Although he tried to persuade de Valera not to go to the United States, Collins nevertheless arranged through his Liverpool contacts to have him smuggled to America. De Valera left Ireland for the United States on 1 June 1919. His first stop was Britain, where he stowed away on the SS Lapland, which was bound from Liverpool to New York. He was seasick for most of the eight-day voyage, holed up in a tiny cabin.
The main aims of the visit were to secure American recognition of the Irish Republic and to collect money. There had also been word of a growing split among Irish-Americans and de Valera, the great conciliator, hoped to resolve that dispute. On the one hand, the leadership of the Friends of Irish Freedom were merely calling for recognition of Ireland’s right to self-determination, while their critics were insisting that the call should be for recognition of the Irish Republic as a legitimate government. Daniel Cohalan, a judge on the New York State Supreme Court and widely recognised as the effective leader of the Friends of Irish Freedom, felt that calling just for recognition of the right to self-determination offered the best opportunity for success, because the United States had supposedly fought in the First World War for the rights of small countries to have self-determination. Once that right was recognised in Ireland’s case, then recognition of the Irish Republic became a logical step, because Sinn Féin had won the overwhelming majority of Irish seats in the 1918 general election.
Cohalan’s main backer was John Devoy, the editor of the Gaelic American newspaper and effective leader of the IRB’s sister organisation, Clan na Gael. Their main critics were the editor of the Philadelphia-based Irish Press newspaper, Joseph McGarrity, and the IRB’s emissary, Patrick McCartan; Harry Boland sided with these.
In Ireland de Valera had repeatedly emphasised the self-determination approach. In March when the Irish Self-Determination League was founded in England, for instance, he had called publicly for the organisation’s ‘moral and financial support in influencing public opinion on behalf of Ireland’s claim to self-determination’. McCartan tried to explain the intricacies of the dispute to de Valera on his arrival in New York.
‘I had just told him Cohalan had tried to reduce our claim for recognition to a claim for self-determination,’ McCartan wrote.
‘Self-determination,’ de Valera interrupted, ‘is a very good policy.’
He initially hoped to persuade Woodrow Wilson to recognise the Irish Republic and he felt the best way to do that was to exploit the President’s eloquent pronouncements about democracy and self-determination. He realised American officials would be reluctant to recognise the Irish Republic for fear of offending their wartime ally, Britain, and believed that using the President’s own words afforded the best chance of enlisting sufficient popular support to embarrass the American President into helping Ireland.
De Valera therefore insisted on playing up the self-determination theme in a press statement that was prepared on his arrival in the United States. In this he was referred to as ‘President of the Irish Republic’, but McCartan and McGarrity objected. He had been elected Príomh-Aire of Dáil Éireann, which was something different. From the American standpoint, however, the title Príomh-Aire meant nothing, so the Irish-Americans were anxious to describe him as President. De Valera resolved the matter with his own wording: ‘From to-day I am in America as the official head of the Republic established by the will of the Irish people in accordance with the principle of Self-Determination,’ he declared. Everyone was satisfied with that description.
From the outset de Valera saw his role in the United States as a propagandist, and he quickly realised that the title of President of the Irish Republic was a much more impressive title in the eyes of Americans. He therefore essentially changed his title without consulting or even informing colleagues at home. ‘I wonder what Griffith will say when he reads that I came out in the press as President of the Republic?’ de Valera remarked in New York. It has been suggested that de Valera was also afraid that the IRB might take exception, because that organisation had traditionally considered its leader to be President of the Irish Republic. Collins, who was rapidly establishing himself as the real driving force of the IRB, did not seem to have any reservations.
He was delighted with the welcome de Valera received on the other side of the Atlantic. His only criticism was that de Valera and Boland talked too much about their respective trips, which risked exposing those who had helped them. ‘You should not be so communicative over there,’ Collins wrote to Boland. ‘Other people may want to go in the same manner.’ He actually referred quite matter-of-factly to de Valera as ‘the President’ in a letter to his IRB colleague Stack on 20 July 1919. ‘The President is getting tremendous receptions and the press in its entirety has thrown itself open to Irish propaganda,’ Collins wrote.
De Valera told his first press conference in New York on 23 June that he aimed to arouse public opinion in order to exert pressure on President Wilson. He intended to do this by injecting the Irish question into the controversy over the Versailles Treaty, which was already building in the United States, where there was uneasiness over the covenant of the League of Nations, which had been incorporated into the treaty. He told the press conference:
We shall fight for a real democratic League of Nations, not the present unholy alliance which does not fulfil the purposes for which the democracies of the world went to war. I am going to ask the American people to give us a real League of Nations, one that will include Ireland.
I well recognise President Wilson’s difficulties in Paris. I am sure that if he is sincere, nothing will please him more than being pushed from behind by the people, for this pressure will show him that the people of America want the United States’ government to recognise the Republic of Ireland.
This is the reason I am eager to spread propaganda in official circles in America. My appeal is to the people. I know that if they can be aroused government action will follow. That is why I intend visiting your large cities and talking directly to the people.
The Versailles Treaty was formally signed five days later as de Valera was about to set out for a hectic speaking tour. Next day, 29 June, he delivered his first public address to a gathering of some 50,000 people in the Fenway Park baseball stadium in Boston, and the day after that he spoke to the Massachusetts state legislature. This was followed by a speech to some 30,000 people in Manchester, New Hampshire, before he returned to speak to an overflowing crowd of 17,000 people at Madison Square Gardens, New York. The crowd was reportedly the biggest ever crammed into the arena, because the local police force — with its strong Irish presence — had permitted people to fill the isles in blatant contravention of safety regu-lations. On 13 July de Valera addressed some 25,000 people at Soldier Field, Chicago. Next he met the Chicago City Council, before setting out for San Francisco, where the Ancient Order of Hibernians was holding its convention. Following a brief stay in the San Francisco Bay area, he visited Montana, where he addressed the state legislature, before returning to New York.
In little more than three weeks he had travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific seaboard and back again. This, of course, was before the era of air travel. He made seventeen major public addresses to an estimated total of half a million people, in addition to numerous short talks at smaller functions. In the process he received enormous publicity in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, where he was given prominent front-page coverage with banner headlines in the major newspapers, and inside pages devoted exclusively to activities surrounding his visit. Normally Irish affairs would get little more than an occasional short paragraph on an inside page in those newspapers, with the result that de Valera’s visit unquestionably put Irish affairs into the media spotlight.
The enthusiasm of the gatherings helped to obscure his failings as a public speaker. He tended to read his speeches in a dull, halting manner but, as voice amplification was still rather primitive, this failing was of little consequence at the large gatherings. Even though he had been preceded by much better orators on the platform in Fenway Park, the Boston Herald reported that de Valera was nevertheless effective on the rostrum because he exuded the outstanding qualities of ‘passionate sincerity’ and ‘utmost simplicity’ — two characteristics that ‘burn their way into the consciousness of everyone who sees and hears him’.
De Valera repeatedly denounced the Versailles Treaty, but he did so as supporter rather than as critic of Wilsonian ideals. In the light of subsequent historical developments, his comments could be characterised as particularly astute political forecasts. He complained in Boston, for instance, that the treaty was ‘a mere mockery’ that would lead to twenty wars instead of the one it had nominally ended. Unless the United States was willing to take ‘responsibility for the world to which her traditions entitle her’, he predicted mankind would be in for ‘a period of misery for which history has no parallel’.
‘The present opportunity is never likely to occur again,’ de Valera argued. ‘The idea of a unity of nations recognising a common law and a common right ending wars among nations is today a possibility if America will do what the people of the world look forward to, and expect her to do.’ He wanted the Americans to use their influence to get the treaty revised so that the League of Nations could be based on the principle of national equality, which, he contended, was the only basis on which the organisation would be likely to succeed.
The treaty had many defects, as far as de Valera was concerned. While in Dublin he had warned of the futility of expecting a lasting peace, if vindictive terms were imposed on Germany. But while he was in the United States he adopted a positive approach. If he were an American, he said in Chicago, he would have felt obliged to serve in the United States army during the recent war, in view of the country’s avowed motives in entering the conflict. ‘I hold,’ he said, ‘that those of us who were fighting England were in reality fighting for the very principles for which the Americans fought.’
When asked by a member of the Chicago City Council why members of Sinn Féin had not fought in the war, de Valera explained that, firstly, they did not think they were strong enough to ensure that their aim of securing freedom for small nations would be respected in Ireland’s case, and secondly, they were afraid that Britain would use their participation to undermine the Irish struggle for independence. ‘If we had gone in,’ he said, ‘England would have made it appear we were in as England’s partners and therefore content with England’s occupation.’
De Valera was careful to present his case in terms that both appeared consistent with America’s war aims and at the same time offset what seemed like the betrayal of those aims at Versailles. He took particular exception to Article X of the covenant of the League of Nations, which was part of the Versailles Treaty. It committed members of the league ‘to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity of fellow members’. The clause was objectionable because it could be used by imperial nations to preserve the international status quo. If the United States subscribed to the covenant, he argued, Americans would be placing their seal of approval on Britain’s title to all her imperial possessions, including Ireland.
Before signing the Versailles Treaty, therefore, he suggested that the United States could eliminate the obnoxious implications of Article X by insisting that the imperial powers should ‘surrender their colonies and possessions as mandatories of the League’. De Valera complained so much about the covenant that he was popularly believed to be opposed to the League of Nations, whereas he actually favoured the concept and also approved of Article X per se. ‘If you are going to have a League of Nations, you must have some article in it like Article X, but it must be based on just conditions at the start,’ he stated in San Francisco.
‘Article X is the whole essence of the League,’ de Valera told a Denver gathering. ‘It is the preserving clause. If you preserve the conditions under which you start, then start right. It is wrong to preserve wrong: this is why we are against the League of Nations.’ The big objection, therefore, was the way the league was being founded. The Irish people were going to be dragged into the organisation as part of the United Kingdom, with the result that Article X could henceforth be used by the British to deny independence to Ireland. In short, the real problem was not the covenant, but Ireland’s lack of recognition, and he was exploiting the controversy in an attempt to secure diplomatic recognition.
‘A new “Holy Alliance” cannot save democracy,’ de Valera declared in Boston. ‘A just League of Nations, founded on the only basis on which it can be just — the equality of right among nations, small no less than great — can.’ He added that ‘America can see to it that such a League is set up and set up now. She is strong enough to do so, and it is her right, in consequence of the explicit terms on which she entered the war.’ He said that a new covenant could be formed in Washington just as easily as Paris. ‘Now is the time to frame it,’ he said. ‘It is not enough for you to destroy, you must build.’
De Valera was speaking like a supporter of Woodrow Wilson. Indeed he wrote privately that his strategy was to let Wilson ‘know that if he goes for his 14 points as they were and a true League of Nations, Irishmen and men and women of Irish blood will be behind him’. Yet when he was in Madison Square Gardens, the mere mention of Wilson’s name provoked a cacophony of disapproval as the Irish-American crowd jeered, booed and hissed for some three minutes. The reaction was so strong that it prompted a banner front-page headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune.
De Valera therefore soft-peddled his Wilsonian views before the gathering in Soldier Field, Chicago, a few days later. That gathering had already passed a resolution declaring that it was ‘unalterably opposed’ to the covenant. As that stand had been taken on ‘purely American grounds’, he said that he, ‘as a stranger and as a guest here, could not presume to interfere’. Yet that did not prevent him from interfering elsewhere.
To the horror of Wilson’s Irish-American critics, de Valera’s addresses frequently bore the indelible imprint of Wilson’s brand of internationalism. In San Francisco the following week, for example, he told a gathering at City Hall that he was looking to the American people ‘to make the world safe for democracy’. ‘You can do it even now,’ he said. ‘If America is determined to champion the cause of democracy in the world, that cause will triumph. If America leads the way towards true democracy, the democracy of England even, and of France and of Spain and every country in the world will follow your lead.’ ‘You are the only people that can lead,’ he emphasised, ‘and if you lead, democracy will triumph and the world will indeed be safe for democracy.’
When de Valera stated at his initial American press conference that he wanted ‘a real League of Nations, one that will include Ireland’, he seemed to imply that his real objection to the covenant was that Ireland was not being assured of a place as a separate nation within the organisation, rather than that there was anything wrong with such an organisation, as many Americans believed. Prominent Irish-Americans like John Devoy and Judge Daniel Cohalan were bitterly opposed to the idea of the United States joining the League of Nations, and they naturally resented de Valera saying that they would approve of the idea, if only Ireland were accorded membership. Cohalan warned that joining the league would involve abandoning America’s traditional policy of avoiding ‘permanent, entangling alliances with any countries of the Old World’. He therefore used the Friends of Irish Freedom to organise Irish-Americans to lobby against the league.
Faced with growing opposition, President Wilson set out on a whistle-stop tour of the United States to drum up popular support for America to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League of Nations. During the tour he said that Irish fears about Article X were groundless, because it would not apply to struggles of liberation. In fact, he implied that the covenant would actually strengthen Ireland’s position by allowing the United States to press the Irish case for self-determination at the council of the league under the provisions of Article XI, which, he said, stipulated that ‘every matter which is likely to affect the peace of the world is everybody’s business’. ‘In other words,’ Wilson explained, ‘at present we have to mind our own business. Under the Covenant of the League of Nations we can mind other people’s business, and anything that affects the peace of the world, whether we are parties to it or not, can, by our delegates, be brought to the attention of mankind.’
De Valera promptly countered those arguments by issuing statements contending that fears concerning Article X were not baseless, because it would commit members of the League of Nations ‘to respect and preserve’ the territorial integrity of other member states ‘against external aggression’. Thus, if the United States ratified the treaty without first recognising the Irish Republic, Americans would be obliged to cut off support to Irish rebels because Ireland would be legally regarded as part of the United Kingdom. To make matters worse, if some foreign power intervened militarily on Ireland’s behalf — as France had helped the American colonies in their struggle for independence — the United States and other members of the league would be obliged to help Britain under the terms of Article X.
‘There is scarcely a single instance of where a revolution from within, alone and without external aid, was ever successful,’ de Valera continued. Once the United States ratified the covenant, he warned, ‘England will insist on America acting in the letter and spirit of that declaration. Disguise it as we may, the new Covenant is simply a new Holy Alliance. . . . Unless America makes an explicit reservation in the case of Ireland, the ratification of the Covenant by America will mean that England can hold that America has inferentially decided against Ireland, has admitted England’s claim to Ireland as part of her possessions, the integrity of which America must evermore lend her assistance in maintaining.’
Although he did not openly question Wilson’s sincerity in suggesting that the United States would support Ireland’s claim to self-determination at the League of Nations, de Valera did contend that support would be too late because Britain would kill any discussion of the matter by insisting that Irish affairs were an internal British matter. As a result the proposed use of Article XI would be like trying to recover a horse after it was stolen, rather than trying to prevent the theft in the first place. ‘It is before the signing of the Covenant that those who are in sympathy with Ireland, those who do not want to be unjust to Ireland, must act, not afterwards,’ de Valera argued. ‘Instead of relying on Article XI to undo the wrong of Article X, why not set up Article X in such a form that there will be no wrong to be undone?’
Having secured enormous publicity by contradicting Wilson’s remarks about Articles X and XI, de Valera set out to emulate the American President with a whistle-stop tour of his own. He began in Philadelphia on 1 October 1919 and criss-crossed the country to California, with the aim of returning to the east coast via the Deep South. Throughout his tour he stressed that he was just looking for the United States to recognise Irish independence before ratifying the Versailles Treaty. ‘If the Irish Republic is recognised,’ he told a banquet in Philadelphia on the first night of his tour, ‘the Covenant will be acceptable.’
Although it was not generally known at the time, Wilson was gravely ill. He had suffered a stroke three weeks into his nationwide tour and he had to return to Washington, where he suffered a second and much more serious attack. As his lay incapacitated, the controversy over ratification of the Versailles Treaty in the United States Senate came to a head. Wilson was unwilling to allow any amendments or reservations to the covenant, so when the Senate adopted fourteen specific reservations, Wilson’s supporters joined with his isolationist critics to defeat the treaty on 26 November 1919.
On hearing the news in southern California, de Valera cancelled the remainder of his tour and returned to New York. He had secured neither recognition nor an American commitment to support Ireland’s case at the League of Nations, but he had at least contributed towards the rejection of the covenant, although the significance of his contribution and that of the Irish-Americans was greatly exaggerated at the time.
The prospect of American membership of the League of Nations had suffered a serious setback, but Wilson’s supporters worked hard to get the treaty reconsidered. It was brought before the Senate again in March 1920, when two further reservations were adopted. One of those actually referred to Ireland:
In consenting to the ratification of the Treaty with Germany, the United States adheres to the principle of self-determination and the resolution of sympathy with the expectations of the Irish people for a government of their own choice, adopted by the Senate on 6 June 1919, and declares that when such government is attained by Ireland, a consummation it is hoped is at hand, it should promptly be admitted as a member of the League of Nations.
The reservation, which was passed by thirty-eight votes to thirty-six, would have virtually committed the United States to support Irish membership of the League of Nations. As a result de Valera was ecstatic. He sent Griffith an open telegram describing the resolution as a victory for Ireland. ‘Our mission has been successful,’ he wrote. ‘The principle of self-determination has been formally adopted in an international instrument. Ireland has been given her place amongst the nations by the greatest nation of them all.’ The reservation was ‘what I had been always wishing for, and it finally came beyond expectations,’ de Valera continued. But his jubilation was indicative of his inexperience in American politics. He did not recognise that the reser-vation was only passed in order to make the reservations to the treaty so unpalatable that Wilson would be sure to instruct his supporters to kill the treaty itself. Sixteen of the senators who voted for the Irish reservation turned around and voted against the treaty two days later, when Wilson’s supporters again joined with his die-hard critics to block ratification of the treaty. As a result the United States never did join the League of Nations.
Meanwhile in Ireland Collins was involved in different areas. As Minister for Finance he was responsible for the bond drive to collect money for the movement. As head of intelligence he was involved in the struggle with the police. Within months of de Valera’s departure to the United States, Collins would begin a campaign to systematically wipe out the most effective police in order to render Dublin Castle both blind and deaf, and by the end of the year the authorities there would be moving to retaliate. At the same time as director of organisation of the Volunteers. Collins was building up the movement for the coming confrontation with the Crown forces.
While Collins was preparing the bond prospectus for publication, he received word from the United States that de Valera had come to appreciate the merits of agreeing to honour Fenian bonds of half a century earlier, thereby making a direct connection with the Fenian movement. Collins proceeded to write to de Valera rather tactlessly that ‘it was worth going to America to be converted to that idea’.
The remark was a mere passing comment, but to someone like de Valera, for whom every written word was carefully calculated, the whole thing was pregnant with significance. ‘What did you mean it was worth going to America to be “converted” to the idea of paying the Fenian bonds?’ he asked indignantly. ‘Surely I never opposed acknowledging that as a National debt. You must mean something else. What is it?’
‘I meant about the Fenian Bonds, that it was worth going to America to be converted to my idea,’ Collins replied. ‘Honestly I did not think the fact that I was practically forced to delete a certain paragraph from the prospectus looked much in favour of the idea. For God’s sake, Dev, don’t start an argument about its being from the prospectus only, etc. Don’t please. It’s quite all right.’
Before de Valera went to the United States, the Friends of Irish Freedom had launched a Victory Fund to collect $1million, a quarter of which was earmarked for Ireland. He was convinced he could collect much more by selling Irish republican bonds, but he felt Irish-American leaders adopted obstructionist tactics. They were opposed to any interference with the Victory Fund, which was due to be wound up in August 1919. This really did not matter because de Valera would not have been ready to launch the bond drive by then in any event, but he contended afterwards that Cohalan dragged his feet. The judge pointed out that the sale of such bonds would be illegal unless the United States recognised the Irish Republic first. As a trained lawyer on the bench of the New York State Supreme Court, he knew what he was talking about — selling such bonds would have been a violation of the federal ‘blue sky’ laws. De Valera, with no training in Irish much less American legal matters, was certainly presumptuous in pitting his own judgment against someone like Cohalan, but then the Irish leader’s correspondence with Collins showed that he was clearly touchy about having his judgment questioned on the bond issue.
It took some six months to figure out a way around the American laws to get the scheme off the ground. Collins, on the other hand, was in the happier position of not having to bother with legal niceties when he formally launched the National Loan in Ireland at a meeting of the Sinn Féin executive in the Mansion House on 21 August 1919. Griffith presided and there were delegates from throughout the country. Collins told the meeting that the $1.25 million being sought in the United States had been upped to $5 million. The prospectus, which was issued over the names of de Valera and Collins, explained that ‘the proceeds of this loan will be used for propagating the Irish Case all over the World, for establishing in Foreign Countries Consular Services, to promote Irish Trade and Commerce, for fostering Irish Industries, and, generally for National Purposes as directed by Dáil Éireann’.
The British proscribed the loan and ordered that no newspaper should carry any loan advertisements. Newspapers that tried to defy this ban were promptly suppressed and copies of offending editions seized. The suppressions, of course, had the effect of actually advertising the loan. Indeed, it was almost as if the whole editions had been published with nothing but advertisements promoting the loan. In addition, people selling the bonds or even speaking publicly about the scheme were arrested. By 11 September 1919 Collins was writing to Donal Hales in Italy of ‘the usual daily round — raids and counter raids, and repression’. The British were gradually being sucked into the confrontation that Collins had been seeking for months.
The prospectus had been published for more than a fortnight when de Valera wrote to complain that he had only just noticed that it contained a promise to pay interest on the bonds from the date of purchase. ‘It should be of course from the date of recognition and evacuation,’ he wrote. ‘I hope you have not made that mistake in your proposed issue in Ireland. The debt accumulated interest might be a very serious handicap later. We must look to the future.’
‘I was fully aware at the time of the liability we were incurring, and deliberately drafted the particular paragraph accordingly,’ Collins replied. ‘We are responsible for an accumulated interest, at a rate of six per cent per annum, from varying dates during the period 1864–1867. This was in my mind when we were going over the original draft prospectus. You remember I talked a good deal of “continuity of responsibility”. I am sorry to be always fighting with you on these matters.’ By then, of course, de Valera realised that it was already too late to do anything about the bonds on sale in Ireland. ‘I am sorry it is so, but I suppose it is too late now to change it,’ he wrote. ‘It must not be so in any foreign subscriptions. It will not be so in America.’
When the Dáil cabinet discussed the situation on 10 October, however, it agreed with Collins. ‘We are, I think, definitely committed to this liability. You will, I am sure, agree that, having in mind all this, it is not possible to alter the conditions of the Loan,’ Collins wrote to de Valera on 14 October.
‘The enemy’s chief offensive here at the moment is directed against the loan,’ he continued. The more the Crown authorities tried to interfere with his efforts to promote the National Loan, however, the more determined he became to ensure its success, despite mounting promotional problems. ‘We are having extreme difficulties in advertising as far as newspapers are concerned,’ he noted. It was illegal for the press to carry advertisements for the loan, and The Cork Examiner and some twenty-one local newspapers were suppressed between 17 September and 7 October for carrying such ads.
Of course, he was impatient with those newspapers which were not prepared to risk suppression by defying the law. ‘The Independent is particularly objectionable and hostile — in its own cowardly and sneaking way,’ he wrote to Donal Hales. ‘It has not the courage to express its hostility openly, but does so with carefully conceived innuendo. We will meet that position too in due time.’
A novel way of promoting the campaign was found. John McDonagh, a brother of one of the executed leaders of 1916, made a short film clip of Collins and Diarmuid O’Hegarty sitting at a table outside Pearse’s old school, St Enda’s, signing bonds to Pearse’s mother, Clarke’s widow, and Connolly’s daughter. Armed Volunteers then raided cinemas throughout the country and ordered projectionists to run the brief clip. They would then hightail it with the film before the police or military could be called. Until then the name of Michael Collins was largely unknown outside separatist circles, but the film projected his name before the public as never before and, as the Crown forces concentrated on suppressing the loan, his reputation grew to the point where he became the most wanted man in the country. ‘That film of yourself and Hegarty selling Bonds brought tears to me eyes,’ Harry Boland wrote from the United States. ‘Gee Boy! You are some movie actor. Nobody could resist buying a Bond and we having such a handsome Minister for Finance.’
Once the loan programme was under way in Ireland, de Valera asked Collins to come to the United States to help arrange things in America, but Collins declined, because he believed his place was at home. He realised that America afforded enormous opportunities for both propaganda and financial assistance, but he was convinced that all this would only happen if the right atmosphere were generated by actual events in Ireland. ‘Our hope is here and must be here,’ he wrote. ‘The job will be to prevent eyes turning to Paris or New York as a substitute for London.’ In short, they should not make the mistake of concentrating on efforts to secure international recognition because, in the last analysis, they could only win by wearing down the British government.
Instead of going to the United States himself, Collins sent one of the trustees of the Dáil, James O’Mara, who took over the organisation of a bond-certificate drive. With the help of Cohalan, the law was circumvented by selling certificates entitling purchasers to buy bonds of a similar value once the Irish Republic was recognised. As Cohalan had strong ties to the Republican Party, de Valera had the scheme vetted also by a lawyer with strong ties to the Democratic Party. He happened to be the future President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had recently retired from the Wilson administration.
In the spring of 1919 de Valera restrained the Big Fellow’s desire for a military campaign by ensuring that the political wing of the movement had a big say in policy, but shortly after de Valera went to the United States, Collins was authorised to kill one of the DMP detectives who had refused to be cowed by the Volunteers.
Many policemen were resigning because of their social ostracisation. Those who were nearing retirement after spending the bulk of their working lives in the police force were too old to find other employment. They stayed on, but most kept their heads down and ignored all political activities, though there were some who were not terrorised by the Volunteers.
‘I’m not letting any young scuts tell me how to do my duty,’ Detective Sergeant Patrick Smith declared. He had arrested Piaras Béaslaí for making a seditious speech and found some incriminating documents on him. Collins and Harry Boland tried to induce Smith not to produce those documents in court but the detective ignored them, with the result that Béaslaí was sentenced to two years in jail, instead of the two months he might have otherwise expected. Collins was authorised by Richard Mulcahy as chief of staff of the Volunteers and Cathal Brugha as Minister for Defence to eliminate Smith, who was shot and mortally wounded outside his Drumcondra home on the night of 30 July 1919. He had been warned on a number of occasions ‘to lay off Republicans or he would be shot’, one of those who took part in the assassination later explained.
Although he had authorised the shooting of Smith, Brugha tried to strengthen the political restraints on the military wing introduced by de Valera. On 20 August he proposed in the Dáil that the next convention of the Volunteers should be asked to swear allegiance to Dáil Éireann.
As things stood the Volunteers were an autonomous organisation. De Valera was president of both the Volunteers and Sinn Féin as well as Príomh-Aire of the Dáil, so there was already a considerable amount of overlapping, but Brugha and many others were deeply suspicious of Collins and the IRB. During the summer Collins had taken over as president of the supreme council of the IRB and as such he could claim to be a successor to Pearse as president of the Irish Republic. To remove any doubt about the Dáil being the supreme organ of the new state, Brugha suggested that all Volunteers should take the following oath:
I . . . do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I do not and shall not yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government, authority or power within Ireland hostile and inimical thereto, and I do further swear (or affirm) that to the best of my knowledge and ability I will support and defend the Irish Republic and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.
Collins and some of his IRB colleagues had been arguing that an oath to the Republic should be enough, rather than an oath to the Dáil, but Griffith supported Brugha strongly, and this was enough to carry the day. The Dáil passed Brugha’s proposal on a division. Thus the soldiers of the movement were required to pledge their allegiance to the politicians. ‘The Volunteer affair is now fixed,’ Collins wrote to de Valera on 25 August.
But within a matter of days the supremacy of the politicians was effectively undermined by the British. In early September Detective Sergeant Patrick Smith finally succumbed to the bullet wounds suffered in the attack outside his Drumcondra home five weeks earlier. Dublin Castle’s reaction was to ban Sinn Féin. It was an ill-conceived act that played directly into the hands of Collins, who would henceforth have little difficulty in outmanoeuvring Sinn Féin moderates and implementing a more militant policy. The checks that de Valera had placed on the militants were wiped out by the banning of the political wing of the movement, which prompted the head of the British civil service, Sir Warren Fisher, to conclude that the Castle regime was ‘almost woodenly stupid and quite devoid of imagination’.
‘Imagine the result on public opinion in Great Britain of a similar act by the executive towards a political party (or the women’s suffrage movement)!’ Fisher wrote in near disbelief after he had been sent to investigate the Irish situation a few months later. Dublin Castle had not only banned Sinn Féin but also proscribed Dáil Éireann, Cumann na mBan, and the Gaelic League.
The DMP raided Sinn Féin headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street on 12 September 1919. Collins was in his finance office upstairs as the raiding party burst into the building. ‘It was only by almost a miracle I was not landed,’ he wrote next day. ‘It so happened the particular detective who came into the room where I was did not know me, which gave me an opportunity of eluding him.’
The detective asked Collins about some documents he was carrying. ‘What have they got to do with you?’ Collins snapped. ‘A nice job you’ve got, spying on your countrymen.’ The detective was apparently so taken aback by the confident show of insolence that he made no effort to prevent Collins going upstairs to the caretaker’s living quarters on the top floor. There, Collins climbed out the skylight and hid on the roof of the nearby Ivanhoe Hotel. Two prominent members of Sinn Féin were arrested in the building, Ernest Blythe and Pádraig O’Keeffe, the party’s general secretary.
One of the policemen involved in the raid was Detective Constable Daniel Hoey, a particular thorn in the side of the Volunteers going back to before 1916. He was shot and killed that night just around the corner from his headquarters by the same men who had gunned down Smith in July.
The following week Collins was formally authorised to set up ‘the Squad’, a permanent full-time active service unit under his personal direction, to undertake the assassination of detectives who persisted in political work against the movement, as well as any ‘spies’ who helped them. It was basically the counter-intelligence arm of the Big Fellow’s network. It began with the five men who had taken part in the killings of Smith and Hoey, along with two others. It was soon extended to twelve, who were sometimes irreverently known as ‘the Twelve Apostles’, and the name stuck even after more were included.
Detectives and their would-be touts were warned to desist from political work, or they would be shot. Collins noted that ‘spies are not so ready to step into the shoes of their departed confederates as are soldiers to fill up the front line in honourable battle. And even when the new spy stepped into the shoes of the old one, he could not step into the old one’s knowledge.’
‘We struck at individuals and by so doing we cut their lines of communication and we shook their morale,’ he explained afterwards.
Mick McDonnell, a colleague from Frongoch days, was the first head of the Squad, which included his brother-in-law, Tom Keogh, and other inmates from Frongoch, like Bill Stapleton and Jim Slattery. They were never intended as a bodyguard for Collins, as has been suggested. Instead they were a full-time assassination team, made up of clerks, tradesmen, and general workers, who were paid £4–10 a week.
Initially the Squad’s meeting-place was in Oriel House, but it soon moved to a builders’ yard near Dublin Castle. There was a sign over the main gate, ‘Geo. Moreland Cabinet Maker’. Vinny Byrne was a master carpenter and did carpentry work in the yard while not engaged in Squad business, but most prospective customers who ventured into the yard were discouraged by outrageously long delivery dates.
Before ordering the Squad to kill any detective, the consequences were carefully considered. ‘Collins would always work out how the public would react to the shooting of a “G” man first,’ Ned Broy noted. ‘And then he’d hang back for a while before he’d have another one shot. He tried to warn them off first without killing them.’
Usually one of his intelligence people would accompany the Squad to identify the target. ‘We’d go out in pairs, walk up to the target and do it, and then split,’ Byrne recalled ‘You wouldn’t be nervous while you’d be waiting to plug him, but you’d imagine that everyone was looking into your face. On a typical job we’d use about eight, including the back-up. Nobody got in our way. One of us would knock him over with the first shot, and the other would knock him off with a shot to the head.’
The Crown authorities naturally retaliated, but the more they reacted, the more they played into the hands of Collins. ‘The repressions have been of benefit to us,’ Collins wrote to de Valera on 10 October 1919.
Collins opened new offices at 76 Harcourt Street, and this time certain precautions were taken to ensure an escape route for himself and a hiding-place for important papers. Batt O’Connor built a small secret closet into a wall to store documents. ‘I also provided a means of escape for Collins,’ O’Connor wrote. ‘We had an alarm bell on the top landing, so that, when the caretaker saw the enemy coming, he could ring the alarm bell outside the room where Collins worked. I had also provided a light ladder on the top landing, hanging on two hooks, so that he could immediately get this through a skylight. On the outside of the skylight we had bolts, so that it could be bolted from the outside after the ladder had been pulled up after him.’
Collins was told that the owner of the Standard Hotel two doors away was sympathetic, but he was more interested in the porter. ‘It is not the friendship of the proprietor I want, but the friendship of the boots.’ Collins said. The porter, or boots as they were called at the time, was approached and he promised to leave the skylight on the roof permanently unbolted.
Of course, Collins was much too busy to be personally involved in all of the attempts. He was occupied on other matters like the National Loan, building up his intelligence network, and springing Austin Stack from jail. He took a particularly active interest in supervising arrangements for the escape of Stack. For more than a year he had been planning to spring him, first from Dundalk Jail and then Belfast Jail, but on each occasion Stack was moved before arrangements could be finalised. Now he was in Strangeways Jail in Manchester. Collins actually visited Stack in the prison to discuss plans for the escape, which was finally set for 25 October 1919. Some twenty men were posted outside the jail, under Rory O’Connor.
Basically the same technique was used as in the mass escape from Mountjoy the previous March. Piaras Béaslaí had been involved in that escape, but had been recaptured by Detective Sergeants Smith and Wharton, and he was again involved in this break, in which Stack, himself, and four others managed to escape. They were taken to safe houses in the Manchester and Liverpool area while Collins personally crossed the Irish Sea to make arrangements for their return to Dublin.
The more the notoriety of Collins grew, the more willing some people were to work for him, and the fact that he was president of the supreme council of the IRB probably helped in recruiting spies. A person in his position in a secret society was someone they could trust. Joe Kavanagh and Ned Broy introduced a new detective, Jim McNamara, who was administrative assistant to the assistant police commissioner in Dublin Castle. The son of a policeman, McNamara was a charming individual, and he joined Kavanagh and Broy in their weekly meetings with Collins in Thomas Gay’s home.
In September Collins learned that a Sergeant Jerry Maher of the RIC in Naas might be sympathetic. When an emissary approached Maher about working for Collins, his eyes immediately lit up. ‘You’re the man I’ve been waiting for,’ Maher replied. He was working as a clerk for the district inspector of the RIC, and he was able to feed Collins with information about various circulars from headquarters, as well as current codes being used. At times in the coming months Collins would have dispatches decoded and circulated to brigade intelligence officers before some of the RIC inspectors had decoded their own messages.
Collins had at least two other sources for police codes. Maurice McCarthy, an RIC sergeant stationed in Belfast, was one, and the other was a cousin of his own working in Dublin Castle. The cousin, Nancy O’Brien, had spent some years working in the post office in London and was brought to Dublin as a cipher clerk to decode messages. She was selected, she was told, because the Castle authorities wanted someone they could trust since Collins was getting some messages even before the British officers for whom they were intended. She, of course, promptly went to Collins. ‘Well, Christ!’ Collins exclaimed. ‘What a bloody intelligence service they have.’
Sergeant Thomas J. McElligott had sought to organise a representative body within the RIC in 1918 but was soon dismissed from the police because of his Sinn Féin sympathies. He secretly went to work for Collins as a kind of police union organiser. Ostensibly he was trying to improve the pay and conditions of the RIC, but, in fact, he was engaged in black propaganda, trying to undermine the morale of the force by sowing seeds of discord.
When the police went on strike in London, Collins sent McElligott there to make some useful contacts. At strike headquarters he met a man using the name of Jameson, who was posing as a Marxist sympathiser but was actually a Secret Service agent. Shortly afterwards he turned up in Dublin and very nearly entrapped Collins, but this is getting ahead of the story.
The ready comradeship between Collins and his military colleagues was particularly striking. Liam Deasy visited Dublin on 14 October 1919, with instructions to go to Vaughan’s Hotel, where he met Collins; also there were Gearóid O’Sullivan, Seán Ó Muirthile, Peadar Clancy, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, Dick McKee, Liam Tobin, and Frank Thornton. ‘My recollection,’ he wrote, ‘is of a very informal meeting where GHQ staff were constantly coming and going, and it was a surprise to me to see how nonchalantly they seemed to accept the constant risk that was theirs.’
Next day Deasy was introduced to Brugha and Mulcahy by Collins at Lalor’s on Upper Ormond Quay. ‘It was quite clear to me that these men were anticipating an early development of hostilities on the part of the enemy,’ Deasy wrote. Plans were being made to transfer the allegiance of the Volunteers to Dáil Éireann at a convention called for December, and Deasy was informed that they were changing the name of the Volunteers to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
While deeply involved in intelligence, fund-raising, and arranging escape plans, Collins also became involved with Dan Breen in a plot to assassinate the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord French. This, of course, was something he had obviously been thinking about ever since he was a teenager when he advocated emulating the Finns in the assassination of the Russian Governor-General Nicholai Bobrikov in 1904. It was Breen and three colleagues who had killed the two RIC men escorting the explosive consignment at Soloheadbeg in January. They had since come to Dublin looking for more meaningful action. ‘We felt bigger game was needed,’ Breen wrote.
Collins shared their impatience, but he had no intention of getting involved in a numbers game. He believed in striking at individuals who were providing useful service to the British. The person with the highest profile in this regard was Lord French, a symbol of Britain’s domination as well as Lloyd George’s most influential adviser on Irish matters at the time. Brugha and Mulcahy agreed, so Collins ordered members of the Squad to join with the four Tipperarymen in a plan to assassinate the viceroy.
‘For three long months we watched, planned and waited,’ according to Breen. ‘Mick Collins was with us on the first occasion that we lay in ambush.’ He had learned that French was returning from England through Dún Laoghaire that night and the ambush was set up at the junction of Suffolk and Trinity Streets. They waited until dawn but the viceroy never showed. Nothing happened either on a number of other occasions because French — mindful of the need for extreme caution — repeatedly altered his route at the last moment.
In the interim Collins was in his new finance office in 76 Harcourt Street when it was raided on 8 November. The staff managed to get the important papers into the secret closet, while he headed for the skylight with an attaché case, but his escape route and procedures were not nearly as carefully planned as they should have been. For one thing, Collins did not lift the ladder behind him and he obviously forgot to bolt the skylight from the outside. To make matters worse, he found that while the skylight of the Standard Hotel was unlocked as arranged, it was directly above a stairwell, which meant that he had to make a dangerous jump across to the landing.
‘Just as I got through the hotel skylight I saw a khaki helmet appear out of the skylight of No. 76,’ he told colleagues that evening. ‘I flung my bag across, commended myself to Providence, and jumped.’ Although he hurt himself a little in the process, he was in great spirits afterwards as he recounted what happened to Batt O’Connor, Joe O’Reilly, and Piaras Béaslaí, who had just arrived back in Dublin that day following his escape from Strangeways. The Big Fellow was in his element — he too had just made his own daring escape.
Three members of the Dáil were arrested in the raid, along with three members of the Volunteers’ headquarters staff, but the police failed to find the secret closet. One of the uniformed policemen ordered to search the building was Constable David Neligan, who had no intention of trying to find anything. ‘I went upstairs and counted the roses on the wall paper until the raid was over,’ he later explained.
‘They got no document of importance, so that the only disorganisation is through the seizure of the staff,’ Collins wrote. ‘The enemy is certainly very keen at the moment in preventing the Dáil loan being a success, so that it becomes a more pressing duty than ever that every supporter of the Republic should increase his efforts.’
The latest raid on his office was probably in response to an attack the previous day on Detective Sergeant Wharton, who — along with the ill-fated Patrick Smith — had arrested Béaslaí earlier in the year. On the eve of Béaslaí’s return, Wharton was shot and seriously wounded by a member of the Squad as he walked by St Stephen’s Green. Although he survived, his injuries forced him to resign from the police force, but he was luckier than his fellow Kerryman, Detective Sergeant Johnny Barton, who investigated the Wharton shooting. He was shot near the G Division headquarters during the evening rush hour on 30 November 1919. ‘What did I do?’ he moaned repeatedly as he lay dying. He had been in G Division only two months.
While it was believed that Collins moved about in disguise, highly armed and well-protected, he usually went alone, unarmed and undisguised, on a bicycle. Some of the detectives knew him, but he had so terrorised the G Division that they were afraid to apprehend him, lest the faceless people supposedly protecting him would come to his rescue, or take revenge on the detectives or their families at some later date. Attacking members of anyone’s family would have been out of character for Collins, but his enemies were not to know this. They knew only of his ruthless reputation, and he exploited it to the full.
One can imagine the scene as Collins recognised a detective on a tram. He would sit down next to him, ask about specific members of the detective’s family, or colleagues in the DMP, and — before alighting — would assure the detective it would be safe for him to get off the tram, at some later stop.
One day in the street Batt O’Connor became uneasy at the way two DMP men looked at Collins. They seemed to recognise him, but he was unperturbed.
‘Even if they recognised me,’ Collins said, ‘they would be afraid to report they saw me.’ Anyway, if they did report, it would take the DMP an hour to muster the necessary force to seize him. ‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘all the time I would wait here until they were ready to come along!’
He never stayed in any one place very long; he had difficulty sitting still. He always had something to do, somebody to see, or somewhere to go. Though always on the go, he never thought of himself as being ‘on the run’. Wanted men frequently developed a habit of venturing forth only with care. Before leaving a building they would sneak a furtive glance to make sure there were no police around, whereas Collins had contempt for such practices. He just bounded out a door in a carefree, self-confident manner without betraying the slightest indication he was trying to evade anybody. ‘I do not allow myself to feel I am on the run,’ he explained. ‘That is my safeguard. It prevents me from acting in a manner likely to arouse suspicion.’
When the police started looking for him in May 1919, he moved from the Munster Hotel, but in the autumn he felt safe enough to move back again. By acting as he did he gave the distinct impression of not being afraid of the detectives; they were left to ponder whether he was crazy or just very well protected. In either case he was not someone to mess with.
Faced with the demise of the DMP’s most active detectives, Lord French set up a three-man committee to consider what to do about the deteriorating intelligence situation from the British point of view. The three were the acting inspector general of the RIC, the assistant under-secretary at Dublin Castle, and a resident magistrate named Alan Bell. Bell, a former RIC man, was particularly close to French and had a great deal of investigative experience going back to the troubles of the 1880s.
The committee reported on 7 December 1919 that ‘an organised conspiracy of murder, outrage and intimidation has existed for some time past’ with the aim of undermining the police forces. Even though the first killing of policemen had taken place in Tipperary, the committee concluded that ‘Dublin City is the storm centre and mainspring of it all’. To remedy the situation it was proposed that the Sinn Féin movement should be infiltrated with spies and some selected leaders should be assassinated. ‘We are inclined to think that the shooting of a few would-be assassins would have an excellent effect,’ the committee reported. ‘Up to the present they have escaped with impunity. We think that this should be tried as soon as possible.’
The same day Collins returned to the Munster Hotel to find a police raid in progress. The DMP were looking for him, but he mingled outside with spectators in the street. He knew that Detective Inspector Bruton was aware he lived there, and he apparently blamed him for the raid. The Squad were ordered to kill Bruton, though this was easier ordered than done.
Bruton ventured out of Dublin Castle only under armed escort, and he took the precaution of not developing any routine. Soon the attempt to kill him began to take on the aspects of a farce as Squad members lurked near a Castle entrance. ‘Misters! They’re not here today,’ a newsboy shouted one day. That was enough. If the boy could twig them, it was time to move to other matters. In any event the finger of suspicion was soon transferred from Bruton to a spy who had wormed his way close to Collins.
H. H. Quinlisk from Wexford had been one of the prisoners of war recruited by Roger Casement for his Irish Brigade in Germany. With credentials like that, Quinlisk was easily accepted in Sinn Féin quarters, especially after Robert Brennan introduced him to Seán Ó Muirthile, the secretary of the supreme council of the IRB. Quinlisk, or Quinn as he called himself, cut a dashing figure and was quite a man for the ladies. ‘He was always immaculately dressed and one would have said that with his good looks, his self-assurance and general bonhomie, he would have got anywhere,’ according to Brennan. ‘He liked to give the impression that he was in on all of Mick Collins’s secrets.’
As a result of his enlistment in the Irish Brigade, he had been denied back-pay for the period of his imprisonment in Germany. Collins helped him out financially, and Quinlisk stayed for a time at the Munster Hotel, but he wanted more. On 11 November 1919 he wrote to the under-secretary at Dublin Castle, mentioning his background and offering to furnish information. ‘I was the man who assisted Casement in Germany and since coming home I have been connected with Sinn Féin,’ he wrote. ‘I have decided to tell all I know of that organisation and my information would be of use to the authorities. The scoundrel Michael Collins has treated me scurvily and I now am going to wash my hands of the whole business.’
He was brought to G Division headquarters to make a statement, which Broy typed up; then, of course, he furnished a copy to Collins. But Quinlisk had taken the precaution of telling Collins that he had gone to the DMP merely to get a passport so he could emigrate to the United States. He said the police put pressure on him to inform on Collins, offering money and promising to make arrangements for him to get his wartime back-pay. He told Collins that he was merely pretending to go along with the police.
Following the raid on the Munster Hotel, Collins found it necessary to move, though he did return there weekly. The owner, Myra McCarthy, an aunt of Fionán Lynch, continued to do his laundry for him. For the next nineteen months, until the truce in the Anglo-Irish war in July 1921, he moved about, never staying in any one place for very long. ‘Living in such turmoil,’ he wrote to Hannie, ‘it’s not all that easy to be clear on all matters at all times.’ Yet he maintained a very regular daily routine.
After his office at 76 Harcourt Street was raided in November, he opened a new finance office at 22 Henry Street. Like his other offices, it was on a busy thoroughfare with a lot of passing traffic, so that the comings and goings of strangers would not attract attention, as they would if the offices had been place in some quiet, out-of-the-way location. The Henry Street office survived for about eighteen months. He also had another finance office at 22 Mary Street and he set up a new intelligence office at 5 Mespil Road. He kept papers in the home of Eileen McGrane at 21 Dawson Street, and had gold hidden in a house owned by Batt O’Connor at 3 St Andrew’s Terrace, and also in O’Connor’s home at 1 Brendan’s Road, Donnybrook.
In the morning he would go to his intelligence office in Mespil Road. This routine was known only to his secretary Susan Mason, Liam Tobin, Joe O’Reilly, and a couple of other people. He did not meet people there. Afterwards he would cycle over to his finance office in Mary Street, and he would have lunch at either Batt O’Connor’s home in Donnybrook or Pádraig O’Keeffe’s wife’s restaurant in Camden Street. He would meet people in either of those two places or in one of the many ‘joints’ that he used about the city.
There was a whole cluster of these on the north side of the city around the Rutland (now Parnell) Square area. ‘Joint No. 1’ was Vaughan’s Hotel at 29 Rutland Square. It was a kind of clearing-house for him. People visiting from outside Dublin wishing to meet him for the first time would go to Vaughan’s, where the porter, Christy Harte, was usually able to pass on a message to him. ‘Joint No. 2’ was Liam Devlin’s pub at 69 Parnell Street on the south side of the square. Here Collins met a more select group of people, like members of the Dublin Brigade, while he met warders from Mountjoy Jail in Jim Kirwin’s bar on the same street. Other ‘joints’ around the square included No. 4, the old headquarters of the Irish Volunteers; No. 20, Banba Hall; No. 41, the Irish National Foresters Hall; and No. 46, the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League. Nearby were other joints, Barry’s Hotel on Great Denmark Street and Fleming’s Hotel in Gardiner Row. He met railwaymen carrying despatches to and from Belfast at Phil Sheerin’s Coolevin Dairies in Amiens Street, police contacts in the Bannon brothers’ pub in Upper Abbey Street, and sailors with news from Britain in Foley Street at Pat Shanahan’s bar, which was also the haunt of Dan Breen and the Soloheadbeg gang.
They and the Squad finally caught up with Lord French on 19 December 1919. He had gone to his country residence in Roscommon, and Collins sent a man there to report when the Lord-Lieutenant left for Dublin. An ambush was then prepared at Ashtown Cross, not far from the Vice-Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. The attempt was bungled, however, and the only fatality was one of the ambushers who was apparently caught in crossfire.
After his escape French was highly critical of G Division. ‘Our Secret Service is simply non-existent,’ he complained. ‘What masquerades for such a service is nothing but a delusion and a snare. The DMP are absolutely demoralised and the RIC will be in the same case very soon if we do not quickly set our house in order.’
Detective Inspector W. C. Forbes Redmond was brought from Belfast as assistant commissioner to reorganise G Division, and he brought along a number of his own people to work under cover. Not knowing Dublin, he had to have someone as a guide to the city, so he naturally used his administrative assistant, Jim McNamara. Redmond set about capturing Collins, and he came quite close with the help of a Secret Service agent who wormed his way into Collins’s confidence.
The agent was John Charles Byrne, alias Jameson, the supposed Marxist whom T. J. McElligott had met at the police strike headquarters in London. He had come to Dublin with a letter of introduction from Art O’Brien, the Sinn Féin representative in Britain. Posing as a revolutionary anxious to undermine the British system, Byrne offered to supply weapons, and arrangements were made for him to meet Collins, Mulcahy, and Rory O’Connor at the Home Farm Produce Shop in Camden Street. They met again the following day at the Ranelagh home of Jennie Wyse Power, a member of the Sinn Féin executive. ‘What he was delaying about that prevented him getting us caught with him, at least on the second of these occasions, I don’t know,’ Mulcahy later remarked. Byrne, however, did make arrangements to have Collins arrested at a third meeting at the home of Batt O’Connor on 16 January 1920.
Redmond had one of his own undercover men watching O’Connor’s house, but that man did not know Collins; by a stroke of good luck Liam Tobin, who also happened to be at the house, left with Byrne, and the lookout — assuming that Tobin was Collins — intercepted Redmond on Morehampton Road as he approached with a lorry-load of troops to raid O’Connor’s house. The raid was promptly called off, but Redmond had brought McNamara with him, and also used him as a guide that night when he decided to keep O’Connor’s house under personal observation.
By next day Collins had been briefed. He was due to have dinner again at O’Connor’s house, but he gave it a skip. When Redmond and the police arrived, there was no one in the house, other than O’Connor’s wife and children. He left, promising not to bother her again, a prophetic promise as it turned out.
Redmond had already made a fatal mistake when a detective had come to him with a grievance over some of his changes in G Division and he dismissed the complaint with some disparaging comments about G Division as a whole. ‘You are a bright lot!’ Redmond reportedly said. ‘Not one of you has been able to get on to Collins’s track for a month, and here is a man only two days in Dublin and has already seen him.’ The disgruntled detective duly mentioned this to Broy, who promptly informed Collins. Given this information from McNamara, the spotlight of suspicion was immediately cast on Byrne. He not only had arrived from London recently but had also had a meeting with Collins at Batt O’Connor’s house.
Tobin had disliked Byrne from the outset, but had problems convincing Collins, who liked the unusual visitor. The thirty-four-year-old Byrne was clearly an adventurer. Small with a very muscular build, he had a series of tattoos on his arms and hands. There were Japanese women, snakes, flowers, and a bird. He had a snake ring tattooed on the third finger of his right hand and two rings tattooed on his left hand. He also had a strange fascination for birds, which he kept in cages in his hotel room.
Collins wrote to Art O’Brien in London on 20 January that he had grounds for suspecting Jameson, as he called him, because he was in touch with the head of intelligence in Scotland Yard. ‘I have absolutely certain information that the man who came from London met and spoke to me, and reported that I was growing a moustache to Basil Thompson,’ he wrote.
Collins and Tobin decided to lay a trap for Byrne, by leading him to believe that important documents were being stored in the home of a former lord mayor of Dublin, J. J. Farrell of 9 Iona Road. The Castle authorities had no grounds for suspecting him, because he had no sympathy whatever for Sinn Féin. The greatest moment of his life had been when he received King Edward VII on a visit to Dublin. Collins’s men kept an eye on Farrell’s house, and had a great laugh when the police raided it and forced the former mayor to stand outside in his night attire. ‘You are raiding your friends,’ Farrell protested. ‘Do you know I received the King? I had twenty minutes conversation with him.’
Of course the raid looked particularly bad for Byrne, and he promptly left the country. On the night of 20 January Collins was tipped off that Redmond planned a raid that night on Cullenswood House, where Collins had a basement office and Mulcahy had a top-floor flat with his wife. Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton roused Mulcahy from his bed, and he spent the remainder of the night with a friend a short distance away. Redmond was becoming a real thorn, and Collins gave the Squad orders to eliminate him. ‘If we don’t get that man, he’ll get us and soon,’ Collins warned the Squad.
Redmond made a soft target, because he underestimated his opponents. Nattily dressed in civilian clothes, topped off by a bowler hat, he looked more like a stockbroker than a policeman. He stayed at the Standard Hotel in Harcourt Street and walked to work at Dublin Castle and back without an escort, though he did take the precaution of wearing a bullet-proof vest. The following evening the Squad got their chance as Redmond returned to his hotel. ‘We knew he had a bullet-proof waistcoat,’ Joe Dolan later explained with a childish giggle. ‘So we shot him in the head.’
Following Redmond’s death, his own undercover detectives pulled out and returned to Belfast, and thereafter G Division ‘ceased to affect the situation’, according to British military intelligence.
Stunned by Redmond’s killing, Dublin Castle offered £10,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for his death. This was probably where the story about a big reward for Collins’s arrest originated. He was the one who had given the order to kill Redmond. Rewards of £5,000 had already been offered in connection with the deaths of the three DMP detectives, Smith, Hoey, and Barton, and these rewards were now doubled. As Collins had ordered all four killings, there was a handsome accumulative reward for the evidence to convict him, though the authorities never officially offered a reward for his capture.
The British gradually began to fight back. On 24 February 1920 a curfew was introduced from midnight until five o’clock in the morning. ‘Last night,’ Collins wrote next day, ‘the city of Dublin was like a city of the dead. It is the English way of restoring peace to this country.’ In the following weeks he would complain of growing repression. ‘By night the streets of Dublin are like streets of a beleaguered city — no one abroad save the military forces of the enemy fully equipped for all the purposes and usages of war.’
The British were infiltrating undercover people into Ireland, and their established agents made desperate efforts to entrap Collins. Quinlisk, who had lost touch with Collins following the raid on the Munster Hotel, began making determined efforts to contact him. By now, however, Collins had firm evidence of his treachery — having got his hands on Quinlisk’s actual letter offering his services to Dublin Castle. But Collins did not ask the Squad to take out the spy immediately. Instead he tried to use him as bait to get at Detective Superintendent Brien of the DMP. The Squad had been trying to kill him for some time, but Brien rarely moved outside the walls of Dublin Castle.
Seán Ó Muirthile was assigned to keep Quinlisk busy, while one of the Squad telephoned the Castle to say that Quinlisk had vital information and would meet Brien outside the offices of the Evening Mail, just outside the Castle, at a certain time. Brien turned up, but something spooked him before the Squad could get a shot at him. He darted back into the cover of Dublin Castle. Collins learned afterwards that Brien had twigged he was being set up and blamed Quinlisk, who explained that he had been detained all night by Ó Muirthile. ‘You’re in the soup,’ Collins told Ó Muirthile with a laugh.
Quinlisk should have had the good sense to quit at that point, but he persisted in his efforts to see Collins. So a trap was set. He was told that Collins was out of town and would meet him that night at Wren’s Hotel in Cork city. Liam Archer, one of Collins’s agents at the GPO, intercepted a coded message to the district inspector of the RIC at Union Quay, Cork. ‘Tonight at midnight surround Wren’s Hotel, Wintrop Street, Cork,’ the message read when decoded. ‘Collins and others will be there. Expect shooting as he is a dangerous man and heavily armed.’
‘tAnnam an Diabhal,’ Collins exclaimed with a laugh on reading the message. ‘They’ll play síghle caoch with the place.’
The RIC duly raided the hotel and, of course, found nothing. Quinlisk stayed in Cork searching for Collins. On the night of 18 February he was met by some members of the IRA, who, promising to take him to Collins, took him outside the city, shot him dead and pinned a note to his body — ‘Spies Beware’.
District Inspector MacDonagh of the RIC had made the mistake of looking for Collins in Cork, and he was gunned down on the street in the city three weeks later. No evidence was ever produced to suggest Collins had called for the attempt on his life. But even if the IRA in Cork had done so without directions from Dublin, the ultimate message to the police was still the same — looking for Collins could have fatal consequences.
Around this time Byrne, alias Jameson, returned from England with a suitcase of revolvers. Tobin took the guns and pretended to leave them in a business premises on Bachelor’s Walk, which he said was an arms dump for the IRA. When the premises was raided that night, Collins was finally convinced of Byrne’s duplicity. Members of the Squad called for Byrne at the Granville Hotel on Sackville Street on the afternoon of 2 March on the pretext of taking him to Collins’s hideout, but they brought him to the grounds of a lunatic asylum in Glasnevin instead. Realising what was about to happen, he tried to bluff about his friendship with Collins and Tobin, but the Squad members knew better. They asked him if he wished to pray.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘We are only doing our duty,’ one said to him.
‘And I have done mine,’ he replied, drawing himself to attention as they shot him twice, once in the head and the other through the heart. Some weeks later members of the British cabinet were told that Byrne had been ‘the best Secret Service man we had’.
Fergus Bryan Molloy was gunned down in Dublin in late March by the Squad in broad daylight on South William Street. He had been offering to procure arms. He was a soldier working for Colonel Hill Dillon, the chief intelligence officer of the British army at Parkgate Street. The colonel’s secretary, Lily Merlin, was supplying information to Collins, and she warned him of Molloy, who had already written to his sister in America that if anything happened to him, Liam Tobin would be responsible. On one occasion he asked Tobin in the Cairo Café to write down on Dáil Éireann notepaper the names and addresses of prominent members of Sinn Féin, like Count Plunkett and Countess Markievicz.
‘We have to shoot that fellow,’ Tobin warned Collins.
‘Well shoot him so,’ Collins replied.
On the day Byrne’s body was returned to England, Alan Bell, the resident magistrate who had served on the secret committee which had called for ‘the shooting of a few would-be assassins’, opened a much publicised inquiry into Sinn Féin funds. He was empowered to examine bank accounts in order to locate money deposited in the names of a number of party sympathisers.
Bell stayed out in Monkstown and travelled into the city each day on a tram. A police guard escorted him to and from the tram each day, but he travelled into the city alone. He was coming into the city as usual on the morning of 26 March when four men approached him as the tram reached Ballsbridge. ‘Come on, Mr Bell, your time has come,’ one of the men said. Horrified passengers looked on as the Squad members dragged the elderly man into the street and shot him dead on the pavement. The killing of an old man like that provoked a storm of revulsion.
It was widely believed that he was killed because he was trying to find the National Loan money, though there were also published rumours that he had been investigating the attempt on the life of his friend, Lord French. One rather colourful story was published in the United States to the effect that Bell had arranged for a Scotland Yard detective to go to Mountjoy Jail, pose as a priest and ‘hear’ confessions of political prisoners there. The IRA supposedly learned of this and shot both Bell and the detective next day. The fact that no detective was killed next day, or indeed in the whole month of March, did not prevent the publication of the story.
Despite his frail elderly appearance, Bell had posed an extremely dangerous threat to Collins. He had, in fact, directed Detective Inspector Redmond during hs brief stint in Dublin, and he was also one of the architects of the policy which led, as will be seen in the next chapter, to the killing of Tomás MacCurtain, the lord mayor of Cork. This was not brought out at the time, presumably because Collins was not in a position to release the information without endangering his source in Dublin Castle.
In any event, the bad publicity surrounding Bell’s elimination had some advantages, as far as Collins was concerned, because it acted as a very public warning to various individuals not to go looking for the loan money. Despite early misgivings he achieved the goal of raising £250,000. In fact the loan was oversubscribed by some 40 per cent and more than £357,000 was collected. Of that the British captured only a mere £18,000. ‘From any point of view the seizure was insignificant,’ Collins wrote, ‘but you may rely upon it we shall see to the return of this money just as someday Ireland will exact her full reparation for all the stealings and seizures by the British in the past.’