The Squad (29 page)

David Neligan concluded that he was wasting his time in the DMP. ‘Now I was alone in the castle,’ he said. ‘I carried on for some time.’ He decided to try to get into British intelligence. ‘I told Collins the facts,’ Neligan said. ‘It was useless staying there any longer. The British secret service had taken over and we were completely in the dark. I told him I intended trying to join the British secret service, which I did in a few days.’

Neligan, who was interviewed by Major Stokes, was told that he been highly recommended. He was therefore promptly sworn into the service the same day. The oath he took was:

I ___ do solemnly swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully perform the duties assigned to me as a member of His Majesty’s Secret Service; that I will implicitly obey those placed over me; that I will keep forever secret such membership and everything connected therewith, that I will never, in any circumstances betray such service or those connected with it even when I have left the Service. If I fail to keep this Oath in every particular I realise that vengeance will pursue me to the end of the earth, so help me God.

‘I was assigned to the district of Dalkey, Kingstown and Black rock,’ Neligan explained. ‘I got a curfew pass signed by General Boyd, O/C., Dublin District.’

‘Join the IRA by all means, if you can,’ Major Stokes told him. ‘We will be glad if you get in.’

Stokes then called in a Captain Woolridge, a British army intelligence officer. They arranged to meet him in Kingstown a couple of days later.

‘When I told Collins the next day he was pleased his Squad already knew Woolridge, but they didn’t know the Major,’ Neligan said. Cullen and Tobin had followed Woolridge from the North Dublin Union before but had lost him. Neligan was not supposed to go into Dublin proper, so Collins agreed to come out to meet him in Keegan’s Bar in Blackrock.

‘I met plenty of the British secret service after this,’ Neligan added. ‘They were scattered in various private houses about the city. These houses were all owned by loyalists and they were carefully screened by the British before the agents were allowed to go into them, a very wise precaution! These loyalists, whose houses lodged the secret service men, were, for the most part, Freemasons and were of course largely staffed by Protestant servants.

‘The other secret service men I knew were practically all Englishmen,’ Neligan explained. ‘Those fellows were good types. They could not understand why I, a Catholic and an Irishman, was hostile to my own countrymen and they clearly told me that I should be ashamed of myself and that if they were Irishmen they would be Sinn Féiners.

‘I was expected to make an intelligence report once a week,’ Neligan continued. ‘Collins often helped me to write these re ports; in fact, he wrote them himself. Many a good laugh we had over them! He used to say in these reports that the IRA was in no way short of arms or ammunition; recruits were simply falling over each other; they had plenty of money; new columns were being formed to fight the British.’

Captain Woolridge complimented Neligan on his reports and said that he knew the IRA had plenty of ammunition, because they were deliberately feeding the republicans with booby-trapped ammunition so that the IRA would use it. ‘We are dropping stuff here and there,’ Woolridge explained. ‘If they use them, they will get a shock.’

The doctored bullets were marked ‘ZZ’. Neligan passed this on to Collins, who had a warning circulated.

Collins was under intense pressure and had a number of narrow escapes, but the British still had no idea what he looked like, or where to look for him. There were a number of unfounded reports of his arrest. On 10 January 1921 John Foley, a former secretary of the lord mayor of Dublin, was arrested while having lunch in Jammet’s restaurant with a former high sheriff of Dublin, T. J. McAvin. ‘Come on, Michael Collins, you have dodged us long enough,’ one of the arresting officers said. The two men were taken to Dublin Castle before they could establish that Foley was not Collins. In fact, he did not even look remotely like him.

Soon after a man whose real name was Michael Collins was arrested in the Prince of Wales hotel where he was a barman working under the name of Corry. The
Daily Sketch
reported that Collins had been shot off a white horse while trying to escape from Burgatia House on the outskirts of Rosscarbery, County Cork, on 2 February, even though he was not within a hundred miles of the place. IRA intelligence intercepted a telegram from Dublin Castle asking for confirmation. ‘Is there any truth that Michael Collins was killed at Burgatia?’ the telegram read.

‘There is no information of the report re Michael Collins, but some believe he was wounded,’ came the reply from Cork.

‘We are hoping to hear further confirmation about poor Michael Collins,’ the Big Fellow remarked on being shown the telegrams. On 8 February a news agency circulated a report that Collins had been killed in Drimoleague, County Cork; obviously untrue.

The amazing stories of his escape were according him enormous notoriety. ‘He combined the characteristics of Robin Hood with those of an elusive Pimpernel,’ Ormonde Winter wrote. ‘His many narrow escapes, when he managed to elude almost certain arrest, shrouded him in a cloak of historical romance.’

The ASU (Active Service Unit) was established from among the Dublin brigade with over one hundred men on full time service under the direction of Oscar Traynor. It engaged in two or three ambushes daily against the auxiliary lorries as they moved about Dublin. The lorries were caged to prevent the IRA throwing grenades into them. However, the IRA came up with methods to bomb the trucks, so the British resorted to carrying hostages. A wooden post was erected in the truck and an imprisoned member of the dáil was handcuffed to it as the truck travelled about the city. IRA headquarters decided to retaliate by taking members of the British parliament hostage. The headquarters intelligence section was given the task of planning the retaliation.

‘We were instructed to be ready on a suitable date within any one week to arrest twelve members of the then British government,’ Frank Thornton recalled. ‘This number was to include cabinet ministers if possible.’

Thornton, Seán Flood and George Fitzgerald went to London to check out the habits of government members of the British House of Commons. They were in regular contact with Sam Maguire and Reggie Dunne of the London IRA. ‘One day when Seán Flood and I were going out to Acton on a routine check-up on the Underground Metropolitan Railway, we ran into West minster Station to find the lift gates just closing,’ recalled Thornton.

‘I’ll race you to the bottom down the runway,’ Flood said.

‘It was a long winding passage with about three bends on it,’ Thornton explained. ‘Seán raced off in front and disappeared around the second last bend about a few feet in front of me. I heard a terrific crash and on coming around the corner I fell over two men on the ground, one of whom was Seán Flood. We picked ourselves up and both assisted in helping to his feet the man who Seán Flood had knocked down. To our amazement two other men who were with him ordered us to put up our hands. We more or less ignored them and started to brush down the man and apologise to him when to our amazement we discovered that the man we had knocked down was Lloyd George, the prime minister.’

Lloyd George told the two guards to put their guns away. They pointed out the two men were obviously Irish from their accents.

‘Well, Irishmen or no Irishmen, if they were out to shoot me I was shot long ago,’ the prime minister replied.

After about a month, during which they got some interesting insights into the extracurricular activities of members of the British parliament, they had a list of twenty-five members of parliament who had regular patterns for certain nights of the week. They provided the details to the London IRA whose members helped them draw up a list of addresses from where those people could be kidnapped. But the London operation was abandoned when the British quit the practice of using dáil deputies as hostages.

Local leaders like Dan Breen in Tipperary, Tom Barry and Liam Lynch in Cork, Tom Maguire in Mayo and Seán MacEoin in the Longford area, had generally acted independently of IRA head quarters, but Collins was always quick to endorse their actions. This generated the impression that their actions were being orchestrated centrally. As a result the British often accused Collins of involvement in skirmishes with which he had no connection.

Brugha wanted to resurrect his old scheme to kill members of the British cabinet. This was abandoned after Tobin concluded it would be suicidal. Collins realised this would be the same mistake that the British had made in Ireland. The IRA was not beating the British despite such successful ambushes as Kilmichael and Clonbannin, which undermined Lloyd George’s contention that he had ‘murder by the throat’. But more and more British people began to question the democracy of a kind of paramilitary chaos in which the rule of law was being ignored. The reprisal policy was not intimidating the Irish but it was embarrassing the British and forcing more and more people to question both the morality and the efficacy of a policy of reprisals in which the crown forces were engaging in counter murder, arson and looting without regard to any law.

Brigadier General Frank Crozier resigned in disgust as leader of the auxiliaries after General Tudor, the head of all police operations, had undermined his efforts to discipline some of his men for outrageous conduct. Crozier had ordered the arrest of the auxili aries responsible both for arson and looting in Trim and for the killing of the two young men in Drumcondra. Eighteen-year-old Patrick Kennedy and twenty-seven-year-old James Murphy had been arrested on the night of 9 February and taken to Dublin Castle, where they were questioned and slapped around. Neither was a member of the IRA. They were supposedly released but were in fact taken out to Drumcondra and shot. The auxiliaries said that the two were ‘trying to escape’, but the
Irish Times
noted that ‘the postures suggested that the two men had been placed side by side and with their backs to the wall before being shot.’ Kennedy was found dead and Murphy mortally wounded. He died a couple of days later in hospital, but not before making a deathbed statement eabout what happened to them.

Three auxiliaries – Captain William L. King, Temporary Cadets Herbert Hinchcliffe and F. J. Welsh – were subsequently charged with murder. King was particularly notorious in the eyes of republicans because he was believed to have been involved in the mistreatment and killing of McKee, Clancy and Clune. Murphy’s deathbed statement was not admitted in evidence and the three were acquitted.

The growing hostility of British opinion was causing political problems for the Lloyd George government, but Collins realised that killing cabinet members would drive the British people to support the militants. Sinn Féin had been able to project the British campaign as an affront to democracy in Ireland, but killing the British cabinet would have been seen as a challenge to democratic government in Britain, and the British people could easily be roused to defend their own democracy against an Irish assault, especially in the light of the sacrifices in defending that democracy against the might of the German empire in the recent Great War. Hence Collins opposed Brugha’s plan to kill British cabinet members.

‘You’ll get none of my men for that,’ he declared.

‘That’s all right, Mr Collins, I want none of
your
men. I’ll get my own.’

Brugha called Seán MacEoin to Dublin and outlined the scheme to him. MacEoin reluctantly agreed to lead the attack.

‘This is madness,’ Collins thundered when MacEoin told him. ‘Do you think that England has the makings of only one cabinet?’

Collins suggested that MacEoin should discuss the matter with the chief-of-staff, Richard Mulcahy.

‘I was appalled at the idea,’ Mulcahy wrote. He reprimanded MacEoin for coming to Dublin and ordered him to have nothing further to do with the idea. On 3 March MacEoin was spotted on the train and when he got off at Mullingar the crown forces were waiting for him. He was shot trying to escape and was brought to King George V hospital in Dublin. ‘It is simply disastrous,’ Collins said. ‘Cork will be fighting alone now.’ He actually wrote that he ‘would almost prefer that the worst would have happened’ than MacEoin would have fallen into the hands of the enemy. He began trying to arrange MacEoin’s escape.

The heaviest fighting in the country was in County Cork with the result that some of the most blatant reprisals occurred there. Unlike elsewhere in the country, the British army took a particularly active role in Cork, under Major A. E. Percival of the Essex regiment. He became a target of the IRA. Collins introduced Frank Thornton to Bill Aherne, Pa Murray and Tadhg Sullivan in Kirwan’s pub in Parnell Street, one Sunday. The three Cork men had been selected to kill Percival in England when he was on holidays in March, and Thornton was to help them.

On arriving in London they tracked Percival with the help of Sam Maguire and Reggie Dunne, but their plan to shoot the major in Dovercourt proved impractical, because Percival was staying in a military barracks there. ‘However, our contact man succeeded in getting the information that Percival was returning to Ireland on 16 March and would arrive at Liverpool Street Station, Lon don, at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon,’ Thornton noted. ‘We made our plans and our party, augmented with a few more from London, took up our positions in Liverpool Street Station.’

About fifteen minutes before Percival was due to arrive at the station, Sam Maguire arrived to call the whole thing off, as he had learned from one of his contacts in Scotland Yard that the police had made plans to surround the place. ‘We got out as quickly as possible,’ Thornton added. ‘We learned afterwards that at about five minutes to three a cordon of military and police was thrown round the station and every passenger had to pass through this cordon, some of them being held for hours. The unfortunate part about it was that Percival was able to get back to Cork safely.’

Captain Cecil Lees was brought back from the east in 1921 as the British felt that he would be an excellent man for intelligence work in Ireland. He came with a very high reputation as an ace intelligence officer, and he became part of Colonel Hill-Dillon’s staff.