The Squad (3 page)

Maids in guesthouses and hotels, porters, bartenders, sailors, railwaymen, postmen, sorters, telephone and telegraph operators, warders and ordinary policemen all played an important part. Certain sorters and postmen intercepted mail for British agents undercover, and Collin and his men had mail sent to them under cover-names at convenient addresses. The Big Fellow had the splendid ability of making each of the people helping feel important, even though he rarely, if ever, thanked them for what they were doing.

‘Why should I thank people for doing their part?’ he would ask. ‘Isn’t Ireland their country as well as mine?’

Central to the success of intelligence gathering was the network of police spies. After Collins took over as director of intelligence in January 1919, one of his first moves was to make contact with Ned Broy, who had provided the information to allow him to avoid arrest in the round-up of May 1918. He had Broy invited to meet with him at 5 Cabra Road, Michael Foley’s home.

‘I was filled with curiosity,’ Broy recalled. ‘Would this Michael Collins be the ideal man I had been dreaming of for a couple of years? Looking up the police record book to see what was known about him, I discovered that he was a six-footer, a Cork man, very intelligent, young and powerful. There was no photograph of him at that time in the record book.’

‘Steeped in curiosity, I went to 5 Cabra Road and was received in the kitchen by Foley.’ This was ‘a place where every extreme nationalist visited at some time or another,’ Broy continued. ‘I was not there long when Greg Murphy and Michael Collins arrived. I had studied for so long the type of man that I would need to act efficiently, that the moment I saw Michael at the door, before he had time to walk across and shake hands, I knew he was the man.’

Collins was dressed in black leggings, green breeches and a trench coat. He struck Broy as being a handsome man, with a quick mind and bundles of energy. He thanked Broy for all the information he had been furnishing and said he felt that the time had come for them to meet, and said there would be no further failure to make proper use of his information. ‘We discussed what the Volunteers could do,’ Broy added. ‘If they did not resort to violence, the movement would collapse, and, if they resorted to violence, there were extreme risks also.’ Collins explained that he and his good friend Harry Boland had called on Tim Healy, who had been one of the most prominent politicians going back to the Parnell period of the previous century.

‘You are all stark mad,’ Healy had told them. He had said that they did not have a chance of succeeding by violence, but he agreed that they were unlikely to get anywhere by constitutional means either.

‘I agreed entirely with Michael Collins that force was the only chance, however difficult and dangerous,’ Broy recalled. ‘I explained to him the police organisation and suggested that as the DMP uniformed service took no part whatsoever in anti-Sinn Féin activities – as unlike the RIC they did not do political duty – they should not be alienated by attacks on them. The majority, at least of the younger men, were anti-British, and had many relatives in the Volunteers.’ He added that they had a more liberal outlook than the RIC and were not under as much close supervision as the unmarried men among them lived in barracks scattered throughout the city. ‘The result was,’ Broy said, ‘that they freely exchanged their opinions in the mess halls about home rule, the Ulster resistance, the Curragh mutiny, etc., and there was no authority to prevent them expressing their opinions. I tried to make the difference clear to Mick and he, as usual, was quick enough to grasp the point instantly.’

Morale was low within the force. Even though the majority of the police were Irish Catholics, their prospects of advancement seemed limited as religious and racial discrimination were rife within the police forces. Preferment was given to Protestants and just about anyone other than a Catholic. As a result the rank and file tended to regard the district and county inspectors of the RIC as social climbers and status seekers, rather than committed policemen. It was the same in the DMP, where the men considered their senior officers more ornamental than operational. A double-barrelled name seemed to be an advantage, along with membership of the Masons and Kildare Street Club. To make matters worse the top echelons were reserved for retired army officers.

‘We discussed the psychology of the RIC and how it came about that when an ordinary decent young Irishman joined the RIC depot, that within about two months there was an unaccountably complete change in his outlook, and he was never the same afterwards to friends,’ Broy continued. Collins said that his friend, Batt O’Connor, from Kerry, had observed the same phenomenon among some young Kerry men who had joined the RIC.

Broy recalled mentioning to Collins the danger posed by the policemen stationed in villages who could easily gather intelligence to arrest local volunteers. ‘They were a menace to Volunteers going to such an isolated area. We agreed that ruthless war should be made on the small stations, attack the barracks if the police were in them, and burning them down where they had been evacuated. The RIC would then be compelled to concentrate on the large towns and attempt to patrol the vacated areas from these distant centres. Such concentration would cause the police to lose their grip, psychologically and otherwise, and the inhabitants of the vacated areas, because the police, who returned from a distance to patrol the area, would be in no better position than the British military.’

Broy advocated the Volunteers adopt a twin psychological approach of trying to convince members of the RIC and DMP that, even if they were not prepared to assist the Volunteers in the coming struggle to secure Irish independence, they should not hinder those efforts, at least. At the same time Broy advocated that efforts should be made to persuade the families of the police to convince their police relatives that they would be a disgrace if they hindered the Volunteers. In addition, he said they should try to make contact with policemen in clerical positions, like Broy, who could furnish information to the Volunteers.

After all those efforts he said that ‘a ruthless war’ should be waged on those police who persisted in resisting the independence struggle. ‘A s regards the DMP,’ Broy argued, ‘no attack should be made on the uniformed service, and no attack should be made on the members of the G Division who were not on political duty and active on that duty. In this way, the DMP would come to realise that, as long as they did not display zeal against the Volunteers, they were perfectly safe from attack. In the case of any G man who remained hostile, a warning was to be given to him, such as tying him to a railing, before any attack was made on him.’

* This referred to the inquiry into the death of Thomas Ashe on hungerstrike following a forced feeding in September 1917.

On 7 January 1919 twenty-four of the Sinn Féin candidates elected to the British parliament met to consider their next move, Collins among them. They took an oath ‘to work for the establishment of an independent Irish Republic’ and discussed arrangements for setting up their own national assembly in Ireland, Dáil Éireann, a fortnight later. Collins was opposed to setting up the dáil while so many of those elected to the British parliament were in jail.

On 21 January, the day the dáil was founded, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were shot dead at Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary. Although this event is usually seen as the start of the War of Independence, the killings did not in fact have the sanction of the leadership of the independence movement at the time. The leaders in Dublin were furious because Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and their colleagues had acted without authority and had upstaged the establishment of the dáil. The big news story the next day was not the establishment of the dáil but the murders of Constables James McDonnell, a native of Belmullet, County Mayo, and Patrick O’Connell from Clonmoyle near Coachford, County Cork. Dan Breen later wrote that his ‘only regret’ was that there were only two policemen to kill that day. ‘Six would have created a bigger impression than a mere two,’ he explained.

McDonnell was a widower with four or five children. ‘We must show our abhorrence of this inhuman act,’ parish priest Monsignor Ryan told the congregation in St Michael’s church in Tipperary. ‘We must denounce it and the cowardly miscreants who are guilty of it – aye, and all who try to excuse or justify it.’

‘It used to be said “Where Tipperary leads, Ireland follows”,’he continued. ‘God help poor Ireland if she follows this lead of blood! But let us give her the lead in our indignant denunciation of this crime against our Catholic civilisation, against Ireland, against Tipperary.’

Dick Mulcahy looked on the wild, undisciplined approach to matters of Breen and the Soloheadbeg gang, especially their unauthorised killing of the two policemen, as a kind of nuisance. The volunteers in Dublin did not welcome them and ‘the only place in which they could find association and some kind of scope for their activities was on the fringe of Collins’ intelligence activity work,’ according to Mulcahy.

‘It would be incorrect to say in the years before 1916 the RIC were unpopular,’ wrote Seán Moylan, one of the heroes of the War of Independence. ‘They were of the people, were inter-married among the people; they were generally men of exemplary lives, and of a high level of intelligence.’ Many of the younger RIC men resigned in the following years, but the older men felt unable to do so because of their pensions. ‘It was a providential thing for the country that these older men remained at their posts,’ Moylan added. ‘They were a moderating influence that kept within some bounds the irresponsibilities and criminalities of the Black and Tans [the police reinforcements hastily recruited in Britain].’

When those involved in the Soloheadbeg ambush moved to Dublin ‘in search of bigger game’, in the words of Breen, Collins welcomed them, but other leading members of the movement, such as Dick Mulcahy, the IRA chief-of-staff, virtually shunned them over their upstaging of the establishment of the dáil. Some did wonder whether Collins had been behind the Soloheadbeg ambush, but he had not even been in the country at the time. He was listed as present at the meeting of the first dáil but in fact he was in England personally supervising the final arrangements for springing de Valera, along with Seán McGarry, who was a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and Seán Milroy, from Lincoln Jail.

The prisoners had managed to send out a drawing of a master key on a postcard. This found its way to Paddy O’Donoghue, a Kil-larney man based in Manchester. ‘I crossed to Dublin that evening and contacted Martin Conlan, who, in turn, made an appointment with Michael Collins. I saw Collins that night in Mrs McGarry’s house and I showed him the postcard,’ O’Donoghue recall ed. ‘A key was then made from the dimensions given on the postcard by Gerry Boland. Mrs McGarry baked this key in a cake. I took this key with me to England enclosed in the cake and had it sent in to the prison as a gift to the prisoners, but it did not work.’

A suitable blank key together with a file was also sent into the prison to allow the prisoners to fashion a key themselves. When this was ready Collins went to England to supervise the final arrangements personally. ‘I accompanied him to the vicinity of the prison,’ O’Donoghue recalled. ‘We walked round the precincts and had a good look at the escape gate selected, and Collins was quite satisfied with everything he saw. Before Collins [went] back to Dublin, I was working out plans for the escape, such as the hiring of taxis and the position they would take up, and where the prisoners would be taken to following the escape. Collins was satisfied and returned to Dublin to await the selection of the night of 3 February for the escape attempt.’

‘A few days before the date fixed for the escape Harry Boland and Michael Collins and Fintan Murphy came over from Dublin,’ O’Donoghue continued. ‘I was not married then and I had a house to myself. As the Manager of Beecham’s Opera Company was a friend of mine we went to an opera on the night before the proposed escape. After the opera we were invited to supper by Sir Thomas Beecham in the Midland hotel. We were all naturally in very good form. I introduced Collins and Boland to Sir Thomas Beecham under their proper names and he expressed his delight at meeting prominent people interested in the Irish Independence movement.

‘On Saturday afternoon the four of us – Collins, Boland, Murphy and myself went to Lincoln. We left Fintan Murphy at Worksop with instructions to have a car at his disposal about the time we would arrive there. Petrol restrictions were very severe at the time and we could not extend beyond Worksop on the first stage. Leaving Murphy behind, the three of us went to Lincoln and I engaged a car there. I had used the driver of this car on several occasions before and had become very friendly with him. I instructed the driver to remain with his car at a certain hotel on the verge of the town. I stayed with the driver and Collins and Boland left me and went to the gates of the gaol which was about a quarter of a mile distant.’

The two men approached the jail from a nearby field and gave a prearranged signal with a flashlight indicating everything was ready. Milroy responded from the jail by setting light to a whole box of matches at his cell window.

Collins tried to open a side gate with a key he had made, but it jammed. With characteristic impetuosity, he tried to force it, only to have the head of the key snap off in the lock. By this time he could hear de Valera and the others approach the other side of the gate.

‘Dev,’ he exclaimed, ‘the key’s broken in the lock!’

De Valera managed to knock the broken piece out with his own key and the three prisoners then emerged to the immense relief of those outside. Collins gave de Valera a jubilant thump of the shoulder, and they all made for the taxis. By the time they arrived at the hotel with the three prisoners the whole thing had taken less than half an hour. Collins and Boland left at that point to take a train to London.

‘The three prisoners and myself got into the car and went along to Worksop,’ O’Donoghue took up the story. ‘I dismissed my driver and we walked a couple of hundred yards to the point where Fintan Murphy had his car. We got into the car and drove to Sheffield. When passing near the railway station at Worksop the driver started gibbering about going further because he would be disobeying petrol regulations and suggested we should take the Sheffield train which was in at the station at the time. I tactfully explained to him that the train would not suit us as we had a call to make en route. So the driver accepted the position and continued his journey with us.’