The Squad (15 page)

Between 3.45 and 4 p.m. on 1 June 1920 members of the Squad were involved with the local IRA in a daring daylight raid for arms on the sentry and guards at the King’s Inns, Dublin. There were some twenty-five to thirty soldiers at the post at the time. They had planned the operation for a fine sunny afternoon, reasoning that the soldiers would be out in the grounds at the back in the good weather.

‘Peadar Clancy was in charge of this operation, which was to be carried out by members of the Squad, assisted by some men from the first battalion,’ recalled Jim Slattery. ‘Joe Dolan was told to cover the sentries at the main entrance gate. When Keogh and I reached Dolan he was to hold up the sentry, which he did very slickly. Keogh and I then slipped into the guardroom smartly and held up the guard.’ The soldiers were caught by complete surprise and none of them had a weapon at hand. ‘The operation was carried out without any casualties and no shots were fired,’ Slattery continued. ‘The rifles were locked in racks and we had difficulty in getting the keys. The soldiers stated that they had not got the keys, but Keogh noticed one of them acting suspiciously, and ordered him to hand out the keys, which he did.

‘Captain Jimmy Kavanagh brought some of his Company in and collected the arms, which were loaded on a Ford car and driven away by David Golden,’ Slattery continued. ‘Keogh and myself travelled with him in the car.’ The haul consisted of thirteen rifles and a similar number of bayonets, as well as a Lewis machine gun.

Two weeks later members of the Squad went to County Wex-ford to kill District Inspector Percival Lea Wilson in Gorey on the afternoon of 15 August. Wilson had been a constable in Charle ville before joining the British army in 1915. He had served for a time in France and was in charge of the Rotunda Gardens while the republican prisoners were being held there following the Easter Rebellion. He became notorious for mistreating prisoners and had reportedly humiliated Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott.

‘Tom Keogh, Pat McCrae, Tom Cullen and other Wicklow men were picked to carry out his execution,’ said Paddy O’Daly. ‘Men who knew the country were sent, because they would have to take to the hills.’

Dressed in civilian clothes, Wilson had been to the RIC barracks in Gorey and was walking to his home, which was about a quarter of a mile outside the town. He stopped at the railroad station at about 9.25 a.m. to purchase a copy of the
Irish Times
. He had been walking with Constable Alexander O’Donnell, but they had parted about 200 yards earlier.

Wilson was reading his newspaper as he walked so he may not have seen his assailants until the final moments. From the bloodstains and sounds it would seem that two shots were fired and that he went down but got up again and tried to run for about fifteen yards. There were bullet marks on the wall at the side of the footpath. He then went down again and was shot repeatedly on the ground. He died at the scene. Minutes earlier, while on his way to work, Joseph Gilbert, a grocer’s assistant, had noticed a car in the area. The bonnet was up and four men who he had not recognised were standing around the engine; there was another man in the car. After the shooting the car was seen going in the Ballycarnew direction.

Joe Sweeney happened to be in the bar of the Wicklow hotel that evening when Collins stomped in. ‘We got the bugger, Joe.’

‘What are you taking about?’

‘Do you remember that first night outside the Rotunda? Lea Wilson?’

‘I’ll never forget it.’

‘Well,’ said Collins, ‘we got him today in Gorey.’

If Collins had another reason for killing Lea Wilson, he might not have been able to tell Sweeney without compromising his source, but his remarks, the fact that there had been no rebel activity around Gorey,* and the fact that the Squad was sent to County Wexford to carry out the hit, seem to suggest that it was in revenge for what happened outside the Rotunda on the evening in 1916.

However, Paddy O’Daly had a different opinion. ‘Captain Lea Wilson was not shot because he had ill-treated Seán McDermott and other prisoners in 1916, because there were other British officers just as bad as he had been and no attempt was made to shoot them,’ O’Daly argued. ‘I believe he was shot because of the position he held at the time, and for no other reason. I am satisfied from my long experience with the Squad that no man was shot merely for revenge and that any execution sanctioned by Michael Collins was perfectly justified.’

O’Daly recalled that he was once reprimanded by Collins, who thought that O’Daly was planning to take revenge on an officer who had shoved his daughter in 1916. Following his arrest over his involvement in the Easter Rebellion an army officer had informed his wife that O’Daly was in hospital and he looked around her house. As the officer was leaving, a neighbour, Superintendent John Winters of the DMP, arrived, having apparently just got out of bed. The superintendent said there was a large store of guns in the house and, citing his authority as a police officer, began to search the place.

‘This is martial law,’ the army officer said. ‘We are in command and you must get out.’

When Winters did not comply, the officer called on two soldiers to put him out. As he was leaving, O’Daly’s four-year old daughter called Winters ‘a traitor’ and he pushed her to the ground. Enraged, the officer ordered his men to throw Winters outside the gate.

Somebody told Collins that O’Daly was going to kill Winters, who still lived near him. ‘What is this I hear about you going to shoot Winters?’ Collins asked him.

‘That is the first I heard of it,’ O’Daly replied. ‘I think it is a joke.’

‘That is too serious to be a joke.’

‘As far as I was concerned, it was a joke,’ O’Daly explained. ‘The thought of killing Winters had never entered my head.’

‘Collins gave me a lecture on revenge and told me that the man who had revenge in his heart was not fit to be a Volunteer,’ Daly continued.*

As part of the British reorganisation, police around the country were being reassigned. Most of the eighteen men stationed in Listowel were being transferred to other stations and replaced by a much larger number of Black and Tans. Only three would remain, essentially to act as local guides for the new men. This led to uproar and the men resisted the move. The new divisional commissioner for Munster, Gerald Brice Ferguson Smyth, went to Listowel to explain the situation. He was accompanied by Major-General Henry H. Tudor, who was in charge of the Black and Tans and the RIC.

‘Sinn Féin has had all the sport up to the present, and we are going to have sport now,’ Smyth told the assembled police at the RIC station in Listowel on 19 June 1920. The thirty-eight year old was a highly decorated veteran of the Great War during which he had risen to the rank of brigadier-general. He had been wounded six times and had lost his left arm. He was appointed as a division commissioner of the RIC on 3 June and believed in a policy of shooting first and asking questions afterwards.

‘We must take the offensive and beat Sinn Féin at its own tactics,’ Smyth said. ‘If persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are suspicious looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally, and innocent people may be shot, but that cannot be helped. No policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.’

‘By your accent I take it you are an Englishman, and in your ignorance you forget you are addressing Irishmen,’ Constable Jeremiah Mee replied, appalled by the thought of such a policy. He took off his cap and belt and threw them on a table.

‘These too, are English,’ he said. ‘Take them.’

Smyth, a native of Banbridge, County Down, informed him that he was not English. He ordered that Mee be arrested, but the constable’s colleagues shared his indignation and ignored the order. Afterwards Mee drew up an account of what had happened and thirteen of those present testified to its accuracy by signing the statement, which they gave to a local curate, Fr Charles O’Sullivan, for transmission to Sinn Féin and the media. Five of the constables then quit the RIC. They were Mee, Michael Fitzgerald, John O’Donovan, Patrick Sheeran and Thomas Hughes. Mee offered his services to Sinn Féin and the IRA.

On 14 July 1920 T. P. O’Connor, the Irish nationalist MP from Liverpool, formally asked about the events in Kerry during question time in the House of Commons

‘Divisional Commissioner Colonel Smyth made a speech to the members of the force, eighteen in number, stationed at Listowel,’ Hamar Greenwood replied. ‘I have seen the report in the press, which, on the face of it, appears to have been supplied by the five constables already mentioned. I have myself seen Colonel Smyth, who repudiates the accuracy of the statements contained in that report. He informed me that the instructions given by him to the police in Listowel and throughout the division were those mentioned in a debate in this House on 22 June last by the Attorney-General for Ireland, and he did not exceed these instructions. The reason for the resignation of the five constables was their refusal to take up duty in barracks in certain disturbed parts of Kerry. They had taken up this attitude before the visit of the Divisional Commissioner. I am satisfied that the newspaper report is a distortion and a wholly misleading account of what took place.’

Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor had also been at the meeting and his presence seemed to suggest that what Smyth said was official policy. O’Connor tried to have a parliamentary debate on the Listowel incident on the grounds that Smyth’s address was calculated to produce serious bloodshed in Ireland, but this was blocked by the government.

Mee and a colleague met Collins and others in Dublin the next day. Those present included Countess Markievicz, Erskine Childers (who was editor of the republican news-sheet
The Bulletin
), together with the editor and managing director of the
Freeman’s Journal
which was being sued for libel by Smyth for publishing details of Mee’s allegations.

‘I had always imagined that the IRA leaders who were on the run were in hiding in cellars or in some out of the way place far removed from the scene of hostilities,’ Mee recalled. ‘I was somewhat surprised then, as I sat with some of these same leaders, and calmly discussed the current situation, while military lorries were speeding through the street under the very windows of the room where our conference was taking place. As a matter of fact there seemed to be nothing to prevent anybody walking into that room and finding Michael Collins and Countess Markievicz.

‘For at least three hours we sat there under a cross examination,’ Mee wrote. The representatives of the
Freeman’s Journal
were trying to build a defence against the libel action, and the republicans were seeking to exploit the Listowel incident.

Smyth was merely reflecting British policy, but the London government was not about to admit this openly, so Smyth accused Mee and the media of distorting his remarks.

Smyth wrote his own explanation on 13 July of what happened in Listowel. He reported that he said ‘that if the Sinn Féiners succeed in burning a [police] station we would seize the most suitable house in the neighbourhood, preferably a house of a Sinn Féiner, and fit it up as a police station, that no notice must be given that we intended to seize this house or it would be burnt; that the inhabitants must be turned out of the house on to the streets, and the police put in as quickly as possible. I did not say “let them die there – the more the merrier”. A man does not die because he is turned out of his house.’

‘I told the police,’ Smyth added, ‘that they would no longer be tied down by regulations in the police code as to firing on as sailants; that a policeman was justified in challenging a man who was carrying arms, or who he had good reasons to believe was carrying arms; that mistakes might occur, but they should not, as the police knew the men in each locality who were likely to carry arms for murderous purposes; that, if such men did not put up their hands when challenged and ordered to do so, the police were justified in shooting.’

Smyth never got his chance to press the libel suit. He had become notorious for nothing yet other than shooting his mouth off but members of the IRA were now determined to get him. Through a waiter working at the County Club in Cork city they learned that Smyth stayed there. They planned to shoot him there on the night of Friday, 17 July, but he went away for the weekend. He returned unexpectedly the following evening and the IRA mobilised a hit squad of six men. They entered the County Club at about 10 p.m., held up the hall porter, Fitzgerald, who was expecting them. Three men went down to the smoking room where Smyth was sitting with RIC County Inspector Craig.

‘Were not your orders to shoot at sight?’ one of the men said to him. ‘Well, you are in sight now, so prepare.’

Smyth tried to rise and take out his pistol but he was shot twice in the head as he staggered towards the hallway. He was shot three more times in the chest, one through the heart. He collapsed dead in the hallway. County Inspector Craig was wounded in the leg.

The coroner was unable to find enough people to serve on a jury for an inquest. Collins proceeded to milk the controversy surrounding Smyth’s remarks in Listowel for all the affair was worth in the propaganda war by recruiting two of Mee’s colleagues for speaking tours of the United States. In a way it was ironic because the policy advocated by Smyth was not really much different from that being pursued by the IRA in general, and Collins in particular. ‘We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people,’ Patrick Pearse had written in the article that Collins had enthusiastically endorsed.

Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, told the House of Commons on 19 July 1920 that the government’s Irish policy was, ‘by the use of all the means in our power, to restore law and order in Ireland and to carry into law the Government of Ireland Bill.’ He has previously opposed home rule but was now advocating it along with repressive measures. Law now enjoyed inordinate influence on the government because even though his party was in coalition with Lloyd George’s Liberals (they had fought the election on a coalition platform), the Conservatives had an overall majority of their own in both houses of parliament. Thus there was an amount of bewilderment in relation to British policy in London and this led to ‘really incredible’ confusion in Dublin Castle.