The Squad (28 page)

They did not realise he was one of the more dangerous men. O’Connor was a middle-aged man with a distinctly unhealthy appearance – short, very thin, with a haggard pale face. Despite his hangdog look, he was a cheerful individual, a great talker, and fearlessly brave. He managed to escape without being recognised. Ernie O’Malley was taken in Kilkenny in somewhat similar circumstances. Even though they had not identified him, he was transferred to Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, where he was held with a number of men arrested for involvement, or supposed involvement, in the Bloody Sunday killings.

During January and February 1921 the British charged ten men with murder in relation to the Bloody Sunday killings. Only one of them, Frank Teeling, was involved in the killing with which he was charged, but four of them were convicted of murder, another as an accessory, while the other five were acquitted of all charges.

The first to be tried were Thomas Whelan of 14 Barrow Street, Michael J. Tobin of 19 Upper Sherrard Street, James McNamara of 81 Lower George’s Street in Kingstown and James Boyce of 10 Aungier Street. They were accused of murdering Captain Baggallay at 119 Lower Baggot Street. The case against Tobin was dropped at the opening of the trial, and McNamara and Boyce were found not guilty, largely on the basis of the evidence of witnesses who testified that the accused were at nine o’clock mass when Baggallay was killed. One woman swore that she sat in the same pew as Whelan at mass at the same time in Ringsend, while a man testified to meeting him leaving the church after mass at 9.40, and a bar worker who had gone out to purchase a newspaper said that he saw the accused at the same time coming out of the church with the crowd after mass. But the officer who was shaving in the bathroom at the time Baggallay was killed identified Whelan as one of the men in the hallway. This was a military court and Whelan was convicted and sentenced to death.

Frank Teeling, who had been wounded and captured during the shoot-out at 22 Mount Street, was tried along with three others for the murder of Lieutenant H. Angliss (alias Paddy McMahon). Others charged were William Conway of 32 Upper Mount Street and Edward Potter of 41 Rathmines Road. Daniel Healy of 86 Phibsborough Road was also charged with this murder but he was granted a separate trial and was subsequently acquitted.

The officer who had been sharing the bed with Angliss identified Teeling and Potter as having been among the gunmen that broke into their room at 22 Lower Mount Street, while Conway was identified by a maid in the house. ‘I declared before Almighty God that I am not connected with any political organisation,’ Potter testified on his own behalf. ‘I am not guilty of the charge. I have never used a revolver in my life.’ Conway was equally forceful in proclaiming his innocence. ‘I am innocent of the charge brought against me,’ he told the court. ‘I know nothing of the transaction whatever, and I have never been in 22 Mount Street in my life. I fired no shot, and I have never used a revolver.’

Teeling spoke up on their behalf. ‘These people who have been arrested for this affair, I honestly swear, were not there at all, and had nothing to do with it,’ he told the court. ‘I, therefore, do not like to see them suffer when wholly innocent.’

Before sentence could be pronounced on Teeling, he escaped from Kilmainham Jail on 15 February, along with Simon Donnolly and Ernie O’Malley, who was being held under the false name of Bernard Stewart. They wanted Paddy Moran to come with them. He had led the assassination team in the Gresham hotel on Bloody Sunday morning, but he was being tried for the murder of Captain Peter Ames in Upper Mount Street, along with Joseph Rochford of 11 Elm Park Avenue. Rochford stated that he was at home in bed until 11 a.m. on the Sunday morning, while Moran said that he had attended eight o’clock mass and had a witness that saw him there and others who saw him in Blackrock, where he lived, after nine o’clock. Only then had he gone into the city centre on the tram.

‘I’m not going,’ Moran said when O’Malley tried to persuade him to escape with them. ‘I won’t let down the witnesses who gave evidence for me.’

‘Someone has to die for this,’ O’Malley warned. ‘Maybe Teeling or myself, but they’ll hang you for certain if we get through.’

Following the escape from Kilmainham, Collins cycled out to meet O’Malley in his hiding place. The Big Fellow shook his hand for a long time. ‘You’re born to be shot,’ Collins said. ‘You can’t be hanged! Why didn’t Paddy Moran come with you?’

‘I don’t know,’ O’Malley replied. ‘He thought there was no case against him.’

‘They’ll hang him as a reprisal now,’ Collins said.

Joseph Rochford was acquitted of the murder of Ames, but Moran was wrongly convicted of that killing. He and Whelan were hanged on 13 March for crimes they did not commit. Of course, in Moran’s case he was responsible for the two killings in the Gresham hotel, but Whelan hadn’t had an involvement in any of the killings. Conway and Potter were both sentenced to life in prison, even though they had no involvement in the killings either. James Green, the hall porter at 38 Upper Mount Street, who was acquitted of the murder of Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh F. Montgomery, was convicted of assisting the man that Major Woodcock’s wife had seen in the back garden. She saw Green unlock a side door to let that man out after the killings. For this he was sentenced to two years in jail.

On New Year’s Eve the flat of Eileen McGrane at 21 Dawson Street was raided and a huge cache of Collins’ papers were discovered. The documents found included the carbon copies of reports supplied by Ned Broy, and the daybook that Collins had taken in April 1919 during the night he spent in the G Division archives.

‘That damned old daybook of yours was twice nearly getting me shot,’ Joe O’Reilly told Broy.

Collins warned Broy that the documents had been found and that it would only be a matter of time before he would come under suspicion. Broy received a further warning from Superintendent John J. Purcell, who had replaced Owen Brien.

‘Every vestige of political duty was immediately removed from the Brunswick St office to the castle,’ Broy wrote. British intelligence ceased to give any further confidential information to the D M P.

‘I continued to meet Collins almost every night during this time and, of course, had to take extra precautions in doing so.’ He found Collins ‘very perturbed’ about cabinet pressure both to ease off on the war that he had been engaging in against individuals and to get him to go to the United States. Even though Collins had built up a formative intelligence network, his most valuable police spies had lost their effectiveness. Joe Kavanagh died in September 1920 from a blood clot after an operation for appendicitis in Jervis Street hospital. Sergeant Jerry Maher came under suspicion at the county inspector’s office in Kildare, and quit the RIC. He was replaced by then Sergeant Patrick Casey, who was already supplying Collins with information. He was able to continue until March, when he too came under suspicion and was transferred to Downpatrick. Broy and McNamara’s effectiveness as spies was ended when they came under suspicion as a result of the captured documents.

‘I was in charge of the office from which the documents were taken and, consequently, was not likely to have given out the documents myself, as I would have been obviously the first to be blamed,’ Broy argued in his own defence. When he was brought before the commissioner of the DMP he was handed a sensitive report drawn up by a detective who had watched over Broy as he typed it up. Broy had not been able to make an extra carbon of that report, but he had given the file copy to one of Collins’ people with the instruction that they should type up a copy and return the original to him without delay. Thus it was the re-typed copy that was found and Broy was quick to notice that this was typed on an elite typewriter with ten characters to the inch, as opposed to the typewriters at G Division headquarters, which were all pica models with just eight characters to the inch. This was enough to raise some doubts about Broy’s guilt. He argued that if he had been supplying Collins with the information, he would have fled once it became clear that he was under suspicion, yet he stayed around for more than a month before his arrest.

The man that Broy had to fear within the DMP was Detective Chief Inspector Joe Supple who was expected to prepare the case against him. He was a slight man with a goat face, according to Neligan. Supple began every day by attending mass in Mount Argus near his home, and McNamara suggested that Collins warn Supple that if he took the case he should pick out his spot in Mount Jerome cemetery beside Mount Argus.

‘By God,’ Collins said, ‘I’ll go up there tonight!’

Collins arranged for a man to deliver the warning without delay. ‘I have a grave warning to give you!’ the man told Supple. ‘It concerns someone called Broy, of whom I know nothing. I am to tell you that if you go on with the case against him, you will be shot!’

Collins enlisted the help of former Detective Sergeant Pat McCarthy, who had tried to play on both sides of the fence in the DMP for a time. His brother was active in Sinn Féin and had told Collins that Pat was not involved in political work. However, the Big Fellow was able to produce a report in which the detective sergeant had detailed the names, addresses and usual haunts of prominent Sinn Féiners. In the circumstances Pat McCarthy resigned from the DMP and emigrated to London. Now Collins contacted him and, in order to deflect suspicion from Broy, asked him to flee to America as soon as secret transportation could be arranged. ‘McCarthy agreed, and sent me word that under no circumstances would he make a statement to the British or come to Dublin,’ Broy explained. ‘When the Civil War was over, I had the pleasure of reinstating McCarthy in the Dublin Police and promoting him to inspector and later superintendent.’

Among the papers found at Eileen McGrane’s there was apparently evidence that prompted the intelligence people to look at the whole affair about the American seamen bringing arms into Dublin again and McNamara came under suspicion for having leaked the document to the IRA. Upon his return to Dublin from Glasgow, McNamara was summoned to the office of the DMP inspector general and summarily dismissed from the force.

‘Listen, Mac!’ Neligan warned him, ‘don’t go to your father’s house tonight or any other night.’

‘You are lucky,’ Collins told McNamara. Obviously the British did not have much on him, or they would not have let him go. But henceforth he went on the run, with the IRA.

Meanwhile Collins was still living a charmed life. Following Bloody Sunday, the British had arrested thousands of suspects, but it took some time to reorganise their intelligence network. They regularly cordoned off city blocks and searched the buildings within the area. One night Frank Thornton was in Jim Kirwan’s pub in Parnell’s Street with Sergeant Maurice McCarthy of the RIC from Belfast, the man who had helped to supply him with the photograph of Forbes Redmond a year earlier. Collins rushed into the pub.

‘Get out quick and see what the auxiliaries are doing,’ Collins said to Thornton. ‘There is a crowd of them coming up the road in extended order.’

‘I went out the back way and down the lane into Parnell Street, and as I got to the end of the lane I was held up by the auxiliaries, demanding where I was going and so forth, and after searching me for a gun I was let go,’ Thornton recalled. ‘I turned to the right and walked into Kirwan’s by the front entrance and walked down towards the rear of the shop to find that Collins had left the snug and was standing at the counter in one of the partitions and I stood in the next. We both called for drinks, but didn’t recognise one another.’

The auxiliaries searched the snug where McCarthy was still sitting. He produced his identification card and his revolver. One of the auxiliaries bought a drink for McCarthy and warned him that carrying a gun in Dublin was dangerous because if he were not careful the republicans would take his gun and might shoot him as a spy. This was one of the many occasions in which Collins was allowed to slip through the enemy’s net.

In addition to the uncovering of most of his main police spies in Dublin, some of Collins’ hideouts were being uncovered. On 31 January the British raided Cullenswood House because they had become suspicious about a number of seemingly unnecessary structural alterations that they had noticed on a recent raid. They decided to inspect the alterations, only to discover that the changes included false walls and false doors, and a false wardrobe with a secret spring which opened into a chamber that appeared to be a secret office. In one of the rooms secret doors and secret cupboards were found. There were nine existing doors giving access to adjacent fields. During the investigation a revolver and some ammunition were found in one of the dummy walls. There was nobody on the premises but in one room supper had been laid, apparently for people on the previous night.

The spy ring within the DMP had practically disintegrated but it was no longer that important because the DMP had ceased to be any real threat to the IRA. There was no longer that much information to be picked up within the force, because British intelligence did not now share any information with the DMP as it had proved so unreliable. Collins therefore had to recruit new spies in other branches of the security forces. He suffered a further set back when Major Reynolds, his informer within F Company of the auxiliaries, was transferred to Clare, where he continued to work for the IRA. Liam Tobin managed to recruit another auxiliary named McCarthy, but Tobin and the others were always deeply suspicious of paid informers like Reynolds and McCarthy.

Willie Beaumont had a scare one day when Major Stokes, one of the senior British intelligence officers, produced some of the notes that Seán Beaumont had submitted about what Willie had told him. ‘I’ll show you what these Sinn Féiners are able to do,’ he said as he produced the notes. Willie Beaumont thought he was in trouble, but Stokes never linked the notes to him.

Willie actually became disillusioned about the lack of activity in targeting undercover people that he had identified. ‘He told me that he had come to the conclusion that Collins did not want to prosecute the war vigorously against the Auxiliaries,’ his brother Seán noted. ‘I don’t know whether he actually had an interview with Collins or with one of the Squad but he accused them anyway of not acting vigorously enough and more or less washed his hands of any further activity.’