The Squad (25 page)

All the witnesses stated that the shooting started at the canal end at the southwest corner of the stadium near where Jones’ Road crossed the Royal Canal. This shooting led to panic. One of the armoured cars at the St James’ Avenue exit opened up with a machine gun burst of fifty shots in the air to stop people rushing out of that exit. In the panic people took off their overcoats to allow them to run faster. Men, women and children were knocked down and trampled upon as they tried to run up the steep embankment

When it was all over fifteen people lay dead or fatally wounded including a ten-year-old boy, Jeremiah O’Leary, who was shot in the head, John Scott aged fourteen, and Jane Boyle, who had gone to the game with her fiancée. They were due to marry five days later. The other people killed were Michael Hogan, the fullback on the Tipperary team, as well as Thomas Hogan, Thomas Ryan, James Burke, James Matthews, Thomas Boyle, Patrick O’Dowd, William Robinson, Joseph Traynor, Michael Feery, James Teehan and Daniel Carroll. There were over sixty people requiring hospital treatment and eleven of those were detained in hospital.

There was no proper inquest, just a military inquiry held in camera and the result of which was not published for over eighty years. The auxiliaries testified that they were fired on.

‘I was in the first car of the convoy detailed to go to Croke Park,’ one of them testified. ‘Immediately we came to the canal bridge on the rise overlooking the park I observed several men rushing back from the top of the bridge towards the entrance gate of the park. I observed three of them turning backward as they ran and discharging revolvers in our direction. Almost immediately the firing appeared to be taken up by members of the crowd inside the enclosure. At this time the members of our party were jumping out of the cars. Most of them rushed down the incline towards the entrance gate.’

‘I was in the second lorry of the convoy to Croke Park,’ another auxiliary testified. ‘The lorry halted just over the canal bridge. I saw no civilians on the bridge. There were some civilians in the passage leading to the turnstiles. I got out and went to the turnstiles as quickly as I could. As I got to the turnstiles I heard shots. I am certain they were revolver shots, a few shots fired quickly. They were fired inside the field. I tried to get through the turnstiles and found that they were locked. When getting over them a bullet hit the wall near to my head. This was the wall on the right hand side inside the archway and splinters of brick and mortar hit me in the face. It could not have been fired from outside the field. As I got inside I landed on my hands and feet. I saw young men aged between 20 and 25 running stooping among the crowd, away from me between the fence and the wall. I pursued and discharged my revolver in their direction.

‘Having been fired at, I used my own discretion in returning fire,’ the second auxiliary continued. ‘I aimed at individual young men who were running away trying to conceal themselves in the crowd. I used a .45 revolver and service ammunition. I chased them across the ground nearly to the wall on the east side. I then saw that a number of people were going back towards the main gate by which I came in. I rushed to that gate and took up my position outside to try and carry out my duties of identification. I stayed there until the ground was cleared.’

Two DMP officers, who testified that they were in the vicinity of the canal bridge on Jones’ Road, said nothing about the auxiliaries being fired on, or any civilians acting in a threatened manner. One officer testified that the men in the first lorry to arrive ran down towards the entrance of the stadium. He did not know what started the shooting. A military officer raced up to him.

‘What is all the firing about?’ he asked. ‘Stop that firing.’

Another DMP testified that he was on duty at the main gate in Jones’ Road. ‘At about 3.25 p.m., I saw six or seven large lorries accompanied by two armoured cars, one in front and one behind, pass along the Clonliffe Road from Drumcondra towards Bally bough,’ he testified. ‘Immediately after a small armoured car came across Jones’ Road from Fitzroy Avenue and pulled up at the en trance of the main gate. Immediately after that, three small Crossley lorries pulled up in Jones’ Road. There were about ten or twelve men dressed in RIC uniforms in each. When they got out of the cars they started firing in the air which I thought was blank ammunition, and almost immediately firing started all round the g r o u n d .’

The auxiliaries fired a total of 228 rounds of small arms fire, in addition to the fifty rounds fired from the armoured car. The court of inquiry found that the shooting was unauthorised and excessive, even if some members of the crowd fired on the auxiliaries first. Following the inquiry Major-General G. F. Boyd, commanding officer of the British soldiers in Dublin, concluded that the firing on the crowd, which began without orders, was both indiscriminate and unjustifiable.

Brigadier General Frank Crozier, who would shortly resign in protest against what he believed was the condoning of the miscon duct of his men, publicly stated that one of his officers told him that the auxiliaries started the shooting. ‘It was the most disgraceful show I have ever seen,’ one of his officers told him. ‘Black and Tans fired into the crowd without any provocation whatever.’

It has generally been stated that all of the Squad stayed away from Croke Park because they expected trouble, but some of them were definitely there, although they had dumped their guns beforehand. ‘Tom Keogh asked Joe Dolan and myself to go to the football,’ Dan McDonnell recalled. ‘We went there. His theory was that if there was any sudden raid we would be much safer there. We parked ourselves on the famous Hill 16, and the match had just started when, as far as we could see, there was a rumble and bustle going on around the entrance gate at the Hogan Stand side. (I personally had no interest in the match.) We suddenly realised that the whole ground was under rifle and machine-gun fire. We scattered and separated from one another on the hill. My hat fell off and while I was picking it up the man in front of me was shot. I was very fit in those days and I ran across the slob lands at the back of Hill 16 over to the Ballybough gate. I ran so fast that I was nearly the first to reach it.’

‘Next morning we knew the actual number of British agents who had been disposed of. We were disappointed with the result,’ Dan McDonnell recalled.

‘The fact is that the majority of raids by the IRA were abortive,’ Todd Andrews noted. ‘The men being sought were not in their digs, or in several cases the men looking for them bungled the jobs. It is not clear how many people were actually on the overall list. At one point there were apparently more than fifty, but some names were dropped at the insistence of Cathal Brugha. About thirty-five still remained, which meant that the IRA actually got less than a third of those targeted. Nevertheless the British agents were terrified and many went to ground.

‘My one intention was the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of ordinary decent citizens,’ Collins wrote. ‘I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed. Perjury and torture are words too easily known to them. If I had a second motive it was no more than a feeling such as I would have for a dangerous reptile. By their destruction the very air is made sweeter. That should be the future’s judgment on this particular event. For myself my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting in wartime the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.’

In London Lloyd George and members of the cabinet were very jittery, according to Sir Maurice Hankey. Greenwood provided weapons for all his domestic staff, though – unlike the prime minister – he was able to joke about his own predicament. ‘All my household are armed,’ the chief secretary told the cabinet, ‘my valet, my butler, and my cook. So if you have any complaints about the soup you may know what to expect.’

When the House of Commons next met, there were some ugly scenes. Joe Devlin, the nationalist MP from Belfast, provoked up roar from the benches when he asked why members were asking about the deaths of the officers in the morning and ignoring what had happened in Croke Park in the afternoon.

‘Sit down!’ members shouted. ‘Sit down!’

‘I won’t sit down,’ Devlin replied. ‘I want to know from the prime minister why the House has not been made acquainted in this recital with the entrance of the military into a football field of 15,000 people, the indiscriminate shooting, and the ten men killed. Why have we not heard of this?’

‘I was never asked that question,’ Hamar Greenwood replied, on walking to the despatch box. ‘But I am prepared to answer it now.’ The chief secretary rummaged among his papers as members on the government benches beneath Devlin were on their feet shouting at him to sit down. Devlin turned to Major John Molson on the Conservative bench below him and said something. The major grabbed Devlin around the neck with his right arm and tried to drag him into the row below. A violent scuffle ensued as Devlin broke loose and traded punches with government MPs.

‘Kill him, kill him,’ members from all sides of the house shouted. Other members rushed to break up the scuffling. Devlin’s coat had been pulled from him in the struggle. T. P. O’Connor and James M. Hogge, the Liberal M P, restrained Devlin from behind.

‘This is a fine specimen of your English courage and chivalry – to attack one man among six hundred,’ Devlin taunted his attackers.

‘If there is a fight I am in it,’ Jack Jones of the Labour Party said as he imposed himself in front of Devlin.

‘I declare the sitting suspended,’ the speaker said.

The public gallery was cleared, but some members remained rooted to their benches. Lloyd George, Bonar L a w, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain sat together on the treasury bench, while Greenwood, Sir Eric Geddes and Sir Lionel Worthington-Evans stood staring at where Devlin sat, pale and angry, flanked by O’Connor and Hogge. A number of members went to Devlin and shook hands with him, while some Conservatives engaged in animated discussion with him. Those included Viscount Curzon and Sir Harry Brittain. The session resumed after about a twenty minute recess.

The three men arrested in the hours before the 9 a.m. strike, McKee, Clancy and Clune, were being held in the old detective office in the Exchange Court. The room was being used as a kind of guardroom in which beds, other furniture and some stores were kept, including a box of handgrenades. Even though there were three windows in the room overlooking an alley, it was dark because of the high building on the other side. The prisoners supposedly got hold of the handgrenades and threw them, and one of them was also said to have got hold of a rifle. But all three – McKee, Clancy and Clune – were shot dead before they could do any damage.

‘I stood erect, and saw one of the prisoners with a rifle, which he levelled and fired at the guard commander, who had just entered the room,’ one of the guards later testified. ‘The prisoner then swung round and fired a shot at me. I fired at the prisoner with my revolver, and he dropped. The guard commander also fired at the prisoner with his revolver.’

‘I heard a scuffling noise and rushed into the guardroom,’ the commander of the guard testified. ‘The prisoner McKee fired at me with a rifle; the shot passed my head and buried itself in the wall. McKee also fired a shot at the sentry, who appeared above the table. I fired at McKee with my revolver and he dropped. I saw Clancy with a shovel strike at one of our men twice and miss him. A guard fired at him, and I saw Clancy fall.’

A sentry on duty at the window testified that he and a colleague heard noise behind them and, looking round, noticed that two of the prisoners had thrown handgrenades at them and dived behind some mattresses. When the grenades did not detonate, Clancy seized a shovel and aimed to hit the sentry. ‘I fired at the prisoner, Clancy, killing him,’ the sentry explained. A fourth witness told much the same story, and he, too, said that he had seen Clancy holding a shovel and being shot and killed.

When the bodies were released to the families there were extensive signs of discolouring that seemed to indicate extensive bruising, but the army doctor said that large staining could occur after death, depending on the position in which a body was lying after death. Clancy had been hit by up to five bullets, which made eight wounds, McKee had three wounds caused by two bullets, while Clune had nine wounds cause by seven bullets at most. He said there were no bayonet wounds, but there was a bullet lodged underneath McKee’s skin in the right side of the chest. David Neligan was quite adamant that they were not bayoneted.

The bodies were handed over for burial. While Clune’s body was sent to Quin, County Clare, Collins requested that some volunteers who were not prominent should collect the bodies of McKee and Clancy. Pat McCrae of the Squad was detailed to find such volunteers but could only get Tom Gay and one other man, so he went himself as well. They were brought to a small chapel at the pro-cathedral. Collins had doctors examine the bodies ‘so that the minds of their comrades could be satisfied that they had not been tortured, as their imaginations had led them to think,’ according to Ernie O’Malley. But Piaras Beaslaí told a very different story. He contended that the examination showed that McKee had been savagely mistreated, a bayonet thrust had punctured his liver and he had suffered broken ribs. The bodies were then dressed in the uniforms of the Irish Volunteers.

Collins was distraught at the deaths. They were ‘two men who fully understood the inside of Collins’ work and his mind, and who were ever ready and able to link up their resources of the Dublin brigade to any work that Collins had in hand, and to do so promptly, effectively and sympathetically,’ Richard Mulcahy noted. Next morning Collins, Cullen, Thornton and Gearóid O’Sullivan, the adjutant-general, helped to carry the bodies out to the waiting hearses. A photograph of Collins and Cullen at the head of one of the coffins actually appeared in the
Evening Herald
. He attended the requiem mass and went on to the graveside, where he was actually filmed as he stepped out of the crowd to lay a wreath on the grave. Attached was a note signed by himself: ‘In memory of two good friends – Dick and Peadar – and two of Ireland’s best soldiers.’