The Squad (14 page)

‘The intelligence section got to know of his activities, with the result that we were instructed to have him put away,’ Jim Slattery explained. ‘Liam Tobin was the man who pointed Dalton out to us.’

‘Mick McDonnell, Tom Keogh and Jim Slattery were detailed to shoot him,’ according to Joe Dolan. ‘Vinny Byrne and myself were to be the covering party.’

Dalton was walking towards Broadstone station with Detective Constable Robert Spencer at about 12.30 on the afternoon of 20 April 1920. They were planning to meet the 1.10 train from the west. It was raining heavily when they came under gunfire from behind while passing by St Mary’s church.

Spencer raced off towards Dorset Street and Dalton headed towards the railroad station. Two of the men followed him and one brought him to the ground with a shot to the leg, as they believed he was wearing a steel vest. ‘Let me alone,’ the wounded detective pleaded. An eyewitness stated that one of the gunmen fired three shots at him on the ground from a short distance. Dalton was mortally wounded and died at the Mater hospital about two hours later. ‘All that can be said now is that personal antagonism brought about this man’s death, which I deeply regret,’ Neligan wrote in
The Spy in the Castle
. ‘It was one of the tragedies of the time.’

Some of the Squad were uneasy that they were merely providing back up cover and not doing the actual shooting. None of the reports of the killing were even written, and Paddy O’Daly noted that many felt that headquarters would think they were doing nothing of importance. ‘I promised that they would carry out the next operation, which happened to be the elimination of Sergeant Revell,’ O’Daly added. ‘As in the majority of the executions which we carried out, we were not aware of the reason for his elimination, we simply got orders to carry out the execution. The reason did not concern us.’

Revell slept at home in Connaught Street off Phibsborough Road, and Vinny Byrne was sent to observe how he came into the city to Dublin Castle, where he worked. One morning, as he was waiting, unarmed, Revell came along. ‘I tried to look as innocent as I could,’ Byrne explained. ‘He walked down Phibsboro Road towards the city on the righthand side. As he came right opposite to me, he stopped and stared very hard over at me. I halted and pretended to look at my watch.

‘Looking up and down the road, he moved off again,’ Byrne continued. ‘I made no further attempt to follow him, as I could see that he had me under cover. The next thing, he went over to the policeman, who was on point duty at Phibsboro.

‘It’s about time I made myself scarce,’ Byrne said to himself. ‘I boarded a tram going towards Glasnevin, got off it at Lindsay Road and proceeded to Mick McDonnell’s house to make my report.’ McDonnell and Tobin were there together when Bryne told them what had happened.

‘We had better have a go in the morning,’ one of them remarked.

The Squad was in place the following morning. ‘The two men detailed for the actual job were standing about twenty-five yards from Connaught Street on the left side coming from the city. As he came within a few feet of them they stepped out on the roadway and let him have it. He was beaten across the street with gunfire. When the job was finished they made off towards the Cross Guns Bridge.’

A policeman on duty on the Phibsboro Road came running up to the spot with a pistol in his hand and gave chase as far as the bridge. There were a number of men outside a mill, and the policeman asked, ‘Why did you not stop them?’

‘Not bloody likely,’ one of the men replied. ‘Do you want us to get the same as the fellow got down there?’

‘The last I saw of Revell was when he was lying on his back on the road.’ The job was finished as far as O’Daly was concerned and he took off. Tom Keogh caught up with him. ‘These fellows will do a bit of crowing now,’ he said.

‘We were perfectly satisfied that Revell was dead, and we were mesmerised when we read in the paper that night that he had only been wounded,’ O’Daly noted. Vinny Byrne was particularly worried about an interview that Revell gave because he mentioned: ‘I would know one of them very well, as I had seen him the previous morning.’

‘Needless to say, we were disappointed that he was not finished off completely,’ Byrne noted. ‘It left me in the position that I could never be arrested after this, as Revell was in the castle and would identify me at any time.’

Prior to 1920 the British cabinet was too preoccupied with other problems to devote much attention to Ireland, but the need to do something about the deteriorating situation gradually dawned on Lloyd George and his colleagues. Giving the orange clique at Dublin Castle a virtual free hand had been disastrous. Far from reforming the RIC and the DMP, the police forces had only become more demoralised.

The general officer commanding in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Shaw, had advocated and secured cabinet approval for using British recruits to bolster the RIC back in October 1919. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of the imperial general staff, has often mistakenly been credited with the idea, but he did support the new force. ‘The state of Ireland is terrible,’ Wilson noted in his diary on 13 January 1920 after a cabinet meeting. ‘I urge with all my force the necessity for doubling the police and not employing the military.’ Wilson’s impact was in reinforcing General Shaw’s initial intent of keeping the involvement of the British military to a minimum. Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for war, advocated raising the auxiliary division, a special force of 8,000 former soldiers to reinforce the RIC. Like Wilson he was proposing to bolster the RIC rather than involve the British army in Ireland. There was clear opposition from a military committee appointed by the cabinet under the chairmanship of General Sir Nevil Macready, the new general in charge of the British army in Ireland. The son of a famous Shakespearian actor, Macready had served in the First World War, before being appointed commissioner of the London police. He was then moved to Dublin, from whence one of his grandfathers had emigrated.

Churchill refined his pet scheme so that the new force consisted of two distinct elements – one, former enlisted men, and the other, former officers, who became known as auxiliaries. The enlisted men were so hastily recruited that they did not have proper uniforms, so they wore a blend of military khaki and the dark green uniforms of the RIC. They acquired the sobriquet Black and Tans. They made little or no pretence to be policemen. They were an irregular military force with little or no discipline. Some stole everything they could lay hands on, and as a force they committed terrible outrages, often against non-combatants.

The auxiliary division of the RIC was established with an initial intake of 500 men in July 1920. By November, 5,498 new recruits had bolstered the RIC. Those consisted of 4,501 Black and Tans and 997 auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were former officers from various branches of the service with the RIC rank of ‘temporary cadets’. Their number ultimately grew to about 1,500 men, in comparison with some 12,000 Black and Tans. The auxiliaries received £1 a day, ‘all found’, which was double the pay of the Tans.

The British set about a thorough spring-cleaning of the personnel in Dublin Castle. ‘Administration in Ireland is, I believe, as bad as it is possible for it to be,’ the lord lieutenant wrote to Bonar Law on 18 April. Hamar Greenwood, a Canadian, replaced Ian Macpherson as chief secretary of Ireland. From the outset, even before he had ever been to Ireland, the new chief secretary was determined to follow a hard-line policy. The cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, noted in his diary on 30 April that Greenwood ‘talked the most awful tosh about shooting Sinn Féiners on sight, and without evidence, and frightfulness generally.’

There were calls for the removal of James MacMahon as undersecretary, but Sir Warren Fisher came out strongly against it, even though he characterised him as lacking initiative and driving force. Fisher wished to retain MacMahon as a kind of token Catholic. He warned that it would be impolitic to remove him as he could be a propaganda asset, while a more dynamic individual, such as Sir John Anderson, could be appointed as a joint under-secretary to carry out the more important duties. Anderson was duly appointed to the joint position with MacMahon, and Alfred Cope replaced John Taylor as assistant under-secretary. Mark Sturgis was also effectively an assistant under-secretary, but he was given the title of private secretary to Anderson instead. Taylor’s two unionist henchmen, W. J. Connolly and Maurice Headlam, were also removed. The new regime under Anderson was essentially moderate in comparison with the hard-line unionists surrounding Taylor. The new men all favoured the concept of dominion home rule for Ireland, and they were prepared to co-operate with more nationalist minded civil servants like William E. Wylie and Joseph Brennan. Unfortunately for them, it was too late: a dreadful evil had been allowed to develop and fester in the Irish body politic.

Éamon de Valera had wished to block the killing of policemen, but in his absence, Collins had been authorised to kill Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth. Macpherson had retaliated by introducing policies which he knew would provoke war. Within a matter of months, under the influence of a rabid Irish unionist element, the British had introduced a policy which effectively amounted to counter murder to combat the policies of the IRA in general and Michael Collins in particular.

General Sir Nevil Macready became commander-in-chief of the British army in Ireland, and Major-General Henry Tudor was placed at the head of all the police forces. But there was always tension between them because Tudor did not insist on proper discipline from his forces. Forbes Redmond was not replaced as second assistant commissioner of the DMP, but the assistant commissioner, Fergus Quinn, was retired and replaced by Denis Barrett. General Sir Ormonde Winter, known as ‘O’, became chief of overall intelligence. Mark Sturgis described him as ‘a most amazing original’ because he was ‘clever as paint’ and was probably entirely without morals. ‘“O” is a marvel,’ he wrote, ‘he looks like a little white snake and can do everything!’

While Hamar Greenwood was advocating a militant policy against the IRA, the latter was planning to shoot him before he even set foot in Ireland. George Fitzgerald was sent to Sunderland to gather information which would help the IRA to kill Greenwood. Fitzgerald, who was born and had spent some time in the United States, met some of Greenwood’s people and got an invitation to hear him speak. He was afterwards introduced to the new chief secretary and his wife. ‘He gave me a pass to admit me to any other meetings that were to be held,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I got all information possible about his cars, their numbers, etc., the number of bodyguards he had with him, where he was staying, etc … I came back to Dublin some ten days later, and handed in this information. This was before Greenwood had actually arrived in Ireland.’

Threatening letters similar to the one sent to Tomás MacCurtain were already being sent to prominent republicans. Through intercepted letters Collins realised the British were planning to exterminate certain republicans whose names were already listed, in the words of one British official, ‘for definite clearance’.

The British were clearly out of touch with the temper of the Irish people, as was evident from some of the ideas advocated at high level meetings in London during May 1920. When General Macready explained that he planned to take on the IRA with more mobile forces who would surprise rebel elements, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of imperial general staff, dismissed Macready’s plan as useless. Wilson suggested instead that lists of hostages be issued. What was needed, he argued, was ‘to collect the names of Sinn Féiners by districts; proclaim them on church doors all over the country; and whenever a policeman is murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them! My view is that somehow or other terror must be met by greater terror.’

Hamar Greenwood told the cabinet the following week that ‘thugs’ were going about the country shooting people. ‘We are certain they are handsomely paid, that their money comes from the USA,’ he said. ‘The money is paid out to the murderers in public houses.’

‘It is monstrous that we have 200 murders and no one hung,’ the minister for war, Winston Churchill, complained. He even advocated that the British should behave in Ireland like the Bolsheviks were behaving in Russia. ‘After a person is caught he should pay the penalty within a week. Look at the tribunals, which the Russian government has devised. You should get three or four judges whose scope should be universal and they should move quickly over the country and do summary justice.’

‘You agreed six or seven months ago that there should be hanging,’ he said to Lloyd George.

‘I feel certain you must hang,’ the prime minister replied. ‘Can you get convictions from Catholics?’

‘There is no detective department in Ireland,’ General Macready complained. ‘We are at present in very much of a fog but are building up an intelligence system.’

‘The best secret service man we had,’ Walter Long said, referring to John C. Byrne (alias Jameson), ‘was shot near Glasnevin some time ago.’

‘We must try to get public opinion in Ireland in favour of bringing this state of things to an end,’ Lloyd George argued. ‘Increase their pecuniary burdens.’ He was in favour of intensifying economic pressure by compelling the people to pay for local damage in the form of rates and taxes. ‘There is nothing the farmers so dislike as the rates,’ he added. If they could be got to support the law, ‘then you could deal with the terror’.

‘The difficulty is that a large percentage of the adult population carries arms,’ Greenwood argued.

‘Why not make life intolerable in a particular area?’ Churchill asked. He went on to suggest ‘recruiting a special force’. He got his way and the elite force of 1,000 former officers known as auxiliaries was recruited.

In view of the way that Greenwood, Churchill and Macready were talking, not to mention the even more volatile Sir Henry Wilson, it was hardly surprising that the troops on the grounds were thinking on the same lines.