The Squad (20 page)

The Tipperary gang was broken up in October. Part of the British reorganisation had involved the setting up of a combined intelligence unit to track down wanted members of the IRA. The Central Raid Bureau under Ormonde Winter soon began to make its presence felt as it tracked down Dan Breen and Seán Treacy. The British mistakenly thought that Breen was responsible for the shooting of the one-armed colonel, Ferguson Smyth, in the County Club in Cork. Major Gerald Smyth had returned from the Middle East to avenge his brother’s death and when Winter’s people learned that Breen and Treacy were spending the night of 11 October at the Drumcondra home of Professor John Carolan, Smyth was selected to lead the raiding party.

The group burst into the house, but Smyth and Captain A. P. White were killed as they approached the room occupied by Breen and Treacy, who then escaped through a window. When the shooting started the troops outside raced into the house, thereby allowing the two men to escape. Breen had been wounded in the exchange of fire and was taken to the Mater hospital, where doctors and nurses colluded to hide his identity and the nature of his wounds. Professor Carolan was also brought to the hospital, where he died of his wounds, but not before making a full deathbed statement that he had been shot in cold blood by one of the raiding party.

The funeral of Smyth and White took place the following day, 14 October. The Squad and members of the Dublin IRA were in place at various vantage points to the funeral, while intelligence officers were scattered only along the quays which the funeral procession was expected to pass. ‘Our information was that Hamar Greenwood, General Tudor and other prominent officers would take part in the funeral procession, and it was decided that an attempt would be made to shoot them en route,’ related Frank Thornton. ‘With this purpose in mind Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen, Dick McKee, Frank Henderson, Leo Henderson, Peadar Clancy and I met at the back of Peadar Clancy’s shop. Receiving information that none of those whom we sought were taking part in the funeral, the job was called off.’

Thornton and Tom Cullen were almost the last to leave Clancy’s shop, with Dick McKee following behind them. ‘As we left, Seán Treacy arrived, and on informing him of what had happened he went on towards the shop while we went towards the Pillar,’ Thornton continued. ‘We had very nearly arrived at the Pillar when the shooting started lower down the street, but to all intents and purposes it looked to us like one of the ordinary incidents which were happening every day in the streets of Dublin.’ Treacy was killed along with two innocent bystanders – Patrick Carroll, a young messenger boy, and Joseph Corringham, of 57 Lower Gardiner Street who ran a tobacco shop.

RIC Sergeant Daniel Roche and Constable Fitzmaurice were sent to Dublin to identify Treacy and another Volunteer (Matt Furlong as it turned out) who had been killed in a premature explosion and who seemed to fit Breen’s descriptions. David Neligan was given the gruesome task of accompanying Roche to the Richmond hospital morgue, where he identified Treacy, but did not recognise the other body.

‘That’s not Dan Breen,’ Roche said. ‘I would know his bulldog face anywhere.’

That evening Neligan mentioned the incident to Liam Tobin and added that he was due to meet Roche on Ormond Quay the following afternoon. Collins decided that the Squad should eliminate Roche, a twenty-year veteran of the RIC, in his mid-forties, and a father of four.

When Neligan saw Tom Keogh, Jim Slattery, Joe Dolan and Frank Thornton at the corner of Capel Street the next day he realised what was about to happen. There is a discrepancy here though as he said that he did not know that they would be waiting to kill Roche, whereas they said he was to identify Roche for them.

‘For Christ’s sake, what has he done?’ Neligan asked.

‘I don’t know,’ one of the men replied. ‘I’ve my orders to shoot him and that’s what I’m going to do.’

Dolan claimed that it had been arranged for Neligan to identify Roche. The Squad already had a description of Roche but his presence with Neligan would have made it easy to identify him.

‘We took up our position and then we saw Neligan talking to two men near the Ormond hotel,’ Slattery noted. ‘One of them was a stout man and looked more like a farmer than an RIC man. Joe Dolan and Frank Thornton were supposed to shoot these men, and we got the job of covering them off. We did not take any particular notice for a little while, until we saw Dolan approaching us with a drawn gun in his hand, and the two men who had been talking to Neligan walking in front of him.’

At that time repairs were being carried out on the bank premises at the corner of Capel Street and scaffolding poles were erected, so that there was room for only one person to pass at a time. Roche was walking with Constable Fitzmaurice. ‘The two policemen were coming towards us and we let them pass us,’ Dolan explained. ‘Then I took out my revolver and put six bullets into Roche when he was just in front of me in the passage-way. Tom Keogh and Jim Slattery put a few more bullets into him.’

‘When they passed us, Dolan levelled his gun and we knew that they were the men we were looking for, so we fired at them, killing Roche,’ Slattery recalled. The wounded man still managed to run some distance as they were shooting him. In the process two bystanders were wounded – a fifteen-year-old girl, Eileen Allen, of 23 Lower Bridge Street, and an elderly man, Daniel Reid, of 34 Little Strand Street.

‘The other man [Fitzmaurice] escaped, although we had the place surrounded. He got away before we realised he was one of the men we were looking for.’ According to Dolan the other policeman ran to Dublin Castle and promptly resigned from the RIC.

Constable Fitzmaurice reported that he had seen Neligan talking to one of the killers, and Neligan had some difficulty extricating himself. He was summoned before Colonel Walter Edgeworth-Johnson, the head of the DMP.

‘This constable says he saw you talking to the men who shot Sergeant Roche,’ the inspector general said.

‘He is making a mistake, sir.’

‘What did you do?’ he asked. ‘Did you see the men who attacked Roche?

Neligan said that he had run away as he thought the shots were being fired at him. ‘I also told him that I was waiting for a tram to go to the Park,’ he added. ‘I had no sooner said this than I saw there was a flaw in it as I was on the wrong side of the road for an outgoing tram.’

The inspector general could not understand how the IRA learned that Roche was in Dublin. ‘Didn’t you tell me that some woman at the railway station enquired where you were going?’

‘Yes,’ Fitzmaurice replied. ‘A woman in the magazine stall at Limerick Junction asked me where we were bound for.’

At that point Neligan was told he could leave. He was understandably annoyed that shooting Roche in his presence had jeopardised his cover as a spy. It really demonstrated a dangerous blind spot in the Big Fellow’s intelligence operations. As a man of action he was so anxious to get things done that he sometimes acted before the dust had settled to cover his agents’ tracks.

Vinny Byrne did not believe the Squad had shot Sergeant Roche just because he identified Treacy’s body. ‘There is no doubt there must have been some other reason for the shooting,’ he argued, ‘as it in itself would not warrant such action; but that was of no concern of the Squad’s; they got their orders and asked no questions.’ Neligan thought likewise. ‘Identifying a dead man was certainly not an offence at all, but of course it was not for me to question the ins and outs of the matter,’ he explained.

Paddy O’Daly said that Roche and Fitzmaurice had supposedly been recognised in the lorry that raided a republican outfitters, and it was suspected that they were in Dublin to look for Breen. It seemed more likely to Neligan, however, that Roche was just shot as a reprisal for the killing of Seán Treacy. Whatever the real story, Neligan clearly had pangs of conscience. ‘That was the one day I regretted my role,’ he said. ‘If for one second I thought the poor wretch would have been shot, not a word of his visit would have been mentioned.’

Believing that Larry Dalton and Daniel Roche had both been unfairly eliminated, Neligan set out to spare Detective Sergeant Denis Coffey, who had picked out men in 1916 for execution. Coffey knew many of the older Volunteers and could pick them out in the street. There was an even greater danger that someone might tip him off about IRA activities. Hence he was on the Squad’s hit list.

‘Although, in my opinion, he richly deserved such a fate, I determined to save his life for the sake of his poor wretch of a wife and young family,’ Neligan explained. ‘I, therefore, sought him out and told him I’d heard two fellows in a public house saying they’d shoot him next day.’

Coffey was terrified. ‘He had no stomach for the business after that,’ Neligan said. ‘He never came out of the castle (where he lived with his wife and family) again until the Truce … Hordes of officials holed up there and spent their evenings walking about, some wearing steel waistcoats.’

The first of the hunger strikers to die was Michael Fitzgerald on 17 October, but his death was hardly noticed against the backdrop of MacSwiney’s continuing struggle. The lord mayor died eight days later on 25 October, after seventy-four days on hunger strike. Joseph Murphy died some hours later, and Arthur Griffith ordered that the other hunger strikes be called off.

MacSwiney attracted most attention because he was not only an elected member of the Westminster parliament, even though he had never actually taken his seat, but was also the lord mayor of the island’s third largest city. After his death Sinn Féin sought to make as much capital as possible out of the funeral. If they had had their way the body would have been brought to Dublin and then brought down through the country, but the British military delivered it straight to Cork, where there was a massive funeral.

MacSwiney was buried in Cork on Sunday, 31 October 1920. Speaking in New York at the polo grounds that day, de Valera said that MacSwiney ‘and his comrades gave up their lives for their country. The English have killed them … Tomorrow a boy, Kevin Barry, they will hang, and he alike, will only regret that he has but one life to give. Oh God!’ De Valera then quoted Yeats:

They shall be remembered forever,

They shall be alive forever,

They shall be speaking forever,

The people shall hear them forever.

The execution of Kevin Barry, an eighteen-year-old university student, was the first official British execution of a rebel in Ireland since 1916. He was sentenced to death on 21 October and hanged eleven days later. Collins did consider some rescue plans but Barry’s mother was opposed as she thought his sentence would be commuted because of his age.

There was intense public pressure to reprieve Barry, but there was little support for the idea at Dublin Castle, because ‘the three soldiers he and his party killed were all under 19,’ noted Mark Sturgis, who felt this made a nonsense of the arguments about Barry’s age. ‘I think the Shinns would gain more sympathy as “sportsmen” if they were a little more logical about this,’ Sturgis wrote. ‘They seem to see nothing absurd in making their proudest boast that they are a rebel army attacking a tyrant and yet using every sort of plea for mercy whenever one of their brave soldiers is up against it.’

Churchill was finally getting his way, but he could hardly have conceived of a timing that would cause greater offence to the Irish people than by desecrating ‘All Saints’ Day’, a Catholic holy day, with the hanging of a teenage college student. They thereby played right into the hands of Michael Collins. ‘Rather a pity no one noticed it is All Saints’ day,’ Mark Sturgis wrote in his diary. Barry would immediately go into the pantheon of Irish heroes as a martyr and a virtual saint. He was immortalised in song:

Another martyr for old Ireland,

Another murder for the crown,

Whose brutal laws may kill the Irish,

But won’t keep their spirit down.

Lads like Barry are no cowards

From the foe they will not fly,

Lads like Barry will free Ireland,

For her sake they’ll live and die.

IRA headquarters decided on a general attack on British forces on the eve of Barry’s execution as a kind of a reprisal. Orders were sent out to this effect to the officer commanding each brigade. Tadgh Kennedy brought the order to the Kerry No. 1 brigade as he was just returning to Tralee after five months in Dublin.

‘I conveyed the order to Paddy Cahill,’ Kennedy explained. ‘A cancelling order was sent out at the last minute but none reached Kerry.’

Four RIC men had been killed in Kerry by rebels since the Easter Rebellion, but within twenty-four hours of Barry’s execution no less than sixteen policemen and a radio naval officer had been shot, seven fatally, another two were kidnapped, beaten savagely, and then released. One of those never recovered from the ordeal and committed suicide shortly afterwards.

Hugh Martin of the
Daily News
argued that what occurred next in Tralee was symptomatic of what was happening throughout Ireland. The IRA struck and the crown police lashed out in retaliation against the people as a whole. This had the impact of solidifying local support for the IRA.

On the night of 31 October Constable William Madden, aged thirty, from Newcastlewest, was shot dead in Abbeydorney and a colleague, Constable Robert Gorbey, aged twenty-three, was mortally wounded. He died later in the week. Constable George Morgan, also aged twenty-three, a native of Mayo, was killed in nearby Ballyduff and Constable Thomas Reidy, aged forty-two, from Clare, was shot through the head and two other colleagues were wounded. Black and Tans arrived in Ballyduff a few hours later and proceeded to torch the creamery and some of the principal business houses.

John Houlihan was taken out of his home near the village and shot by the Black and Tans. The military arrived at the house around 4.30 a.m. As the teenager’s horrified parents looked on the Tans dragged him from the house across the road, where one stabbed him with a bayonet in the side, shot him three times, and then another finished him off with a blow of a rifle butt to the head.