The Squad (11 page)

Redmond had already made a fatal mistake when a detective came to him with a grievance over some of his changes in G Division: he dismissed the complaint with some disparaging comments about G Division as a whole. ‘You are a bright lot!’ Redmond reportedly said. ‘Not one of you has been able to get on to Collins’ track for a month, and there is a man only two days in Dublin and has already seen him.’

The disgruntled detective mentioned this to Broy, who promptly informed Collins. Together with the information from McNamara, the spotlight of suspicion was immediately cast on Byrne. He had not only arrived from London recently but had also had a meeting with Collins at Batt O’Connor’s house on the day of the aborted raid.

The thirty-four year old Byrne was clearly an adventurer. Small, with a very muscular build, he had a series of tattoos on his arms and hands. There were Japanese women, snakes, flowers and a bird. He had a snake ring tattooed on the third finger of his right hand and two rings tattooed on his left hand.

Collins wrote to Art O’Brien in London on 20 January saying that he had grounds for suspecting Jameson, as he called him, because he was in touch with the head of the intelligence in Scotland Yard. ‘I have absolutely certain information that the man who came from London met and spoke to me, and reported that I was growing a moustache to Basil Thomson,’ he wrote.

That same night Collins was tipped off that Redmond planned a raid that night on Cullenswood House, where Collins had a basement office and Mulcahy had a top-floor flat with his wife. Cullen and Thornton roused Mulcahy from his bed, and he spent the remainder of the night with a friend a short distance away. Redmond was becoming a real danger, and Collins gave the Squad orders to eliminate him.

‘If we don’t get that man, he’ll get us and soon,’ Collins warned the Squad.

Nattily dressed in civilian clothes, topped off by a bowler hat, Redmond looked more like a stockbroker than a policeman. He stayed at the Standard hotel in Harcourt Street while a residence was being renovated for him in Dublin Castle.

Collins had Tom Cullen booked into the hotel to keep an eye on Redmond and gather information about his habits, such as when he left the hotel and returned, and what he did in the evening and at night. He walked to and from work at Dublin Castle without an escort each day.

Usually one of the intelligence people would accompany the Squad to identify the target. ‘We’d go out in pairs, walk up to the tar-get and do it, and then split,’ Vinny Byrne recalled. ‘You wouldn’t be nervous while you’d be waiting to plug him, but you’d imagine that everyone was looking into your face. On a typical job we’d use about eight, including the back up. Nobody got in our way. One of us would knock him over with the first shot, and the other would knock him off with a shot to the head.’

Members of the Squad got their chance on 21 January 1920. ‘I saw Redmond coming down from the castle but he turned back and went in again,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘Tom Keogh, Vinny Byrne and myself were waiting and Redmond came out again. T o m Keogh turned to Vinny Byrne and myself and told us to cover them off. Redmond went straight up Dame Street, Grafton Street and Harcourt Street, and we followed him.’

‘Michael Collins picked Joe Leonard, Seán Doyle and myself to be between the Standard hotel and the foot of Harcourt Street,’ Paddy O’Daly recalled. ‘Joe Leonard and myself were walking up and down one side of the street, and Seán Doyle was on the other side.’ It was nearly six o’clock when O’Daly spotted other members of the Squad walking briskly: ‘I saw Tom Keogh and another man crossing the road to the railings’ side of the Green.

‘Look out, Joe, here is Keogh and the gang,’ O’Daly said to Leonard.

‘I had hardly spoken these words when I turned and saw Redmond crossing Harcourt Street about six yards away,’ O’Daly continued. ‘When Redmond was about two yards from me I fired and he fell mortally wounded, shot through the head.’ Keogh was about twenty yards away when he started running and arrived moments after O’Daly had hit Redmond behind the left ear and Keogh had shot him in the back. Byrne and Slattery watched, acting as a covering party.

The shot behind the ear was a fatal wound, because it had severed Redmond’s spinal cord at the second vertebrae. The other bullet went through his liver, a lung and his stomach. ‘There were a number of British servicemen around, but no attempt was made to follow us and we got away,’ Jim Slattery noted.

Following Redmond’s death, his own undercover detectives pulled out and returned to Belfast, and thereafter G Division ‘ceased to affect the situation’, according to British military intelligence. Redmond’s post was not filled, but Fergus Quinn, who had been assistant commissioner since 1915, was retired and replaced as assistant commissioner by Denis Barrett.

Dublin Castle offered £10,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Red mond’s death. This was probably where the story about a big reward for Collins’ arrest originated.

He was behind the killing of Redmond. Rewards of £5,000 had already been offered in connection with the deaths of the three other DMP detectives, Smyth, Hoey and Barton, and these re wards were now doubled. Collins had ordered all four killings, so there was a handsome cumulative reward for the evidence to convict him, though the reward was never specifically offered for his arrest and conviction.

Many of the detectives and policemen knew him by sight, but their failure to arrest him could not be explained by fear alone. Like the police who were working for him, others were undoubtedly passive sympathisers. For example, Collins had come across Inspector Lowry of the uniformed branch of DMP as early as 1917 when he delivered the oration at Thomas Ashe’s funeral and ever since Lowry had always seemed to salute and show Collins great respect, but there was never much more between them than the inspector’s polite ‘Mr Collins’. One night as Collins was cycling before curfew, a couple of uniform policemen were standing by the road, and one of them shouted, ‘More power, me Corkman!’

Although the Squad had been set up to kill specific individuals, it also engaged in some other operations. They were especially busy on these other operations during February 1920.

Mick McDonnell told Jim Slattery and Vinny Byrne that they would be wanted on the night of 5 February to help the Dublin brigade under Vice-Brigadier Peadar Clancy with a ‘bit of a job,’ which turned out to be a raid on the navy and army canteen board garage at Bow Lane. They took tools, motor parts, a motorcycle, and two light Ford motor vans, which they first filled with petrol. The Squad later used one of the Ford vans on a number of different operations.

The following week the Squad was involved with the Dublin IRA in an attempt to rescue Robert Barton on 12 February 1920. ‘Seán Russell, my Company Captain, informed me that he had orders to send a few men to intercept a military lorry some place in the vicinity of Berkeley Road, as it was believed that this lorry would be conveying Robert Barton from Ship Street barracks to Mountjoy Prison, following his trial,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘Peadar Clancy was in charge of this operation. The entire Squad, plus a few men from E Company, second battalion, assembled at Berkeley Road fairly early in the day.’

Mick McDonnell arrived on his motorbike to say that the canvas-covered military truck with Barton had left Ship Street barracks. There were some repairs being done to a nearby house and there was a forty-foot ladder on a handcart outside the house. Some volunteers were working on the house and they wanted to help. ‘But we did not let them join us because they were too well known and we had sufficient men at the time,’ O’Daly noted. ‘We told them that we would take the ladder and the handcart.’

It was shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon and there were many pedestrians in the vicinity, while trams were passing to and from Phoenix Park and Glasnevin. As the military truck approached on Berkeley Road, opposite Nelson Street, a short distance from Mountjoy Jail, the handcart with the ladder was pushed across the road. As the lorry came to a stop, Clancy jumped into the cabin and, pointing his revolver, held up the driver and the two officers travelling with him who had taken part in the case against Barton. They were unarmed. But Barton was not in the lorry, he was being taken to Marlborough barracks, not Mount joy Jail. In the back there was only a private and a military prisoner.

The raiders were wearing trench coats and had soft hats pulled down over their eyes but they were not masked or disguised in any way, according to witnesses. Each had a handgun. The occupants of the truck were ordered out and told to line up at the rear.

‘He’s not here,’ some of the men shouted having checked the back of the lorry.

A number of the men had remained at the front of the truck while the others covered the soldiers with revolvers or automatic pistols. Suddenly a revolver shot rang out from the front. The military shouted that it was one of the rebels who fired the shot. It was an accident in which the man had shot himself in the left leg. He was taken away in the sidecar of a motorcycle in the direction of Phibsborough.

‘Although the whole affair lasted only four or five minutes, it attracted a great deal of attention, as tramcars going to and from the city were held up. People were watching curiously from their houses and the upper decks of the trams. Other than the firing of the one shot, there was no other incident. The driver was ordered to return to the city. ‘I do not know why,’ O’Daly said, ‘except that we did not want him to know why we held him up.’ Nobody was fooled.

‘It is believed that the purpose of the attacking party was to rescue Mr Barton on his return from the court martial to Mountjoy Prison,’ the
Irish Times
reported next day. ‘This is borne out by the remark, “He’s not here”, which was made by some members of the attack party after they had made a search of the motor wagon.’ Barton’s trial continued and he was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail the following week and promptly moved to England.

The Squad was out with the Dublin brigade again the following evening when they learned that a trainload of ammunition would be leaving the North Wall on a certain date and that it was to be fired on.

‘The entire Squad, assisted by members of the Dublin brigade and men from the country including General Michael Brennan, assembled in the vicinity of Newcomen Bridge,’ according to Jim Slattery. ‘We were waiting for the train, but at the last moment the operation was cancelled.’ The train with the ammunition consignment was actually approaching. ‘At that particular moment I had the pin drawn from my grenade, and, being rather annoyed over the operation being called off, I fired the grenade at the passing train,’ Slattery continued. ‘I believe that the signalman on the line was wounded.’

Michael Geraghty of 1 Gilford Place, North Strand, Dublin, was actually leaning out of the signal box at the time and it was initially believed that he was shot by one of the twenty or so soldiers on the train. ‘It is assumed,’ the
Irish Times
reported, ‘that the putting out of a flag from the window of the signal box to indicate that the line was clear was misunderstood by the military guard, and that shots were fired.’

A couple of days later there was a report that two armed men had actually stopped the train, that one had got on and ordered the driver to back up and then after some minutes had told him to go forward again. By then the men on the banking had clearly got away, but there were tyre tracks to indicate that the raiders were using two motor vehicles.

Henry Quinlisk, who had lost touch with Collins after the information he had given to Dublin Castle led to a raid on the Munster hotel, had been making repeated efforts to contact him again. He was told that it had got so hot for the Big Fellow in Dublin that he had gone back to Cork. The Squad suspected Quinlisk was a spy and tried to use him as bait to get at Detective Superintendent Owen Brien. The Squad had been trying to kill him for some time but he rarely moved outside the walls of Dublin Castle.

Seán Ó Muirthile was assigned to keep Quinlisk busy while one of the Squad telephoned Dublin Castle to say that Quinlisk had vital information and would meet Brien outside the offices of the
Evening Mail,
just outside the castle, at a certain time. Brien turned up but something spooked him before any of the Squad could get a shot at him. He darted back into the cover of Dublin Castle.

Collins learned afterwards that the detective superintendent suspected he was being set up. He blamed Quinlisk, who explained that he had been detained all night by Ó Muirthile.

‘You’re in the soup,’ Collins told Ó Muirthile with a laugh.

Quinlisk should have had the good sense to quit at that point, but he persisted in his efforts to see Collins. So a trap was set. He was told that Collins was out of town and would meet him that night at Mrs Wren’s hotel in Cork city.

Liam Archer intercepted a lengthy telegram from the inspector general of the RIC to the county inspector in Cork. The message was coded, but Collins had the code. ‘On leaving the office, I went to the Keating Branch (of the Gaelic League) and there started to decipher it,’ Archer recalled. ‘While at this Seán Ó Muirthile joined me. The message informed the county inspector that Collins would be in a Wren’s hotel, Cork.’

‘Tonight at midnight surround Wren’s hotel, Winthrop Street, Cork,’ the message read when decoded. ‘Collins and others will be there. Expect shooting as he is a dangerous man and heavily armed.’ The telegram added that Collins should be taken ‘dead or alive’. When Archer showed the telegram to Collins later that night, the Big Fellow remarked ‘That ****** has signed his death warrant.’ He was, however, amused about what was likely to happen at Wren’s hotel. ‘They’ll play
síghle caoch
with the place,’ he said with a laugh. On the night of 18 February 1920 members of the Cork No. 1 brigade of the IRA met Quinlisk, promising to take him to Collins. Instead they took him outside the city and shot him eleven times. There was one bullet wound through the socket of the right eye, two bullet wounds between the right eye and right ear, and three further bullet wounds on the right side of the forehead, as well as five other bullet wounds to the body.
The Cork Examiner
concluded, ‘the medical evidence was that they could not have been selfinflicted.’