Britain none the wiser about the crimes committed in their name.

Striking at the heart of the Westminster Establishment, well, that would be a very different matter, one which the British public would have no choice but to sit up and take notice of. Mac Eoin was thus to lead the selected team to London, with each member allocated the name of the Government Minister he was to execute. Logistics would be left to Mac Eoin to handle – that is, if he accepted.

Brugha stared at Mac Eoin straight in the eye, waiting for the ‘yay or ‘nay’, leaving the other man distinctly uncomfortable; not so much with the morality of the operation – if it was legitimate to kill the invader of your country, surely it was equally just to do so to the one who sent him in the first place – but the practicalities.

After a minute of silence with which to muster his thoughts, Mac Eoin:

…explained that I thought I was not the man to lead such a party…Did he realise that I was only a plain, simple country lad, inexperienced and untraveled, who had never been beyond Dublin, and, even in Dublin, would be a poor leader of a mission.

Not at all, Brugha brusquely reassured him in his not-very-reassuring manner. Mac Eoin was just the man for the job – which, by the way, was to start on Wednesday, in two days’ time.

This startled Mac Eoin into further protest. There were duties of his back in Longford that would need to be settled, he said. Though Brugha initially resisted sparing Mac Eoin any further time, he at last relented: Mac Eoin could head off to London on the Friday instead. The pair shook hands, sealing the deal, upon which Mac Eoin took his leave to seek the rest of the IRA leadership in Dublin.[3]

If Mac Eoin had been surprised and more than a bit flustered at Brugha’s briefing, then Michael Collins was aghast when Mac Eoin relayed the details of the undertaking to him. “You are mad!” Collins said. “Do you think that England has only the makings of one Cabinet?”

Michael Collins

As if not angry enough, Collins was flummoxed as to why Mac Eoin was wasting time in Dublin when he already had more than enough work to do in his native county. Collins ordered him back to Longford henceforth, to which Mac Eoin – however little he liked the situation – stood his ground, pointing out that Brugha, as Minister for Defence, could not simply be overruled, least of all by a mere verbal command. Calming down, Collins promised to provide him with a more concrete directive in writing.[4]

In this, Collins was true to his word. When they met next on the Wednesday, Collins handed Mac Eoin a letter from Brugha, cancelling the mission to London. As good and dutiful a soldier as he was, Mac Eoin doubtlessly breathed a sigh of relief – whatever arguments Collins had made or strings he pulled behind the scenes had worked. Mac Eoin was now free to return home, to pick up the fighting from where he had left off in Longford, and not a minute too soon.[5]

That is, if he made it back at all.

A Soldier’s Attempt

From the Irish Times, 4^th March 1921:

A report that McKeon [alternative spelling], the rebel leader in Ballinalee, who was wanted by the police on several charges, was captured at Mullingar on the arrival of the night mail on Wednesday [2^nd March 1921], is confirmed at Longford.

It is stated that the fugitive, who travelled in a third class carriage, was surrounded by the military and police, and that in an attempt to escape he was fired on and seriously wounded. McKeon, who is a blacksmith by trade, had been “on the run” for many months.[6]

Mullingar Train Station (today)

From the sworn testimony of a police witness for the prosecution during the court-martial of Séan Mac Eoin, three months later, on the 14^th June 1921:

Q: Were you stationed at Mullingar with a party of police in March of this year?

A: Yes.

Q: On the 2^nd March, were you at the Railway Station?

A: Yes.

Q: On the arrival of the 9 o’clock train from Dublin that night?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you see some male passengers on the platform?

A: Yes, a number of male passengers were taken from the train after it came in and lined up on the platform and searched. Among them was a man who gave his name as Smith from Aughnacliffe.

Q: When you heard him say that did you say anything?

A: Yes, I recognised him and I said: “You are John James McKeon from Ballinalee.”[7]

Irish Times, 4^th March 1921:

As the police and military were marching the prisoners from the station…McKeon made a dash for liberty…Shots rang out, and McKeon was struck, but continued to run.

Being a very quick runner, he had gained considerable ground when he was again hit, the bullet passing through the right breast. When he was turning into a gateway he was hit in the arm, and felled. He was then taken to the police barracks in the town under a heavy escort, and his condition is considered precarious.[8]

Mullingar Garda Station, formerly the RIC barracks where Seán Mac Eoin was taken after capture

Q: Did you proceed to take him to the barracks?

A: Yes.

Q: Was he handcuffed on the way to the barracks?

A: Yes.

Q: During the journey to the barracks, did he make a determined effort to escape from the escort?

A: He did.

Q: Was he recaptured?

A: He was.

Q: During the process, was he fired at and wounded?

A: Yes.

Q: On the way to the barracks after being wounded, did he say anything?

A: Yes. Going on towards the barracks he turned to me and said, “You are right, I am the man. I made a soldier’s attempt to escape and failed.” Then, after a pause, he said: “I know I am for a firing squad, anyway.”[9]

Seán Mac Eoin in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer

A Mullingar Mess

To add insult to injury, the whole debacle could have been avoided. Mac Eoin’s capture had been the consequence of carelessness, by others – and himself.

While contemporary accounts indicate that the discovery of Mac Eoin in Mullingar had been by chance, Mac Eoin later told a different spin on the story to Ann Farrington, manager of the Crown Hotel, adjoining the Gresham on O’Connell Street, where Mac Eoin stayed while in Dublin, as did a number of other rebel leaders such as Collins, Eoin O’Duffy and Dan Breen. Mac Eoin had a number of aliases under which to sign in – ‘Mr Brown’, ‘Mr Black’, ‘Mr Green’ and so on – but he was less cautious during his last stay, when he had with him a female acquaintance, who he intended to use as a courier for orders to his Longford IRA column.

The Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, Dublin (today)

As the pair sat opposite each other at a table in the hotel smoking-room:

He took a sheet of paper and started writing out the message and when he had finished he put it in an envelope which he closed and handed to her. He was not aware that she had followed every word as he wrote it and therefore knew the contents of the message.

What followed then is a matter of conjecture on Farrington’s part, but, according to her, the girl – who Farrington had never seen before or since, and whose name is unknown – passed on the envelope as instructed, and then went to her uncle, a retired RIC man:

Evidently the uncle went to the Tans and told them about the message which gave the clue about the train he intended to travel by. As a result the train was met in Mullingar by the Tans who started to search for McKeon.

As for further details, Farrington wrote, “probably Seán himself would be able to give the information.”[10]

Mac Eoin did not, making no mention of any double-crossing colleen or leaked itinerary in his own account. He noted, however, that his train stopped at a different platform in Mullingar Station than expected, one crowded with RIC personnel and British soldiers, who ordered the passengers out before lining them up for inspection. With them was a Head Constable who had previously escorted Mac Eoin to jail in 1919 and was thus qualified to recognise the fugitive – as indeed he did.

Black-and-Tans search Irish suspects (possibly staged photo)

Even so, Mac Eoin could have escaped, as one of the other senior policemen present, District Inspector Harrington, was one of Michael Collins’ many agents within the Crown forces. Mac Eoin was to learn that Harrington had been instructed by Collins to alert the Mullingar IRA of Mac Eoin’s arrival and for them to stop the train and take him off before it pulled into the station – “a tip that the Mullingar Brigade, never any good, had failed to act upon,” as Mac Eoin stingingly put it.[11]

He would have been even angrier had he known the difference a simple bicycle could have made. A telegram from Dublin Castle to the Mullingar police had been intercepted by another rebel mole, this being Jimmy Hynes, the principal telegraphist in Mullingar Post Office. Upon Mac Eoin’s arrest, Hynes asked his IRA contact what had happened. Had he not received the warning Hynes had sent?

“Yes,” said the other man, “but I could not get a bicycle.”[12]

‘Alas and Alas!’

Michael Noyk

Mac Eoin’s arrest was a heavy blow, not least to Collins, who would be preoccupied by his fate for as long as it hung in the balance. Michael Noyk, an in-house solicitor for the revolutionary underground, described Mac Eoin as being “one of the special favourites of Michael Collins,” who paid tribute to him as being worth four or five other men.[13]

Efforts to rescue Mac Eoin began a day or two after his arrest, when Collins dispatched seven members of his ‘Squad’ to Leixlip, Co. Kildare, through which, it was believed, Mac Eoin would be transported en route to Dublin. Collins would have sent more but those were the most to be found at such short notice.

Time, after all, was of the essence.

Members of the ‘Squad’

The selected men drove to Leixlip, keeping their eyes along the road for the Red Cross ambulance Mac Eoin was supposed to be hidden in and their firearms ready should the chance of a hijack arise. It did not and, with no sight of the desired vehicle, the would-be-rescuers returned to Dublin, where Mac Eoin already was, having been delivered by a different way as it turned out.[14]

Perhaps this failure was just as well. Inside the ambulance with Mac Eoin had been two policemen and an army officer, all armed with guns that they intended to use on him in the event of trouble, as they warned at the start. Mac Eoin protested that this was hardly appropriate for the Red Cross; besides, he was still weak from the wounds received from his ill-fated dash for freedom but the officer replied: “We know you too well to take any risk” – which was a compliment of sorts.

The ambulance drove first in the opposite direction towards Longford, then doubled back through Meath and reached Dublin by the Trim-Belfast road – a roundabout route, but it did the trick of outfoxing any ambushers. After more than two years of insurgency, the British were becoming savvy to Ireland’s ways.

The first stop was the King George V Military Hospital, for a bullet still lay buried beneath the skin at the back of Mac Eoin’s shoulder, requiring an operation to extract. This process was not a pleasant one, for Mac Eoin refused any anaesthetic stronger than a localised sort for fear of spilling any incriminating secrets in a drugged state.

St Bricin’s Military Hospital (formerly the King George V Military Hospital)

But the pain was worth it, with the offending item successfully plucked out, and Mac Eoin had the first glimmer of hope when the hospital chaplain startled him with word from the ‘Big Fellow’: Collins was planning to send a group of his followers disguised in British uniforms on the following evening, at 11 pm:

I need not say that this was joyful intelligence to me. I slept very little that night, but did not care, and every hour of the next day was long in passing until night should come – and the fateful eleven o’clock. But my fate was settled two hours earlier for, on the stroke of nine o’clock, I was astonished to see a military officer walk into me – attended by his satellites. But alas and alas! They proved to be real Britishers.[15]

There was nothing be done but allow himself to be transferred to his accommodation at Mountjoy Prison. Since he was still on the mend, he was allowed a ground-floor room in the hospital wing, facing the main building, which Mac Eoin could see through a window with about half a dozen iron bars across.

A formidable obstacle, to be sure, but one that would hopefully be breached by the hacksaw that a female visitor had smuggled in under her overcoat, complete with instructions from Collins – who was not one to give up – for Mac Eoin, at the assigned time on a certain date, to saw his way through. Then Mac Eoin was to cross the yard to the prison wall, in time for the wicket gate there to be opened by men from the Dublin IRA, waiting on the other side.

IRA men

in his weakened state, Mac Eoin succeeded in cutting through the bars, working at intervals to allow for the turnkey on duty to pass by obliviously. Only the last few inches of metal remained, and Mac Eoin rested in bed, mustering his strength for the final push, when a doctor stopped by to check on him. Shocked at his patient’s high temperature, the conscientious-but-meddlesome physician ordered the warden to remove Mac Eoin to a different room, one on the third floor for the fresh air.

“And another bright hope of Séan MacEoin was nipped in the bud,” the man in question later bewailed in the third person.[16]

Mountjoy Prison

A Rescue Planned

With the days counting down towards Mac Eoin’s court-martial and the almost inevitable sentence of death, only the direct approach was left to try.

The germ of the idea came when Michael Lynch noticed the armoured car outside the Dublin Corporation abattoir on North Circular Road every morning to escort the van picking up the daily meat for the British Army. Lynch was in an unusual position, being Superintendent of the butchery as well as O/C of Fingal IRA Brigade, a combination of civilian and guerrilla duties that required him to be absent from work during the day until he could enter the slaughterhouse at night when everyone else had gone.

It was his wife, from their house opposite the abattoir gate, who drew his attention to the armoured vehicle, and Lynch, seeing its potential for the IRA’s own use, relayed this to Collins. Collins was infuriated at what he saw as a fool’s errand but Lynch was adamant. He had been observing the car for some time from his window and how sloppy the crew had become through routine, to the point of leaving their ride unguarded save for a mere padlock on a chain. Collins sent two of his Squad, Joe Leonard and Charlie Dalton, to the Lynch residence to gauge the potential prize for themselves.

Members of the Squad, with Joe Leonard (far left) and Charlie Dalton (far right)

What they reported back must have satisfied Collins for, at a subsequent meeting, he announced to the others that the car was to be seized and put to use for a very special job: the liberation of Seán Mac Eoin from the bowels of British captivity.[17]

But, first, planning was key. With help from a sympathetic warden in Mountjoy, one of the many pair of eyes and ears so essential to the rebel underground, Collins:

…got all the local information about wardens, position of Military guards, police and auxiliary relief times. Seán McKeon had been instructed to get an interview on any complaint pretext, every morning at 10 a.m. with the Governor, and so be on the outside of three obstructing gates when an attempted rescue would be made.[18]

Taking the armoured car would be the first step in this complicated scheme. In preparation for this, Lynch procured some Dublin Corporation uniform caps for the IRA men assigned to the mission to wear inside the abattoir, which they did for five consecutive day beforehand, in order to keep the soldiers who came by complacent.

Paddy Daly

But there was still so much that could go wrong. Even if only one or two of the targets stayed inside the car, they could slam the door shut and deny the ambushers access. In addition, Lynch was aware that some of the IRA men involved had a tendency to shoot first and ask question afterwards. With his wife, sister and children in their house across from the abattoir, the last thing Lynch wanted was a stray bullet. To help put his mind at ease, Paddy Daly, the officer in charge of this step of the rescue, agreed that, once things began, he would remove the Lynch household upstairs and lock them in a bedroom.[19]

The only thing left to do…was do.

“Well, good luck,” Collins said as the men set forth, “but whatever happens, come back.”[20]

Carjack

Daly and Mrs Lynch were watching through the window of the latter’s home as the armoured car stopped by the abattoir as expected on the 14^th May 1921. What was not expected, but feared, was how the passengers had not all disembarked, putting the plan too gravely at risk to proceed. It would have to wait until the following morning….and then Mrs Lynch saw the remaining soldiers step out on to the pavement. Daly had turned to leave when Mrs Lynch shouted out, snapping his focus, and the plan, back on. He blew a whistle and the IRA men on standby rushed to perform their roles.[21]

“In less time than it takes to tell we had taken over the car,” described one participant, John Caffrey, proudly.[22]

British armoured car in Ireland, with soldiers nearby

Lynch would recall a more chaotic, bloodier scene in which a soldier reached for his firearm, only to be cut down by a bullet. Upon hearing the commotion, a second serviceman, acting as an orderly, dashed outdoors:

When he saw the guns in the hands of our men, he pulled up with a jerk. Unfortunately, another man behind him, not realising what was on, bumped into him, pushed him forward, and he emerged from the building, with his right hand down low on his thigh, steadying his butcher’s sheath. Our men told me afterwards that it looked as if he was in the act of pulling a gun, and they fired.[23]

Unfortunate, indeed; of the wounded pair, one would later expire in hospital. The rest of the soldiers quickly surrendered, allowing their vehicle to be boarded and then driven off at great speed. The whole incident, according to one eyewitness, had lasted for no more than ten minutes.[24]

To be continued in: Hanging by a Thread: Seán Mac Eoin and the Trial of his Life, 1921 (Part II)

References

[1] Mac Eoin, Seán (BMH / WS 1716, Part II), p. 181

[2] Ibid, pp. 168-70

[3] Ibid, pp. 171-4

[4] Ibid, pp. 176 -7

[5] Ibid, p. 180

[6] Irish Times, 04/03/1921

[7] Mac Eoin, Part I, p. 84

[8] Irish Times, 04/03/1921

[9] Mac Eoin, Part I, pp. 84-5

[10] Farrington, Ann (BMH / WS 749), pp. 2, 4-5

[11] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 183-5

[12] Maguire, James (BMH / WS 1439), pp. 33-4

[13] Noyk, Michael (BMH / WS 707), pp. 80, 85

[14] Stapleton, William James (BMH / WS 822), p. 51

[15] Mac Eoin, Part II, pp. 194-7

[16] Ibid, pp. 200-4

[17] Lynch, Michael (BMH / WS 511), pp. 123-5

[18] Leonard, Joe (BMH / WS 547), p. 16

[19] Lynch, p. 125

[20] Caffrey, John Anthony (BMH / WS 569), pp. 7-8

[21] Lynch, pp. 125-6

[22] Caffrey, p. 8

[23] Lynch, pp. 126-7

[24] Sunday Independent, 15/05/1921

Bibliography

Newspapers

Irish Times

Sunday Independent

Bureau of Military History Statements

Caffrey, John Anthony, WS 569

Farrington, Ann, WS 749

Leonard, Joe, WS 547

Lynch, Michael, WS 511

Mac Eoin, Seán, WS 1716

Maguire, James, WS 1439

Noyk, Michael, WS 707

Stapleton, William James, WS 822