The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The flying columns, ‘having to serve actively all the time, would have to be kept fully equipped and supplied with all necessaries’. As ‘the work required of them would be very exacting’, they were to ‘consist only of first-rate troops’. They were to be organized like the cyclist half-companies of the 1914 Volunteers – with a lieutenant and two section commanders, each heading two squads of four men under a squad commander, together with an adjutant and a quartermaster – a maximum total of twenty-six (sic) combatants. (‘A larger number than this had better be formed into two Flying Columns.’) They should be ‘thoroughly familiar with cyclist tactics’ – studied via British manuals – but since the superior enemy forces would often deny them the use of roads, they should also be ‘minutely trained as Infantry’. GHQ envisaged most members of the columns being officers, some of these being battalion commanders temporarily attached for training (perhaps a tribute to the impression made by the ‘elite’ ADRIC ex-officers).

  The columns would undertake two ‘quite distinct types’ of action – ‘auxiliary’ and ‘independent’. In the first case, brigade commandants would be able to assign the column as a ‘very valuable’ extra force to any battalion for the kind of local operations already taking place. The second ‘would supply a striking arm not hitherto in our possession’, able to undertake ‘enterprises requiring to be taken on at instant notice and liable to be endangered by delay. Flying-column commanders would have ‘a wide discretion as to enterprises they may undertake’.178 An attached Operations Memorandum ordered that columns should ‘adopt guerrilla tactics generally’, and suggested specific actions ranging from field service training, through ‘harassing small and quieter military and police stations’, interrupting and ‘pillaging’ enemy stores and interrupting communications, to ‘covering towns threatened by reprisal parties’.179 This last proposal, with its hazardous hint of regular defensive fighting, was the nearest the GHQ order came to identifying what would become the most celebrated item in the flying columns’ operational repertoire, the ambush.

  The flying-column ambush would become the iconic act of the republican guerrilla campaign – even though not many successful ambushes were ever mounted. Though the number of columns snowballed, many, if not most, of them would not even attempt one. By the time of the GHQ order, a fair number of columns had already appeared, and thereafter there was a rush to form them. But then and later they never conformed to any fixed pattern, in size or style. They could range in size from about ten to over a hundred in the most active areas.180 The biggest and most aggressive brigades – where, obviously, the most men had gone on the run – established one or more core columns, which moved through their areas picking up local forces to assist with operations. The appeal of the columns for GHQ was obvious. For organizers who had struggled for years to foster a military attitude among the Volunteers, they offered a shortcut to professionalization. In the more intense atmosphere of the ASU, training could be more or less continuous, as in a regular army. This is vividly illustrated in one account of the preparation of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade’s second flying column, where the influence of Ernie O’Malley on the two-week training camp was evident. ‘Our drill and training was gruelling … Often after a strenuous day of fatiguing work, during the night we were suddenly called for a “Stand To”. This meant that every man was to be fully equipped and standing to attention within 3 minutes’ – a drill all too familiar to regular soldiers. ‘A night route march often followed.’ The aim was to ‘submit each member to the acid-test of his durability and stamina and readiness to endure the hardships and dangers that were yet to follow’.181 This was a question not just of ‘hardening’ men to outdoor life, but also of trying to instil a self-belief that would sustain them in combat.

  The attractions of going ‘on the column’ were considerable – otherwise they would not have existed, however keen GHQ might have been. Revolution on the hoof offered the young an escape route from the constriction of rural life – ‘they went “on the run” not only from the police but from their childhood.’ The columns offered safety and status as well. There was some security in numbers – up to a point – and even columns which failed to get into action seem to have had more prestige than local units. This added glamour seems to have meant that there was not much difficulty in finding ‘column men’. Roger Rabbitte of the Kilterna company in Galway attended a battalion meeting late in 1920 at which ‘we were ordered to make a list of all the men in our companies who would be ready and willing to go on full-time active service if and when called upon.’ In the event, when the column was formed early in 1921, Rabbitte was instructed not to join but to stay and keep his company going as a unit – especially for routine work like dispatches. He concentrated on organizing dances and raffles, handing the proceeds over to the battalion quartermaster for the upkeep of the column.182

  On the other hand, columns were far from invulnerable, and always depended on local auxiliaries for survival. Some men never found life on the run very agreeable. In areas where the people were unsupportive, the life was hard and stressful. Like ‘real’ soldiers, column men learnt that most of their time was spent in waiting for action. On the whole, they seem to have thrived none the less. Men who were not already hardy became so. A Carrick-on-Suir doctor, Patrick Murphy, who looked after two South Tipperary columns, thought that ‘generally speaking, the men were always in the pink of condition’, though their feet were often in need of treatment. The worst affliction was ‘that dreadful visitation known as the Republican itch’ – scabies, caused by diet. The West Clare Brigade’s history recorded that ‘the invariable prelude to retiring for the night was, in the vulgar parlance, “an hour’s scratching”.’183 It was treated by washing and rubbing in copious quantities of sulphur ointment: at one point Dr Murphy treated all forty men of Dinny Lacey’s column by having them bathe in a lake before applying the ointment (to his discomfiture, the big tins marked with his hospital’s name were found by the British).184 The daily life of most columns was some way removed from the GHQ ideal; most did little more than survive. Survival meant evading British forces by moving constantly between safe areas, ‘guided and guarded by local Volunteers’; these moves have been dismissed as ‘rambles’, but though they may have had a certain aimlessness, the bottom line was that survival was more than a negative achievement. In publicity terms it was priceless. However much the columns varied in reality, in the pages of the Irish Bulletin they were all equal. As long as the columns existed, they represented a massive challenge to the British state – out of all proportion to their actual military capacity.

  Even if only a small minority of columns ever managed a successful ambush, the transition to ‘active service’ was a game-changing move for the Army of the Republic. High-profile operations such as an ambush at Rineen in west Clare on 20 September, in which a district inspector of the RIC was killed, and the police retaliated by burning down twenty-six buildings and killing four people in the nearby towns of Ennistymon, Lahinch and Milltown Malbay, got international coverage. The British army reluctantly began to recognize that it was confronting a kind of war that regular soldiers deeply disliked. Even in places where they faced little open opposition, units noted the distinctive topographical features of their area for the conduct of guerrilla warfare: the 14th Brigade at the Curragh, for instance, could see that ‘enclosed and winding roads, the peculiar type of Irish bridge, bog roads’ afforded ‘special facilities to guerrilla forces for laying ambushes and blocking passage of military vehicles’.185

  THE INTELLIGENCE WAR

  The Volunteers’ transition into a viable guerrilla force rested in part in the development of specialist technical departments like engineering and signalling. In these services it had some success, though less than might have been hoped – certainly less than GHQ hoped. The Dublin Brigade developed a 5th Battalion devoted to engineering and signals, one of the highest concentrations of expertise anywhere in the country. Its members, however, seem to
have hankered after playing a more direct part in the fighting, and though they were strictly forbidden to do so by the Director of Engineering, Rory O’Connor, it is easy to see why they wanted to. In their specialist work they struggled to make a tangible contribution. For instance, Liam Archer, a senior member of the battalion, recorded that when they got hold of a British aircraft wireless transmitter late in 1920, they set up a listening station with a full-time trained operator. ‘But I do not recollect that we secured any tangible results.’ Experiments with explosives were interesting, and the battalion played a part by running training courses for provincial specialist units, and producing manuals. But, as Mulcahy would later argue, the overall contribution was disappointing.

  The most effective special service created by the Volunteers was intelligence. The basic spur in this was defensive; previous attempts at rebellion had usually been stymied by penetration by state intelligence agencies. The IRB’s oathbound secret structure had been developed precisely to guard against this. The more open, and more potent, post-1916 military organization was also more vulnerable – or felt itself to be. In fact, as we know, beyond making a fair effort at counting heads in the Sinn Féin clubs and Volunteer companies, British intelligence agencies had a fragile grasp of the republican movement’s inner structure. Even in the matter of simply identifying dangerous individuals they had been a big disappointment to Lord French. But some of them, notably the detective division of the DMP, did possess knowledge, derived from long hours of tailing suspects, that was potentially a threat. The Volunteers needed to find ways not only to counter this threat, but to acquire information themselves on a scale that would enable them to plan and carry out operations.

  The 1916 Volunteers seem to have had virtually no intelligence system, but their successors soon saw that the kind of conflict they were likely to get into would be defined by a contest for information. According to Florrie O’Donoghue, ‘the need for an organised intelligence service became obvious’ early in 1919. Even small actions ‘required the gathering of some information in advance’, and this was ‘the basis of all intelligence activity’. He himself became one of the IRA’s most successful intelligence officers, not least because he had a clear conception of the level of organization needed. He saw the need for two ‘branches’, the first military and the second incorporating ‘a wide variety of men and women, individually selected’, who could acquire information about the enemy. Developing the military intelligence was a matter of finding officers who shared his dedication and his belief in the centrality of intelligence. He himself was fortunate to recruit (and marry) a particularly effective example of the civilian branch.

  The development of the republican intelligence system as a whole – for all its legendary status, and real importance – has not been fully charted. The story of local intelligence activity has appeared only in fragmentary form. Most attention has always focused on the ‘intelligence war’ in Dublin, directed by Michael Collins personally. The most substantial recent account of this devotes only a few lines to the ‘national IRA intelligence system’ of which the GHQ Intelligence Department supposedly formed the ‘apex’.186 But it is clear that the GHQ intelligence organization could not in fact ‘contribute a great deal directly to the operational conduct of the war outside Dublin’.187 Operational intelligence had to be the responsibility of the local units which needed it, and the quality of their intelligence work was closely related to their military efficiency as a whole.

  The low military priority at first given to intelligence is indicated by the fact that GHQ entrusted it to Edmund [Eamonn] Duggan, a sensible if not very imaginative solicitor. It began to move into the limelight after Collins replaced Duggan as director of intelligence – or director of information as he was usually called at this time – in mid-1919. According to Piaras Béaslaí he had actually ‘been Director of Intelligence in fact, though not in name, for several months past’.188 Collins’s takeover of GHQ intelligence was a natural outgrowth of his phenomenal networking skills. It had been the 1918 German Plot that brought him into intelligence work, though the warning of the impending arrests actually came from someone Collins did not know at that time. Ned (Eamon) Broy, the clerk of the DMP Special Branch (G Division), was passing messages to Duggan, but they were never acted on quickly enough. As soon as Collins met up with Broy, he adopted him as his personal contact. The relationship became the cornerstone of what has been called his ‘intelligence franchise’, as Collins ‘worked his way into the intelligence business’, using his privileged information to ease Duggan out.189 The organization he built, and especially its methods, bore his personal stamp, though it was not entirely his personal creation. Duggan had already taken on the Dublin Brigade’s Intelligence Officer, Liam Tobin, as his deputy, and Collins’s decision to retain him as his chief intelligence officer was apparently taken mainly in deference to the Dublin brigadier, Dick McKee.

  The intelligence staff ‘was built up slowly, as suitable men were not easily found’, as Piaras Béaslaí explained. Fortunately the core organizing group were strikingly capable and energetic. Collins himself, who seemed to be good at everything, had a marked gift for intelligence work, thanks to a mix of tireless activity and prodigious memory. Tobin turned out to be no mere deputy: he, not Collins, ‘was the real Intelligence man in Dublin’, one insider said, adding that ‘Collins would be the first to admit that.’190 Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton completed a central quartet who – quite apart from the question of ability – worked together far more harmoniously than their opponents. They set up the first intelligence HQ, with characteristic nerve, over Fowler’s premises in Crow Street – ‘right bang up against Dublin Castle’. Collins conducted much of his administrative work in offices, but famously preferred public bars in Parnell Square (Vaughan’s Hotel at first, and later Devlin’s opposite the Rotunda) for face-to-face meetings in the evening. These might have seemed rather exposed, but Thornton suggested that ‘a headquarters of this kind in the heart of the city was valuable … for, being a public house, no notice was taken of people continually going in and out.’ Devlin’s, remarkably, was never searched, even on the night that Parnell Square was systematically raided. Troops once entered the bar and searched the customers while Collins and his group were in the dining room, but went no further in.

  Beyond trying to foster a countrywide organizational structure, GHQ’s capacity to increase general operational intelligence was limited. But it was uniquely placed to penetrate the official structure in the capital. According to Thornton, they had ‘one individual who was working with us from the very commencement in records, who secured for us photographs and the names and addresses and history of practically all the typists and all the clerical workers in the most important departments of the enemy’. Armed with this priceless information their agents were soon able to find ‘quite a number’ who agreed to work for them.191 The most useful, perhaps, were women like Lily Mernin who worked on British military and police documents. The key step, the creation of a small dedicated counter-intelligence unit, was launched by the Dublin Brigade under McKee, who had already assigned men to tail the DMP detectives and record their movements, and it was McKee’s energy that ensured that the unit worked. Mick McDonnell, another Frongoch-camp veteran, ‘advocated the execution of those who were responsible’ for identifying the 1916 rebels, and eventually persuaded McKee and (presumably) GHQ to agree to this. McKee called some selected men to a meeting ‘and asked us if we had any objection to shooting enemy agents’. Most seem to have done, but a handful – like Jim Slattery – said they were ‘prepared to obey orders’.192

  The first action of this ‘special duty’ squad – which became known as the Squad – was the shooting of a detective sergeant they called ‘the Dog’, Patrick Smyth, on 30 July 1919. It nearly failed, through inexperience and inappropriate weapons – .38 revolvers, quickly replaced by .45s. After that a steady sequence of shootings brought G Division to the point of paralysis by the end of
the year. In January 1920 the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Division, William Redmond, was killed. This was a psychologically stunning blow, coming only a few weeks after he had been brought to Dublin from Belfast to rebuild the detective service. The aura of omniscience and omnipotence that began to surround the GHQ intelligence outfit was powerfully enhanced. The shock effect echoed throughout the police service and beyond. The struggle went on for a few more months, but the old ‘eyes and ears of the Castle’ were effectively closed. Just how formidable ‘the G’ had really been is open to doubt; though Broy painted a picture of an elaborate network of undercover operatives, the organization was certainly more dangerous in the imagination of its targets than in reality. The DMP detectives might be hated and even feared, but the ‘almost flawless system of espionage’ conjured up in Dorothy Macardle’s great republican history was a nationalist myth.193 The police had a unique store of personal knowledge, but no organization of spies or undercover agents, and no proper record system. Their operating procedures – they ‘spent a lot of time at railway stations to see who got on or off trains’ – meant that ‘far from being an invisible hand’, they were quite well known to their targets.194 When one of them was killed, a significant chunk of their database effectively went with him.