‘Smith is very highly spoken of by all who know him best,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘Carson has a high opinion of him.’
Smith, an Ulster loyalist, was so highly partisan in political terms that many of the English took a jaundiced view of the appointment. Edgeworth-Johnson was left in charge of the DMP, but a new man was brought in to take charge of G Division. Detective Inspector W. C. Forbes Redmond was also brought from Belfast, where he had spent fifteen years as a detective. He was appointed second assistant commissioner of the DMP and given the task of reorganising G Division. He brought a number of his own detectives to work under cover. Redmond showed himself to be incredible naïve and his appointment further undermined the morale of the DMP.
He made the capture of Collins a priority. He called all DMP detectives from sergeants up and told them ‘that they were not doing their duty, that he would give them one month to get Michael Collins and those responsible for shooting the various detectives, or else he would order them to resign.’ They need not have worried because Redmond did not last the month himself.
Frank Thornton was sent to Belfast to get a photograph of Redmond. While there he met Sergeant Maurice McCarthy of the RIC who was a Kerryman stationed at Chichester Street, Belfast. Thornton pretended to be a country cousin when he called on McCarthy, who was already working for Collins. That night there was an amateur boxing championship on at the Ulster Hall, and most of the off duty police were there. McCarthy directed his visitor to the district inspector’s office, where he was able to lift a photograph of Redmond and return to Dublin with it the following day.
Not knowing Dublin, Redmond had to have someone as a guide to the city, and he made the lethal mistake of using his administrative assistant, Jim McNamara, who was, of course, working for Collins. However the authorities had been recruiting spies of their own.
Henry Timothy Quinlisk from Wexford was one of the prisoners-of-war recruited by Casement for his Irish brigade in Germany and was given the rank of sergeant major. With such credentials he was easily accepted in Sinn Féin quarters, especially after Robert Brennan introduced him to Seán Ó Muirthile, the secretary of the supreme council of the IRB. Quinlisk, or Quinn as he called himself, cut a dashing figure and was quite a man for the ladies. ‘He was always immaculately dressed and one would have said that with his good looks, his self-assurance and general bonhomie, he would have got anywhere,’ said Robert Brennan. ‘He liked to give the impression that he was in on all of Mick Collins’ secrets.’
As a result of his enlistment in the Irish brigade, he had been denied back pay for the period of his imprisonment in Germany. Collins helped him out financially, and Quinlisk stayed for a time at the Munster hotel but he wanted more. On 11 November 1919 he wrote to the under-secretary at Dublin Castle, mentioning his background and offering to furnish information.
‘I was the man who assisted Casement in Germany and since coming home I have been connected with Sinn Féin,’ he wrote. ‘I have decided to tell all I know of that organisation and my information would be of use to the authorities. The scoundrel Michael Collins has treated me scurily [sic] and I now am going to wash my hands of the whole business.’
He was brought to G Division headquarters to make a statement, which Broy typed up and, of course, furnished to Collins. But Quinlisk had taken the precaution of telling Collins that he had gone to the DMP merely to get a passport so he could emigrate to the United States. He said the police put pressure on him to inform on Collins, offering money and promising to make arrangements for him to get his wartime back pay. He told Collins that he was just pretending to go along with police.
Collins arrived outside 44 Mountjoy Street while the resulting DMP raid was in progress and he watched from a distance. Detective Inspector John Bruton was in charge of the raid. The Squad were ordered to kill him but this proved easier ordered than executed because he never ventured outside Dublin Castle without an armed escort and he took the precaution of not developing any routine.
Following the raid on 44 Mountjoy Street, Collins moved, though he did return there weekly for his laundry. The owner, Myra McCarthy, was an aunt of the Sinn Féin activist, Fionán Lynch. For the next nineteen months Collins moved about, never staying in any one place for very long. ‘Living in such turmoil,’ he wrote to his sister Hannie, ‘it’s not all that easy to be clear on all matters at all times.’ Yet he maintained a very regular daily routine.
After his office at 76 Harcourt Street was raided in November, he opened a new finance office at 22 Henry Street. Like his other offices, it was on a busy thoroughfare with a lot of passing traffic so that the comings and goings of strangers would not attract attention, as they would if the offices had been placed in some quiet, out-of-the-way location. The Henry Street office survived for about eighteen months. He had another finance office at 29 Mary Street and he set up a new intelligence office at 5 Mespil Road. He also had an office in Cullenswood House, which had been the site of Patrick Pearse’s school, St Enda’s. It had been renovated into a series of flats.
With Forbes Redmond as the new head of G Division, a concerted effort was made by some of the police to find Collins. Quin-lisk was told that things had got so hot in Dublin that Collins had moved to Cork. On 1 January 1920 William Mulhern, the crimes special sergeant in Bandon, produced a letter that Collins had written to someone in his area in relation to national loan. His return address was the Mansion House, and Mulhern suggested that Collins was ‘seemingly at present staying in Dublin’. The county inspector of the RIC reported from Cork next day that ‘Michael Collins, M.P. is carrying on operations from the Mansion House. I am putting all my DI’s on the alert re the matter + taking steps to deal with the men likely to be appointed to further the loan in different districts. It is clear that Collins is in communication with the Sinn Féin organisation in all counties in Ireland in regard to the Loan.’
However Detective Superintendent Brien telephoned Cork on 5 January to say that Collins was in the Clonakilty area. That was true but he was back in Dublin by the time word got to Cork.
‘Collins cannot be found in this District,’ District Inspector Henry Connor reported three days later. He said that careful enquiries had been made and a number of houses searched without result. ‘A close watch will be kept and if Collins appears I will have him arrested,’ the detective inspector concluded. ‘No trace of Collins has been found in their districts,’ Sergeant William Mulhern reported of Bandon and Skibbereen on 15 January. ‘There is reason to believe this man is in Dublin still according to local information in Skibbereen,’ the county inspector added at the end of the report, which was shown to Redmond.
One report from the country suggested that Collins was staying at the Clarence hotel, but Detective Officer Denis O’Brien could find no trace of him there, or at Mountjoy Street. Redmond learned that an undercover agent had made contact with Collins.
Sergeant Thomas J. McElligott had sought to organise a representative body within the RIC in 1918 but was soon dismissed from the force because of his Sinn Féin sympathies. He secretly went to work for Collins as a kind of police union organiser. Ostensibly he was trying to improve the pay and conditions of the RIC, but, in fact, he was engaged in black propaganda, trying to undermine the morale of the force by sowing seeds of discord.
When the police went on strike in London, Collins sent Mc Elligott there to make some useful contacts. At strike head-quarters he met John Charles Byrne, a secret intelligence service (MI6) agent who was using the alias of John Jameson while posing as a Marxist sympathiser. Shortly afterwards he turned up in Dublin with a letter of introduction from Art O’Brien, the Sinn Féin representative in Britain. Posing as a revolutionary anxious to undermine the British system, Byrne offered to supply weapons, and arrangements were made for him to meet Collins, Mulcahy and Rory O’Connor at the Home Farm Produce shop in Camden Street. They met again the following day at the Ranelagh home of Mrs Wyse Power, a member of the Sinn Féin executive.
/> ‘What he was delaying about that prevented him getting us caught with him, at least on the second of these occasions, I don’t k n o w ,’ Mulcahy remarked. Byrne did make arrangements to have Collins arrested at a third meeting at the home of Batt O’Connor on 16 January 1920.
Redmond had one of his own undercover men watching the house, but that man did not know Collins and by a stroke of good luck Liam Tobin, who also happened to be at the house, left with Byrne. The lookout – assuming that Tobin was Collins – intercepted Redmond on Morehampton Road as he approached with a lorry load of troops to raid O’Connor’s house and the raid was promptly called off. Redmond had brought his guide, McNamara, with him that night when he decided to keep O’Connor’s house under personal observation.
Redmond had already made a fatal mistake when a detective came to him with a grievance over some of his changes in G Division: he dismissed the complaint with some disparaging comments about G Division as a whole. ‘You are a bright lot!’ Redmond reportedly said. ‘Not one of you has been able to get on to Collins’ track for a month, and there is a man only two days in Dublin and has already seen him.’
The disgruntled detective mentioned this to Broy, who promptly informed Collins. Together with the information from McNamara, the spotlight of suspicion was immediately cast on Byrne. He had not only arrived from London recently but had also had a meeting with Collins at Batt O’Connor’s house on the day of the aborted raid.
The thirty-four year old Byrne was clearly an adventurer. Small, with a very muscular build, he had a series of tattoos on his arms and hands. There were Japanese women, snakes, flowers and a bird. He had a snake ring tattooed on the third finger of his right hand and two rings tattooed on his left hand.
Collins wrote to Art O’Brien in London on 20 January saying that he had grounds for suspecting Jameson, as he called him, because he was in touch with the head of the intelligence in Scotland Yard. ‘I have absolutely certain information that the man who came from London met and spoke to me, and reported that I was growing a moustache to Basil Thomson,’ he wrote.
That same night Collins was tipped off that Redmond planned a raid that night on Cullenswood House, where Collins had a basement office and Mulcahy had a top-floor flat with his wife. Cullen and Thornton roused Mulcahy from his bed, and he spent the remainder of the night with a friend a short distance away. Redmond was becoming a real danger, and Collins gave the Squad orders to eliminate him.
‘If we don’t get that man, he’ll get us and soon,’ Collins warned the Squad.
Nattily dressed in civilian clothes, topped off by a bowler hat, Redmond looked more like a stockbroker than a policeman. He stayed at the Standard hotel in Harcourt Street while a residence was being renovated for him in Dublin Castle.
Collins had Tom Cullen booked into the hotel to keep an eye on Redmond and gather information about his habits, such as when he left the hotel and returned, and what he did in the evening and at night. He walked to and from work at Dublin Castle without an escort each day.
Usually one of the intelligence people would accompany the Squad to identify the target. ‘We’d go out in pairs, walk up to the tar-get and do it, and then split,’ Vinny Byrne recalled. ‘You wouldn’t be nervous while you’d be waiting to plug him, but you’d imagine that everyone was looking into your face. On a typical job we’d use about eight, including the back up. Nobody got in our way. One of us would knock him over with the first shot, and the other would knock him off with a shot to the head.’
Members of the Squad got their chance on 21 January 1920. ‘I saw Redmond coming down from the castle but he turned back and went in again,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘Tom Keogh, Vinny Byrne and myself were waiting and Redmond came out again. T o m Keogh turned to Vinny Byrne and myself and told us to cover them off. Redmond went straight up Dame Street, Grafton Street and Harcourt Street, and we followed him.’
‘Michael Collins picked Joe Leonard, Seán Doyle and myself to be between the Standard hotel and the foot of Harcourt Street,’ Paddy O’Daly recalled. ‘Joe Leonard and myself were walking up and down one side of the street, and Seán Doyle was on the other side.’ It was nearly six o’clock when O’Daly spotted other members of the Squad walking briskly: ‘I saw Tom Keogh and another man crossing the road to the railings’ side of the Green.
‘Look out, Joe, here is Keogh and the gang,’ O’Daly said to Leonard.
‘I had hardly spoken these words when I turned and saw Redmond crossing Harcourt Street about six yards away,’ O’Daly continued. ‘When Redmond was about two yards from me I fired and he fell mortally wounded, shot through the head.’ Keogh was about twenty yards away when he started running and arrived moments after O’Daly had hit Redmond behind the left ear and Keogh had shot him in the back. Byrne and Slattery watched, acting as a covering party.
The shot behind the ear was a fatal wound, because it had severed Redmond’s spinal cord at the second vertebrae. The other bullet went through his liver, a lung and his stomach. ‘There were a number of British servicemen around, but no attempt was made to follow us and we got away,’ Jim Slattery noted.
Following Redmond’s death, his own undercover detectives pulled out and returned to Belfast, and thereafter G Division ‘ceased to affect the situation’, according to British military intelligence. Redmond’s post was not filled, but Fergus Quinn, who had been assistant commissioner since 1915, was retired and replaced as assistant commissioner by Denis Barrett.
Dublin Castle offered £10,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Red mond’s death. This was probably where the story about a big reward for Collins’ arrest originated.
He was behind the killing of Redmond. Rewards of £5,000 had already been offered in connection with the deaths of the three other DMP detectives, Smyth, Hoey and Barton, and these re wards were now doubled. Collins had ordered all four killings, so there was a handsome cumulative reward for the evidence to convict him, though the reward was never specifically offered for his arrest and conviction.
Many of the detectives and policemen knew him by sight, but their failure to arrest him could not be explained by fear alone. Like the police who were working for him, others were undoubtedly passive sympathisers. For example, Collins had come across Inspector Lowry of the uniformed branch of DMP as early as 1917 when he delivered the oration at Thomas Ashe’s funeral and ever since Lowry had always seemed to salute and show Collins great respect, but there was never much more between them than the inspector’s polite ‘Mr Collins’. One night as Collins was cycling before curfew, a couple of uniform policemen were standing by the road, and one of them shouted, ‘More power, me Corkman!’
CHAPTER 7
‘EXPECT SHOOTING’
Although the Squad had been set up to kill specific individuals, it also engaged in some other operations. They were especially busy on these other operations during February 1920.
Mick McDonnell told Jim Slattery and Vinny Byrne that they would be wanted on the night of 5 February to help the Dublin brigade under Vice-Brigadier Peadar Clancy with a ‘bit of a job,’ which turned out to be a raid on the navy and army canteen board garage at Bow Lane. They took tools, motor parts, a motorcycle, and two light Ford motor vans, which they first filled with petrol. The Squad later used one of the Ford vans on a number of different operations.
The following week the Squad was involved with the Dublin IRA in an attempt to rescue Robert Barton on 12 February 1920. ‘Seán Russell, my Company Captain, informed me that he had orders to send a few men to intercept a military lorry some place in the vicinity of Berkeley Road, as it was believed that this lorry would be conveying Robert Barton from Ship Street barracks to Mountjoy Prison, following his trial,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘Peadar Clancy was in charge of this operation. The entire Squad, plus a few men from E Company, second battalion, assembled at Berkeley Road fairly early in the day.’
Mick McDonnell arrived on his motorbi
ke to say that the canvas-covered military truck with Barton had left Ship Street barracks. There were some repairs being done to a nearby house and there was a forty-foot ladder on a handcart outside the house. Some volunteers were working on the house and they wanted to help. ‘But we did not let them join us because they were too well known and we had sufficient men at the time,’ O’Daly noted. ‘We told them that we would take the ladder and the handcart.’
It was shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon and there were many pedestrians in the vicinity, while trams were passing to and from Phoenix Park and Glasnevin. As the military truck approached on Berkeley Road, opposite Nelson Street, a short distance from Mountjoy Jail, the handcart with the ladder was pushed across the road. As the lorry came to a stop, Clancy jumped into the cabin and, pointing his revolver, held up the driver and the two officers travelling with him who had taken part in the case against Barton. They were unarmed. But Barton was not in the lorry, he was being taken to Marlborough barracks, not Mount joy Jail. In the back there was only a private and a military prisoner.
The raiders were wearing trench coats and had soft hats pulled down over their eyes but they were not masked or disguised in any way, according to witnesses. Each had a handgun. The occupants of the truck were ordered out and told to line up at the rear.
‘He’s not here,’ some of the men shouted having checked the back of the lorry.
A number of the men had remained at the front of the truck while the others covered the soldiers with revolvers or automatic pistols. Suddenly a revolver shot rang out from the front. The military shouted that it was one of the rebels who fired the shot. It was an accident in which the man had shot himself in the left leg. He was taken away in the sidecar of a motorcycle in the direction of Phibsborough.
The Squad Page 8