‘I’m not letting any young scuts tell me how to do my duty,’ Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth had declared. He had arrested Piaras Beaslaí for making a seditious speech and had found some incriminating documents on him. Collins and Harry Boland warned Smyth not to produce the documents in court, but the detective ignored them. As a result Beaslaí was sentenced to two years in jail, instead of the two months he might have otherwise expected.
Jim Slattery recalled a meeting at 35 North Great George’s Street around the middle of July 1919. A number of men were selected by Dick McKee and Mick McDonnell and brought to an inner room. McKee asked if any of them objected to shooting enemy agents.
‘The greater number of Volunteers objected for one reason or another,’ Slattery said. ‘When I was asked the question I said I was prepared to obey orders … I recall that two men, who had previously told Mick McDonnell that they had no objection to being selected for special duty, turned down the proposition at that meeting … McDonnell seemed very annoyed at them and asked them why they had signified their willingness in the first instance.’
Among the men who agreed that night were Tom Keogh, Tom Kilcoyne, Jim Slattery and Joe Leonard. These four, together with Tom Ennis and, later, Paddy O’Daly, were to become the nucleus of the famous Squad, but there was no mention of this that night.
‘We were merely told that we were to be given special duties,’ Slattery added. He received his orders from McDonnell to shoot Detective Sergeant Smyth, who was living in Millmount Avenue. A native of Dromard, County Longford, Smyth was in his early fifties and had helped identify some of the leaders following the Easter Rebellion.
‘McDonnell instructed me to go to Drumcondra Bridge and take with me Tom Keogh, Tom Ennis and Mick Kennedy, who knew Smyth by sight,’ according to Slattery. ‘McDonnell told us that Smyth usually came home by tram, alighted at Botanic Avenue and walked across the bridge. We were to wait at the bridge and shoot Smyth when the opportunity offered. We waited at Drumcondra bridge for about five nights.’
The first time he came along they did not strike because Kennedy was not sure it was Smyth. They expected him to turn into Millmount Avenue where he lived, but he passed the entrance and walked to Milburn Avenue, which was adjacent to his home. It was too late before his would-be assassins realised what had happened. Fearing that they had aroused Smyth’s suspicion, they did not come back for about a week, until the night of 30 July.
They waited that night with .38 revolvers, which they soon found were not powerful enough. They had expected that Smyth would fall as soon as he was shot. ‘But after we hit him he ran,’ Slattery noted. ‘The four of us fired at him. Keogh and myself ran after him right to his own door and I think he fell at the door, but he got into the house.’
Smyth gave a statement next day. ‘When I got off the tram at the end of my own avenue, I saw four or five men against the dead wall, and a bicycle resting against the curb stone. Just as I turned the corner into Millmount Avenue, I was shot in the back. I turned and said to them, “You cowards” and three of them fired again with revolvers at me.’ Even though one bullet had hit his right leg, he had still managed to run towards his home.
‘They pursued me to within fifteen yards of my own door, and kept firing at me all the time. In all about ten or twelve shots were fired at me. I called for assistance but no one came to me except my own son.’
Smyth’s teenage son, Thomas, had witnessed the whole thing; he was just over five yards from his father when he was shot.
Smyth was hit four times, the most serious wound was from a bullet that entered his back, passed through a lung and lodged in his chest, just above the heart. At the time Smyth’s wife and three of their seven children were in the country on holiday. In the commotion his six-year-old second son raced from the house vowing ‘to catch those who shot Dada’. He returned later saying that the men had run off.
‘Was it not a cowardly thing to shoot him in the back without giving him a chance of defending himself?’ Smyth’s sixteen-year-old daughter said next day. ‘He always carried a revolver,’ she added, ‘but he hadn’t it with him last night, so he could not put up a fight against his would-be murderers.’
‘We had made a right mess of the job,’ McDonnell complained next day.
‘But I can assure you,’ Slattery said, ‘I was more worried until Smyth died than Mick was. We never used .38 guns again; we used .45 guns after that lesson.’
Although Smyth was mortally wounded, he lived for five weeks before finally succumbing as a result of complications caused by an abscess of the lung resulting from a bullet wound. He died on the afternoon of 8 September 1919.
The reaction in Dublin Castle was to use the killing as an excuse to ban Sinn Féin. It was an ill-conceived act that played directly into the hands of Collins, who would henceforth have little difficulty in outmanoeuvring Sinn Féin moderates and implementing a more militant policy. The checks that de Valera had placed on the militants were wiped out by the banning of the political wing of the movement. To some Irish people this amounted to a British declaration of war, and it was intended to appear as such.
Back in the spring of 1919 Ian Macpherson, the chief secretary for Ireland, had wished to ban Sinn Féin, the Irish Volunteers, the Gaelic League and Cumann na mBan, and had written to Bonar Law on 16 May 1919 acknowledging that it would mean ‘open war with all its horrible consequences’. Law and Edward Carson, the two staunchest unionists, thought this would be a mistake. ‘To proclaim Sinn Féin means putting an end to the whole political life of Southern Ireland and that could not be effectively done,’ Law had warned. In the circumstances Macpherson had to back off, but after an attack on British soldiers in Fermoy on 7 September, followed by Detective Sergeant Smyth’s death next day, Dublin Castle announced the drastic measures that the chief secretary had predicted would amount to ‘open war’ just four months earlier – Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and Cumann na mBan were all banned, along with Dáil Éireann. ‘We had allowed these members to sit together in consultation if they wished,’ Macpherson wrote to Bonar Law on 13 September, but when they ‘conspired by executive acts to overthrow the duly constituted authority then we could act.’
Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the British civil service, would later conclude that the Dublin Castle regime was ‘almost woodenly stupid and quite devoid of imagination’. He could hardly believe the folly of banning Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan. ‘Imagine the result on public opinion in Great Britain of a similar act by the executive towards a political party (or the women’s suffrage movement)!’ he exclaimed.
The DMP raided Sinn Féin headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street on 12 September 1919. Collins was in the building when the police arrived at 10.30 a.m., backed up by two army lorries with British soldiers. ‘We had no warning of this raid at all,’ Eibhlín Lawless, one of the young secretaries recalled. ‘Collins was upstairs in our room.’ J. J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell had come in to talk to Collins and had left the door to the room open as he left.
‘I was getting up to shut it when I saw a policeman standing on guard outside,’ Lawless said. ‘I shut the door and told Mick it looked like a raid.’
‘I think only Mick was armed,’ she continued. ‘If any of the others were, the girls took the arms from them. I stuck Mick’s revolver down my stocking and anything else incriminating we girls took charge of. The police seemed to start the raid systematically from the bottom up thus giving us time to take these precautions. When they arrived, we had disposed of everything and they found nothing of any importance. They searched the men but not us.’
‘There was no means of escape,’ she noted, ‘as the military had occupied the narrow entrance in the back as well as the front.’ The police had locked the front door and they were not letting anyone in or out. Detective Inspector George Love was in charge of the raid.
‘We are caught like rats in a trap and there is no escape,’ Collins said. He sat at his desk, quite calm and collected until Dete
ctive Inspector Neil McFeely came in. ‘It was Inspector McFeely who came to our room, looking a little bit frightened,’ Lawless reported. ‘He went round searching the different desks, and seemed desperately anxious to finish his task and get out. Mick sat very casually on his desk with one leg swinging and told him in no measured terms what sort of work he was engaged on. He was scathing in his remarks about it.’
McFeely had only recently been promoted inspector in charge of political duty. ‘He was about the least efficient officer that could be allocated to such work, as he was a man completely without guile or ruse,’ according to Ned Broy. ‘He had been all his life a clerk, could do some “finger and thumb” typing, and frequently was given such duty as making maps of the scene of accidents, burglaries and suchlike. He was directed to take a party of detectives and raid No. 6 Harcourt St.’ He was told to arrest people like Paudeen O’Keeffe or Paddy Sheehan, but nobody suggested to arrest Michael Collins because they would not have believed he would be at such a well-known Sinn Fein address as party headquarters. The detectives accompanying McFeely recognised the people on the ground floor, but McFeely wandered upstairs alone. He did not know Collins and he apparently assumed that Collins could not be of much importance if he was upstairs working with a bunch of women.
Broy had advised Collins that McFeely was a staunch home ruler and the way to confront him would be to say that ‘by his activities against Sinn Féin he was sowing up disgrace for himself, his family and descendants for years to come.’ Thus, according to Lawless, when the detective inspector asked Collins about some documents in his hands, he was met with a torrent of abuse.
‘What have they got to do with you?’ Collins snapped. ‘A nice job you’ve got, spying on your countrymen. What sort of a legacy will you leave to your family, looking for blood money? Could you not find some honest work to do?’
‘The inspector was writhing under the attack,’ Lawless added. ‘At that stage they left the room.’ They then searched the caretaker’s quarters overhead.
In the course of the search, the DMP found Ernest Blythe hiding in a small store-room, so he was arrested along with Sinn Féin secretary Paudeen O’Keeffe. ‘It was Mick’s coolness that saved him from being recognised,’ Lawless thought. ‘From time to time the girls would take a peep out at the corridor to see if the coast was clear and, as soon as we got word that the police had left the caretaker’s room, Mick managed to slip up the stairs, which were now empty,’ she added. Some of the other police came into the room later but they just looked and did not question anybody.
‘It was only by almost a miracle I was not landed,’ Collins wrote next day. ‘It so happened the particular detective who came into the room where I was did not know me, which gave me an opportunity of eluding him.’
McFeely would never have confided in someone as junior as Broy, but he did tell Inspector Kerr about the raid. ‘McFeely says there is going to be serious trouble,’ Kerr told Broy afterwards. ‘He has met a very determined young man, a clerk in 6 Harcourt Street, and if they are all as extreme as he is, there is plenty of trouble coming.’
Detective Constable Daniel Hoey, a native of King’s County (now Offaly), would find himself on the receiving end of that trouble that night. Although only in his early thirties, he had been a particular irritation for the Volunteers going back to before 1916. He would have recognised Collins but had missed his chance and would not get another.
Mick McDonnell called on Jim Slattery at 9 Woodville Road that evening and asked him to go on a job. ‘They very nearly got the man we want to guard,’ McDonnell said.
‘That was the first inkling I got that Collins was the heart of things,’ Slattery noted. ‘It became very urgent to get Detective Officer Hoey, because he was the leading spirit in the raiders.’ He was the detective on the ground with most knowledge and O’Daly and Kilcoyne had been trying to get him for a couple of weeks.
‘Ennis, Mick McDonnell and I came down to Townsend Street,’ Slattery recalled. ‘Mick said he thought that Detective Hoey would be going off duty at about ten o’clock, and he did not go off. Hoey crossed over from College Street towards the police headquarters in Brunswick Street. I asked Mick if he was sure that this man was Hoey?
‘“I am not quite sure, but we will go after him,” he replied.
‘We intended that if he went straight to the door of the building we would shoot him, but instead of going there he went down Townsend Street nearly as far as Tara Street. We passed him by when he was looking at a window and Mick said, “It is Hoey all right.” He went into a shop and passed back up to the corner of Hawkins Street. When we saw him approaching again, we crossed over to the side of the street, which was at the back of the barracks, and we shot him at the door of the garage.’
After the shooting, Mick McDonnell said, ‘we had better go to Mick Collins and report to him.’ They were confident that they had killed Hoey, who was rushed to Mercer’s Hospital, where he was dead on arrival.
Paddy O’Daly had not been at the original meeting in July at which the nucleus of the Squad was formed as he was not released from Mountjoy until 2 August but he did tell of another meeting. ‘Dick McKee told Joe Leonard and myself to report to 46 Parnell Square – the meeting place of the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League – on 19 September 1919,’ O’Daly recalled. Mick McDonnell, Joe Leonard, Ben Barrett, Seán Doyle, Tom Keogh, and Jim Slattery were at this meeting, which Michael Collins and chief-of-staff Richard Mulcahy addressed.
‘They told us it was proposed to form a Squad,’ O’Daly said. ‘The Squad would take orders directly from Michael Collins, and, in the absence of Collins, the orders would be given to us through either Dick McKee or Dick Mulcahy. We were told that we were not to discuss our movements or actions with Volunteer officers or with anybody else. Collins told us that we were being formed to deal with spies and informers and that he had authority from the government to have this matter carried out.’
Collins gave ‘a short talk, the gist of which was that any of us who had read Irish history would know that no organisation in the past had an intelligence system through which spies and informers could be dealt with, but that now the position was going to be rectified by the formation of an intelligence branch, an Active Service Unit or whatever else it is called.’ Collins went on to emphasise ‘that under no circumstances whatever were we to take it on ourselves to shoot anybody, even if we knew he was a spy, unless we had to do it in self-defence while on active service. He also told us to remember that all members of G Division and the police were not our enemies, and that indiscriminate shooting might result in the death of friends. We discovered afterwards how many of them were our friends.’
‘Collins only picked four of us for the Squad that night – Joe Leonard, Seán Doyle, Ben Barrett and myself in charge,’ according to O’Daly. ‘He told the others that he had special work [for them] to do, but he told the four of us that we were to leave our employment and that we would be compensated for loss of work. We were to have a fixed point where we could be mobilised, and I gave him No. 10 Bessboro Avenue, North Strand, where I had relations and where I practically lived at the time.’
The special work for McDonnell was to go to London to investigate the possibility of killing prominent people there. ‘I was approached by Dick McKee and asked to make myself available to go to London for special duty with the object of looking the situation over in London and coming back and reporting as to the possibility of wiping out the British cabinet and several other prominent people including editors of newspapers, etc., who were an tagonistic to this country’ he recalled. ‘I went with Liam Tobin in charge and George Fitzgerald who remained with me for two weeks.’
‘Our chief job in London was to familiarise ourselves with the then Ministers of the British cabinet, their haunts, habits, etc.,’ George Fitzgerald explained. ‘We were to attend any meetings at which they were tabled to speak or any function at which they were to attend. In addition, we were to get any informa
tion we could about the geography of Whitehall, especially No. 10 Downing Street. After about a fortnight of this work Mick McDonnell left us and returned to Dublin.’
‘I first reported to General Mulcahy at Harcourt Street and made an appointment to go to 41 Parnell Square that night and meet Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, General Mulcahy and a few others,’ McDonnell noted. ‘I could not report favourably owing to lack of assistance on the part of the London Volunteers and to the impossibility of making a simultaneous swoop on the entire cabinet and the other people who were earmarked for execution. Michael Collins who had lived in London and knew the situation existing there, agreed with this report, but Cathal Brugha insisted that it could and should be done.’
Wiping out the British cabinet had long been one of Brugha’s pet ideas. He knew it would be a kind of suicide mission, but he had already led a similar team to London to kill cabinet members in the House of Commons in 1918 if they had introduced conscription in Ireland. In the course of his planning he had gone into the parliament building to check out first hand the possibility of killing the cabinet there, but the whole thing was called off when the conscription plan was dropped. Brugha was a man of great determination but rather limited vision. He was as ‘brave and as brainless as a bull’ noted Mulcahy.
‘I then told him it would take at least thirty of the best men we could find and they did not hope to return alive, but he still agreed it would be worth while to lose thirty good men,’ McDonnell noted. ‘This ended the matter as far as I was concerned and I did not go back to London.’
Collins was still supposedly wanted in connection with the illegal drilling in Skibbereen, but the attorney general had ruled that ‘no further proceedings need to be taken’ in regard to the Longford charges. Collins felt secure enough to move back into Myra McCarthy’s Munster hotel at 44 Mountjoy Street. He bragged that the police were afraid to arrest him. In October 1919 he went to Britain primarily in connections with plans to spring Austin Stack and Piaras Beaslaí from Strangeways jail in Man chester. He had taken a particular interest in arranging Stack’s escape over a number of months, first from Dundalk Jail, and then from Belfast Jail, but each time Stack was transferred before the escape plans could be implemented. Collins actually visited Stack in Strangeways to finalise the escape arrangements for 25 October 1919.
The Squad Page 5