De Valera’s overall approach to the controversy over the League of Nations led to difficulties with the leadership of the influential Irish-American organisation, the Friends of Irish Freedom. Its leaders, Judge Daniel Cohalan and John Devoy, resented his suggestion that the United States should renew efforts to make the world safe for democracy. That was sheer Wilsonian babble, as far as Cohalan was concerned.
Born in upstate New York of Irish parents, Cohalan was a controversial figure, detested in Democratic Party circles as a political turncoat. In the past he had been closely identified with the powerful Tammany boss, Charles F. Murphy, and had been a member of the New York delegations at the Democratic Party’s national conventions of 1904 and 1908. In 1910 he was appointed to the New York Supreme Court and, together with Murphy, spearheaded an unsuccessful attempt to block Woodrow Wilson’s quest for the Democratic nomination on his way to the presidency in 1912. Murphy soon made his peace with Wilson, but Cohalan did not. He bolted the party and supported Wilson’s Republican opponent in 1916. Cohalan despised Wilson, and the feeling was quite mutual.
When the judge headed an Irish-American delegation which sought to make representations to Wilson before his departure for the Paris Peace Conference, the President insisted on Cohalan’s exclusion. He gracefully withdrew and in the process greatly enhanced his own standing among Irish-American activists. He had not only stepped aside and borne Wilson’s affront in the interest of the cause, but more importantly, he had been singled out as an opponent by the President himself, and this would become a valuable distinction in the coming months as Wilson’s reputation plummeted in Irish-American circles.
Cohalan would undoubtedly have been delighted to use de Valera against Wilson, but the Irish leader was wisely unwilling to be used in such a way. He was anxious to be on friendly terms with both the Democrats and the Republicans, and he might have succeeded had he not tried to act as a power-broker, ready to deliver Irish-American support.
Cohalan and Devoy had already informed de Valera of their utter opposition to American membership of the League of Nations, even if Ireland were admitted to the organisation, so they therefore naturally resented his nationwide effort to depict ‘men and women of Irish blood’ as being prepared to support the Versailles Treaty in return for Wilson’s recognition of the Irish Republic. De Valera had no mandate whatever to speak for Irish-Americans and his intervention was resented as outside interference in American politics. Cohalan tried to keep him out of Irish-American affairs, and when de Valera asked ‘to be let into the political steps’ the judge was planning, he was told not to ‘go near the political end at all’.
‘The trouble is purely one of personalities,’ de Valera wrote to Griffith. ‘I cannot feel confidence enough in a certain man [Cohalan] to let him have implicit control of tactics here without consultation and agreement with me.’ In short, de Valera was insisting on having the final say on policy matters, though he was prepared to consult with Irish-American leaders. ‘On the ways and means they have to be consulted,’ he conceded, ‘but I reserve the right to use my judgment as to whether any means suggested is or is not in conformity with our purpose.’
Whether the United States decided to join the League of Nations or not was basically none of his business. ‘The fight for the League of Nations was purely an American affair attacked from a purely American angle,’ de Valera admitted in a letter to the cabinet at home. He certainly had no right to say that people like Cohalan would support the Versailles Treaty under conditions that they had pronounced unacceptable. The two men developed a distinct personal dislike for each other. Cohalan felt that the Irish leader was interfering in American politics while de Valera felt that the judge was interfering in Irish affairs. A clash was therefore virtually inevitable.
In the summer of 1919 de Valera had refused to go along blindly with efforts to arrange for him to address the United States Congress. Cohalan had approached Senator William E. Borah of the Foreign Relations Committee with a view to making arrangements to secure an invitation for de Valera. But as Borah was an isolationist Republican and a strong critic of Wilson, de Valera believed the approach should be bipartisan, and he insisted that Senator James D. Phelan of California should be asked to co-sponsor the approach. De Valera subsequently met with Cohalan, Borah, and Phelan to discuss the matter but nothing ever came of it, much to the irritation of Cohalan, who believed they would have had a much better chance if the Irish leader had gone along with Borah.
De Valera’s own reports to the cabinet in Dublin left no doubt that he had interfered in American affairs by presuming to speak for Irish-Americans during the controversy over the Versailles Treaty. On the other hand, the Cohalan faction interfered in Irish affairs when de Valera tried to reassure the public that Britain had nothing to fear from an independent Ireland. Many Americans had reservations about Irish independence because they felt an independent Ireland would pose security risks for Britain, their ally in the recent war. Congressman Tom Connolly of Texas contended, for instance, that the British could never permit Ireland to become independent because it would ‘become the prey of every scheming nation in Europe’. De Valera tried to allay these fears by indicating that Ireland would guarantee Britain’s legitimate security needs.
In the course of an exclusive interview with the Westminster Gazette on 5 February 1920, he explained there were four different ways of ensuring Britain’s security. First, there could be an international guarantee of Ireland’s neutrality as in the case of Belgium, or second, ‘in a genuine League of Nations the contracting parties could easily by mutual compact bind themselves to respect and defend the integrity and national independence of each other, and guarantee it by the strength of the whole’.
The other two ways of guaranteeing that Irish independence would not endanger Britain’s security had distinct American parallels. De Valera suggested that the London government could simply declare a doctrine for Britain and Ireland similar to the Monroe Doctrine used by the United States to insist against European encroachment on the independence of Latin American countries. The fourth idea was for Britain to agree to a treaty similar to the 1901 treaty between Cuba and the United States. The Americans had protected their interests then, according to de Valera, by demanding that the Cuban government promise it would ‘never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which shall impair or tend to impair Cuban independence, nor in any manner authorise or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonisation or for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgment in or control over any portion of the said island’.
‘Why doesn’t Britain do with Ireland as the United States did with Cuba?’ de Valera asked. ‘Why doesn’t Britain declare a Monroe Doctrine for her neighbouring island? The people of Ireland so far from objecting, would co-operate with their whole soul.’
In advocating the Cuban analogy de Valera had quoted from the first clause of what was known as the Platt Amendment, which had been incorporated into the 1901 treaty. He did not make any reference to other Platt clauses demanding that the United States should be granted naval and coaling stations in Cuba, as well as the right to intervene there for the preservation of the island’s independence. De Valera did not intend the other clauses of the Platt Amendment to be part of his proposal. He actually intimated during the interview that he would not be in favour of allowing Britain to have Irish bases. In summarising his arguments, for instance, he said that ‘It is not her national safety nor her legitimate security that England wants to safeguard. By any of the four methods indicated she could have made provision for these. What she wants to make provision for, I repeat, is the perpetuation of her domination of the seas by her control of the great Irish harbours.’
Unknown to de Valera there was an arrangement between the Westminster Gazette and the New York Globe to share their material, so the interview appeared on the front page of the New York newspaper next day under the headline: ‘Compromise Suggested by Irish’. The Globe mentioned that the salient features of the interview were de Valera’s call not only for ‘the operation of a policy based on the American Monroe Doctrine’ but also for ‘the granting of complete independence to Ireland on the same basis as the independence granted to Cuba’. There was no suggestion in the report that the Irish leader was prepared to accept less than ‘complete independence’.
He had achieved part of his objective. A Globe editorial in the same edition suggested that de Valera had offered ‘a really convincing assurance’ to ‘the seemingly unanswerable argument’ that Irish independence would be extremely damaging to Britain’s security. The editorial concluded, however, that the assurance in question actually introduced ‘a new principle. It is a withdrawal by the official head of the Irish Republic of the demand that Ireland be set free to decide her own international relations.’
Although the Philadelphia Irish Press and the New York Irish World both welcomed de Valera’s initiative, the Gaelic American condemned the proposals as an offer of surrender to Britain, and the Globe editorial was cited to support the charge. De Valera quickly clarified that he had only quoted the first clause of the Platt Amendment and was referring to it alone when he put forward the Cuban analogy. He had no hesitation in reaffirming that Ireland would give Britain that guarantee, because it would not be incompatible with Irish independence, on which he said he had no intention of compromising. John Devoy, the editor of the Gaelic American, chose to disregard de Valera’s clarification. ‘When a part of a document is offered in evidence in court, or in negotiations,’ Devoy declared in an editorial, ‘the whole document becomes subject for consideration.’ He basically wanted to put de Valera on trial in the columns of the Gaelic American.
Instead of replying to Devoy, de Valera took the extraordinary step of complaining to Cohalan. The judge had made no public comment on the controversy, yet de Valera essentially demanded that he dissociate himself from Devoy’s views. De Valera wrote that he was planning to use ‘the great lever of American opinion’ as a wedge to achieve his aims in the United States. As the Irish-Americans were to be the thin edge of this wedge, he was anxious to satisfy himself that the metal at the point was of the right temper. ‘The articles of the Gaelic American and certain incidents that have resulted from them, give me grounds for fear that, in a moment of stress the point of the lever would fail me,’ he wrote. It was therefore vital he should know how the judge stood in the matter. ‘I am led to understand that these articles in the Gaelic American have your consent and approval. Is this so?’
De Valera’s letter was a naive piece of insensitive arrogance. He was in effect telling the judge that he intended to use him without so much as asking if he was willing to be used in such a manner. Understandably indignant, Cohalan replied he had no intention of being used as a lever for alien ends. And he warned that de Valera was making a serious mistake if he thought other Irish-Americans would allow themselves to be used in this way. The judge emphasised that he considered himself ‘as an American, whose only allegiance is to America, and as one to whom the interest and security of my country are to be preferred to those of any and all other lands’.
‘Do you really think for a moment that any self-respecting American citizen will permit any citizen of another country to interfere, as you suggest, in American affairs?’ the judge asked. ‘If so, I may assure you that you are woefully out of touch with the spirit of the country in which you are sojourning.’
The Irish leader was undoubtedly acting tactlessly by interfering in American politics, but then Cohalan was doing the same thing by injecting his views on what was essentially an Irish policy matter. ‘A British Monroe Doctrine that would make Ireland an ally of England, and thus buttress the falling British Empire so as to further oppress India and Egypt and other subject lands would be so immoral and so utterly at variance with the ideals and traditions of the Irish people as to make it indefensible to them as it would be intolerable to the liberty-loving people of the world,’ Cohalan wrote.
De Valera’s critics were not confined to an Irish-American clique. Sinn Féin envoy Patrick McCartan was hostile to Devoy and Cohalan but he was decidedly uneasy about the Westminster Gazette interview. ‘Apart from its malice there was little Devoy said with which we could in our hearts disagree,’ McCartan wrote. ‘Had he said in private what he spread over the pages of the Gaelic American, we might have tried to moderate his tone, but not to refute his argument.’ De Valera had been needlessly antagonising people ‘by betraying an unconscious contempt’ for the views of others, according to McCartan. He noted that de Valera ‘tends to force his own opinions without hearing the other fellow’s and thus thinks he has cooperation when he only gets silent acquiescence’.
On the day that the United States Senate finally rejected the Versailles Treaty, Cohalan complained to a meeting of prominent Irish-Americans in New York that de Valera, who was present at the meeting, knew very little about American politics, yet consulted no one and by his arrogance alienated many people who had spent a lifetime helping the Irish cause. In the course of a thirty-minute tirade, the judge accused de Valera of interfering in American affairs and causing ‘considerable friction’ among Irish-Americans. He certainly had a valid point, but he continued in terms which showed that he himself was interfering in purely Irish affairs. He complained, for instance, that de Valera’s controversial Westminster Gazette interview amounted to an offer of ‘a compromise to England which would put Ireland in the position of accepting a protectorate from England, and consent to an alliance with that country which would align the race with England as against the United States in the case of war’ between America and Britain.
When de Valera was invited to explain his own position to the meeting, he tactlessly blurted out that he was not in the United States a month when he realised the country was not big enough for himself and Cohalan, which prompted Archbishop William Turner of Buffalo to remark that the judge could hardly be expected ‘to leave his native land just because the President had decided to come in’.
The meeting, which dragged on for ten hours, was acrimonious in the extreme. At one point Harry Boland went into hysterics and had to retire from the room to compose himself. ‘De Valera’s attitude was one of infallibility; he was right, everybody else was wrong, and he couldn’t be wrong,’ one witness recalled. ‘I thought the man was crazy.’ In the end the bishop persuaded the two factions to agree to a truce. The meeting broke up on the understanding that henceforth de Valera would not interfere in purely American matters, and Cohalan and Devoy would keep out of essentially Irish affairs.
But de Valera had no intention of upholding his side of the agreement. Within a week he was writing to Griffith asking the Dáil to secretly authorise him to spend between a quarter and a half a million dollars in connection with forthcoming elections in the United States. He wanted to keep the matter secret for the time being so as not to upset his fund-raising efforts. ‘It is very important,’ he wrote, ‘that there should not be an open rupture until the Bond Drive were over at any rate.’
He was already being confronted with an internal problem. James O’Mara, the man that Collins sent out to help organise the bond-certificate drive, resigned over de Valera’s arrogant behaviour. ‘What on earth is wrong with Mr O’Mara?’ Collins wrote to Boland. ‘There always seems to be something depressing coming from the USA.’ O’Mara agreed to withdraw his resignation following an appeal from Griffith, who noted that the resignation would be damaging to the movement.
There was also a degree of uneasiness at home over the Westminster Gazette interview. Father Michael O’Flanagan, a Sinn Féin vice-president, wrote to Collins complaining about the ‘suspicion that we are prepared to desert our friends in a foolish attempt to placate our enemies. In the last resort we must rely not upon the people who wish to make the world safe for the British Empire, but upon those who don’t.’
Despite his own reservations, McCartan backed de Valera over the Cuban controversy because he believed that repudiating him ‘would irredemiably injure our cause in America’ as well as hurt the cause at home by providing encouragement to the British. McCartan was therefore sent back to Dublin to explain to the cabinet what was happening in America. He found that Brugha, Plunkett, and Markievicz ‘showed marked hostility’ to the interview, but Griffith deftly limited discussion on the matter and secured cabinet acceptance of de Valera’s explanation, with strong backing from Collins. The cabinet also authorised de Valera to spend the money he requested on the American elections.
In the following weeks de Valera concentrated on the recognition question as he toured the Deep South. He was trying to drum up public support to rescue a bill introduced in the House of Representatives some months earlier by Congressman William Mason, who had proposed that Congress allocate funds for a diplomatic mission to Ireland. Normally the President would first accord recognition and Congress would then authorise the funds for a diplomatic mission. In the case of the Mason bill the procedure was being reversed, but the novel approach ran into such determined opposition that it was necessary to abandon it.
The poet, W. B. Yeats, attended one of de Valera’s rallies in New York in May 1920, but he was disappointed. He described de Valera as ‘a living argument rather than a living man. All propaganda, no human life, but not bitter, hysterical or unjust. I judged him persistent, being both patient and energetic, but that he will fail through not having enough human life as to judge the human life in others. He will ask too much of everyone and will ask it without charm. He will be pushed aside by others.’
In some respects the assessment was prophetic, but de Valera was no pushover, as Cohalan and Devoy were to learn in the coming months. The campaign for recognition had suffered a serious setback with the failure of the Mason bill, but de Valera did not despair. It was an election year in the United States and he was already working on a scheme to enlist the support of a presidential candidate for Irish recognition in return for Irish-American votes. Although the Irish-Americans were a distinct minority in the United States, they possessed an inordinate political influence because they were concentrated in the large urban areas of the most populous states and tended to block vote as directed by their leaders.
In New York, the state with the largest number of electoral votes for the presidency, for example, the Irish-Americans were concentrated in New York city, where their support was crucial to any Democratic candidate, because upstate New York was heavily Republican. Thus, the Democratic candidate had to win well in New York city to carry the state, and this was highly improbable without the support of the Irish-American community. The ‘Irish vote’ tended to have the same kind of pivotal influence in other important states; hence the excessive influence exerted by the Irish-American political bosses within the Democratic Party. De Valera hoped to enlist that influence to further his aims. ‘The Democrats will bid high for the Irish vote now,’ he explained. ‘Without it they have not the slightest chance of winning at the elections, unless something extraordinary turns up.’
While he thought the Democratic Party was Ireland’s best hope, he did not write off the Republicans. ‘Our policy here has always been to be as friendly with one of the political parties as with the other,’ he wrote. If the Irish-American vote was important to the Democrats, it could be just as valuable to the Republicans, seeing that solid Irish-American backing could guarantee the Republicans victory in a number of very important states because it would deprive the Democrats of their traditional support; they would then need to pick up twice as many votes from elsewhere just to offset the loss of the Irish-Americans.
Consequently, de Valera was just as optimistic about the possibility of being able to bargain with a Republican candidate. In fact, he considered Senator Hiram Johnson, the California Republican, to be ‘the best man available’. The only way ‘to play the cards’ for Ireland, de Valera believed, was to get a firm public commitment from a candidate to recognise the Irish Republic. He hoped to get such a commitment from Johnson in order that ‘our people could start working for him’, but the Gaelic American endorsed the California senator’s candidacy without waiting for such a commitment.
De Valera resented Devoy’s action; Johnson had been able to get what he was looking for without any commitment. ‘It is disappointing to see a clear nap hand played poorly,’ de Valera wrote. ‘Sometimes when I see the strategic position which the Irish here occupy in American politics I feel like crying when I realise what could be made of it if there was real genuine teamwork for Ireland alone being done. As far as politics is concerned, the position is almost everything one could wish for.’
This amazing comment again betrayed his naive view of the political situation. The Irish-Americans considered themselves Americans first. Their ‘Irish’ prefix was indicative of their ancestry, not their allegiance. To have engaged in ‘real genuine teamwork for Ireland alone’ would have meant subordinating American interests to those of Ireland. De Valera was trying to set himself up as a power-broker in the selection of the US President by getting Americans to vote strictly on the grounds of what the man would do for Ireland.
All this was clearly a violation of his agreement to stay out of American affairs but, as previously stated, he never really intended to uphold his end of the agreement anyway. Under the circumstances another clash with the Cohalan–Devoy faction was virtually certain. The political truce collapsed in June 1920 when de Valera went to Chicago for the Republican Party’s national convention, despite being asked to stay away. He was hoping to influence the Republicans to adopt a plank calling for recognition of the Irish Republic in the party’s election platform.
His people opened offices across from the convention centre and published a daily newsletter. On the eve of the convention they organised a torchlight parade involving some five thousand marchers, who were afterwards addressed by de Valera. ‘The Republicans must promise to recognise the Irish Republic,’ he told them. ‘All of Chicago wants this — I know the entire country wants this — I have been all over the country and I know.’
‘There was no chance of offending America that we did not take,’ McCartan later recalled. Their actions were so glaring that the Chicago Daily Tribune carried a cartoon of the Irish leader with the comment: ‘De Valera is not really a candidate in this Convention.’ When he tried to get a personal hearing before the party’s subcommittee on resolutions, he was refused and his plank calling for official recognition was heavily defeated by a vote of twelve to one.
Cohalan managed to persuade the subcommittee to adopt a resolution by seven votes to six calling for ‘recognition of the principle that the people of Ireland have the right to determine freely, without dictation from outside, their own governmental institutions and their international relations with other states and peoples’. But on learning of the acceptance of the Cohalan plank, de Valera objected and demanded it be withdrawn. The chairman of the subcommittee was so annoyed at this foreign interference that he reversed his own vote and killed the plank.
Afterwards de Valera explained that he had undermined the Cohalan resolution because it was too vague. ‘It was positively harmful to our interests that a resolution misrepresenting Ireland’s claim by understating it should have been presented,’ he said. The plank was supposedly an understatement because it called, not for recognition of the Irish Republic, but merely for recognition of the Irish people’s right to self-determination.
Before going to the United States, de Valera had stressed that Ireland was only seeking the right of self-determination. After his arrival in New York, he endorsed this policy, and he subsequently emphasised it by dwelling on the point in many of his American speeches. ‘What I seek in America,’ he said on more than one occasion, ‘is that the United States recognise in Ireland’s case, Ireland’s right to national self-determination, that and nothing more.’ Upon his return to Ireland at the end of 1920 he again emphasised the same theme in a series of interviews with foreign correspondents, as when he told a Swiss journalist that ‘the principle for which we are fighting is the principle of Ireland’s right to complete self-determination’. In addition he bitterly resented it the following April when Seán T. O’Kelly advised him to stop talking about self-determination and just call for recognition of the Irish Republic. The dispute in Chicago had nothing to do with principles: it was strictly a power struggle over who should speak for the Irish people and for the millions of Irish-Americans.
De Valera had already written home that he did not want anyone to think that he had ‘become a puppet to be manipulated’ by the judge. He did not want American politicians to get the idea Cohalan was ‘the real power behind our movement — the man to whom they would have to go. Were I [to] allow myself to appear thus as a puppet, apart from any personal pride, the movement would suffer a severe blow. Those who hold aloof because of the plea that the Judge is running this movement would cry out that they were justified.’ It is noteworthy that he mentioned his personal pride before the interests of the movement.
In view of the manner in which he was denied normal parental affection, de Valera grew up with a deep yearning for distinction and a nagging sense of inferiority which was perversely stirred by his sudden fame, a fame which owed so much to chance that it provided little sense of security. Had he been more secure in his own mind, he might not have looked on Cohalan’s actions as menacing, but as things stood he felt his position threatened, and he had to show he was no longer insignificant. He may well have convinced himself that he was acting in Ireland’s interest, but then, as he would show in the coming years, he had a facility for being able to convince himself that his own self-interest was in the national interest.
Following the Chicago debacle there were efforts to convene a conference to stop the feuding, but some of de Valera’s own people wished to exclude him because he had been betraying ‘an unconscious contempt’ for the opinions of others by doing most of the talking and not allowing others to speak. De Valera also wanted a conference, but his aim was to reorganise Irish-Americans in order to inject the Irish question into the forthcoming national elections. In a letter to Bishop Michael J. Gallagher of Detroit, who was elected president of the Friends of Irish Freedom shortly after the Chicago debacle, de Valera suggested a convention of the Irish race should be held in some central point like Chicago in order to make arrangement for a fresh campaign.
Chicago was suggested as the site in an obvious attempt to break the stranglehold on the Friends of Irish Freedom that was enjoyed by Cohalan’s supporters, most of whom were based in the New York area. But their resentment over Irish interference in American affairs was already very strong, and was further fuelled with the publication of some seized documents showing that the Dáil had authorised de Valera to spend a half a million dollars on the American elections. De Valera tried to take the mischief out of the report by issuing a statement emphasising that it was misleading to speak of the funds as intended for the American elections. ‘In public and in private I have been scrupulously careful to avoid even appearing to take sides in the party politics of this country,’ he declared. ‘Apart from any possible illegality, it would obviously be bad taste on my part and most inexpedient.’
He seemed to be contending that he was staying above party politics by being prepared to back sympathetic candidates without regard to their party affiliation, but it was patently absurd for his authorised biographers to contend that he ‘could never be accused of interference with American internal politics’. By his own admission he knew full well he was interfering in American politics in calling for the revision of the Versailles Treaty. Providing support for candidates in American elections would likewise have constituted an intervention in internal politics.
The Irish-American refusal to call a race convention before the November elections was understandable. Devoy considered the idea a blatant effort to remove himself and Cohalan so that de Valera could ‘show that nobody in America amounts to anything and that he is the kingpin of the movement’. They did agree, however, to call a meeting of the national council of the Friends of Irish Freedom in New York on 17 September 1920. De Valera personally telegraphed each council member to attend, with the result that delegates from as far away as California came, but when he was unable to get his way, he walked out, trailed by supporters shouting ‘follow the President’.
Outside, de Valera announced plans to found a new organisation, which, he said, should be under the democratic control of members throughout the country, instead of being run by a cabal in New York. ‘We from Ireland simply ask this,’ he said, ‘that we should be accepted as the interpreters of what the Irish people want — we are responsible to them, they can repudiate us if we represent them incorrectly.’
Devoy sought to undermine de Valera by depicting Collins as the real Irish leader following the Big Fellow’s interview with Carl W. Ackermann of the Philadelphia Public Ledger in August 1920. ‘Michael Collins Speaks for Ireland’, Devoy proclaimed boldly in a Gaelic American editorial. The weekly newspaper also carried a large front-page photograph of Collins in uniform (taken in 1916), with the caption, ‘Ireland’s Fighting Chief’. There was no doubt Devoy was hitting at de Valera, but Collins wanted nothing to do with it. ‘Every member of the Irish cabinet is in full accord with President de Valera’s policy,’ Collins wrote to Devoy on 30 September. ‘When he speaks to America, he speaks for all of us.’
These were not mere words. Collins actually went so far as to sever the IRB’s connections with Clan na Gael a fortnight later. ‘Let it be clearly understood,’ he emphasised in a further letter to Devoy, ‘that we all stand together, and that here at home every member of the cabinet has been an ardent supporter of the President against any and every group in America who have either not given him the co-operation which they should, or have set themselves definitely to thwart his actions.’
Collins could not have been more forthright in his support of de Valera’s position. He obviously held the President in high esteem, and that affection was extended to de Valera’s family. Although Collins was the most wanted man in the country, he regularly visited Sinéad de Valera and the children at their home in Greystones, County Wicklow. He brought her money and news from America, and he also played with the children. Sinéad de Valera sincerely appreciated his help. In later life she would go out of her way to tell members of the Collins family how much the visits had meant to her. She appreciated that he took the trouble to visit her personally, rather than sending messengers, as he could so easily have done.
He also arranged for her to visit the United States, but that may not have been one of his more helpful gestures, to judge, at least, from de Valera’s reaction. He complained that his wife’s place was at home with the children, and she promptly returned to Ireland. There were, however, some rather unseemly rumours about de Valera’s relationship with his secretary, Kathleen O’Connell, whom he met in the United States. They had been travelling together, and it was rumoured they were having an affair.
On 16 November 1920 de Valera formally launched the new organisation in Washington, D.C. The American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic prospered for some months and seemed to justify de Valera’s belief that Cohalan’s leadership was unacceptable to many Irish-Americans. In the following year the Friends of Irish Freedom suffered serious defections as its membership declined to about 20,000, while that of the new association soared to around half a million in the same period.
But any chance of securing official American recognition had already been dashed with the election of Senator Warren G. Harding as the next President of the United States in November 1920. There had been a noticeable shift among Irish-Americans to the Republican candidate even though he made no effort to woo votes on the Irish question. In fact, when asked during the campaign about his attitude towards the Irish issue, he came down clearly on the British side. ‘I would not care to undertake to say to Great Britain what she must do any more than I would permit her to tell us what we must do with the Philippines,’ Harding declared.
De Valera had failed dismally in his principal goal of securing official American recognition, as well as in his secondary aim of helping to end the developing split within Irish-American ranks. The split was wider than ever when he returned to Ireland in December 1920, but he did leave behind a viable organisation which was primarily dedicated towards serving the Irish cause, rather than using the Irish situation to serve American ends. His mission had certainly not been a total failure, because he collected over $5 million for the cause at home. Moreover, by his clever exploitation of the opportunities afforded for propaganda, he had secured invaluable publicity for the cause. As a result of this publicity the British government came under enormous pressure to negotiate an Irish settlement, if only to avoid Anglo-American difficulties.
Prior to 1920 the British cabinet was too preoccupied with other problems to devote much attention to Ireland, but the need to do something about the deteriorating situation gradually dawned on Lloyd George and his colleagues. During the early months of 1920 they set about changing their own policy and undertook a thorough spring-cleaning of the Dublin Castle administration. Sir Hamar Greenwood was appointed Chief Secretary, Sir John Anderson under-secretary, and Sir Alfred (Andy) Cope assistant under-secretary. General Sir Nevil Macready became commander-in-chief of British forces in Ireland, Major-General Henry Tudor took over at the head of the police, and General Sir Ormonde Winter became chief of combined intelligence services.
From the outset Greenwood was determined to follow a hard-line policy. Even before visiting Ireland he ‘talked the most awful tosh about shooting Sinn Féiners at sight, and without evidence, and frightfulness generally’, according to Sir Maurice Hankey, the cabinet secretary.
The British began to retaliate by using some of the IRA’s tactics. In Cork during recent weeks, for instance, there had been the killings of Quinlisk and a number of constables, as well as the shooting of District Inspector MacDonagh. The police held Tomás MacCurtain responsible; he was both lord mayor of Cork and commander of the local IRA. On the night of 20 March, following the killing of another constable, a group of men with blackened faces forced their way into MacCurtain’s home and shot him dead in front of his wife and daughter.
At the subsequent inquest there was evidence that the RIC had assisted the killers during the attack by cordoning off the area around the shop over which MacCurtain lived. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of murder against Lloyd George and various members of the British administration in Ireland, as well as District Inspector Swanzy of the RIC. He was one of a large number of Orangemen from Ulster stationed in Cork, and they were believed to have been implicated in the killing. Swanzy was transferred from Cork for his own protection.
Collins was deeply upset by the death of his friend, MacCurtain; they had been quite close ever since their internment together in Frongoch. ‘I have not very much heart in what I am doing today, thinking of poor Tomás,’ Collins wrote to Terence MacSwiney. ‘It is surely the most appalling thing that has been done yet.’
Two similar killings took place on following nights in the Thurles area, where the RIC also contained a strong contingent of Orangemen. Collins complained that the British and ‘their agents here, whether military, police or civil, are doing all they can to goad the people into premature action’. It had been with difficulty that Mulcahy and Collins had persuaded MacCurtain not to go ahead with plans to stage a 1916-style rebellion in Cork to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Easter Rebellion. Terence MacSwiney, who succeeded MacCurtain as lord mayor, would not be easily goaded. He was quite prepared to suffer. ‘This contest is one of endurance,’ he declared in his inaugural address. ‘It is not they who can inflict most, but they who can suffer most who will conquer.’
The other side’s capacity for suffering was already showing signs of stress. Members of the RIC were not prepared to put up with the social ostracisation and attacks to which they were being subjected. Resignations from the force were running at more than two hundred a month in early 1920. It was not long before the British found it necessary to bring in new recruits from outside. The first of these arrived in Ireland on 25 March 1920. They had been recruited so hastily that there was not time to get them proper uniforms.
All wore the dark green caps and belts of the RIC, but some had the dark green tunics with military khaki pants, while others had khaki tunics and dark green pants. Most were veterans of the Great War who had been unable either to find civilian employment or to adjust to civilian life. The ten shillings a day, all found, was a relatively good wage for the time, especially for men who were desperate for a job. In view of the colour of their uniforms and the ruthless reputation they quickly acquired, they were called Black and Tans after a pack of hounds. The more active undoubtedly welcomed the name, because they — like Dan Breen — tended to see their enemy in terms of hunting ‘game’.
Faced with the choice of British or Irish terrorists, the Irish people preferred their own; they hid them and supported them. As a result the Black and Tans quickly began to look on all civilians as their enemy and acted accordingly, thereby further alienating the Irish people from the Crown government.
The week after the arrival of the first contingent of Black and Tans, the IRA intensified its campaign. At Collins’s suggestion tax offices throughout the country were fire-bombed on the night of 3 April in an attempt to disrupt the British tax-collecting apparatus. Around the same time more than 350 unoccupied RIC barracks were burned to the ground.
When the British government discussed what to do about the Irish situation, General Macready advocated making the security forces mobile enough to surprise IRA bands, but Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of imperial general staff, dismissed this idea as useless. He wanted, instead, ‘to collect the names of Sinn Féiners by districts; proclaim them on church doors all over the country; and whenever a policeman is murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them!’ One could hardly imagine anything more likely to provoke the indignation of Irish people than to defile their churches in such a barbarous manner. The suggestion was a measure of the wooden stupidity of the Crown authorities when it came to dealing with Ireland.
‘Somehow or other terror must be met by greater terror,’ wrote Sir Maurice Hankey. And this is precisely what happened. When members of the new Dublin Castle administration met on 31 May to discuss the situation with Lloyd George and Minister for War Winston Churchill, the new Chief Secretary complained of ‘thugs’ going about shooting people in Dublin, Cork, and Limerick. ‘We are certain that these are handsomely paid,’ Greenwood said, ‘the money comes from the USA.’ According to him, Collins paid ‘the murderers in public houses’.
‘It is monstrous that we have 200 murders and no one hung,’ Churchill cried. ‘After a person is caught he should pay the penalty within a week. Look at the tribunals which the Russian Government have devised. You should get three or four judges whose scope should be universal and they should move quickly over the country and do summary justice.’ It was ironic that he, of all people, should privately advocate imitating the Bolshevik system, against which he railed in his public speeches.
‘You agreed six or seven months ago that there should be hanging,’ he said to Lloyd George.
‘I feel certain you must hang,’ the Prime Minister replied, but he doubted that an Irish jury would convict any rebel of a capital offence. In the circumstances, he therefore advocated economic pressure.
‘Increase their pecuniary burdens,’ he said. ‘There is nothing farmers so much dislike as the rates.’
‘Why not make life intolerable in a particular area?’ Churchill asked.
‘We are at present in very much of a fog,’ Macready explained. The old system of intelligence had broken down, as the DMP’s ‘morale had been destroyed by the murders’. There was no longer an effective detective division in Ireland, though he added that a new system was being built.
While the British were reorganising, Collins’s network was able to settle an old score. On 15 June Joe Sweeney happened to be in the bar of the Wicklow Hotel when Collins stomped in.
‘We got the bugger, Joe.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Sweeney asked.
‘Do you remember that first night outside the Rotunda? Lee Wilson?’
‘I’ll never forget it.’
‘Well,’ said Collins, ‘we got him today in Gorey.’
He had tracked Wilson to Gorey, County Wexford, where he was an RIC district inspector. He was shot dead that morning in revenge for his degrading treatment of Tom Clarke on the evening of the surrender in 1916.
‘Sinn Féin has had all the sport up to the present, and we are going to have sport now,’ Colonel Ferguson Smyth, the newly appointed RIC divisional commissioner for Munster, told the assembled police at the RIC station in Listowel on 19 June. A highly decorated veteran, he was scarred by the Great War in which he had been shot six times and had lost an arm as a result of his injuries. He seemed a rather embittered man as he advocated the RIC should shoot first and ask questions afterwards, but his remarks were obviously authorised because General Tudor was present.
‘We must take the offensive and beat Sinn Féin at its own tactics,’ Smyth said. ‘If persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are suspicious looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally, and innocent people may be shot, but that cannot be helped. No policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.’
‘By your accent I take it you are an Englishman, and in your ignorance you forget you are addressing Irishmen,’ Constable Jeremiah Mee replied, appalled by the thought of such a policy. He took off his cap and belt and threw them on a table. ‘These, too, are English,’ he said. ‘Take them.’
Smyth, a native of Banbridge, County Down, denied he was English. He ordered that Mee be arrested, but the constable’s colleagues shared his indignation and ignored the order. Afterwards Mee drew up an account of what had happened and thirteen of those present testified to its accuracy by signing the statement.
Mee and a colleague met Collins and others in Dublin on 15 July. Those present included Countess Markievicz and Erskine Childers (who was editor of the republican news-sheet The Bulletin), together with the editor and managing director of the Freeman’s Journal, which had recently published details of Smyth’s speech and was being sued for libel as a result.
‘I had always imagined that the IRA leaders who were “on the run” were in hiding in cellars or in some out of the way place far removed from the scene of hostilities,’ Mee recalled. ‘I was somewhat surprised then, as I sat with some of these same leaders, and calmly discussed the current situation, while military lorries were speeding through the street under the very windows of the room where our conference was taking place. As a matter of fact there seemed to be nothing to prevent anybody walking into that room and finding Michael Collins and Countess Markievicz.’
‘For at least three hours we sat there under a cross-examination,’ Mee wrote. The representatives of the Freeman’s Journal were trying to build a defence against the libel action, and the republicans were seeking to exploit the Listowel incident for propaganda purposes. But Smyth never got the chance to press his libel suit. He was shot by the IRA on 18 July in the County Club in Cork city. He was hit five times and died at the scene. When the authorities sought to hold an inquest afterwards, they were unable to find enough people to serve on a jury.
In the coming months, Collins would milk the controversy surrounding Smyth’s remarks in Listowel for all the affair was worth in the propaganda war by recruiting Mee and two of his colleagues for speaking tours of the United States. In a way it was ironic because the policy advocated by Smyth was not really much different from that being pursued by the IRA in general, and Collins in particular. ‘We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people,’ Pearse had written in the article in An Claidheamh Soluis which Collins had endorsed so enthusiastically.
Collins’s intelligence network also traced District Inspector Swanzy to Lisburn, County Antrim, where he was shot dead on 22 August in revenge for the killing of MacCurtain. ‘Inspector Swanzy and his associates put Lord Mayor MacCurtain away,’ Collins later explained, ‘so I got Swanzy and all his associates wiped out, one by one, in all parts of Ireland to which they had been secretly dispersed.’
The killing of Swanzy led to a massive outbreak of sectarian violence in Belfast and other towns in Antrim, as Roman Catholics were burned out of their homes in mixed areas, and some eight thousand Catholic workers were expelled from the shipyards and other industries. The Dáil retaliated by sanctioning a boycott of goods from Belfast.
IRA units in various parts of the country had begun attacking policemen, many on a random basis, as Breen and his colleagues had done at Soloheadbeg. One incident that caused particular revulsion was the killing of Constable Mulhern in Bandon, County Cork. He was shot in the local Catholic Church, where he had gone to attend Sunday mass on 25 July 1920. Others were shot, not because they had shown initiative against Sinn Féin or the IRA, but simply because they were policemen. When the Crown forces retaliated, it contributed to a vicious circle of violence.
Flying columns were established by the IRA in several areas to cope with the increasing mobility of Crown forces. Local leaders like Tom Barry and Liam Lynch in Cork, Tom Maguire in Mayo, and Seán MacEoin in the Longford area generally acted independently of IRA headquarters, but Collins was always quick to endorse their actions, and this created the impression that their efforts were being orchestrated centrally. As a result Collins was often credited with, or accused of, involvement in skirmishes that he only learned about later.
Dick Mulcahy looked on Breen and the Soloheadbeg gang as a kind of nuisance. Their wild, undisciplined approach to matters, especially their unauthorised killing of the two policemen on the day the Dáil was established, was resented. Even within the IRA, they were not generally welcome in Dublin. ‘The only place in which they could find association and some kind of scope for their activities was on the fringe of Collins’s Intelligence activity work,’ according to Mulcahy. Collins adopted a warm and friendly attitude towards them. ‘It would have been a comfort to them at all times compared with the natural attitude of Gearóid O’Sullivan and Diarmuid O’Hegarty,’ Mulcahy wrote. Of course, Collins’s ‘rough breezy manner’ afforded him ‘greater flexibility in being able, while putting up with them when he liked, to get away with pushing them unceremoniously out of his way when he didn’t want them’.
Lloyd George’s initial hope of using economic pressure to turn the Irish people against the rebels by putting the cost of fighting on the local rates was undermined when Sinn Féin won control of all but five of the island’s thirty-three county councils in June 1920. As a result the party controlled the striking of rates throughout all but the north-east corner of Ireland. Later that month Collins outmanoeuvred the British on the income tax front by getting the Dáil to establish a tax department. All Irish people were called upon to pay income tax to this new department rather than to the British government, and the Dáil promised to indemnify anyone against loss. The call was partly effective as people avoided Crown taxes by exploiting the chaos caused by the burning of tax offices in April. Some did pay the Sinn Féin regime, but most simply used the opportunity to evade income tax altogether.
With economic pressure holding little prospect for success, Lloyd George gave a virtual free rein to militants like Churchill and Greenwood. On 23 July 1920 Churchill told his cabinet colleagues it was necessary ‘to raise the temperature of the conflict’. One of his pet schemes was to recruit ‘a special force’ of carefully selected men to act in Ireland. The cabinet authorised this during the summer, and advertisements were placed for a corps d’élite in which the recruits were supposed to be veteran officers from any of the services.
Known as Auxiliaries, they contained a mixture of fine men and scoundrels. On the whole they were more intelligent than the Black and Tans and received twice the pay. Like the Black and Tans they wore a blend of police and military uniforms, though with their own distinctive headgear, a glengarry cap. They were heavily armed; each man carried two revolvers, some on low-slung holsters, Wild West style, and they also had a rifle each, as well as a Sam Browne belt. They usually travelled in Crossley tenders, seated back to back in two rows, and they had at their disposal fast armoured cars with revolving turrets and Vickers machine guns. They were a formidable force as far as the IRA was concerned. Although sometimes accused of having started the counter-terror, the policy was already in operation for some time before the Auxiliaries took up duty in September 1920.
During August the Black and Tans revenged attacks on their forces by ‘shooting up’ towns and burning the business premises or homes of people known to be sympathetic to Sinn Féin. In towns like Bantry, Fermoy, Thurles, Limerick, Enniscorthy, Tuam, and other towns and villages, they rampaged about the streets, shooting indiscriminately into buildings, and generally terrorising the communities. In the process nine civilians were killed.
Although a hard-liner, Field Marshal Wilson was disgusted at the undisciplined conduct of the Black and Tans. ‘I told Lloyd George that the authorities were gravely miscalculating the situation but he reverted to his amazing theory that someone was murdering two Sinn Féiners to every loyalist the Sinn Féiners were murdering,’ Wilson wrote on 1 September. ‘He seemed to be satisfied that a counter murder association was the best answer to Sinn Féin murders.’
Collins, for his part, saw the British terror as a kind of mixed blessing, in that it clearly drove any doubting nationalists into the arms of Sinn Féin. ‘The enemy continues to be savage and ruthless, and innocent people are murdered and outraged daily,’ he wrote on 13 August. ‘Apart from the loss which these attacks entail, good is done as it makes clear and clearer to people what both sides stand for.’
Even the DMP betrayed signs of uneasiness with the British policy. Since it was implicit in Collins’s attitude towards the force that policemen would not be attacked if they stayed out of political or military matters, representatives of the DMP approached Sinn Féin for a guarantee that they would not be shot at if they stopped carrying weapons. Collins was consulted and he agreed, provided they also ceased their supportive role of the military on raids. The DMP commissioner agreed and the force was effectively withdrawn from the ongoing struggle during October.
While the terror and counter-terror were spiralling, the British sent out peace feelers and quietly orchestrated press speculation about a possible settlement on the lines of Dominion Home Rule. Fearing that Lloyd George was merely exploiting the speculation in order to obscure the terrorist policies of British forces, Collins tried to scotch the unfounded rumours by giving his famous newspaper interview to the celebrated American journalist, Carl W. Ackermann, who had earlier interviewed Lenin during the Russian Revolution. Ackermann had sought a meeting with Collins because the British considered him ‘the most important member of the Irish Republican cabinet’. (This was the interview that Devoy exploited in the Gaelic American to suggest that Collins was the real Irish leader.)
‘There will be no compromise,’ Collins told Ackermann, ‘and we will have no negotiations with any British Government until Ireland is recognised as an independent republic.’
‘But Mr Collins,’ the reporter asked, ‘would you not consider accepting Dominion Home Rule as an installment?’
‘I see you think we have only to whittle our demand down to Dominion Home Rule and we shall get it. This talk about Dominion Home Rule is not promoted by England with a view to granting it to us, but merely with a view of getting rid of the Republican movement. England will give us neither as a gift. The same effort that would get us Dominion Home Rule will get us a Republic.’
Ackermann concluded his scoop with a prediction that ‘there will be a real war in Ireland in the not-distant future’. A British officer told him ‘the next few weeks will be decisive — one way or the other’.
The outrages continued. On the night of 20 September 1920, one of the Black and Tans was shot and killed in a pub in the village of Balbriggan, a short distance from Dublin. Afterwards his colleagues went on the rampage in the village, bayoneted to death two young men, viciously beat others with rifle butts, and burned down some twenty homes. When questions were asked in the House of Commons, Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, virtually condoned the police taking the law into their own hands.
‘I found that from 100 to 150 men went to Balbriggan determined to avenge the death of a popular comrade shot at and murdered in cold blood,’ Greenwood said. ‘I find that it is impossible out of that 150 to find the men who did the deed, who did the burning. I have had the most searching inquiry made. But I cannot in my heart of hearts condemn in the same way those policemen who lost their heads as I condemn the assassins who provoked this outrage.’
The Sinn Féin regime was clearly getting the better of the propaganda struggle on the world stage, and the movement received enormous publicity when the new lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, went on hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. He had been arrested in August after being found in possession of police codes personally given to him by Collins. Although there were eleven others on hunger strike in Cork around the same time, he got the most extensive publicity because he was an elected member of the British parliament. His seventy-four-day fast was given worldwide publicity, and Lloyd George came under pressure from all sides to do something about MacSwiney and the deteriorating situation in Ireland.
Collins took a keen interest in MacSwiney’s condition and was in regular contact with Art O’Brien, the Sinn Féin representative in London, where Cork’s lord mayor was imprisoned in Brixton Jail. ‘As the days pass,’ Collins wrote to O’Brien, ‘we will marvel more and more at the fight being made by him and by our men in Cork.’
At one point, O’Brien reported that MacSwiney was deeply agitated by rumours that de Valera was going to announce that he would go on hunger strike himself, if the lord mayor died. MacSwiney believed the hunger strike would not prove effective again because the British realised that they had made a mistake in allowing things to go so far. In future they would force-feed hunger strikers, but those already on hunger strike were too far gone.
De Valera apparently never had any intention of making such a gesture. He felt very strongly that once anybody went on hunger strike, it was necessary to carry it through to its ultimate conclusion. A couple of years later when MacSwiney’s sister Mary went on hunger strike, de Valera essentially insisted that she would hurt the cause if she did not persist, having started.
‘When Terry was dying, knowing how conscientious he was and how good, I feared he might have some scruples about what he was doing, and intended giving him an official order to continue, as I might to a soldier running great risk on the battlefield,’ de Valera wrote to her. ‘For him to surrender having begun would have been not personal defeat, but defeat for the cause. Your cause is the same and may the God of Calvary give your spirit the necessary strength to endure to the last if need be and take you to Himself when your ordeal is ended.’
Collins, on the other hand, reportedly wrote to Terence MacSwiney suggesting that he had ‘put up a glorious fight’ and had done all that was humanly possible. ‘The British Cabinet mean to finish this hunger strike weapon of ours, and do not intend to release you,’ Collins reportedly wrote. ‘I now order you to give up the strike as you will be ten times a greater asset to the movement alive than dead.’ Seán Murphy, the republican diplomat, said that he saw the letter in the Big Fellow’s own handwriting. He was visiting MacSwiney and the letter was passed around amongst his visitors. All of them thought Collins was right, with the exception of Terence’s sister Mary, who would have ‘no surrender’.
Although Dr Daniel Cohalan, the bishop of Cork, virtually sanctified the death of MacSwiney in 1920 by describing him as a martyr, he later rounded on Mary MacSwiney for having ‘gambled on the life’ of her brother in the apparent belief that the British would be compelled to relent and release him. ‘She encouraged Terry to continue the strike,’ Bishop Cohalan said. ‘She never believed it would go to a fatal end. She thought he would be released, and that she would share in a sunburst of cheap glory.’ Of course, there were republicans, like Ernie O’Malley, who thought that the lord mayor would be of more use to the movement if he were allowed to die rather than being freed in the final days. He hoped MacSwiney ‘would not be released when his body was almost used up’.
Michael Fitzgerald was the first of the hunger strikers to die, and eight days later, on 25 October, Joseph Murphy, a seventeen-year-old, died the same day as MacSwiney. Though both Fitzgerald and Murphy were on the seventy-fifth day of their fast, their deaths received very little attention in comparison with the massive international coverage given to MacSwiney. People around the world were greatly moved by his fortitude and determination. Among those who derived inspiration was Mahatma Gandhi in India, and another was Clement Attlee, the future British Prime Minister, who would be in power over a quarter of a century later when Gandhi used similar tactics in leading the Indian people to independence. Attlee was so moved by MacSwiney’s gesture that he actually walked in the first part of his funeral in Britain.
While the MacSwiney drama was being played out, there was an intense debate raging in British government circles about the impact of their policy of counter-murder. In private Lloyd George ‘strongly defended the murder reprisals’, according to Sir Maurice Hankey, the cabinet sec-retary. ‘The truth is that these reprisals are more or less winked at by the Government.’ Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of imperial general staff, was blunt with Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, when he had a ninety-minute meeting with them on 29 September 1920. ‘I pointed out that these reprisals were carried out without anybody being responsible; men were murdered, houses burnt, villages wrecked,’ Wilson noted in his diary. ‘I said that this was due to want of discipline, and this must be stopped. It was the business of Government to govern. If these men ought to be murdered, then the Government ought to murder them. Lloyd George danced at all this, said no Government could possibly take this responsibility.’
Winston Churchill was concerned that the security forces were ‘getting out of control, drinking, and thieving, and destroying indiscriminately’. He argued that the reprisal policy should be formally regularised. Instead of turning a blind eye while the Black and Tans burned or killed indiscriminately, he wanted it done officially and publicly acknowledged, with the full support of the British government. He wanted official hangings rather than shooting prisoners in cold blood and then contending they were killed while trying to escape.
After months of clamouring, he finally had his way with the hanging of Kevin Barry, who was executed on Monday, 1 November, All Saints Day. Barry, an eighteen-year-old university student, had been captured after a shoot-out in which a couple of British soldiers had been killed. It is hard to imagine how the British thought that making a martyr out of Barry would help their cause. In view of his age, there was strong public pressure for his sentence to be commuted. Collins tried to arrange for Barry’s escape but all efforts failed, and the young man became, in the words of the popular ballad:
Another martyr for old Ireland,
Another murder for the Crown,
Whose brutal laws may kill the Irish
But can’t keep their spirit down.
On the eve of Barry’s hanging, Terence MacSwiney was buried in Cork. De Valera was speaking in the Polo Grounds baseball stadium in New York that day and he drew attention to the impending execution of Barry. MacSwiney and Michael Fitzgerald had sacrificed themselves for love of country, de Valera declared. ‘The English have killed them,’ he told the crowd. ‘Tomorrow a boy, Kevin Barry, they will hang, and he alike, will only regret that he has but one life to give. Oh God!’ De Valera then went on to quote W. B. Yeats:
They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever.
The people shall hear them forever.
Tensions were running extremely high around the country that Sunday night. Collins was reportedly very upset about the situation, and the IRA were asked to make their presence felt. Maybe they could not save Barry, but they could make the British realise that the executions would not be taken lying down. There were over fifty attacks on police throughout the country that night, and seven policemen were killed in Kerry. Two Black and Tans, lured into a trap by local girls, were killed in Tralee and buried in the mud of the local canal at low tide.
The Tans retaliated by burning down the local County Hall the same night and enforcing a reign of terror in Tralee for the next nine days. On Monday they fired just over the heads of people coming from twelve o’clock mass at St John’s Parish Church. John Conway, a fifty-seven-year-old painter and father of six, was killed by the Tans as he was returning from evening devotions. The authorities said that he died of heart failure but a bullet wound to his head was clearly visible, according to a journalist from The Times of London. He was one of a group of foreign journalists who stayed at the Grand Hotel in Tralee that Monday night. Others included representatives from Associated Press, Le Journal (Paris), the London Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, and the London Evening News. They had come from Cork following MacSwiney’s funeral.
Hugh Martin of the Daily News ventured out into deserted streets, along with A. E. McGregor from the Evening News. ‘Upon leaving the Grand Hotel we noticed a party of from twenty to twenty-five men standing on the opposite side of the road,’ Martin reported. ‘We greeted them and said we were journalists. They were Black and Tans.’
‘What have you come for, to spy on us, I suppose!’ one of the men remarked. McGregor explained that they had come to find out the facts about the burning of the County Hall. They were ordered to get indoors. During the night they could hear the noise of shop windows being broken as the Black and Tans attacked the business premises of people known to support Sinn Féin.
A French journalist with the group depicted a frightening situation. ‘I do not remember, even during the war, having seen a people so profoundly terrified as those of this little town, Tralee,’ M. de Marsillac, the London correspondent of Le Journal reported. ‘The violence of the reprisals undertaken by representatives of authority, so to speak, everywhere, has made everybody beside himself, even before facts justified such a state of mind.’
Not knowing the fate of their two missing colleagues, the Tans were insisting that the two men should be released, and for the next eight days, people were ordered to stay indoors. Businesses were not allowed to open, the three local newspapers had to suspend publication, and all schools were shut. The security forces rampaged about the deserted streets firing shots in the air, or even firing blindly into windows as they drove up and down.
Tommy Wall, a twenty-four-year-old former soldier who had fought in France during the First World War, was standing at the corner of the main street around noon on Tuesday when some Tans told him to put up his hands. Being a former soldier who had fought for the Crown, he apparently thought he was safe, but one of the men hit him in the face with a rifle butt and told him to get out of the place. As he left they shot him fatally and declared that he was killed while trying to escape.
‘All the afternoon, except for soldiers, the town was as deserted and doleful as if the Angel of Death had passed through it,’ de Marsillac wrote. ‘Not a living soul in the streets. All the shops shut and the bolts hastily fastened. All work suspended, even the local newspapers.’
‘It is impossible for any person who has not been in the town to realise the terrible plight of the people,’ the Kerry People reported when it returned to the streets afterwards. ‘The privations, particularly in the case of the poorer classes, are appalling, and starvation has by now entered many a home.’
‘The police in Ireland are themselves the victims of a condition of terrorism which is only equalled by the condition of terrorism that they themselves endeavour to impose,’ Hugh Martin of the Daily News wrote. ‘They are, for the most part, quite young men who have gone through the experience, at once toughening and demoralising, of fighting through a long and savage war. They are splendid soldiers and abominably bad policemen.’
‘I do not blame the police or soldiers for the impasse,’ Martin continued. ‘But no honest man who has seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears the fearful plight to which unhappy Ireland has been brought could fail to curse in his heart the political gamble that bred it or cease to use all the power of his pen to end it.’
On Friday, 5 November, Hamar Greenwood told the House of Commons that John Conway had died of natural causes, even though The Times had already reported that its correspondent had seen the obvious bullet wound in his temple.
‘The vital fact in the tragedy is that while the Chief Secretary is repeating his stereotyped assurances that things are getting better, it is patent to the readers of newspapers the world over that they are getting daily worse,’ the Daily News commented. ‘At the moment the supreme need is to withdraw the troops. If the police cannot remain unprotected, let them go too. Ireland could not be worse off without them than with them. There is every reason to believe her state would be incomparably better.’
On the evening of 9 November the Black and Tans posted notices in Tralee that businesses would be allowed to open next morning. That night Lloyd George declared in his address at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall, London, that it was necessary to ‘break the terror before you can get peace’. He left no doubt that he intended to persist with his policy of counter-terror, and he seemed confident he was getting the upper hand. ‘We have murder by the throat,’ Lloyd George declared. ‘We had to reorganise the police and when the Government was ready we struck the terrorists and now the terrorists are complaining of terror.’
With events in Ireland under the international spotlight, speculation about a possible settlement commanded growing press attention. The British had been sending out peace feelers ever since July when a Conservative member of parliament made discreet approaches to Art O’Brien in London about the kind of terms that Sinn Féin would be looking for. Collins was rather dismissive of the approach. He predicted that nothing was likely to happen unless the United States was asked to intervene or ‘offered her services as a mediator’.
Nevertheless Lloyd George continued to encourage peace feelers behind the scenes for the remainder of the year, through a number of people like John Steele of the Chicago Daily Tribune, a Mayo businessman named Patrick Moylett, and George Russell (Æ), the well-known writer. Peace speculation was boosted when former Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, wrote to The Times in early October advocating that Britain offer Ireland ‘the status of an autonomous dominion in the fullest and widest sense’.
Moylett came to Dublin for informal talks with Griffith in mid-October, and, upon his return to London, was invited by Lloyd George to sit in on a Foreign Office meeting at which it was suggested that the Dáil should select three or four people to visit London for preliminary discussions about a formal conference to resolve the Irish situation. Collins remained highly skeptical of the whole proceedings, and felt his suspicions were confirmed when Lloyd George started bragging about having ‘murder by the throat’.
‘I wonder what these people with their hypocritical good intentions and good wishes say to L. George’s speech yesterday,’ Collins wrote. ‘So much for the peace feelers.’
Throughout most of 1920 Ireland was being infiltrated by British Secret Service agents intending to take on Collins and the IRA at their own game in line with the scenario outlined the previous December by the three-man committee on which Alan Bell had served. Most were recruited in London by Basil Thompson, the head of intelligence at Scotland Yard. They were known as the Cairo gang, because some of the more notorious among them hung out at the Cairo Café in Grafton Street.
Members of the gang lived in private houses and guest-houses scattered around the city, and they were given passes to allow them to move about after curfew. Jim McNamara from the DMP furnished the names of people with curfew passes and by a process of elimination Collins’s network was able to narrow the list down to likely agents. Many of them stood out because of their English accents. They were mostly ‘hoy hoy lah-di-dahs’, according to Brigadier General Frank Crozier, the commander of the Auxiliaries. Collins, with the help of his own agents in the postal sorting office, had the mail of suspected members of the Secret Service intercepted and delivered to himself.
Amidst the intercepted correspondence was a letter from Captain F. Harper Shrove to Captain King on 2 March 1920. Even though the country was ‘in a fearful mess’, he wrote that they should be able to put up ‘a good show’ because they had ‘been given a free hand’.
‘Re our little stunt,’ Shrove continued, ‘there are possibilities.’ In hindsight it became apparent that the killing of MacCurtain was part of their ‘little stunt’. The Secret Service planned to exterminate prominent members of Sinn Féin and make it appear that they had been killed in an IRA feud. They had sent a threatening letter to MacCurtain on Dáil Éireann notepaper, seized the previous September in a raid on Sinn Féin headquarters. ‘Thomas MacCurtain, prepare for death,’ it read. ‘You are doomed.’
In the following months most members of the Dáil received threatening letters. One was addressed to Collins at the Mansion House:
AN EYE FOR AN EYE.
A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH
THEREFORE A LIFE FOR A LIFE.
‘I’m quite safe,’ Collins joked. ‘If they get me, I’ll claim I haven’t received my death notice yet.’
While Collins made light of the threat on his own life, he took the overall threat posed by the Secret Service very seriously. In fact, he infiltrated it with at least one agent of his own. Willie Beaumont, a former British army officer, joined the Secret Service to spy for Collins. The agents from Britain had to rely on touts for information, and Beaumont pretended that members of Collins’s intelligence staff — Tom Cullen, Frank Thornton, and Frank Saurin — were his touts. He introduced them to, and they got to know, other Secret Service agents. On one occasion Cullen and Thornton were with Beaumont and David Neligan in a Grafton Street café when one of the Cairo gang joined them. ‘Surely you fellows know these men — Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton,’ he said. ‘These are Collins’s three officers, and if you can get them we could locate Collins himself.’ Getting Collins had clearly become a prime goal of the Secret Service, and they were getting close. At least they now knew the names of his staff, though they were seriously handicapped in not knowing what any of them looked like.
One of the British Secret Service agents, going under the name of F. Digby Hardy, acted as an agent provocateur. He met Griffith and offered to set up his intelligence chief on Dun Laoghaire pier so that the IRA could kill him, but Collins was forewarned. Griffith invited reporters, including foreign correspondents, to a secret meeting on 16 September 1920. Before the meeting he briefed them about Hardy. ‘This man admits he is in the English Secret Service, and offered to arrange for the presence of the Secret Service Chief at a lonely point on Dun Laoghaire pier,’ Griffith told the reporters. ‘He asked me to let him meet leaders of the movement, especially on the military side, and he is coming here this evening imagining that he is to meet some inner council of the Sinn Féin movement,’ Griffith explained. ‘I will let him tell you his own story, but I will ask the foreign gentlemen present not to speak much, lest the man’s suspicion be aroused.’
Hardy duly arrived and told the gathering that he was a Secret Service agent and that upon his arrival in Ireland he had been met by Basil Thompson of Scotland Yard at Dun Laoghaire pier and given instructions to find Michael Collins. He offered to arrange another meeting with Thompson on the pier so the IRA could kill him. He also said that he could arrange to lead the Auxiliaries into an ambush and could locate arsenals of the Ulster Volunteer Force. If the IRA would give him information about Collins’s whereabouts, he said he would withhold the information for a couple of days and could then impress his Secret Service superiors by giving them the information. ‘And, of course,’ he added familiarly, ‘no harm would come to Mick.’
‘Well, gentlemen, you have heard this man’s proposal and can judge for yourselves,’ Griffith intervened. He then proceeded to expose Hardy as a convicted criminal, with actual details of his criminal record. ‘You are a scoundrel, Hardy,’ he said, ‘but the people who employ you are greater scoundrels. A boat will leave Dublin tonight at nine o’clock. My advice to you is — catch that boat and never return to Ireland.’
Griffith furnished the press with detailed inside information supplied by Collins about Hardy’s criminal record. He had been freed from jail to work for the Secret Service, and it made for good propaganda to show that the British were using criminal elements to do their dirty work in Ireland. Indeed, the Sinn Féin Propaganda Department would do such an effective job that many Irish people believed the British had opened their jails for any criminals prepared to serve the Crown in Ireland. This was absurd, but incidents like the Hardy affair certainly lent it credence.
The following week the Secret Service struck again. John Lynch, a Sinn Féin county councillor from Kilmallock, County Limerick, who had come to Dublin with National Loan money for Collins, was shot dead in his room at the Exchange Hotel on the night of 23 September. Secret Service agents claimed he had pulled a gun on them, but Collins dismissed this. ‘There is not the slightest doubt that there was no intention whatever to arrest Mr Lynch,’ he wrote. ‘Neither is there the slightest doubt that he was not in possession of a revolver.’ Neligan reported to Collins that Captain Bagally, a one-legged court-martial officer, had telephoned Dublin Castle about Lynch’s presence in the hotel, and the men responsible for the actual shooting were two undercover officers using the names MacMahon and Peel, each a nom de guerre. There was some suggestion that John Lynch was mistaken for Liam Lynch, an IRA commandant, but that was hardly likely seeing that there was an extreme difference in their ages. John Lynch was simply a Sinn Féiner, and this had become a capital offence as far as the British Secret Service was concerned.
Griffith publicly charged the Secret Service with planning to kill moderates in Sinn Féin and give the impression that they were victims of an internal feud. In this way the movement’s international support could be undermined. ‘A certain number of Sinn Féin leaders have been marked down for assassination,’ he said. ‘I am first on the list. They intended to kill two birds with the one stone by getting me and circulating the story I have been assassinated by extremists because I am a man of moderate action.’
The British were particularly anxious to catch Collins, but he was proving extremely elusive. Bertie Smyllie, a journalist with The Irish Times, was sitting in a Dublin restaurant with a friend who seemed to know everybody. ‘Suddenly I noticed that my companion had turned very pale,’ Smyllie wrote later.
‘Don’t look round yet,’ his friend whispered, ‘Michael Collins has just come in.’
‘I could not resist the temptation to have a look at the elusive “Mike”. The man to whom my friend referred was small, thin, with mouse-coloured hair, and looked rather like a jockey. What he lacked in physique, however, he made up in facial ferocity, for a more villainous looking individual I never saw.’
‘Are you sure that he is Collins?’ Smyllie asked.
‘Of course, don’t I know him well!’
The same thing undoubtedly happened to many other people, and in time some of Collins’s own people would deliberately sow the seeds of confusion. So many diverse descriptions of him added to his aura of elusiveness. Of course the Black and Tans were at a disadvantage in looking for him as they did not know him, but he was known to detectives of the DMP. Yet he had infiltrated them with his spy network, killed off their most efficient officers, and so terrorised the remainder that they were virtually impotent. They were afraid to arrest him for fear of the retaliation of the faceless people who were believed to be protecting him. For instance, Lady Gregory wrote that Collins was known to the police but whenever he felt threatened he would blow a whistle, whereupon hundreds of men would appear and he would vanish in the shuffle. Of course that was nonsense.
Brigadier Ormonde Winter, who took charge of intelligence at Dublin Castle, grudgingly admitted to holding ‘a certain respect’ for his enemies, among whom he singled out Collins as pre-eminent. ‘Actuated by an intense patriotism,’ Winter wrote, ‘he combined the characteristics of a Robin Hood with those of an elusive Pimpernel. His many narrow escapes, when he managed to elude almost certain arrest, shrouded him in a cloak of historical romance.’ As a result he was credited with exploits in which he had no involvement.
The ensuing notoriety was to cause problems for Collins, especially with Cathal Brugha. Although Brugha’s reaction was widely attributed to jealousy, the charge was probably unfair because he was really a selfless character who never sought glory for himself. Brugha was ‘as brave and as brainless as a bull’, according to Richard Mulcahy, who as the IRA chief of staff acted as a kind of buffer between Brugha as Minister for Defence and Collins. As cabinet ministers, Collins and Brugha were equals in the Dáil. However, as director of intelligence of the IRA, Collins was answerable to Mulcahy, who in turn was answerable to Brugha. Mulcahy essentially allowed Collins to do his own thing, and Brugha resented the way Collins was operating. He was repulsed by the egotistical side of the Big Fellow’s personality and the way he interfered in matters that were outside the scope of his official duties.
All British intelligence was being co-ordinated in Dublin Castle by Winter. With his monocle and greased black hair, plastered flat, he was like the prototype of a character in a spy thriller. ‘A most amazing original’ was how the assistant secretary at Dublin Castle, Mark Sturgis, described him. ‘He looks like a wicked little white snake, and is clever as pain, [and] probably entirely non-moral.’ In October Winter organised the Central Raid Bureau to co-ordinate the activities of his agents and the Auxiliaries. And they soon began to make their presence felt.
Major Gerald Smyth, a brother of the one-armed colonel shot in Cork in July, had returned from the Middle East to avenge the death of his brother. It was rumoured that he had been killed by Dan Breen. So when Winter’s people learned that Breen and Seán Treacy were spending the night of 11 October at the Drumcondra home of Professor John Carolan, Smyth was selected to lead the raiding party. They burst into the house, but Smyth and a colleague were killed when Breen and Treacy shot blindly through their bedroom door before making a run for it. Although hit himself, Breen still managed to get away. He went up to a house at random and asked for help as he collapsed on the doorstep.
‘I don’t approve of gunmen,’ he heard the man of the house reply. ‘I shall call the military.’
‘If you do I’ll report you to Michael Collins,’ came a woman’s voice from inside the house. The threat obviously worked because word was passed to the IRA and Breen was collected and taken to the Mater Hospital, where doctors and nurses colluded to hide his identity and the nature of his wounds.
Another patient was Professor Carolan whom the raiding party had put up against a wall and shot in the head. He died of his wounds but not before making a full deathbed statement about what had happened. Treacy had escaped unscathed from Drumcondra only to be shot dead a few days later in a gunbattle in Talbot Street.
Despite his busy schedule and the risk involved, Collins took a keen interest in Breen’s recovery. He visited him in hospital and arranged his transfer to the home of Dr Alice Barry in the south side of the city as soon as he was ready to be moved. Breen was there about a week when he heard a commotion outside the house and looked out to find the whole block cordoned off by the Auxiliaries. They were searching the houses as a crowd of spectators gathered.
‘I concluded there was no chance for me,’ Breen wrote. ‘As I surveyed the mass of spectators, I recognised the figure of Mick Collins.’ He had seen the troops moving in the direction of the house and had followed them in case Breen needed to be rescued. As it was, the Auxiliaries did not bother to search Dr Barry’s home, and Breen was spared.
At one point the DMP thought they had found Breen’s body, so Sergeant Roche of the RIC was brought up from Tipperary to identify him. David Neligan was given the gruesome task of accompanying Roche to the hospital morgue.
‘That’s not Dan Breen,’ Roche said on being shown the body, ‘I’d know his ugly mug anywhere.’
That evening Neligan mentioned the incident to Liam Tobin and added that he was due to meet Roche on Ormond Quay the following afternoon. To his horror next day, Neligan found four members of the Squad waiting for Roche.
‘For Christ’s sake, what has he done?’ Neligan asked.
‘I don’t know,’ one of the men replied. ‘I’ve my orders to shoot him and that’s what I’m going to do.’
Neligan pleaded with them, but it was no good. They shot and killed Roche in front of him. A witness reported that he had seen Neligan talking to one of the killers, and he had some difficulty extricating himself.
Neligan was rightly annoyed that the incident had jeopardised his cover as a spy. It demonstrated a dangerous blind spot in the Big Fellow’s intelligence operations. As a man of action Collins was so anxious to get things done that he sometimes acted before the dust had settled to cover his agents’ tracks.
In early October two American soldiers were shot and wounded by Crown forces in Queenstown (Cobh), and the Republican Publicity Bureau naturally exploited the incident in an effort to secure American publicity and hopefully provoke some Anglo-American difficulties. Collins furnished the Republican Publicity Bureau with a copy of a report from General Tudor to Dublin Castle suggesting that American sailors were engaged in smuggling arms. The report had been supplied by Jim McNamara, who was called to the commissioner’s office and summarily dismissed from the police force. ‘You are lucky,’ Collins told him. There was obviously no hard evidence against McNamara, or he would not have been let go so easily. There was a danger, however, that he would be assassinated by the Secret Service. He therefore went ‘on the run’ to work with the Squad.
As of October 1920 the conflict had become extremely nasty. Collins was deeply upset when he learned that the Black and Tans had captured and tortured Tom Hales, a brother of Seán Hales, his closest friend in Frongoch. Another man tortured at the same time went mad and had to be committed to a mental asylum. Tom Hales managed to smuggle out an account of their ill-treatment, which included pulling out his nails with pincers.
‘I was with Collins when he received the message,’ Piaras Béaslaí recalled. ‘He was beside himself with rage and pity, and, as he told me afterwards, could not sleep that night for thinking of it.’ Collins himself wrote that the whole episode was something ‘that no civilised nation can let pass unchallenged’. It was ironic that he should have been so upset because Tom Hales was the man who would organise the ambush to kill Collins at Béalnabláth less than two years later.
The torture of Hales was indicative of what Collins might expect if he fell into enemy hands. He was now the most wanted man in the country and the Cairo gang were getting close. ‘We were being made to feel that they were very close on the heels of some of us,’ Mulcahy explained.
In the first two weeks of November the Cairo gang detained some of Collins’s closest associates. They had Frank Thornton for ten days, but he managed to convince them that he had nothing to do with the IRA. On the night of 10 November they just missed Mulcahy; he escaped out the skylight of Professor Michael Hayes’s house in South Circular Road around five o’clock in the morning. Three days later they raided Vaughan’s Hotel and questioned Liam Tobin and Tom Cullen, but they managed to bluff their way out of it. In a matter of days the IRA’s chief of staff and the three top men of Collins’s intelligence network had come close to being captured.
Collins prepared detailed files on suspected members of the Cairo gang. One of his sources, whom he merely referred to as ‘Lt. G’, helped identify the members of the gang. Collins planned on killing those he called ‘the particular ones’, and his spy suggested the morning of Sunday, 21 November, as the best time to strike. ‘Arrangements should now be made about the matter,’ Collins wrote to Dick McKee on 17 November. ‘Lt. G is aware of things. He suggests the 21st. A most suitable date and day I think.’
Although Collins was not always as careful as he should have been about protecting the identity of his spies, he was religious about keeping their names to himself. In this case ‘Lt. G’ was apparently a woman typist at army headquarters. She always signed her notes to him with just the letter ‘G’, and he probably added the ‘Lt.’ to make it more difficult for anyone to guess her identity. People naturally assumed his agent was an army officer.
On Saturday night Collins met with Brugha, Mulcahy, McKee, and others to finalise arrangements in the headquarters of the printers’ union at 35 Lower Gardiner Street, where the Dublin Brigade normally held meetings. Brugha felt there was insufficient evidence against some of those named by Collins. But there was no room for doubt in the cases of Peter Ames and George Bennett, the two men who had questioned Tobin and Cullen, nor with Captain Bagally and the two men who had shot John Lynch at the Exchange Hotel, MacMahon and Peel. Brugha authorised their killings along with eleven others.
‘It’s to be done exactly at nine,’ Collins insisted. ‘Neither before nor after. These whores, the British, have got to learn that Irishmen can turn up on time.’ The killings were to be a joint operation of the Squad and the Dublin Brigade, under the command of Dick McKee.
After the meeting Collins, McKee, and some of the others went over to Vaughan’s Hotel for a drink. There was a group of them in an upstairs room when Christy Harte, the porter, became suspicious of one of the hotel guests, a Mr Edwards, who had booked in three days earlier. He made a late-night telephone call and then left the hotel, a rather ominous sign as it was after curfew. Harte immediately went upstairs to where Collins and the others were gathered. ‘I think, sirs, ye ought to be going.’
Collins had come to trust Harte’s instincts and had no hesitation now. ‘Come on boys, quick,’ he said, and all promptly headed for the door.
Collins took refuge a few doors down in the top-floor flat of Dr Paddy Browne of Maynooth College at 39 Parnell Square. From there he watched the raid on Vaughan’s Hotel a few minutes later. By then all the guests in the hotel were legitimately registered, with the exception of Conor Clune, a football supporter in Dublin for a game next day. He had come to the hotel with Peadar Clancy, and had apparently been forgotten. Clune was not registered. Although he was not a member of the IRA, he was obviously nervous when questioned because he made some rather inane comment about being prepared to die for Ireland, or something to that effect. He was therefore taken away for further questioning.
During the night McKee and Clancy were arrested where they were staying, but everything was already in train for the morning. Eleven different assassination teams took part. Some used church bells, and others waited for clocks to strike before they began the operations, exactly at nine o’clock. Each team contained a member of the Squad as well as an intelligence officer, assigned to search the bodies and rooms for documents.
Eleven of the Cairo gang were shot and killed at eight different locations, some in the presence of their families. Captain W. F. Newbury’s pregnant wife was in the room with him at the time; the following week their child was stillborn. There was some confusion over whether or not Captain MacCormack of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps was on the list. He was shot dead in the Gresham Hotel, but Collins had no evidence against him. ‘We have no evidence he was a Secret Service Agent,’ he later wrote. ‘Some of the names were put on by the Dublin Brigade.’ This, of course, raised some questions about the clinical efficiency with which the attacks were supposedly carried out.
Also killed were two Auxiliaries who just happened to be passing the scene of one of the killings at 22 Lower Mount Street as the gunmen were trying to escape while a maid was screaming hysterically from an upstairs window. One of Lynch’s killers had been shot there but his colleague managed to escape by barricading himself in his room while some twenty shots were fired into the door. Frank Teeling of the Dublin Brigade was captured by Auxiliaries.
Brigadier General Crozier, the commander of the Auxiliaries, was nearby and he visited the house on Mount Street. He then went to Dublin Castle to report what had happened. While there, word was received by telephone of the other killings.
‘What!’ the officer who answered the telephone exclaimed, turning deathly pale. He staggered as he turned around. ‘About fifty officers are shot in all parts of the city,’ he said. ‘Collins has done in most of the Secret Service people.’
‘In Dublin Castle panic reigned. For the next week the gates were choked with incoming traffic — all military, their wives and agents,’ according to Neligan. One distraught agent, whose pals had been killed, shot and killed himself and was buried with the others in England, where they were given a state funeral, with services at Westminster Abbey.
Collins certainly had no regrets about what he had organised. ‘My own intention was the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of ordinary decent citizens,’ he wrote. ‘I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed. Perjury and torture are words too easily known to them.’ If he had another motive, he added, ‘it was no more than a feeling such as I would have for a dangerous reptile. . . . That should be the future’s judgment on this particular event,’ he wrote. ‘For myself my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting and destroying in war-time, the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.’
‘The attack was so well organised, so unexpected, and so ruthlessly executed that the effect was paralysing,’ according to Neligan. ‘It can be said that the enemy never recovered from the blow. While some of the worst killers escaped, they were thoroughly frightened.’
Two of those who escaped were Captain King and Lieutenant Hardy, who were particularly despised by the IRA because of their brutal treatment of prisoners; they were not in their residences when the hit teams called. Todd Andrews of the Dublin Brigade burst into King’s room to find only his half-naked mistress. Shocked by the sudden intrusion, she sat bolt upright in bed and looked terror-stricken.
‘I felt a sense of shame and embarrassment for the woman’s sake,’ Andrews noted, but the two Squad members with him were too frustrated at missing King to have any sympathy for the unfortunate woman.
‘I was so angry I gave the poor girl a right scourging with the sword scabbard,’ Joe Dolan recalled. ‘Then I set the room on fire.’
Andrews was horrified at the conduct of Dolan and the other Squad member. They ‘behaved like Black and Tans’, he wrote. Hardy and King, on the other hand, gave vent to their rage by torturing and then killing McKee, Clancy, and Clune in Dublin Castle.
Elsewhere in the city the Auxiliaries went on a rampage at Croke Park, where they raided a football game and began firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Twelve innocent people, including one of the players on the field, were killed and dozens wounded. The Auxiliaries claimed that they were fired upon, as British soldiers would contend on another Bloody Sunday some fifty years later, but Crozier publicly refuted the claim afterwards. ‘It was the most disgraceful show I have ever seen,’ one of his officers told him. ‘Black and Tans fired into the crowd without any provocation whatever.’
In London Lloyd George and members of the cabinet were very jittery, according to Sir Maurice Hankey. Greenwood provided weapons for all his domestic staff, though — unlike the Prime Minister — he was able to joke about his own predicament. ‘All my household are armed,’ the Chief Secretary told the cabinet, ‘my valet, my butler, and my cook. So if you have any complaints about the soup you may know what to expect.’
There was good reason to be fearful. Brugha, it will be remembered, had raised a force to go into the House of Commons and kill as many members of the government as possible if conscription had been enforced in 1918, and he resurrected this plan as a possible response to the death of Terence MacSwiney; he still had not given up on the idea, and would raise it in the coming weeks.
In the interim, arrangements were made for a large-scale operation in Britain, where the IRA planned incendiary attacks on warehouses in the Liverpool and Manchester areas. On the day after Bloody Sunday Collins wanted to send an important message to the IRA in Britain and he arranged for Jeremiah Mee, who had been working for Countess Markievicz since his resignation from the RIC over the late Colonel Smyth’s remarks in Listowel, to take the message personally. He was selected because he had a military look about him, but Mee had been trying to conceal this.
‘What happened to your little moustache?’ Collins asked.
Mee explained he shaved it off because the countess thought it looked too military.
‘Be damn to her,’ cried Collins. ‘She should know by now that a military appearance is the best disguise for our men at the present time.’
He proceeded to outline the best way for Mee to behave in order to avoid detection. The advice provided a real insight into how Collins had been able to move about Dublin so freely in recent months. Dress up in spats with good creases on his pants and carry a walking stick and a supply of cigars, he told Mee. ‘Get into friendly chat with some of the military officers,’ he added. ‘You can do this by passing round your cigars and even if they do not smoke cigars it will at least be an introduction and will save you being questioned or searched. That is how I get across myself and you should have no difficulty if you keep your head screwed on.’
Collins might well have gone himself except that he was anxious to pay his last respects to McKee and Clancy. Their deaths had been a terrible blow to him. They were ‘two men who fully understood the inside of Collins’s work and his mind, and who were ever ready and able to link up their resources of the Dublin Brigade to any work that Collins had in hand, and to do so promptly, effectively and sympathetically,’ Mulcahy noted.
Collins was so upset by their deaths that he seemed to become quite reckless. He went to the Pro-Cathedral to dress the bodies in IRA uniforms and took a prominent part in the funeral. At one point he was actually filmed as he stepped out of the crowd to lay a wreath on the grave. Attached was a note signed by himself: ‘In memory of two good friends — Dick and Peadar — and two of Ireland’s best soldiers.’ As he stepped forward, he overheard a woman. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s Michael Collins.’ He turned and glared at her. ‘You bloody bitch,’ he snarled.
Given his state of mind, it was a measure of his respect for Griffith that he was still ready to go along with Lloyd George’s continuing peace feelers, even though he had no faith in them himself. Patrick Moylett had visited Dublin again in November and returned to London with a letter from Griffith, who was acting President during de Valera’s absence, to the Prime Minister on the eve of Bloody Sunday. One might have thought the events of the next day would have killed the peace initiative at this point, but not at all. When Moylett met Lloyd George on the Monday, the Prime Minister did not seem unduly perturbed.
‘They got what they deserved,’ Lloyd George supposedly said. That, at any rate, was Moylett’s story, but Art O’Brien, the Sinn Féin representative in London, warned Collins that the Mayoman was just a ‘Big Blower’ and a damn fool.
‘Your view is shared by me,’ Collins replied, ‘but Mr Griffith thinks differently, therefore, I am keeping in touch with this man for the present.’
While Moylett was meeting with Lloyd George, the journalist John Steele was talking with Griffith about a possible cease-fire on both sides. ‘I’ll do all I can [to] stop murders but you must call off reprisals at the same time,’ was Griffith’s message for the Prime Minister. Lloyd George met George Russell on 26 November and told him that he would negotiate with anybody but Collins and somebody called ‘Gallagher’. Presumably the Prime Minister was referring to Mulcahy, and either he or Russell got the name mixed up. Lloyd George’s message to Russell was basically that he would call off military operations if there were three weeks of peace. Then negotiations could begin, though he indicated there were limits to what the British would consider. ‘We will not tolerate a Republic,’ he emphasised, ‘but anything short of that.’
Whatever hope Lloyd George entertained for his proposals was seriously upset that day by the arrest of Griffith, who was picked up in a nationwide swoop of Sinn Féin supporters. A a result Collins took over as acting President.