The Squad (19 page)

Another of the prominent civil servants, William E. Wylie, believed that the reprisals would make civil government impossible, but others believed it would be impossible to hold the Tans who went on the rampage at Balbriggan responsible. ‘How the devil can we round up and try fifty policemen when we know that they know that the bulk of their officers up to the top agree in principle with the action even if they prefer shooting to burning (as I do, if we must have either!!),’ Sturgis wrote on 24 September. ‘It’s tragic,’ he wrote the following week, ‘these men cannot see that indiscriminate burning is idiotic and a little quiet shooting equally effective – and shoot a bad man who, if he hasn’t just shot your comrade, has no doubt shot somebody else, is morally much more defensible than this stupid blind work.’ What he called ‘the stupid blind work’ was playing into the hands of Collins, who had envisaged that this would happen if he scuppered Dublin Castle’s attempts to gather intelligence.

No inquests were held, just a brief military inquiry, which concluded that the two Sinn Féiners ‘were stabbed not by bayonets but by some sharp instrument like a knife by unknown members of the police’. What happened in Balbriggan got the most notoriety, but there were similar incidents over the next two nights in Carrick-on-Shannon and Drumshambo, County Leitrim; Tuam, County Galway; Galway city, and the three small County Clare towns of Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown-Malby.

John Lynch, a Sinn Féin county councillor from Kilmallock, County Limerick, who had come to Dublin with national loan money for Collins, was shot dead in his room at the Exchange hotel on the night of 23 September 1920. Secret service agents claimed he had pulled a gun on them, but Collins dismissed this.

‘There is not the slightest doubt that there was no intention whatever to arrest Mr Lynch,’ he wrote. ‘Neither is there the slightest doubt that he was not in possession of a revolver.’ Neligan informed Collins that Captain Baggallay, a one-legged courts martial officer had telephoned Dublin Castle about Lynch’s presence in the hotel, and the men responsible for the actual shooting were two undercover officers using the names Paddy McMahon and Peel, each a
nom de guerre
.

There was a suggestion that John Lynch was mistaken for Liam Lynch, an IRA commandant, but that was hardly likely seeing that there was an extreme difference in their ages. John Lynch was simply a Sinn Féiner and this had become a capital offence as far as the British secret service was concerned. Collins had no doubts and neither had the British, and this was not just the regular officers and men who were involved but the generals at the top, the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson feared that the escalating reprisals would undermine the discipline of the British army. He continued to argue that the British government should assume responsibility for the reprisals; that they should order them and draw up a roster of people who would be held as hostages to be executed as reprisals, rather than allowing troops on the ground to select their own victims.

‘I had one and a half hours this evening with Lloyd George and Bonar Law,’ Wilson noted in his diary on 29 September. ‘I told them what I thought of reprisals by the Black and Tans and how this must lead to chaos and ruin. Lloyd George danced about and was angry, but I never budged. I pointed out that these reprisals were carried out without anybody being responsible; men were murdered, houses burnt, villages wrecked (such as Balbriggan, Ennistymon, Trim, etc.). I said that this was due to want of discipline, and this
must
be stopped. It was the business of the government to govern. If these men ought to be murdered, then the government ought to murder them. Lloyd George danced at all this, said no government could possible take this responsibility.

‘I have protested for months against this method of out-terrorising the terrorists by irresponsible persons,’ Wilson continued. ‘We drift from bad to worse and always under the guidance of Lloyd George. Anyhow, neither Lloyd George nor Bonar can ever say that I have not warned them and very plainly spoken my mind.’

Winston Churchill, who was not renowned for either his political sagacity or sound military judgment as this stage of his career, tended to side with Wilson on the need to take formal responsibility for killings. He had been calling for formal executions for months, and was about to get his way. ‘You have been right all along,’ Churchill wrote to Wilson, ‘the government must shoulder the responsibility for reprisals.’

When Wilson met the prime minister to discuss the Irish situation on 14 October, Lloyd George said that he would ‘shoulder the responsibility for reprisals’, but wanted to ‘wait till the American elections are over’. He did not wish to speak out then, because it would give the Democratic presidential candidate, Governor James M. Cox, an issue with which he could exploit Anglophobic sentiment in the United States. Lloyd George essentially agreed with the reprisals – the issue was simply whether he would accept formal responsibility for what British force were doing in Ireland. Hankey, the cabinet secretary, noted that the prime minister privately argued that ‘murder reprisals’ had been resorted to from time immemorial in Ireland. ‘He gave numerous instances where they had been effective in checking crimes,’ Hankey added. ‘The truth is that these reprisals are more or less winked at by the government.’

There was no use in saying ‘I should shoot without mercy,’ Churchill argued. ‘The question immediately arises “whom would you shoot”. And shortly after that “where are they?”’ He actually came to the conclusion that Wilson’s reprehensible scheme to take reprisals by roster was justified. ‘At last there is some hope that the cabinet will stop whispering from the back parlour and will come into the open.’

The debate about the British reprisals was not confined to the corridors of power; it was also in the public domain. ‘I do not think that any truthful or sane person can avoid the conclusion that the authorities in Ireland are deliberately encouraging, and, what is more actually screening, reprisals and “counter-murder” by armed force of the crown,’ General Sir Hubert Gough wrote to the
Manchester Guardian
in early October. ‘In Ireland at the moment murder and destruction are condoned and winked at, if not actively encouraged. The murders of policemen and others by the “Irish republicans” have been inexcusable. As you say the leaders of Sinn Féin and the Irish priesthood are very greatly to be condemned for not having taken a far more active part against such methods, but that is no excuse for any government, and especially a government of the great British empire, adopting such methods.’

Arthur Griffith publicly accused the British secret service of planning to kill moderate Sinn Féin politicians in order to give the impression that they were victims of an internal republican feud. In this way the movement’s international support could be undermined. ‘A certain number of Sinn Féin leaders have been marked down for assassination,’ he said. ‘I am first on the list. They intended to kill two birds with the one stone by getting me and circulating the story I have been assassinated by extremists because I am a man of moderate action.’

Meanwhile, even though he had provoked the current situation, in September and early October 1920, Collins was acting with extraordinary restraint so as not to take the spotlight off Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike. Although hoping that MacSwiney would be released, he secretly called for him to quit the hunger strike because he did not want him to die. The hunger strike became more protracted than anybody had expected. Many had been expecting him to die in August, but MacSwiney survived until the fourth week of October. While his protest continued it attracted the focus of media attention around the world.

The hunger strikes became so protracted that Sturgis noted they ‘have faded into insignificance as a topic beside reprisals’. Before the end of September Collins was being goaded into arranging what would have been by far the Squad’s most spectacular operation up to then. On the Sunday after the killing of Lynch, he made arrangements for the Squad to kill from eight to a dozen senior policemen such as Owen Brien, John Bruton, and Denis Barrett, as they went to eight o’clock mass at a church near Dublin Castle.

‘I was instructed to accompany Paddy O’Daly and Joe Leonard and report with other members of the Squad for an operation to be carried out outside the Upper Castle Yard in the maze of alleyways that approached the rear entrance of Saints Michael’s and John’s church,’ Charlie Dalton explained. ‘We took up the various positions indicated by Mick McDonnell … We were advised that a party of the political branch of G Division would leave from the Upper Castle Yard on their way to eight o’clock mass.’ In addition to the Squad the Tipperary gang was present – Treacy, Breen, Hogan and Robinson – Tom Cullen of the intelligence branch, along with Hugo MacNeill and Jim Brennan. They took up positions in Essex Street, outside the back entrance of the church.

‘I would say there was between ten and twelve in the group,’ Vinny Byrne recalled. They were waiting for a signal from Cullen. The attack was called off at the last moment because Jim McNamara was among the policemen. They were not in a position to tell so many men not to shoot McNamara as he was a valuable agent. Hence the whole thing was re-set for the following Sunday.

The following Sunday as O’Daly, Leonard and Dalton were making their way from the north side of the city at about 7 a.m., they found that British soldiers had set up a roadblock on Newcomen Bridge and were searching people. The three of them therefore turned down Ossory Road, where they climbed a wall and went down on the railroad track. They took O’Daly’s gun from him and he proceeded to join the others outside the church near Dublin Castle. Leonard and Dalton made their way down the tracks from where they could see that the military had taken up positions on a bridge in Drumcondra.

They obviously had no intention of being robbed of what had promised to be an exciting morning. ‘We decided to fire on the military on Binn’s Bridge,’ Dalton continued. ‘We emptied both our pistols – I was using a Mauser (a Peter-the-Painter) and Leonard a Colt .45 and we saw two soldiers fall as a result of our fire. The range was approximately 200 yards.’ They had, indeed, wounded two soldiers, who were taken to King George V hospital. One had been hit in the thigh and the other in the arm.

The planned attack on the police outside the church had to be called off again that day, this time because the detectives did not turn up. They went to another church – Saint Teresa’s in Clarendon Street. The following Sunday the Squad was in Clarendon Street, but the detectives went elsewhere. ‘Misters! They’re not here today!’ a newsboy shouted at them. If the newspaper boy could twig what they were trying to do, they were clearly becoming too obvious.

Tom Keogh had said that if he did not get Bruton that day, he was going to go into church and shoot him at mass, according to Ben Byrne, who believed that Collins learned of Keogh’s plan and ‘put his foot down in a most determined fashion, feeling that the after-effects on public opinion might not, perhaps, be to our advantage.’ Collins actually called off the plans to shoot the men on their way to mass. With Terence MacSwiney and ten other hunger strikers approaching death, killing the police would undoubtedly detract from the enormous international publicity that MacSwiney’s hunger strike was attracting, and it would then be easier for the British to allow them all to die.

Although the Squad had been unable to kill Barrett, Brien and Bruton, Collins did manage to exploit the rivalries within the DMP to such an extent that Brien was discredited and forced to retire from the force. The British strongly suspected that arms were being brought from America into Dublin on the Moore-McCormack Line. Inspector McCabe, who was on port duty at the north wall, was directed to have a microscopic search made of these boats. The Americans were inclined to make legal trouble for the inspector as regards international law. McCabe wrote a long report, explaining the position and difficulties, legal and otherwise, and asking for instructions. Detective Superintendent Brien submitted this report to the inspector general, Colonel Edgeworth-Johnson, for instructions.

‘This subject ought never to have been raised,’ Edgeworth-Johnson wrote in the margin. ‘All American sailors are now suspect. Their belongings should be searched and a report made in each case.’ Broy gave Collins a copy of correspondence. ‘We will make use out of that,’ he said.

The Americans had been traditionally irked by the British claim of a right to search American ships going back over more than a hundred years, and Collins sought to exploit this. ‘I remember seeing Colonel Johnston’s minute in the latest news column of the Dublin
Evening Mail
,’ Broy recalled. ‘Superintendent Brien hated Inspector McCabe, who was a Unionist, and said that he must have been indiscreet and must have shown the file to some disloyal Customs Officer. Disciplinary action was taken against Inspector McCabe, and he was about to be compelled to retire on pension.’

‘I settled that fellow’s hash at last,’ Brien remarked to some colleagues that included Broy.

‘Apparently they had been life-long rivals,’ Broy explained. ‘I told this to McNamara who met McCabe in the castle and told him. McCabe got on to some of his Unionists friends at the castle and had the matter reopened. The final result was that McCabe was reinstated and Detective Superintendent Brien was compelled to go on pension.’ Collins viewed Brien as a very dangerous man and, having failed to kill him, was delighted to have him discredited and forced out of the DMP, though the whole thing would soon lead to the ousting of McNamara also.

Superintendent John J. Purcell, who replaced Brien, had come up through the uniform branch and loathed G Division and the political detectives. A thirty-year veteran of the force, he had a solemn countenance, close cut hair, rimless glasses and a gruff voice. Neligan, who was working in the superintendent’s office as pay sergeant, used to call in to talk to see Broy, on the pretext of looking for more money. They pretended to be hostile to one another because Purcell was liable to burst in on them at any time.