Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied For Ireland (4 page)

One weekend in March 1918 Mick went to Longford with Harry Boland. He stayed in the Greville Arms, as he had done many times, and was entertained by the Kiernan sisters. Harry was courting the slim, vivacious, Kitty Kiernan at the time. Though her kind disposition charmed Mick, his friendship with Harry compelled him to keep her at arm's length. He found the lively-minded Helen most receptive to his views and hoped to win her affections, although she was friendly with solicitor Paul McGovern. Another sister Maud had been courted before his death by Mick's friend, Thomas Ashe. Mick's relationship with Susan Killeen was now more on a friendship basis with ‘the cause' being the focal point. His current girlfriend was Sinn Féin sympathiser Madeline (Dilly) Dicker, whose sister Clare had worked in the British Post Office with him. Susan had found another boyfriend to take Mick's place. However, her place of work, P. S. O'Hegarty's bookshop on Dawson Street, was already among Collins' dispatch centres.

After Mass at Legga, near Granard, on this cold, March Sunday, Mick delivered a fiery speech condemning conscription and ‘the raiding of private houses for the purpose of seizing old guns'. He urged that all young men should emulate the ‘noble martyrs' of 1916 who put their own country first – they should join the Irish Volunteers and ‘defend their rifles with their lives'.
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That evening he returned to Dublin; a few days later he headed for Limerick, then Cork, on organisational work. On 2 April he was confronted on Brunswick Street by detectives O'Brien and Bruton. He was, he wrote in his diary:

... detained in Brunswick Street for a few hours in a filthy, ill-ventilated cell ... Removed to Bridewell at 3.15 – 3.30. Cab accompanied by uniformed policeman, two detectives (Smith & Wharton). The latter asked me how everything in the South was – showing they had been observing my weekend movements. Learned later on in the evening that as a matter of fact I had unknowingly slipped them at Kingsbridge on the previous night.

At 6 o'clock the following morning he was ‘rudely awakened', and told to dress. He was escorted to Longford by train, and met at the station by quite a number of friends. During his trial he protested to the judge that he had been kidnapped in Dublin by an ‘unlawful and immoral authority'. His plea was overruled. He was charged with having made a speech at Legga ‘likely to cause disaffection' and remanded to the assizes to be held in July. Meanwhile, he was sent to Sligo jail. In line with Volunteer policy he did not seek bail.

On 11 April, Helen Kiernan visited Michael and gave him all the news of Granard. He was delighted to see her. He persuaded her to stay in town overnight so that she could visit him again next day. After a ‘very bad night's sleep' he recorded he had ‘the pleasure of seeing' Helen again. She promised to pay a return visit. ‘All the people in Granard have always been very nice and kind to me,' he wrote in his journal.

(Some time later, to Michael's disappointment, Helen became engaged to Paul McGovern. He went to her in desperation and pleaded with her not to go through with the marriage but eventually became resigned to the situation.)

In his diary of 10 April he noted, ‘Here alone I am in a state of appalling loneliness with the blackest despair in my heart. Of course the reason for my sadness and loneliness is the thought of the work I might be doing ...'
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In his letter to Hannie on 10 April, he said he was ‘anxious to know what Lloyd George has done about conscription for this country. If he goes for it – well he's ended!'
3
He was unaware that on the previous day Lloyd George had introduced his Manpower Bill in parliament and extended conscription to Ireland. This became law on 16 April. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which for some time had lacked the support of a large section of the Irish people, withdrew from Westminster, thereby playing into the hands of Sinn Féin. The separatist bodies agreed that their members would put up bail so that the imprisoned men could be free to fight the conscription issue. Collins was among the first to be freed on bail.

Mick headed for Granard. Word went ahead of him and the local Volunteers assembled to give him ‘a royal welcome' as he drove through the streets. His visit to the Kiernan sisters was short. Around the dining-room table he told the story of his time in jail and Kitty brought him up to date on their mutual friend, Harry Boland, and on activities in Dublin.

Pressure of organisational work forced him to pick up the threads quickly in the fight against conscription. Though 180,000 Irish men had already volunteered for service in the British army, it was clear that compulsion would not work. Men flocked to the Irish Volunteers. Women joined Cumann na mBan in large numbers. Anti-conscription rallies and protests took on more impetus countrywide. On the night of 17 May and throughout the next day police scoured the country and arrested many of the senior officers of Sinn Féin and the Volunteers on the pretext that they were involved in what became known as ‘the German Plot'. Though there was no organised plot for a ‘rising' with German aid, the authorities used the excuse as a ploy to take the leaders out of circulation.

Collins was annoyed by the arrests. If British intelligence were monitoring the movements of the separatists, why not turn the tables and monitor British intelligence? Dublin Castle detective Joe Kavanagh arrived one day at Capel Street Public Library and handed the librarian Thomas Gay the names of key people listed for arrest. Gay passed the list to Harry Boland. Mick Collins had already received a warning from the young Castle police clerk, Ned Broy, but now he had a list with his own name on it.

During a Sinn Féin Executive meeting held on the night of 18 May 1918, Mick advised certain ‘listed' members to go ‘on the run'. He told Kathleen Clarke she was ‘on the list', but as she had three young children she said she was ‘neither temperamentally nor physically fit for such a life'. She decided to let fate decide. That night she was watched; she was arrested next morning and sent to Holloway Prison, where she was kept until February 1919.
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After the meeting Collins headed for Seán McGarry's house to warn him, but already the raid had begun. Collins, helpless, stood with onlookers as McGarry was taken away. When they left he went in and slept in McGarry's bed. ‘I knew it would be the safest bed in Dublin,' he told Ernie O'Malley.

Arrests such as these helped the anti-conscription lobby, boosted Sinn Féin's political campaign, continued to swell Volunteer enlistment and helped the imprisoned Arthur Griffith to win a seat in the Cavan by-election.

Already Mick Collins had begun to nudge his way into the laneways of the secret service in Ireland, by means of his informants in the heart of Dublin Castle. When in May 1918 the Sinn Féin leaders were arrested because of their opposition to conscription, he began to put his faith more and more in revolutionary methods.

In the same month Mick asked his old friend Joe O'Reilly to join him in his work. O'Reilly would be courier, clerk, valet, cook and buffer for his many moods; cheerfully he would carry out detective work and negotiate with Mick the snares of the British secret service.

Mick kept in regular contact with his friend, Austin Stack, who, with Fionán Lynch, Ernest Blythe and others, was in Belfast jail. Stack would write to Mick via Mick's cousin, Nancy O'Brien, who worked in the GPO.

Although public gatherings had been banned, Sinn Féin and their allies defied the British government and held 1,800 rallies countrywide on 18 August 1918. These rallies, cooperatively organised by Cumann na mBan, the Volunteers, Sinn Féin and Gaelic League members, set the tone of separatism. ‘The conscription proposals are to my liking,' Collins wrote to Hannie, ‘as I think they will end well for Ireland.'
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With sheer methodical detail he correlated the data of every Volunteer company, every battalion, every brigade countrywide – their distance and direction from the nearest town or village, the names and addresses of their officers and whether or not they were in jail. In order to assemble this information he needed a vast network of couriers. These were mostly women, such as Máire Comerford, Leslie Price (who later married Tom Barry) and Sheila Humphreys. Up and down the country they travelled, helping with affiliation forms containing inventories of the arms and equipment, which were scant and obtained mainly by raids on barracks or police personnel. The forms included details of stretchers, bandages, signalling equipment, even pikes.
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Despite his busy schedule Mick found time to write to comrades in prison, often sending some little surprise. ‘I know you don't smoke, but I remember you saying you liked candies,' he wrote to Kathleen Clarke, sending a package to her in Holloway Prison.

Mick knew he had to avoid arrest at all costs. He moved his office to a cellar known as the ‘dugout' in St Ita's in Ranelagh – the school founded by Pádraig Pearse. From here he began to conduct his intelligence business. When he sent Ernie O'Malley to London on IRB work, he was annoyed to find out that Cathal Brugha had men in readiness in London to assassinate British cabinet ministers, should conscription be enforced. O'Malley disliked Brugha's tactics and he knew that Mick did also.

In July, with the sanction of GHQ, Mick asked Piaras Béaslaí to become editor of the secret journal,
An tÓglach.
Mick wrote ‘Notes on Organisation' for
An tÓglach,
and was involved in its publication, as well as distribution and subscriptions. Copies found their way to remote corners of Ireland, in bags of flour, in women's handbags or inside their coats. Mick's personal secretary Sinéad Mason knew his every quirk. She knew when he wanted something done now that it was ‘now!' But she also knew his kind streak and that he valued her judgement.

In November a change came with the signing of the armistice ending the Great War. Volunteers and Cumann na mBan who had worked so unitedly against conscription now had time to turn their attentions more intensely towards the fight for independence.

Lloyd George called a general election, and immediately the Sinn Féin machine prepared to fight. The British parliament granted the parliamentary franchise to all women over thirty, so in this 1918 election women would have a more active part. Both women and men in Sinn Féin courted women voters' newly acquired power, and promised (somewhat unrealistically) that ‘as in the past, so in the future the womenfolk of the Gael shall have high place in the Councils of a freed Gaelic nation'
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As many of Sinn Féin members were in jail it fell on leaders outside, such as Mick Collins, Harry Boland, Diarmuid O'Hegarty, Fr O'Flanagan, Jennie Wyse-Power and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, to select candidates and promote their campaign. ‘The candidates who did face the electorate when Collins and Boland had finished with the lists were all staunch Republicans.'
8

Sinn Féin nominated two women to stand for election – Constance Markievicz (who was in jail) for Dublin and Winifred Carey (who had been a nurse in the GPO in 1916) for Belfast.

Sinn Féin enjoyed a great victory at the expense of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Constance Markievicz was the first women elected to the House of Commons but even when released she, like the other Sinn Féin candidates, was loyal to her election pledge and refused to take her seat. Instead the First Dáil was convened in Dublin in January 1919. (Winifred Carey was unsuccessful in the election.)

Mick and Harry Boland were absent for the first session of the First Dáil on 21 January 1919. They were involved in securing the escape of Éamon de Valera from Lincoln Jail. On Mick's return he found that Dan Breen and some Volunteer comrades, in an attempt to get explosives, had killed two policemen in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary, on the same day as the Dáil's first assembly. Mick was now convinced that ‘all ordinary peaceful means are ended and we shall be taking the only alternative actions in a short while now'.
9

Collins had been appointed minister of home affairs in the opening Dáil, while Cathal Brugha was elected acting president. At the second Dáil meeting on l April 1919, de Valera was elected president – prime minister (príomh aire) of Dáil Éireann. Next day he named his cabinet, which included Michael Collins as minister of finance (he relinquished his home affairs portfolio).

As well as his many tasks, he now had to get accustomed to ministerial duties. Soon his waking hours would eat into his time for sleep. Despite this he found time to drop a few lines to his sister Helena (a nun, Sister Celestine, in England) to tell her about the busy week for Dáil members:

... it has been an historical one for very often we are actors in events that have very much more meaning and consequence than we realise ... The elected representatives of the people have definitely turned their backs on the old order and the developments are sure to be interesting ... We go from success to success in our own guerrilla way. Escapes of prisoners, raids against the enemy, etc.'
10

After a few months of relatively unrestricted movement, he was now truly ‘on the run'. An order had been issued for his arrest owing to his failure to attend the spring assizes in Derry to answer the charge for which a year earlier he had been given bail.

Notes