This is the only story in this book that relates in any way to a political confrontation, but it is a tale to freeze the blood. Shortly after the Easter Rising on 24 April 1916, Portobello Barracks was a place where all kinds of military personnel were arriving to gather and sort out where they should be and what they should be doing. One of these was Captain J C Bowen-Colthurst of the Irish Rifles. His decision to take a raiding-party out into the streets led to what we can only call mass murder; it had nothing to do with the suppression of a perceived rebellion and was entirely unrelated to any definable action by troops of Britain.
The time was right in the midst of the action by the Irish Citizen Army and the Volunteers to prise the city from the British. It had been a time of high drama indeed, with the usual chaos and confusion of urban warfare: snipers and random patrols likely to turn up anywhere and threats to soldiers existing as they might do in a guerrilla combat. But none of this was an excuse for what Bowen-Colthurst was to do that day.
Out went the raiding party, and they came across Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Thomas Dickson and Patrick MacIntyre. Sheehy-Skeffington was a pacifist and had no connection with the uprising that Easter. The raiding party consisted of a junior officer and forty men – a formidable force to make random arrests. Bowen-Colthurst had the idea to raid a tobacconist’s shop owned by Alderman James Kelly, maybe confusing the name with that of Tom Kelly, and he thought it would be wise to have a hostage – Sheehy-Skeffington – to take along. The group had only got as far as a little way outside the barracks when they came across a young man called Coade who was going home from church, and there was the first atrocity of the raid – the crazed officer gave orders for the soldiers to hit him, and one soldier smashed the boy’s jaw with his rifle. Then Bowen-Colthurst shot the boy as he lay on the ground; Coade was just seventeen years old.
The prisoners had no connection at all with Sinn Fein or the ICA. But back at the barracks the murderous officer was in that mad frame of mind in which ‘martial law’ could be a situation in which anything could be done, however savage, in the name of right and justice. He had found some papers in Kelly’s shop and he looked at these as his prisoners awaited their fate. He then decided that he wanted the captives out in the yard and then he said, ‘I am taking these prisoners out and I am going to shoot them as I think that is the right thing to do.’
‘Martial law’ simply means that an authority is giving warning that the military powers will take unusual measures to make sure that order is maintained in the community – no more than that. But this officer, who later claimed that he thought his prisoners to be desperate men and ‘leaders of the rebels’ interpreted the notion of martial law as carte blanche to indulge in murder and atrocity. He had in fact shot two loyalists and a writer. Sheehy-Skeffington was born in Baileborough, Co Cavan and had been educated at University College Dublin, where he was a friend of James Joyce. He married the feminist Hannah Sheehy and had kept her name to show his sympathy with the cause of equality. So this man was a pacifist, intellectual and social campaigner. He had founded a journal, the Irish Citizen and supported the socialist and Labour parties. He actually disapproved of the rising, and yet here he was, an innocent man caught up in the anarchy of that ‘Poets’ Rising’.
The deranged officer had done something totally outrageous, and the commander of the barracks, Francis Fletcher Vane, was away from his base at the time. When the murderer did respond to demands for some kind of explanation, he said that he had placed the men in the yard even though he now said that the yard was a place from which they could have escaped. That was no kind of reason, and the second one, that he was ‘unstrung’ mentally was much nearer the truth. The first response to the offence was, from Major Rosborough, to put Bowen-Colthurst on non-combative duties, ‘only to be employed on the defences of Portobello barracks, and not outside’.