The Squad

by T. Ryle Dwyer

  ‘I stood erect, and saw one of the prisoners with a rifle, which he levelled and fired at the guard commander, who had just entered the room,’ one of the guards later testified. ‘The prisoner then swung round and fired a shot at me. I fired at the prisoner with my revolver, and he dropped. The guard commander also fired at the prisoner with his revolver.’

  ‘I heard a scuffling noise and rushed into the guardroom,’ the commander of the guard testified. ‘The prisoner McKee fired at me with a rifle; the shot passed my head and buried itself in the wall. McKee also fired a shot at the sentry, who appeared above the table. I fired at McKee with my revolver and he dropped. I saw Clancy with a shovel strike at one of our men twice and miss him. A guard fired at him, and I saw Clancy fall.’

  A sentry on duty at the window testified that he and a colleague heard noise behind them and, looking round, noticed that two of the prisoners had thrown handgrenades at them and dived behind some mattresses. When the grenades did not detonate, Clancy seized a shovel and aimed to hit the sentry. ‘I fired at the prisoner, Clancy, killing him,’ the sentry explained. A fourth witness told much the same story, and he, too, said that he had seen Clancy holding a shovel and being shot and killed.

  When the bodies were released to the families there were extensive signs of discolouring that seemed to indicate extensive bruising, but the army doctor said that large staining could occur after death, depending on the position in which a body was lying after death. Clancy had been hit by up to five bullets, which made eight wounds, McKee had three wounds caused by two bullets, while Clune had nine wounds cause by seven bullets at most. He said there were no bayonet wounds, but there was a bullet lodged underneath McKee’s skin in the right side of the chest. David Neligan was quite adamant that they were not bayoneted.

  The bodies were handed over for burial. While Clune’s body was sent to Quin, County Clare, Collins requested that some volunteers who were not prominent should collect the bodies of McKee and Clancy. Pat McCrae of the Squad was detailed to find such volunteers but could only get Tom Gay and one other man, so he went himself as well. They were brought to a small chapel at the pro-cathedral. Collins had doctors examine the bodies ‘so that the minds of their comrades could be satisfied that they had not been tortured, as their imaginations had led them to think,’ according to Ernie O’Malley. But Piaras Beaslaí told a very different story. He contended that the examination showed that McKee had been savagely mistreated, a bayonet thrust had punctured his liver and he had suffered broken ribs. The bodies were then dressed in the uniforms of the Irish Volunteers.

  Collins was distraught at the deaths. They were ‘two men who fully understood the inside of Collins’ work and his mind, and who were ever ready and able to link up their resources of the Dublin brigade to any work that Collins had in hand, and to do so promptly, effectively and sympathetically,’ Richard Mulcahy noted. Next morning Collins, Cullen, Thornton and Gearóid O’Sullivan, the adjutant-general, helped to carry the bodies out to the waiting hearses. A photograph of Collins and Cullen at the head of one of the coffins actually appeared in the Evening Herald. He attended the requiem mass and went on to the graveside, where he was actually filmed as he stepped out of the crowd to lay a wreath on the grave. Attached was a note signed by himself: ‘In memory of two good friends – Dick and Peadar – and two of Ireland’s best soldiers.’

  ‘Look, there’s Michael Collins,’ a woman said as he stepped forward.

  ‘You bloody bitch!’ he snarled.

  The auxiliaries of F Company based at Dublin were responsible for the deaths of McKee, Clancy and Clune, but Collins had little inside information on them, ‘Occasionally I visited the Auxies’ canteen with McNamara,’ Neligan said. Their quarters were situated just inside the castle lower gate in a building known as the Exchange Court.

  Dick Foley suggested that a Major Reynolds in F Company would possibly be willing to provide information to the IRA in return for money. Collins had Frank Thornton sound him out. ‘I met Reynolds regularly in different public houses and gave him certain jobs to do, which he did successfully,’ Thornton said. ‘At the beginning, however, we were not too satisfied about his trustworthiness, and on every occasion that I met Reynolds either Dolan or Joe Guilfoyle was conveniently nearby and were armed. However, as the time went on, Reynolds became more useful and secured quite a lot of very valuable information in the form of photographs of the murder gang – F Company, Q Company and other companies of the auxiliaries.’

  Of course, the British also set about reorganising their intelligence operation.

  ‘A number of British intelligence officers were drafted into Dublin Castle,’ according to Lily Mernin. ‘A new department was opened up in the Upper Castle Yard. My work did not bring me in contact with this department.’ She was asked to provide descriptions of the men involved.

  ‘These intelligence officers used come into our office,’ she explained. ‘The three girls of the staff were curious to know who they were. Some of the girls would ask “Who was so-and-so that came in?” In this way we got to know the names of the various intelligence officers. Some of the girls in the office were very friendly with them and used go around with them. General conversation would give a lot of information concerning their whereabouts, things that were said, etc. Any information obtained was immediately passed by me to IRA intelligence.’

  Following Bloody Sunday the British engaged in raids throughout the country to round up as many of the rebels as possible. Dan McDonnell did not go home for a couple of days after Bloody Sunday. When he did go home, he never forgot the scene. ‘I found my home in chaos,’ he said. ‘My mother, extraordinary though it may seem, was as cool as a cucumber, and quietly informed me that the military and Tans had been in the house looking for a Daniel McDonnell. “Your Dad was here when they called,” she said.’

  ‘I am Daniel McDonnell,’ his father had replied. He was taken away and the woman whom his son and Dolan had slapped around in the bed in Renelagh was brought to look him over. Of course, they had the wrong Dan McDonnell, but he was interned anyway in Ballykinlar.

  Arthur Griffith was arrested and jailed on 26 November 1920, much to the annoyance of Lloyd George, who felt that the British government should have been consulted before such a high profile individual was arrested. Now the British felt that somebody much more militant would inevitably take over as president, because Griffith was the most moderate of the Sinn Féin leaders.

  When the dáil met to elect his replacement, the secretary produced a letter from Griffith’s solicitor nominating Cathal Brugha to take office or Austin Stack, in the event of Brugha being unable or unwilling to fill the post, and Michael Collins, should Stack not wish to serve. J. J. O’Kelly presided at the meeting. ‘Cathal would not act; his army work engaged all his thoughts and all his energy,’ O’Kelly wrote. Brugha explained that he had already served as president before de Valera’s election. Stack said that he could not act, as he was too busy setting up republican courts and organising a republican police force.

  ‘Come, Micheál,’ O’Kelly said to Collins, ‘sit in this chair, and we’ll all do our best to help you.’

  ‘As no one else will,’ he said, ‘I suppose I must.’

  Collins was acting president for four hectic weeks, amid a welter of peace rumours. The strain was tremendous. ‘Those of us who were in constant touch with him always possessed the fear that he would collapse under it,’ Seán Ó Muirthile wrote. Now those fears became all the more real when Collins – still deeply upset over the brutal killings of McKee and Clancy – assumed the extra strain of the presidency.

  He was not even in his new post two full days when the British-based IRA fire-bombed more than a dozen warehouses in the Liverpool docks area, causing millions of pounds worth of damage. That same day in Kilmichael, County Cork, Tom Barry led an IRA ambush on a convoy of auxiliaries and killed seventeen of them.

  Lloyd George had been making peace overtures behind the scenes for s
ome weeks and he opened up a new peace channel on 1 December 1920. He asked the Irish-born Roman Catholic archbishop of Perth, Australia, Patrick J. Clune, to meet the Irish leader in Dublin and sound him out about negotiations and a possible ceasefire. Clune was a former chaplain-general to the Australian forces who also happened to be an uncle of the late Conor Clune, the young man killed with Clancy and McKee.

  Griffith, who met the archbishop in Mountjoy Jail, advised Collins against a meeting because of the danger that British agents were watching Clune, but Collins met him without difficulty on 4 December at a school run by Louise Gavan Duffy on St Stephen’s Green. Even if the secret service were keeping an eye on the archbishop, they would have considered his visit to her school quite natural, as she was a daughter of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a former Young Ireland leader who had risen to the top in Australian politics having migrated there in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘I wonder how it is that the archbishop sees Collins apparently without difficulty in Dublin and our intelligence fails to find him after weeks of search,’ Mark Sturgis wrote in obvious exasperation.

  Although Collins was highly sceptical of the British government’s intentions, he gave Clune a written outline of ceasefire terms agreeable to the dáil cabinet. When the archbishop returned to London, Lloyd George told him it would be necessary to hold off on actual talks for a while longer. If the Irish would keep things quiet for about a month, he predicted the atmosphere would be more conducive for negotiations. He also added it would help matters if Collins and Mulcahy left the country for a while. He told the House of Commons that the ‘extremists must first be broken up’ before there could be a negotiated settlement, and he announced the introduction of martial law throughout the southern counties of Ireland.

  Next evening the Black and Tans and auxiliaries ran amuck in Cork, burning much of the business centre of the city in a frightening rampage of arson and looting. Collins was clearly disillusioned. ‘It seems to me that no additional good result can come from further continuing these discussions,’ he wrote to Griffith. ‘We have clearly demonstrated our willingness to have peace on honourable terms. Lloyd George insists upon capitulation. Between these there is no mean, and it is only a waste of time continuing.’ Collins feared the British might think the IRA was desperate for peace because it was on the verge of collapse. ‘Let Lloyd George make no mistake,’ Collins continued, ‘the IRA is not broken.’

  Nevertheless the archbishop brought back proposals suggesting the British would stop arrests, raids and reprisals for a month in return for a ceasefire on the Irish side. ‘A truce on the terms specified cannot possibly do us any harm,’ Collins wrote to Griffith. Clune returned to Griffith on 17 December, however, with news that the British had appeared to harden their attitude again. Dublin Castle was now insisting that the IRA should first surrender its arms. Griffith told him without hesitation that it would not even be considered.

  That evening the Squad killed a prominent RIC officer, District Inspector Philip J. O’Sullivan, a native of Bantry, County Cork, where his father was a solicitor. Philip, who had served in the Royal Navy during the Great War, was just twenty-two years old. A qualified solicitor, he had only been in the RIC for five months and he was based in the office of the RIC’s deputy inspector general at Dublin Castle. Ned Kelliher was given the task of identifying him and suggesting the best time to shoot him. ‘When I identified him I trailed him for about a week,’ he explained. It was decided to shoot him early on an evening in December 1920.

  ‘I was instructed, with others, to proceed to Henry Street to assist in the shooting of D.I. O’Sullivan. About four of us comprised the party,’ recalled Joe Byrne, one of the newer members of the Squad. ‘A couple of us were detailed not to take part in the actual shooting but to cover off the men who were to do the job.’

  ‘I pointed him out to members of the Squad,’ Kelliher said.

  O’Sullivan met his fiancée in Henry Street as usual around 6.15 p.m. She had been waiting for him and had noticed two men in a doorway across the street. As soon as O’Sullivan came along, they walked towards Sackville Street. The two men crossed the street, took out revolvers and shot him from close range. She grappled with one of the men while the other stood over O’Sullivan on the ground and fired another shot at him. The two assailants promptly disappeared into the rush hour crowd.

  ‘I saw the D.I. being shot by a member of the Squad and when the shooting was over we returned to Morelands,’ Byrne noted. Curiously none of the older members of the Squad left any details of this shooting.

  A passing military lorry took the wounded police officer to Jervis Street hospital, where he died within minutes.

  His fiancée said afterwards that she had recently received a warning herself. ‘You are walking out with a Black and Tan – Beware.’ She had told O’Sullivan, but he did not attach much significance to it.

  Next day Collins met Archbishop Clune for a second time. ‘Our interview was not a lengthy one,’ Collins wrote. ‘We had both, practically speaking, come to the conclusion that no talk was necessary, seeing that the new proposal from the British government was a proposal that we should surrender.’ It would seem that the killing of O’Sullivan was the Big Fellow’s real answer to the British.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE’

  Eamon de Valera had received cabinet approval for his plans to stay longer in the United States, but he changed his mind on hearing the news from Dublin that Griffith had been arrested and that Collins had taken over as acting president. He arrived home on Christmas eve and lost no time in complaining about the way the IRA campaign was being waged.

  ‘Ye are going too fast,’ he told Mulcahy. ‘This odd shooting of a policeman here and there is having a very bad effect, from the propaganda point of view, on us in America. What we want is one good battle about once a month with about 500 men on each side.’ It was certainly insensitive to criticise the way the campaign had been run without, at least, waiting to consult a few people at home.

  Collins had his narrowest escape yet from arrest that evening. The Police Gazette: Hue and Cry had come out that day with a good photograph of him taken only the previous year on its front page. He had arranged a stag party with some friends at the Gresham hotel, but the auxiliaries raided the party and all were questioned and searched.

  ‘They were very suspicious of me,’ Collins told friends next day. ‘I was questioned over and over again. One officer actually drew an old photograph of me out of his pocket, and compared it with my face, drawing my hair down as it was in the picture. It was touch and go. They were not quite satisfied, and hesitated long before they left us.’ Throughout it all Collins remained cheerful, and the raiding party eventually departed, leaving him to get very drunk.

  Relations between Collins and both Brugha and Stack had become distinctly strained, and they would become even worse now that de Valera had returned. De Valera got cabinet approval for the idea of sending Collins to the United States, but the Big Fellow refused to go, as he believed the whole thing was a plot to get rid of him.

  ‘That long whore won’t get rid of me as easy as that,’ Collins remarked.

  A new threat began to grow in the form of the so-called Igoe Gang. The Igoe Gang was a group of undercover RIC men whose job it was to identify active republicans from Dublin and from the provinces who had set up in Dublin, such as Dan Breen, Seán Treacy and their gang. Their leader was Head Constable Igoe from Galway. They gradually began playing a very active role.

  Even though they wore civilian clothes, they were heavily armed. They began moving about on the footpaths, covering each other on both sides of the road, walking some yards apart so that they would be inconspicuous as they looked for wanted men from Dublin or the country. IRA intelligence never fully identified the personnel of Igoe’s party, beyond establishing that they comprised members from different ‘hot spots’ in the country. They were nearly all Irishmen with considerable experience and service in the RIC,
and they were effective in picking up volunteers. Igoe’s gang became a difficult and dangerous force in the eyes of the Squad and IRA intelligence.

  ‘We received orders to concentrate on locating Igoe’s gang,’ Frank Thornton explained. ‘On several occasions our intelligence officers would pick them up and, leaving one to keep on trailing them, the other reported back to our Headquarters, when we got in touch with our Squad which then tried to intercept the gang. Their tactics, however, defeated our efforts on numerous occasions as they redoubled on their tracks and we lost contact.’

  ‘One particular day we had actually contacted them up in Thomas Street, our Squad coming down with intelligence officers on one side of the road going towards James’ Street while they were coming down on the other side, when all of a sudden a military patrol of about twenty-five men came up a side street and started to come down in our direction in extended order across the road.’ Thornton continued. ‘We had no option but to disperse as quickly as possible as we would have found ourselves between two fires and would have been completely out-numbered.’

  The first thing they had to do was recognise Igoe. None of the intelligence people knew what he looked like, so Thomas ‘Sweeney’ Newell was brought from Galway to help identify him. For three weeks he walked the streets of Dublin looking for Igoe. He did see him a couple of times but on each of those occasions Igoe disappeared before the Squad could act. Newell saw him a third time on 7 January 1921 as he was going to meet his companion for the day . Igoe was with sixteen or eighteen men near O’Connell’s Bridge and Newell followed them into Dame Street. ‘They crossed Dame Street into Trinity Street and into Wicklow Street,’ Newell recalled. ‘In Wicklow Street I met Charlie Dalton and told him that Igoe and his gang had gone into Grafton Street. We both went back to Headquarters, Crow Street, where he reported the matter.’