The Squad

by T. Ryle Dwyer

  ‘I’m not going,’ Moran said when O’Malley tried to persuade him to escape with them. ‘I won’t let down the witnesses who gave evidence for me.’

  ‘Someone has to die for this,’ O’Malley warned. ‘Maybe Teeling or myself, but they’ll hang you for certain if we get through.’

  Following the escape from Kilmainham, Collins cycled out to meet O’Malley in his hiding place. The Big Fellow shook his hand for a long time. ‘You’re born to be shot,’ Collins said. ‘You can’t be hanged! Why didn’t Paddy Moran come with you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ O’Malley replied. ‘He thought there was no case against him.’

  ‘They’ll hang him as a reprisal now,’ Collins said.

  Joseph Rochford was acquitted of the murder of Ames, but Moran was wrongly convicted of that killing. He and Whelan were hanged on 13 March for crimes they did not commit. Of course, in Moran’s case he was responsible for the two killings in the Gresham hotel, but Whelan hadn’t had an involvement in any of the killings. Conway and Potter were both sentenced to life in prison, even though they had no involvement in the killings either. James Green, the hall porter at 38 Upper Mount Street, who was acquitted of the murder of Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh F. Montgomery, was convicted of assisting the man that Major Woodcock’s wife had seen in the back garden. She saw Green unlock a side door to let that man out after the killings. For this he was sentenced to two years in jail.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘SOMEONE HAS TO DIE FOR THIS’

  On New Year’s Eve the flat of Eileen McGrane at 21 Dawson Street was raided and a huge cache of Collins’ papers were discovered. The documents found included the carbon copies of reports supplied by Ned Broy, and the daybook that Collins had taken in April 1919 during the night he spent in the G Division archives.

  ‘That damned old daybook of yours was twice nearly getting me shot,’ Joe O’Reilly told Broy.

  Collins warned Broy that the documents had been found and that it would only be a matter of time before he would come under suspicion. Broy received a further warning from Superintendent John J. Purcell, who had replaced Owen Brien.

  ‘Every vestige of political duty was immediately removed from the Brunswick St office to the castle,’ Broy wrote. British intelligence ceased to give any further confidential information to the D M P.

  ‘I continued to meet Collins almost every night during this time and, of course, had to take extra precautions in doing so.’ He found Collins ‘very perturbed’ about cabinet pressure both to ease off on the war that he had been engaging in against individuals and to get him to go to the United States. Even though Collins had built up a formative intelligence network, his most valuable police spies had lost their effectiveness. Joe Kavanagh died in September 1920 from a blood clot after an operation for appendicitis in Jervis Street hospital. Sergeant Jerry Maher came under suspicion at the county inspector’s office in Kildare, and quit the RIC. He was replaced by then Sergeant Patrick Casey, who was already supplying Collins with information. He was able to continue until March, when he too came under suspicion and was transferred to Downpatrick. Broy and McNamara’s effectiveness as spies was ended when they came under suspicion as a result of the captured documents.

  ‘I was in charge of the office from which the documents were taken and, consequently, was not likely to have given out the documents myself, as I would have been obviously the first to be blamed,’ Broy argued in his own defence. When he was brought before the commissioner of the DMP he was handed a sensitive report drawn up by a detective who had watched over Broy as he typed it up. Broy had not been able to make an extra carbon of that report, but he had given the file copy to one of Collins’ people with the instruction that they should type up a copy and return the original to him without delay. Thus it was the re-typed copy that was found and Broy was quick to notice that this was typed on an elite typewriter with ten characters to the inch, as opposed to the typewriters at G Division headquarters, which were all pica models with just eight characters to the inch. This was enough to raise some doubts about Broy’s guilt. He argued that if he had been supplying Collins with the information, he would have fled once it became clear that he was under suspicion, yet he stayed around for more than a month before his arrest.

  The man that Broy had to fear within the DMP was Detective Chief Inspector Joe Supple who was expected to prepare the case against him. He was a slight man with a goat face, according to Neligan. Supple began every day by attending mass in Mount Argus near his home, and McNamara suggested that Collins warn Supple that if he took the case he should pick out his spot in Mount Jerome cemetery beside Mount Argus.

  ‘By God,’ Collins said, ‘I’ll go up there tonight!’

  Collins arranged for a man to deliver the warning without delay. ‘I have a grave warning to give you!’ the man told Supple. ‘It concerns someone called Broy, of whom I know nothing. I am to tell you that if you go on with the case against him, you will be shot!’

  Collins enlisted the help of former Detective Sergeant Pat McCarthy, who had tried to play on both sides of the fence in the DMP for a time. His brother was active in Sinn Féin and had told Collins that Pat was not involved in political work. However, the Big Fellow was able to produce a report in which the detective sergeant had detailed the names, addresses and usual haunts of prominent Sinn Féiners. In the circumstances Pat McCarthy resigned from the DMP and emigrated to London. Now Collins contacted him and, in order to deflect suspicion from Broy, asked him to flee to America as soon as secret transportation could be arranged. ‘McCarthy agreed, and sent me word that under no circumstances would he make a statement to the British or come to Dublin,’ Broy explained. ‘When the Civil War was over, I had the pleasure of reinstating McCarthy in the Dublin Police and promoting him to inspector and later superintendent.’

  Among the papers found at Eileen McGrane’s there was apparently evidence that prompted the intelligence people to look at the whole affair about the American seamen bringing arms into Dublin again and McNamara came under suspicion for having leaked the document to the IRA. Upon his return to Dublin from Glasgow, McNamara was summoned to the office of the DMP inspector general and summarily dismissed from the force.

  ‘Listen, Mac!’ Neligan warned him, ‘don’t go to your father’s house tonight or any other night.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ Collins told McNamara. Obviously the British did not have much on him, or they would not have let him go. But henceforth he went on the run, with the IRA.

  Meanwhile Collins was still living a charmed life. Following Bloody Sunday, the British had arrested thousands of suspects, but it took some time to reorganise their intelligence network. They regularly cordoned off city blocks and searched the buildings within the area. One night Frank Thornton was in Jim Kirwan’s pub in Parnell’s Street with Sergeant Maurice McCarthy of the RIC from Belfast, the man who had helped to supply him with the photograph of Forbes Redmond a year earlier. Collins rushed into the pub.

  ‘Get out quick and see what the auxiliaries are doing,’ Collins said to Thornton. ‘There is a crowd of them coming up the road in extended order.’

  ‘I went out the back way and down the lane into Parnell Street, and as I got to the end of the lane I was held up by the auxiliaries, demanding where I was going and so forth, and after searching me for a gun I was let go,’ Thornton recalled. ‘I turned to the right and walked into Kirwan’s by the front entrance and walked down towards the rear of the shop to find that Collins had left the snug and was standing at the counter in one of the partitions and I stood in the next. We both called for drinks, but didn’t recognise one another.’

  The auxiliaries searched the snug where McCarthy was still sitting. He produced his identification card and his revolver. One of the auxiliaries bought a drink for McCarthy and warned him that carrying a gun in Dublin was dangerous because if he were not careful the republicans would take his gun and might shoot him as a spy. This was one of the many occasions in whic
h Collins was allowed to slip through the enemy’s net.

  In addition to the uncovering of most of his main police spies in Dublin, some of Collins’ hideouts were being uncovered. On 31 January the British raided Cullenswood House because they had become suspicious about a number of seemingly unnecessary structural alterations that they had noticed on a recent raid. They decided to inspect the alterations, only to discover that the changes included false walls and false doors, and a false wardrobe with a secret spring which opened into a chamber that appeared to be a secret office. In one of the rooms secret doors and secret cupboards were found. There were nine existing doors giving access to adjacent fields. During the investigation a revolver and some ammunition were found in one of the dummy walls. There was nobody on the premises but in one room supper had been laid, apparently for people on the previous night.

  The spy ring within the DMP had practically disintegrated but it was no longer that important because the DMP had ceased to be any real threat to the IRA. There was no longer that much information to be picked up within the force, because British intelligence did not now share any information with the DMP as it had proved so unreliable. Collins therefore had to recruit new spies in other branches of the security forces. He suffered a further set back when Major Reynolds, his informer within F Company of the auxiliaries, was transferred to Clare, where he continued to work for the IRA. Liam Tobin managed to recruit another auxiliary named McCarthy, but Tobin and the others were always deeply suspicious of paid informers like Reynolds and McCarthy.

  Willie Beaumont had a scare one day when Major Stokes, one of the senior British intelligence officers, produced some of the notes that Seán Beaumont had submitted about what Willie had told him. ‘I’ll show you what these Sinn Féiners are able to do,’ he said as he produced the notes. Willie Beaumont thought he was in trouble, but Stokes never linked the notes to him.

  Willie actually became disillusioned about the lack of activity in targeting undercover people that he had identified. ‘He told me that he had come to the conclusion that Collins did not want to prosecute the war vigorously against the Auxiliaries,’ his brother Seán noted. ‘I don’t know whether he actually had an interview with Collins or with one of the Squad but he accused them anyway of not acting vigorously enough and more or less washed his hands of any further activity.’

  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 t
ruck 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.’