The Squad (4 page)

In Sheffield, Liam McMahon was waiting with a friend’s car at a nearby hotel. O’Donoghue escorted de Valera to the Manchester home of a Fr O’Mahony from Tralee. He was chaplain at the workhouse in Crumpsall and de Valera stayed with him for several days until word was received from Detective Sergeant Thomas Walsh of the Manchester police that ‘it was dangerous to leave de Valera any longer at the priest’s residence, as the police suspected he was staying there,’ according to McMahon.

Disguised in a colonial uniform, de Valera was taken from Crumpsall to Victoria Park to the home of an Irish woman, Mary Healy. By then, McGarry and Milroy had made it to Liverpool by mixing with the Irish crowds going home after the Waterloo Cup. McGarry dressed as a bookmaker and was provided with a bookie bag for the occasion, while Milroy dressed as a strolling musician and dyed his grey hair brown. He carried a violin in a case to boost his disguise.

De Valera had planned to go to the United States but Collins sent for Liam McMahon and asked him to return to Manchester to get de Valera to come to Dublin first. He said that differences had developed within the party in Dublin. ‘The only one who could reconcile the difference would be de Valera. He gave me a letter which I was to deliver to him,’ McMahon noted.

McMahon crossed to Manchester that night and met de Valera the following morning. ‘I told him the object of my visit, and handed him the letter,’ McMahon continued.

‘My own idea is that I should be allowed to go to America, where I could come out in the open,’ de Valera replied, ‘but if they want me at home, my own ideas do not matter … When am I to go?’

‘ Today ,’ McMahon replied.

Neal Kerr and Steve Lanigan made arrangements for de Valera to cross that night from Liverpool to Dublin.

Collins had been hoping that de Valera would lead a military confrontation with the British. ‘As for us on the outside,’ Collins wrote to Austin Stack on 6 February, ‘all ordinary peaceful means are ended and we shall be taking the only alternative actions in a short while now.’ But de Valera believed Ireland’s best chance of success still lay in enlisting American help in view of President Woodrow Wilson’s eloquent pronouncements. Collins tried un successfully to dissuade him. ‘You know what it is to argue with Dev,’ he complained to a friend. ‘He says he thought it out while in prison, and he feels that the one place where he can be useful to Ireland is in America.’ Although some people were already saying the American president would not look for justice for Ireland, de Valera called for patience. ‘Pronounce no opinion on President Wilson,’ he advised. ‘It is premature, for he and his friends will bear our country in mind at the crucial hour.’

De Valera was spirited back to Britain to await a ship to the United States.

Meanwhile Collins was active in assisting the escape of others, especially Robert Barton, from Mountjoy. The two had developed a close relationship. In December 1918 they had been part of an Irish delegation, along with Seán T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy, which had tried to meet the American president, Woodrow Wilson, to make the Irish case for independence. ‘We went over to London and tried to get in touch with Wilson,’ Barton recalled. ‘We never got any nearer to him than a second secretary in the American embassy. We had no success at all.’

Collins was so annoyed he suggested kidnapping the American president to make him listen. ‘If necessary,’ he said, ‘we can buccaneer him.’ Fortunately nobody took the suggestion too seriously, but the proposal provided an insight into why some colleagues thought Collins was sometimes inclined to allow his enthusiasm to get the better of his judgment.

‘I was on very friendly terms with Michael Collins and we used to see one another almost every evening,’ Barton recalled. ‘Collins had an office under Cullenswood House, which was known to us as the “Republican Hut”. Here he was relatively safe and Tom Cullen and Joe O’Reilly could always find him at 9 p.m. and bring persons he wanted to see. Cullenswood House was in the street where I was living and, if I did not turn up, he often sent down for me. I used to hear from him all that was going on. We discussed things in general and he used to urge me to join cabinet meetings to support his point of view.’

Soon after his incarceration in Mountjoy Barton managed to re-establish contact with the Big Fellow. ‘Through friendly warders I got in touch with Michael Collins,’ he explained. ‘Joe Berry, a plumber warder, was one of them. I devised the means of escape. If I had a saw with which to cut one of the bars, I could get out of my cell, they could throw over a rope ladder, and I could climb up the ladder over the wall and get away.’

Collins arranged for Dick Mulcahy, the IRA chief-of-staff, to visit Barton in the jail. He went in posing as a clerk to Barton’s solicitor. ‘These two came to interview me about my pending court martial and they brought me the tools I was asking for. While the warder was not looking, Dick Mulcahy pushed the tools towards me and I hid them in my riding breeches. I was not in prison garb. With the saw, I cut out the bar.’

On the night of 16 March Barton rigged up a dummy in his bed so that when the warder checked during the night he would think Barton was still in bed. He threw a bar of soap over the wall at a certain spot, which was a prearranged signal for volunteers, led by Rory O’Connor, to throw a rope over the wall with a weight attached. By pulling on the rope Barton was able to pull over a rope ladder attached and use it to scale the twenty foot wall and then jump into a blanket being held by the volunteers. ‘Mick Collins was in a street nearby waiting to congratulate me,’ Barton added.

‘This is only the beginning,’ a jubilant Collins declared at Batt O’Connor’s home at 1 Brendan Road, Donnybrook, that night. ‘We’re going to get Beaslaí and Fleming out next.’

‘At this time,’ Beaslaí noted in his biography of Collins, ‘he was sending letters to me continually in which he discussed plans of escape.’ He had big escape plans, but then de Valera, who had re turned to Britain en route to the United States, decided to return to Ireland again. Pierce McCan, one of the prisoners arrested in the ‘German Plot’ round-up the previous May, had died of the deadly Spanish Influenza and the British had decided to free all of those being held in connection with the ‘German Plot’. De Valera was therefore free to return to Ireland without being apprehended. His impending return was announced with the following statement to the press:

President de Valera will arrive in Ireland on Wednesday evening next, the 26th inst., and the Executive of Dáil Éireann will offer him a national welcome. It is expected that the homecoming of de Valera will be an occasion of national rejoicing, and full arrangement will be made for marshalling the procession. The Lord Major of Dublin will receive him at the gates of the city, and will escort him to the Mansion House, where he will deliver a message to the Irish people. All organisations and bands wishing to participate in the demonstration should apply to 6 Harcourt Street, on Monday the 24th inst., up to 6 p.m.

H. Boland

T. Kelly,

Honorary Secretaries.

Such arrangements were usually reserved for royalty, so Dublin Castle banned the reception. The Sinn Féin executive held an emergency meeting. Arthur Griffith presided at what was for him and Darrell Figgis the first meeting since their arrest the previous M a y . Cathal Brugha had complained privately to Figgis some days earlier that Collins and his IRB colleagues had essentially taken over the movement from within while the others were in jail. ‘He told me that he had seen what had been passing, but that he had been powerless to change events,’ Figgis wrote. ‘It was at this meeting I saw for the first time the personal hostility between him and Michael Collins.’

When the executive met to discuss what to do about Dublin Castle’s ban on the planned reception, Figgis asked to see the record of the executive meeting authorising the honorary secretaries to announce the plans to welcome de Valera. He was told that the issue had never come up. ‘I therefore asked Alderman T o m Kelly on what authority he, as one of the signatories, had attached his name as secretary, and he answered with characteristic bluntness that, in point of fact, he had never seen the an nouncement, and had not known of it, till he read it in the press.’

There followed a ‘tangled discussion’ before Collins rose. ‘Characteristically, he swept aside all pretences, and said that the announcement had been written by him, and that the decision to make it had been made, not by Sinn Féin, though declared in its name, but by “the proper body, the Irish Volunteers”,’ Figgis wrote. ‘He spoke with much vehemence and emphasis, saying that the sooner fighting was forced and a general state of disorder created through the country (his words in this connection are too well printed on my memory ever to be forgotten), the better it would be for the country. Ireland was likely to get more out of a state of general disorder than from a continuance of the situation as it then stood. The proper people to take decisions of that kind were ready to face the British military, and were resolved to force the issue. And they were not to be deterred by weaklings and cowards. For himself he accepted full responsibility for the announcement, and he told the meeting with forceful candour that he held them in no opinion at all, that, in fact, they were only summoned to confirm what the proper people had decided.

‘He had always a truculent manner, but in such situations he was certainly candour itself,’ Figgis continued. ‘A s I looked on him while he spoke, for all the hostility between us, I found something refreshing and admirable in his contempt of us all. His brow was gathered in a thunderous frown, and his chin trust forward, while he emphasised his points on the back of a chair with heavy strokes of his hand.’

Although Figgis may have been impressed at the way that Collins had ‘manipulated’ the organisation, Arthur Griffith was certainly not. He had no intention of meekly succumbing to such an arrogant display. Tapping the table in front of him with a pencil, Griffith emphasised that the decision was one to be taken by the meeting, and by no other body.

‘For two hours the debate raged fiercely,’ according to Figgis. Going ahead with the announced plans would undoubtedly lead to trouble, while abandoning them could have disastrous implications for the morale of the whole movement. Parallels were drawn with the disastrous consequences of Daniel O’Connell’s decision to accede to the British decision to ban the monster meeting at Clontarf some seventy years earlier.

De Valera was consulted and he duly requested that the welcoming demonstrations be cancelled rather than risk a confrontation in which lives might be lost. ‘I write to request that you will not now persist in your idea,’ he explained. ‘I think you must all agree with me that the present occasion is scarcely one on which we would be justified in risking the lives of the citizens. I am certain it would not.

‘We who have waited, know how to wait,’ he advised the executive. ‘Many a heavy fish is caught even with a fine line if the angler is patient.’

Thus Big Fellow’s plans to provoke an early confrontation with the British were frustrated and he was obviously disappointed. ‘It is very bad,’ he wrote to Stack. ‘The chief actor was very firm on the withdrawal, as indeed was Cathal. I used my influence the other way, and was in a practical minority of one. It may be that all arguments were sound, but it seems to me that they have put up a challenge which strikes at the fundamentals of our policy and our attitude.’

Whatever harm Collins had done to his own standing by his arrogant display at the party’s executive meeting it was more than offset by the mass escape from Mountjoy Jail on Saturday afternoon, 29 March. The plan was to spring Piaras Beaslaí, J. J. Walsh, Paddy Fleming, and Thomas Malone. Paddy O’Daly was involved in the escape plans from the inside, though he had no intention of trying to escape himself. His wife was dying in a Dublin hospice and he had only been sentenced to six months in jail. If he escaped and went on the run, he would not be able to visit his wife. In the circumstances the prison authorities accorded him parole to visit his wife, and he used this to contact republican leaders on the outside, including the chief-of-staff of the Volunteers, Richard Mulcahy, and Peadar Clancy who was in charge of those designated to help the escape from the outside.

They selected a Saturday afternoon because they had more freedom then than on any other afternoon, as there were fewer warders on duty than on other days. ‘I had a feeling that there was something in the air,’ Joe Berry noted. ‘I had been carrying dispatches between them and Michael Collins and one heard bits of conversation.

‘I used to meet Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen, Frank Thornton, Mulcahy and others who spoke openly to me,’ he added. ‘But there was no actual statement to me by either Collins or the prisoners of the proposed escape.’

‘All the criminal sections of the prison were locked up from dinner-time, and we had the grounds to ourselves, with only one or two warders,’ O’Daly explained. ‘We were supposed to be good boys then and were not causing any trouble.’

He made final arrangements with Clancy on the Friday. ‘Clancy would go to Whitworth Road to find out if he could see my signal, which was the wave of a handkerchief, and he would give a signal in return,’ O’Daly recalled. ‘We fixed the time and everything else. I wanted to make sure that anyone on Whitworth Road could see the window at the end of the corridor on C Wing, from where I was signalling. The rehearsal went off perfectly, he saw my signal all right.’

On the afternoon of the escape there was a snow storm and for a time it looked like the men would not be allowed out to exercise, but then it cleared. There were just three warders with them and two of those were friendly. ‘We did not want one prisoner to hold the three warders in case they would be dismissed afterwards.’ O’Daly explained. Six men were chosen to initially hold off the warders. ‘Any of the six men were told they could [then] escape but the last three or four of these would have to stay behind to hold the warders.’

With Clancy and his party outside, everything was ready. ‘When I gave the signal he threw a rope with a stone on the end of it over the wall,’ O’Daly continued. The men in the prison grounds saw his signal from the window and staged a snowball fight in the prison yard. Fleming pulled the ladder over the wall. ‘Although the three warders were on the ground,’ O’Daly said, ‘everything went according to plan. In fact, the last man over the wall stood at the end of the ladder and said, “Any more of you coming?” I believe that if everyone of us had tried to escape we could have managed it.’