The Squad (10 page)

The second car with just a driver and luggage was hit by a grenade and largely destroyed, but the driver had a miraculous escape, while the third car, with French’s military escort, came through with blazing gunfire. Sergeant George Rumble claimed to have shot one of the attackers in the head as he was throwing a grenade. Martin Savage was hit in the head. He wasn’t a member of the Squad or the Soloheadbeg gang; he just happened to be with Mick McDonnell that day and, as a veteran of the Easter Rebellion, he was invited along, with fatal consequence. Dan Breen was wounded in the leg.

‘All we could do for Martin Savage was to whisper a prayer, search him for guns and papers and lay him outside Kelly’s public-h o u s e ,’ McDonnell said. Savage’s body however was found with two revolvers, fully loaded. They had not been fired, and there was also a grenade ring on one of his fingers. The authorities also found a document linking Savage to the grocery shop where he worked as a clerk. The proprietor, a Scottish Presbyterian with no republican sympathies, was arrested but was not held for long.

‘The failure to get Lord French was mainly due to the road not being blocked,’ O’Daly later concluded, ‘but had the road been blocked I think none of us would have come back alive from Ashtown, because we were out-numbered by at least three to one, rifles against revolvers. All our bombs would have been gone and we would not have had a chance with revolvers. Had we stopped Lord French’s car we would have stopped the military lorry, and although the element of surprise would have been in our favour we would have been out-numbered.’

French was highly critical of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and only slightly less so of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). ‘Our secret service is simply non-existent,’ he complained. ‘What masquerades for such a service is nothing but a delusion and a snare. The DMP are absolutely demoralised and the RIC will be in the same case very soon if we do not quickly set our house in order.’ In figures for the year up to 11 December, which were published the day before the ambush, 169 policemen had been killed throughout Ireland in 1919, and a further 245 had been wounded, while 52 soldiers had been killed and 108 wounded.

Ian Macpherson was appointed the chief secretary for Ireland in 1918 but he rarely visited the country, with the result that the civil servants were essentially in charge at Dublin Castle. As undersecretary of state, James MacMahon was officially the top civil servant. He was a Dublin Castle Catholic who owed his appointment largely to the influence of Roman Catholic hierarchy. He ‘is not devoid of brains, but lacks initiative, force and driving power,’ concluded a senior British civil servant who was assigned to head a committee evaluating the performance of civil servants at Dublin Castle. MacMahon was by-passed by the assistant under-secretary,Sir John J. Taylor, who was a classic martinet – ‘a loathsome character, bigoted and anti-Irish’, according to Joseph Brennan. Brennan began his career as a civil servant under the British regime, went on to advise Michael Collins on financial affairs, and ultimately became secretary of the department of finance in the Irish Free State. Taylor, who advocated vigorous actions against Sinn Féin and the dáil, sought to centralise everything in his own office. Hopelessly inefficient and out of date, he was a diehard unionist who sought to block all change. His two main allies were his principal clerk, W. J. Connolly, and Maurice Headlam, the treasury remembrancer and deputy pay-master general for Ireland. These three were totally opposed to the idea of trying to kill home rule with kindness, the policy of previous Conservative governments.

Prime Minister Lloyd George had initially been preoccupied with the Paris peace negotiations and he was slow to give the Irish executive any guidance, with the result that Dublin Castle took on a distinctly Orange hew in late 1919 and early 1920. There was an ongoing debate among the crown authorities on how to cope with the massive police resignations and plummeting morale. General Frederick Shaw, the British army commander in Ireland, advocated as early as 19 September 1919 that the RIC should recruit non-Irishmen, or the government should raise a force of discharged soldiers and put them under the command of the police forces. Neither Sir Joseph Byrne, the inspector general of the RIC, nor Colonel Walter Edgeworth-Johnson, the inspector general of the DMP, liked either idea, but their reservations were put aside. The following month the RIC began advertising for men ready to ‘face a rough and dangerous task’ to join at one of the recruiting stations established in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, or Liver pool.

Lord French had Byrne effectively removed as inspector general of the RIC in early December by forcing him to go on leave for a month. T. J. Smith, the commissioner of the Belfast police, replaced Byrne in an acting capacity initially but this was quickly made permanent.

‘Byrne,’ the prime minister wrote to Bonar Law, ‘clearly has lost his nerve. It may, of course, very well be that the task in Ireland is a hopeless one and that Byrne has simply the intelligence to recognise it. However, until we are through with home rule, a man of less intelligence and more stolidity would be a more useful instrument to administer in the interregnum.

‘Smith is very highly spoken of by all who know him best,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘Carson has a high opinion of him.’

Smith, an Ulster loyalist, was so highly partisan in political terms that many of the English took a jaundiced view of the appointment. Edgeworth-Johnson was left in charge of the DMP, but a new man was brought in to take charge of G Division. Detective Inspector W. C. Forbes Redmond was also brought from Belfast, where he had spent fifteen years as a detective. He was appointed second assistant commissioner of the DMP and given the task of reorganising G Division. He brought a number of his own detectives to work under cover. Redmond showed himself to be incredible naïve and his appointment further undermined the morale of the DMP.

He made the capture of Collins a priority. He called all DMP detectives from sergeants up and told them ‘that they were not doing their duty, that he would give them one month to get Michael Collins and those responsible for shooting the various detectives, or else he would order them to resign.’ They need not have worried because Redmond did not last the month himself.

Frank Thornton was sent to Belfast to get a photograph of Redmond. While there he met Sergeant Maurice McCarthy of the RIC who was a Kerryman stationed at Chichester Street, Belfast. Thornton pretended to be a country cousin when he called on McCarthy, who was already working for Collins. That night there was an amateur boxing championship on at the Ulster Hall, and most of the off duty police were there. McCarthy directed his visitor to the district inspector’s office, where he was able to lift a photograph of Redmond and return to Dublin with it the following day.

Not knowing Dublin, Redmond had to have someone as a guide to the city, and he made the lethal mistake of using his administrative assistant, Jim McNamara, who was, of course, working for Collins. However the authorities had been recruiting spies of their own.

Henry Timothy Quinlisk from Wexford was one of the prisoners-of-war recruited by Casement for his Irish brigade in Germany and was given the rank of sergeant major. With such credentials he was easily accepted in Sinn Féin quarters, especially after Robert Brennan introduced him to Seán Ó Muirthile, the secretary of the supreme council of the IRB. Quinlisk, or Quinn as he called himself, cut a dashing figure and was quite a man for the ladies. ‘He was always immaculately dressed and one would have said that with his good looks, his self-assurance and general bonhomie, he would have got anywhere,’ said Robert Brennan. ‘He liked to give the impression that he was in on all of Mick Collins’ secrets.’

As a result of his enlistment in the Irish brigade, he had been denied back pay for the period of his imprisonment in Germany. Collins helped him out financially, and Quinlisk stayed for a time at the Munster hotel but he wanted more. On 11 November 1919 he wrote to the under-secretary at Dublin Castle, mentioning his background and offering to furnish information.

‘I was the man who assisted Casement in Germany and since coming home I have been connected with Sinn Féin,’ he wrote. ‘I have decided to tell all I know of that organisation and my information would be of use to the authorities. The scoundrel Michael Collins has treated me scurily [
sic
] and I now am going to wash my hands of the whole business.’

He was brought to G Division headquarters to make a statement, which Broy typed up and, of course, furnished to Collins. But Quinlisk had taken the precaution of telling Collins that he had gone to the DMP merely to get a passport so he could emigrate to the United States. He said the police put pressure on him to inform on Collins, offering money and promising to make arrangements for him to get his wartime back pay. He told Collins that he was just pretending to go along with police.

Collins arrived outside 44 Mountjoy Street while the resulting DMP raid was in progress and he watched from a distance. Detective Inspector John Bruton was in charge of the raid. The Squad were ordered to kill him but this proved easier ordered than executed because he never ventured outside Dublin Castle without an armed escort and he took the precaution of not developing any routine.

Following the raid on 44 Mountjoy Street, Collins moved, though he did return there weekly for his laundry. The owner, Myra McCarthy, was an aunt of the Sinn Féin activist, Fionán Lynch. For the next nineteen months Collins moved about, never staying in any one place for very long. ‘Living in such turmoil,’ he wrote to his sister Hannie, ‘it’s not all that easy to be clear on all matters at all times.’ Yet he maintained a very regular daily routine.

After his office at 76 Harcourt Street was raided in November, he opened a new finance office at 22 Henry Street. Like his other offices, it was on a busy thoroughfare with a lot of passing traffic so that the comings and goings of strangers would not attract attention, as they would if the offices had been placed in some quiet, out-of-the-way location. The Henry Street office survived for about eighteen months. He had another finance office at 29 Mary Street and he set up a new intelligence office at 5 Mespil Road. He also had an office in Cullenswood House, which had been the site of Patrick Pearse’s school, St Enda’s. It had been renovated into a series of flats.

With Forbes Redmond as the new head of G Division, a concerted effort was made by some of the police to find Collins. Quin-lisk was told that things had got so hot in Dublin that Collins had moved to Cork. On 1 January 1920 William Mulhern, the crimes special sergeant in Bandon, produced a letter that Collins had written to someone in his area in relation to national loan. His return address was the Mansion House, and Mulhern suggested that Collins was ‘seemingly at present staying in Dublin’. The county inspector of the RIC reported from Cork next day that ‘Michael Collins, M.P. is carrying on operations from the Mansion House. I am putting all my DI’s on the alert re the matter + taking steps to deal with the men likely to be appointed to further the loan in different districts. It is clear that Collins is in communication with the Sinn Féin organisation in all counties in Ireland in regard to the Loan.’

However Detective Superintendent Brien telephoned Cork on 5 January to say that Collins was in the Clonakilty area. That was true but he was back in Dublin by the time word got to Cork.

‘Collins cannot be found in this District,’ District Inspector Henry Connor reported three days later. He said that careful enquiries had been made and a number of houses searched without result. ‘A close watch will be kept and if Collins appears I will have him arrested,’ the detective inspector concluded. ‘No trace of Collins has been found in their districts,’ Sergeant William Mulhern reported of Bandon and Skibbereen on 15 January. ‘There is reason to believe this man is in Dublin still according to local information in Skibbereen,’ the county inspector added at the end of the report, which was shown to Redmond.

One report from the country suggested that Collins was staying at the Clarence hotel, but Detective Officer Denis O’Brien could find no trace of him there, or at Mountjoy Street. Redmond learned that an undercover agent had made contact with Collins.

Sergeant Thomas J. McElligott had sought to organise a representative body within the RIC in 1918 but was soon dismissed from the force because of his Sinn Féin sympathies. He secretly went to work for Collins as a kind of police union organiser. Ostensibly he was trying to improve the pay and conditions of the RIC, but, in fact, he was engaged in black propaganda, trying to undermine the morale of the force by sowing seeds of discord.

When the police went on strike in London, Collins sent Mc Elligott there to make some useful contacts. At strike head-quarters he met John Charles Byrne, a secret intelligence service (MI6) agent who was using the alias of John Jameson while posing as a Marxist sympathiser. Shortly afterwards he turned up in Dublin with a letter of introduction from Art O’Brien, the Sinn Féin representative in Britain. Posing as a revolutionary anxious to undermine the British system, Byrne offered to supply weapons, and arrangements were made for him to meet Collins, Mulcahy and Rory O’Connor at the Home Farm Produce shop in Camden Street. They met again the following day at the Ranelagh home of Mrs Wyse Power, a member of the Sinn Féin executive.

‘What he was delaying about that prevented him getting us caught with him, at least on the second of these occasions, I don’t k n o w ,’ Mulcahy remarked. Byrne did make arrangements to have Collins arrested at a third meeting at the home of Batt O’Connor on 16 January 1920.

Redmond had one of his own undercover men watching the house, but that man did not know Collins and by a stroke of good luck Liam Tobin, who also happened to be at the house, left with Byrne. The lookout – assuming that Tobin was Collins – intercepted Redmond on Morehampton Road as he approached with a lorry load of troops to raid O’Connor’s house and the raid was promptly called off. Redmond had brought his guide, McNamara, with him that night when he decided to keep O’Connor’s house under personal observation.