I Signed My Death Warrant (2 page)

Collins supported de Valera against Cohalan and the Clan na Gael leader John Devoy, going so far as to sever relations between the IRB and its sister organisation in America, Devoy's Clan na Gael, even though Devoy had actually been touting Collins as the real Irish leader in his
Gaelic American
newspaper. But in one matter the Big Fellow's help was probably less than welcome.

Throughout the period that de Valera was in the United States, Collins helped his family, and de Valera's wife, Sinéad, remained deeply appreciative of this help throughout the remainder of her life. As the dispute between de Valera and the Irish-Americans intensified, there were rumours that de Valera was having an affair with his secretary, Kathleen O'Connell, a Kerry woman that he met in the United States. They were travelling about America together, and de Valera later accused a Catholic bishop in Chicago of spreading rumours that he was philandering. Collins arranged for Sinéad to join de Valera in the United States, but he was less than pleased to see her as he felt her place was at home with the children.

‘The visit to America was one of the biggest mistake I ever made,' she later wrote. ‘It was a huge blunder for me to go to America. I derived neither profit nor pleasure from my visit.' Her son Terry wrote that she often remarked that the six weeks there were ‘the longest and least profitable part of her life'.

Meanwhile in Ireland the struggle entered its bitterest phase with the Black and Tan and Auxiliaries reeking havoc around the country, sacking towns like Balbriggan, Carrick-on-Shannon, Tuam, Ennistymon, Miltown-Malby and Tralee, which was closed down for the first ten days of November 1920. No businesses or schools were allowed to open and people were warned to keep off the streets.

The British had infiltrated many intelligence agents into Dublin, and some of those closest to Collins had very narrow escapes. Lloyd George proudly proclaimed that he had ‘murder by the throat' during his address at the annual Lord Mayor's ban­­quet at the Guildhall on 9 November. The IRA decided to kill simultaneously as many of those agents as they could at nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday, 21 November 1920. Members of the Squad, backed up the various battalions of the Dublin IRA, targeted as many as thirty-five agents. Sixteen of the agents were shot – eleven fatally. Another officer who was killed a result of a mistaken identity and two Auxiliaries were taken prisoner and then shot dead, bringing the total dead for the morning to fourteen.

That afternoon the Auxiliaries retaliated blindly, raiding a football game and firing into the crowd, killing fifteen innocent civilians, including one of the footballers on the field. The dead included, a ten-year-old boy who was shot in the head, a fourteen-year-old boy, and a young woman who had gone to the game with her fiancée. They were due to marry five days later. Over sixty people required hospital treatment, and eleven of those were detained in hospital.

The day was remembered as Bloody Sunday. The following Sunday seventeen Auxiliaries were killed in the famous Kil­michael ambush in Cork, and another was taken prisoner and killed a couple of days later. Arthur Griffith, the acting president of the Dáil, was arrested, and Collins became acting president.

Lloyd George asked Archbishop Patrick J. Clune of Perth, Australia, to contact IRA leaders in Dublin to sound out the prospects for a settlement. The archbishop met Griffith in jail and Collins in a private house. Terms for a ceasefire were agreed but the whole thing fell through, because Dublin Castle contended that the IRA was about to collapse, and Sinn Féin vice president Fr Michael O'Flanagan made some intemperate remarks that were seen as defeatist. The British also learned that de Valera was secretly returning to Ireland. He had planned to stay in the United States for at least another six months, but on hearing that Collins had taken over at home, he decided to return to Ireland immediately. Upon his return he promptly complained to IRA chief of staff Richard Mulcahy that the war was being waged in the wrong way.

‘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 insensitive to criticise the way the campaign had been run without, at least, waiting to consult a few people. In the fol­lowing days, de Valera tried to send Collins to the United States, but the Big Fellow refused to go. ‘That Long Whoor won't get rid of me as easy as that,' he complained.

But Collins had lost some of his clout at home, not only with the return of de Valera, but also with the uncovering of his main police spies. Kavanagh had died of natural causes, McNamara had been dismissed on suspicion of leaking material, and Ned Broy was arrested after the carbon copies of some of his reports were found among captured documents.

While Collins had targeted selected individuals, de Valera called for battles in which numbers became more important. A distinct rift widened between Collins and Minister for Defence Cathal Brugha, who revived an old plan to target members of the British cabinet.

‘This is madness,' Collins thundered when Seán MacEoin told him that Brugha had asked him to lead an attack on the cabinet in London. ‘Do you think that England has the makings of only one cabinet?' He told MacEoin to discuss the matter with Mulcahy, who ordered MacEoin to forget about the operation and return to his battalion. On the way back to Longford, Mac­­Eoin was arrested having being wounded in a shoot out with crown forces.

De Valera was adopting a two-pronged approach in the quest for negotiations with the British. He was encouraging more activity on the part of the IRA, but at the same time, he was speaking in moderate terms to encourage the British to negotiate. Collins appeared to adopt the opposite approach. He deliberately frustrated what he considered the more irrational plans, such as the scheme to kill members of the British cabinet, or engaging 500 members of the IRA in an open battle with the British. But at the same time he adopted a hard-line approach in his public utterances.

In an interview with the American journalist Carl Ackermann in early April, for instance, Collins said the IRA was going to fight on ‘until we win'.

‘What are your terms of settlement?' Ackermann asked.

‘Lloyd George has a chance of showing himself to be a great statesman by recognising the Irish Republic.'

‘Do you mean a Republic within the British commonwealth of Nations or outside?' Ackermann asked.

‘No, I mean an Irish Republic.'

‘Why are you so hopeful?'

‘Because I know the strength of our forces and I know our position is infinitely stronger throughout the world,' Collins explained. ‘The terror the British wanted to instill in this country has completely broken down. It is only a question of time until we shall have them cleared out.'

‘So you are still opposed to compromise?'

‘When I saw you before I told you that the same effort which would get us Dominion Home Rule would get us a Republic. I am still of that opinion, and we have never had so many peace moves as we have had since last autumn.' Off the record, Collins indicated that ‘he was much more accommodating', according to Ackerman, who noted that Collins had pointedly indicated that ‘No one has ever defined a Republic'.

The British concluded there was a power struggle within Sinn Féin in which de Valera was little more than a figurehead, crying in the wilderness for a negotiated settlement, while Collins, the real leader, wanted to fight it out to the bitter end.

‘De Valera and Michael Collins have quarrelled,' Lloyd George told his cabinet on 27 April 1921. ‘The latter will have a Republic and he carries a gun and he makes it impossible to negotiate. De Valera cannot come here and say he is willing to give up Irish Independence, for if he did, he might be shot.'

Lloyd George's government had the greatest majority ever in the House of Commons, but he was drifting into a precarious position. Of course, he was an extremely talented politician. Born in Manchester in 1863, his family promptly moved to north Wales, where he was reared as a native Welsh speaker. He qualified as a lawyer and was elected to parliament as a Liberal in a by-election in April 1890, and he held the seat for fifty-five years. He was appointed to the cabinet in 1905 and served as chancellor of the exchequer from 1908 to 1915. He then became minister for munitions and secretary for war the following year when, with the help of unionists and Conservatives, he managed to oust prime minister Herbert Asquith and split the Liberal Party into two factions, but Lloyd George enjoyed unprecedented popularity following the successful conclusion of the First World War. He would be dubbed as ‘the man who won the war', and the ‘architect of victory'.

In the first post war general election in 1918, Lloyd George led the coalition to a massive landslide victory, winning 473 of the 707 seats throughout Great Britain and Ireland, but the ab­stention of Sinn Féin with its 73 seats, meant the Conservatives with 322 seats, enjoyed an overall majority of their own in par­liament.

The coalition's majority was so big that cracks quickly began to appear, as it was a combination of very different ideologies. The traditional wing of the Unionist Party had little desire for reform, and there was a gulf of suspicion between them and Lloyd George's faction of the Liberal Party. The events in Ireland and the behaviour of the Black and Tans raised serious issues.

Following the general election Lloyd George was preoccupied with the peace negotiations in Paris. He had created problems for himself by promising to squeeze Germans until the pips squeak, but he was unable to command the kind of influence he would have liked at the Peace Conference in the midst of the strong personalities like President Woodrow Wilson of the United States and Premier Georges Clemenceau of France. Asked how he felt he had fared in Paris, Lloyd George replied, ‘Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.' Such irreverence was symptomatic of another problem. The prime minister was having an affair with his secretary Frances Stevenson, whom he eventually married after his wife's death. Although this affair had not been publicised, it was well known in political circles, and did not go down well with the moralistic element in the Conservative Party that included Stanley Baldwin, especially when there were also rumours of growing sleaze with whispers that Lloyd George was selling knighthoods and peerages.

Rather than strengthening his character, his popularity tended to bolster his weaknesses, such as his passions for intrigue and self-assertion, his indifference to principle and his naked man­ipulation of public opinion by his adroit handling of the press. He even endorsed the outrageous tactics of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries by bragging that he had ‘murder by the throat'.

Lloyd George had been sending out peace feelers in Ireland since the autumn of 1920, and de Valera encouraged those by suggesting that Ireland would be prepared to satisfy Britain's legitimate security needs. The Big Fellow's approach was clearly unhelpful as far as de Valera was concerned, and he was naturally annoyed. He later told his authorised biographers that from April 1921 onwards, ‘Collins did not seem to accept my view of things as he had done before and was inclined to give public expression to his own opinions even when they differed from mine.'

Collins organised a daring rescue attempt after MacEoin was transferred to Mountjoy Jail, but it failed due to an inopportune change in procedures that day. De Valera's advocacy of major battles seem to bear fruit in late May when the IRA launched an attack on the Custom House. As this was the biggest operation since the Easter Rebellion, it seemed to make a mockery of British claims that they were winning the war, as they suffered their heaviest casualties that month since the rebellion, but it was something of a pyrrhic victory for the IRA, especially from the perspective of Collins, as the Squad was virtually eradicated with the arrest of most of its members.

Alfred Cope, known to his friends as Andy, had been a detective in the office of customs and excise when he was sent to Ireland as an assistant under-secretary. His real function was to act as a kind a secret envoy on behalf of Lloyd George, making contact with Sinn Féin leaders as part of a peace initiative. He met with Fr Michael O'Flanagan, a Sinn Féin vice president, and Bishop Michael Fogarty, a strong Sinn Féin supporter, and he even met with Michael Collins. He also arranged meetings between de Valera and Lord Derby in April 1921 and with Sir James Craig the following month.

Cope had talks with senior republicans in Mountjoy jail, such as Arthur Griffith, Eamonn Duggan and Eoin MacNeill, and he was instrumental in securing their release from prison, along with the release of Desmond Fitzgerald and Robert Barton. He also arranged the release of Erskine Childers, the editor of the
Irish Bulletin
, following his arrest. Cope actually met with Childers while he was being held at Dublin Castle on 9 May 1921. A couple of weeks later when British intelligence raided Collins' finance office in Mary Street, they found a letter from Childers informing Collins of the ‘settlement outlined to me by Cope in the Castle a week ago'. Childers noted that Cope ‘is probably a good actor, but his ostensible attitude was one of almost feverish anxiety to get something done and the business over'.

The assistant under–secretary's efforts to initiate a negotiated settlement were bitterly resented by the military. One British officer noted that Cope was ‘universally detested by everyone in the Castle, it being generally supposed that he was going to sell us all to the rebels'.

Sir John Anderson, the under–secretary for Ireland, warned assistant under secretary Mark Sturgis that if Cope succeeded in persuading Lloyd George to talk with Sinn Féin that the British military might ‘upset the apple cart not because they want to but out of a mixture of personal pride, soldierly prejudice and downright stupidity.'