The Squad (5 page)

‘Damn it, Joe,’ a warder named Kelly said to Joe Leonard, ‘that’s no way to hold a man on the ground. Tear my coat a bit.’ Leonard duly pulled the buttons off Kelly’s coat in order to simulate a struggle.

‘I think, Paddy, that you had better sit on me,’ the warder Murphy said to O’Daly. ‘Get another man to hold me as well.’

The other warder, Jones, had tried to resist and he got a punch on the jaw. ‘He was the only one who had violence used on him, to keep him quiet,’ according to O’Daly. In all twenty men escaped.

‘We ran along the canal,’ Malone recalled. ‘Someone gave me a bicycle. I went with J. J. Walsh to Jones’ Road, where I spent the night in O’Toole’s. The whole thing went off better than anyone could have expected. Collins was waiting impatiently at the Wicklow hotel for word of the escape, when his aide Joe O’Reilly arrived breathless having cycled from Mountjoy.

‘Is Fleming out?’ Collins asked.

‘The whole jail is out.’

‘What! How many?’

‘About twenty when I came away.’

‘Various rumours are abroad as to the number who escaped,’ the
Evening Herald
reported that evening. ‘Some say twenty-seven, and others thirty-five. We are reliably informed that the number did not exceed twenty.’

Collins and Harry Boland went round to O’Toole’s in Jones’ Road. ‘My clothes were in a bad state,’ Malone recalled. ‘Without a word, Boland, who was a tailor, took out a tape from his pocket and measured me. “I’ll have you right in a couple of days”.’

As he sat in his office in Cullenswood House that night, Collins put down his pen and burst out laughing. They had brought off a coup and boosted party morale and more than offset whatever damage had been done when they cancelled the welcoming ceremonies for de Valera.

At G Division headquarters Ned Broy typed up daily reports for the government on the activities, associates and movements of suspects. He also typed weekly reports summarising the week’s activities and providing a general review of political activity in the district, with monthly reports on similar lines. ‘The majority were typed by me, several copies being made of each report,’ Broy explained. One copy was sent to the commissioner of the DMP, Colonel Edgeworth-Johnson, and another copy to the director of military intelligence, Major Price. A further copy went to ‘the government’, and in some cases a copy went to the RIC. Making so many copies, Broy used to slip in an extra carbon and give those reports to Collins.

Joe Kavanagh – a short, dapper, sixty-year-old Dubliner, with a waxed moustache – had taken part in identifying leaders of the Easter Rising at Richmond barracks, and he clearly regretted his role. He was now secretly committed to Sinn Féin. His earliest contacts with Collins were made through Tom Gay, a librarian in the public library in Capel Street. Gay was a diminutive Dubliner who suffered from bronchial trouble which limited his physical ability, but he nevertheless provided invaluable assistance to Collins. Once Collins gave Gay £5 for Kavanagh in return for certain information. Gay recognised that there was something contemptible about the gesture and he returned the money to Collins a few days later.

‘You didn’t give him the money!’ Collins exclaimed.

‘No .’

‘You didn’t think he’d take it?’

‘No .’

‘A bloody queer G man!’

It was, of course, still early days and Collins was very raw. In his contempt for the police force, it had not immediately dawned on him that there could be patriotic Irishmen in the force as in any other walk of life. But, unlike others in the movement, he soon learned this lesson and turned it to the advantage of the cause.

Collins had a fairly clear vision of what he wished to do and how he wished to do it. He wanted a military confrontation with the British, but not a conventional war. ‘If we were to stand up against the powerful military organisation arrayed against us,’ Collins later explained, ‘something more was necessary than a guerrilla war in which small bands of our warriors, aided by their knowledge of the country, attacked the larger forces of the enemy and reduced their numbers. England could always reinforce her army. She could replace every soldier that she lost.’

‘But,’ he added, ‘there were others indispensable for her purposes which [
sic
] were not so easily replaced. To paralyse the British machine it was necessary to strike at individuals. Without her spies England was helpless. It was only by means of their accumulated and accumulating knowledge that the British machine could operate.’ He basically considered the DMP and RIC as spies.

Detectives from G Division had, after all, segregated the leaders from the rank and file at Richmond barracks after the Easter Rising. And the British had relied on the RIC to select those to be deported from other parts of the country in the aftermath of the rebellion. ‘Without their police throughout the country, how could they find the men they “wanted”?’ he asked.

The British administration was dependent on such people and would be virtually blind without them. Thus Collins determined that the first step should be undermining the political detectives in G Division of the DMP. He anticipated that once the detectives were neutralised or eliminated, the British would inevitably react blindly and in the process hit innocent Irish people and thereby drive the great mass of the people into the arms of the republicans.

When the dáil met on 1 April 1919 de Valera was elected
priomhaire
(prime minister), and he then proceeded to name a cabinet that included people like Griffith, Plunkett, MacNeill, Collins, Brugha and Constance Markievicz. The cabinet were representatives of the various factions within Sinn Fein.

The audacity of Collins seemed to know no bounds in his quest to understand the working of G Division. He asked Broy to smuggle him into the division’s document room one night so that he could see the records for himself. There would usually be one man on night duty in the detective office but it often happened that the detective on duty would have to be in court next day, so Broy was often called on to do temporary duty. On meeting Collins at Foley’s on 6 April 1919 he was able to tell Collins that he would be on duty the following night from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. They arranged for Collins to call him at midnight to ensure that he could smuggle him in. They agreed that Collins would use the name Field, and Broy would use Long. The office where the records were kept was a semi-circular office, with a large steel safe and many windows. As the blinds only covered the bottom of the windows, they would not be able to turn on the electric light without at tracting the attention of the uniformed inspector on duty. It was therefore going to be necessary for Collins to use a candle.

At midnight Collins telephoned. ‘Field here. Is that Long?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Broy replied. ‘Bring a candle.’

Collins arrived at about 12.15 with Seán Nunan, who was one of a number of IRB colleagues with whom he met frequently at Vaughan’s hotel. Collins had asked Nunan to come for a walk with him and it was only then that he told him that he was actually going to the detective division headquarters

Broy had said they should be armed just in case something went wrong. ‘I duly let them in, showed them the back way and the yard door to Townsend Street, in case anything happened, and gave them the general lie of the land. No sooner had I done so that a stone came through the window.’

‘I told them to go into a dark passage and to wait near the back door, in the shadow,’ Broy continued. On looking out on Great Brunswick Street I saw a British soldier in custody of a policeman. I opened the door and inquired of the constable what was wrong.’

‘This fellow is drunk and he is after throwing a stone in through the window next door,’ the constable replied.

Broy took charge of the soldier and brought him to the police station next door and went back to Collins and Nunan. He brought them upstairs and pilfered a box of candles and matches, because Collins had thought he was joking about the candle. Broy locked the dormitory room on the top floor and used a master key to open the detective’s room. He then opened the steel safe with the records. He had just left Collins and Nunan in the room with the candles and gone downstairs again, when there was a loud knock on the door. ‘I opened it and found the same constable back again, inquiring as to the value of the window broken glass. I gave him a rough estimate and he left. I went upstairs, told the boys what the noise was about, and came down to look after telephones, etc.’

Collins wanted to learn first hand the extent of the British knowledge of the Volunteers, to gauge the mentality behind the records, and to use this knowledge to construct an organisation to undermine it. He and Nunan stayed in the office until about 5 a.m. They then walked to their respective residences – Collins in Mountjoy Street and Nunan in Botanic Road.

Among the files that Collins checked was one that the DMP was keeping on him. He later bragged, with characteristic vanity, that his file mentioned he came from ‘a brainy’ family. The report, dated 31 December 1916, was written by the district inspector of the RIC in Bandon. He noted that Collins ‘belongs to a family [of] “brainy” people who are disloyal and of advanced Sinn Fein sympathies.’ His file included police reports on his involvement in the Longford by-election of April 1917 and some of his more controversial speeches, especially those he gave in Ballinamuck and Skibbereen for which the authorities had wished to prosecute him. The various files gave him an invaluable perspective on what G Division knew, and who were its most active detectives. He also got an insight into the people who were providing information. Before leaving, Collins pocketed a bound volume of all telephone messages received by G Division during the week of the 1916 Rising. Some of the messages were from loyalists providing information about where Irish Volunteers had occupied positions in small numbers, or where rebel snipers were posted on roofs or in windows. Others messages were from people who later posed as republican sympathisers. Collins had many cynical laughs listening to protestations of patriotism by some of those who had sent messages to G Division.

Although Collins had no sleep the night he spent in the detective division headquarters, he was in fine form next day when Sinn Féin had a special árd fheis at the Mansion House. De Valera was doing his balancing act in accommodating both sides. He sought to keep militants like Collins in check both by getting the árd fheis to give the standing committee of Sinn Féin a strong voice in policy matters and by debarring members of the cabinet – other than himself and Griffith – from membership of this committee. He undoubtedly had Collins in mind when he explained the standing committee’s consultative role. He said, for example, that if a minister decided that the Irish people should no longer pay income tax to the crown, the proposal would need the approval of the standing committee, or it would be dropped.

Collins had been arguing in favour of such a scheme within the cabinet, but he had come up against the resolute obstinacy of Brugha. De Valera, as was his wont, had assumed a detached position in the dispute, but his remarks at the árd fheis certainly leaned towards Brugha’s more cautious position on the issue. Collins was busy lobbying for the election of his friend and IRB colleague, Harry Boland, as one of the joint national secretaries of Sinn Féin. When it was all over and Boland had won, Collins seemed quite pleased with himself.

Collins was a young man in a hurry, operating at break neck pace in at least three different spheres. Within Sinn Féin he was trying to strategically position IRB colleagues, in his ministerial capacity he was charged with organising the national loan, and, as director of both organisation and intelligence in the Volunteers, he was preparing to initiate a war of independence.

On the night after the árd fheis, detectives of the DMP were given a very public warning. Volunteers raided the home of Detective Sergeant Nicholas Halley, and held up Detective Constable Denis O’Brien in the street, binding and gagging him. O’Brien, a native of Kanturk, had been particularly active in the DMP, especially against his fellow Corkmen in the city. Neither man was hurt, but it was a warning to them and their colleagues that the Volunteers could and would strike at them in the streets or in their homes.

When O’Brien was brought to Dublin Castle to explain what had happened, Detective Superintendent Owen Brien asked why he had allowed himself to be tied up.

‘I would like to know what anyone else would do in the same circumstances?’ O’Brien responded. He later told Broy and some colleagues, ‘They were damned decent men not to shoot me, and I am not doing any more against them.’

Addressing the dáil next day, 10 April 1919, de Valera advocated moral rather than armed resistance. Collins wished to kill those police who did not heed the warnings to lay off, but de Valera instead called for the ostracism of all policemen, whom he accused of ‘brutal treason’, because they were acting as ‘the main instruments’ in keeping the Irish people in subjugation. ‘They are spies in our midst,’ he added, echoing the sentiments of Collins. ‘They are the eyes and ears of the enemy.’

Of course, some of these detectives were becoming invaluable to Collins. Broy was particularly friendly with Detective Sergeant Joe Kavanagh, who was working out of Dublin Castle. He was godfather to Kavanagh’s eldest son. Kavanagh ridiculed Detective Super-intendent Owen Brien as ‘Butt’ Brien. ‘Get your faces ready for the Superintendent’s joke, boys,’ he would say as Brien was about to enter a room. ‘I did not know that Joe hated England, in addition to hating the officers, but I knew that we were such friends that I could trust him,’ Broy said. Collins had asked him about Kavanagh only once or twice. One evening while walking in Stephen’s Green Kavanagh and Broy suddenly realised that they were both giving information to Collins. ‘I told him about Mick’s visit to No. 1 Great Brunswick Street,’ Broy explained. ‘He nearly fell, laughing, knowing the mentality in the G Division office and knowing Mick. He got me to tell it to him a second time, and he laughed so much that people looked at him as if he were drunk or mad. He asked me what did Mick look like in the office, and I said he looked like a big plain-clothes man going out on duty, with a stick.’