Espionage and Assasination with Michael Collins' Intelligence Unit: With the Dublin Brigade (2 page)

The Irish struggle of 1916–1921 was not and is not yet understood by those who did not take part in it or sympathize with it. The episodes described in this book are of novel and dramatic interest, and the story told may serve to throw light on the nature of the struggle, and on the startling changes which marked its end.

‘We have got murder by the throat,' said Mr Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, on 9th October 1920. He ‘hoped for good results from maintaining the pressure' which the British armed forces were exerting in Ireland. He ‘could not permit the country to be debased into a condition of complete anarchy where a small body of assassins, a real murder gang, were dominating the country and terrorizing it'. ‘It is,' he exclaimed, ‘a sham and a fraud, the whole of this nationality.' ‘Undoubtedly you must restore order there by methods very stern.' ‘It is essential in the interests of Ireland that that gang should be broken up, and unless I am mistaken, we shall do it.'

The so-called reprisals – acts of terrorism and sabotage – by the British armed forces were casually mentioned by Mr Lloyd George as ‘some severe hitting back by the gallant men who are doing their duty in Ireland'.

To his fellow-banqueters at the London Guildhall in the following month Mr Lloyd George spoke lightly of Ireland as ‘one disturbed corner of the Empire'. He announced that ‘the police were getting the right men', without troubling to explain who ‘the police' were, what ‘getting' meant, or in what sense they were ‘the right men'.

What was the British law and order in Ireland which Mr Lloyd George was enforcing? The London
Times
wrote on 15th November 1920: ‘Persistence in the present method of Irish Government will, we are satisfied, be proved utterly irreconcilable with the ideals of this Christian country.'

Who was terrorizing Ireland and debasing it into a condition of anarchy? Was it overlooked by Mr Lloyd George that while the British administration was deteriorating into a licensed lawlessness, the Irish people were successfully engaged in building up their own self-government?

Historians are still in want of authentic material to explain the turning point when the British Government at last decided that they must seek for peace. At first they set about negotiations secretly through intermediaries, restricting the matters on which they were willing to confer. They let it be known that they would give safe conducts to any accredited Irish negotiators whose names were not upon their ‘black list' as criminals, and, therefore, outside the pale, and that they would give notice in advance of such names. They would exclude from any terms of peace ‘persons reasonably suspected of murder'.

Many of the soldiers of the Irish Republican Army had already been hanged. One Irish officer lay in Mountjoy Jail under sentence of death. But there were at least three men whom the British had not succeeded in capturing (the ‘right men' whom Mr Lloyd George was still hoping to ‘get'), whom it was known the British Government meant as ‘persons reasonably suspected of murder' – Cathal Brugha, the Minister of Defence, Richard Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff, and Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Chief Intelligence Officer, who was being hunted with the price of £10,000 on his head.

Dáil Éireann (the Irish Parliament) had been declared an ‘illegal assembly'. Thirty-six of its members were in penal servitude or otherwise imprisoned or interned. These included Arthur Griffith, who was acting President while President de Valera was in America, and who later headed the Irish plenipotentiaries in London. They also included Seán MacEoin, who had been tried by court martial and sentenced to death. As a General of the Irish Army he was afterwards to take over from the English the stronghold of Athlone. Another member, Robert Barton, was undergoing penal servitude in an English prison, and on his release was chosen as one of the Irish plenipotentiaries.

President de Valera, who had been rescued in 1919 from Lincoln Gaol by Michael Collins, had recently returned from America. On the eve of the Truce he was arrested, but was promptly released, without reason given, obviously with a view to the possibility of negotiations.

Michael Collins himself was alive and free, but not by the grace of the British Government. How he had eluded the hounds who were continually on his track, is one of the miracles of history. The British were aware that Michael Collins dominated and directed the whole movement. His name was the blackest on the British list. He was the supreme outlaw.

But the climax of the long struggle had already been reached. Events had acquired a momentum which was hurrying them to an inevitable conclusion.

In June 1921, the British Government publicly proposed a conference with the Irish leaders. The previous attempts to impose restrictions on the conference were abandoned. The ‘black list' was thrown into the wastepaper basket. In his letter of 24th June 1921 to President de Valera, Mr Lloyd George proposed that he should attend a conference in London ‘to explore to the utmost the possibility of a settlement', and he invited him ‘to bring with him for the purpose any colleagues whom he might select'.

Terms of Truce were arranged between military officers on both sides on 9th July 1921.

A Peace Conference followed. The right of Ireland as a nation under arms to decide its own destiny was acknowledged. By the Treaty of Peace made between the two nations and afterwards ratified by the British Parliament at Westminster and by Dáil Éireann in Dublin, the Irish Government, deriving its authority from the Irish people and controlling its own army and civil administration, was acknowledged by England and the other nations of the world.

Michael Collins, with Arthur Griffith, was one of the Irish plenipotentiaries, and his was one of the signatures to the Treaty. On the 16th January 1922, as head of the Provisional Government, he took over from Lord Fitzalan the historic Dublin Castle, from which for seven centuries the British had sought to exercise dominion over Ireland.

The wheel of destiny, moved by forces which the historian must appraise, had come full circle. The British Government had completed their volte-face.

In December 1922, a year later, Mr Lloyd George, writing a description of the Peace Conference, said:

Opposite to me sat a dark, short but sturdy figure, with the face of a thinker. That was Mr Arthur Griffith … quiet to the point of gentleness, reserved almost to the point of appearing saturnine. A man of laconic utterance … But we found in our few weeks' acquaintance that his ‘yea' was ‘yea,' and his ‘nay' meant ‘nay.' By his side sat a handsome young Irishman. No one could mistake his nationality. He was Irish through and through. Vivacious, buoyant, highly strung, gay, impulsive, but passing readily from gaiety to grimness and back again to gaiety, full of fascination and charm – but also of dangerous fire. That was Michael Collins, one of the most courageous leaders ever produced by a valiant race.

What were the forces which brought one of the most powerful nations in history to recant its indictments and to acknowledge as a nation on an equality with itself, a country which it had long sought to treat as conquered, and to incorporate as a province? Who were the men who brought it about, what were the aims and methods of the leaders, and the men who followed them?

As yet many essential details have remained hidden in mystery, known only to the actors themselves. There had been months and years of endurance, days and nights of agony, yet illumined by a spirit of exultant faith and the joys of comradeship. One or two frank, unadorned pictures by the men who in the humbler positions played an essential part will tell more than any second-hand history, and will enable persons and events to stand out in their truth. This story by a young Irish soldier who took part in the decisive stage of the struggle must appeal to readers who are interested in human character, or appreciate drama, or are concerned with the history of nations. But for those who are not well acquainted with the history of Ireland leading up to and including the period covered by this memoir, the following summary may serve as a prologue.

The Irish people as a nation had never acquiesced in the British occupation. They were never willing citizens of the United Kingdom.

But for half a century before 1916 Ireland's claim to nationality had been represented chiefly by the Irish Parliamentary Party. Its members sat as Ireland's representatives in the British House of Commons. Though always in a minority there, they claimed that by holding the balance of power they would some day be able to force an English Government to restore the Parliament in Dublin, which had been abolished in 1800 by the Act of Union. In the meanwhile, they assisted legislation, especially Land Acts, with a view to ameliorating conditions in Ireland.

But there were always Irishmen who had no such faith in the British Parliament, in its ability to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas, in its right to determine Ireland's destiny, or in its will to listen to the national demand. Consequently, there had been in nearly every generation an armed revolt. Few in numbers, and with inadequate arms (which had to be procured secretly), the insurgents were always defeated. But when they had been hanged, imprisoned, or transported, they became the heroes and martyrs of Ireland, and the faith for which they had suffered remained alive in the imagination of the people.

In 1858, a secret society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known as the Fenians, was founded by James Stephens. The Brotherhood was a militant organization which inherited the ideas of John Mitchell, an earlier patriot-convict. He had asserted that the physical force argument was the only one to which England had ever listened in her relations with Ireland. Any alleviations of the miseries of the Irish under English rule had come only after violence or preparation for violence. The Fenians, further, shared his view that unless a people from time to time asserted its right to freedom by force of arms it surrendered its claim to be a nation.

The existence of the Irish Republican Brotherhood was in due course discovered by the police (the Royal Irish Constabulary, who were trained to act as political detectives), and Stephens and most of the Executive Council, including the writer and patriot, O'Donovan Rossa, were arrested and sentenced to long terms of penal servitude.

The Fenian policy was embodied in the phrase ‘England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity'. The organization survived the arrests of 1865 and was kept in being secretly all through the era of the Irish Parliamentary Party. It was part of its policy that there should be at all times at least a few men who would be prepared to strike a blow for Irish independence whenever a suitable opportunity arose.

In the United States there was a branch of the Brotherhood. It was known there as the Clan-na-Gael. Its leader was John Devoy, who had been arrested with the other Fenians, and who had emigrated to America after serving a long sentence in an English penal prison. Through John Devoy, the Clan-na-Gael was in close touch with the parent organization at home and kept it supplied with funds for every kind of genuine patriotic purpose.

In Ireland the Brotherhood was strengthened by the release in 1909 of another Fenian, an old comrade of Devoy's – Tom Clarke. Clarke had spent twenty years in penal servitude in England, and, on his release, he took a small tobacconist's shop in Parnell Street, Dublin. There he administered the oath of the Brotherhood to a number of ardent young men who found no inspiration in the policy of the parliamentarians.

Besides this secret militant organization there was another with similar aims – the liberation of Ireland from the domination of England – but which looked to other methods to achieve them. This was the Sinn Féin organization founded by Arthur Griffith. In his weekly paper,
The United Irishman
(afterwards
Nationality
), Griffith wrote that Ireland could only be freed by the determined action of Irishmen themselves. He pointed to the example of Hungary and the means by which it was liberated from the grip of Austria. He preached passive resistance to English rule and an active social constructive policy in Ireland, by which the people should gradually take their political affairs into their own hands and squeeze out the British administration. Griffith was not opposed to the use of physical force (when it found its place afterwards in defending Dáil Éireann and in resisting the campaign of the Black and Tans, he supported every action of the Irish Republican Army), but he saw no hope of his people ever being strong enough to free their country by a military victory.

The men who formed these two organizations were in numbers insignificant, but in brain and character they were by no means so. Tom Clarke was a man of burning patriotic faith and unquenchable courage, and his private influence was enormous. He was looked up to by the men who gathered round him as the bearer of the traditional torch of Irish freedom out of the heroic days of the past. Amongst others, he inspired a young man of great charm of personality – Seán MacDermott, who, though in delicate health, tramped through the country towns and villages, enrolling small groups of young patriots into the Brotherhood.

Arthur Griffith's powerful mind and indomitable character were also bound to draw to him men of force and sincerity. Devoted to his faith, he was content to preach in poverty and obscurity, confident that if the time ever came when his policy could be put into practice, Ireland would be free.

There were two other organizations, which, though non-political, fostered the spirit of patriotism and helped to produce the great national revival of later years. They were the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association. The Gaelic League was founded to revive the national language and the Gaelic Athletic Association for the preservation of Gaelic sport. Many of the men of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were members also of one or both of these organizations, and were often recruited from them. There were also the Fianna, a Republican organization of youths recruited from the Dublin streets by Countess Markiewicz, and drilled and trained by her to act as scouts and carry despatches; and Cumann na mBan, the women's branch of the military organization.