Decoding the IRA (11 page)

Sweetman, brothers, 28 South Frederick Street, Dublin
– telegrams.
⁸⁶

Toner, John, 264 West 118th Street, New York
.
⁸⁷

Watters, Miss May, 117 Butler Street, Belfast
.
⁸⁸

White, Miss H, 505 West 40th Street, New York
.
⁸⁹

List of alleged IRA calling houses

Coady Mrs, 5 Glegg Street, off Great Howard Street, Liverpool
– for delivery of gelignite and detonators, caller to ‘
say stuff is for Mr Kucas
[
sic
]'.
⁹⁰

Cooley, Mrs, 74 Cavendish Street, Clonard, Belfast
– call house for the Belfast battalion, not for comms [letters or despatches].
⁹¹

Fuller, Miss, Exchange hotel, Parliament Street
– caller to ask for Kelly.
⁹²

Lagan, Miss, 353 East 31st Street, New York and Astor Court Building, 18 West 34th Street, Room 207, New York
– call house for Connie Neenan, the IRA's representative in America.
⁹³

McCarthy, Miss, 21 Dawson Street
, Dublin.
⁹⁴

McLoughlin, Miss, Sinn Féin Offices, 23 Suffolk Street
, Dublin.
⁹⁵

Magee, Mr H, Motor and Cycle Agent, Edward Street, Lurgan
– address for delivery of a motorcycle for the Armagh battalion.
⁹⁶

Morin, Patrick, 10 Robson Street, Aikenhead Road, Glasgow
– caller to give name ‘Moore' and ask for ‘Bob'.
⁹⁷

O'Grady, Miss Alice, Clarence hotel, Wellington Quay, Dublin
– for despatches.
⁹⁸

Rob Roy pub, Cobh
, County Cork – received despatches and weapons smuggled from America.
⁹⁹

Sweeney, Mrs, Fruiterer and Greengrocer, 5 Harold's Cross, Dublin
– consignment of explosives, disguised as fruit, to be sent here.
¹⁰⁰

Turley's [pub], Newbridge
, County Galway.
¹⁰¹

Miscellaneous names and addresses

Cadden, Phil, Connolly St, Fermoy
– ex-British soldier who told the IRA about a secret tunnel leading into Fermoy army barracks.
¹⁰²

Cohen, Second Engineer on the
American Farmer
– trans-Atlantic courier for the IRA.
¹⁰³

Delahunty, Fr
, Kilkenny – in contact with the IRA.
¹⁰⁴

Irwin, Henry P and Williams, John F, care of Thomas Cook and Son, Grafton Street, Dublin
– false American passports for Moss Twomey and Seán Russell to be posted to them from the US.
¹⁰⁵

Lalor, JJ, 63 Middle Abbey St, Dublin
– printer.
¹⁰⁶

McKenna, Father Martin, C/O Parish Priest's House, Ballymackey, Carrickmacross
, County Monaghan – priest in England whose name was used by IRA volunteers as a referee. He was also associated with an IRA passport scheme.
¹⁰⁷

Murphy, William, Chief Engineer on the
Tuscor
, which sailed between Liverpool and Waterford – IRA courier.
¹⁰⁸

O'Shea, Miss Winnie, 8 Loraine Road, Holloway, London
– £50 cheque from Dublin for the IRA commander in Britain to be made payable to her.
¹⁰⁹

Shanahan, Martin, 1900 Lexington Avenue, New York (c/o Dan O'Brien) – ex-OC of the Clare brigade, who emigrated to America.
¹¹⁰

Sloan, Todd, 2 Crown Street, Tidal Basin, London E 16
– English communist organiser who offered to give the IRA information on British government ammunition stores.
¹¹¹

Ward's, Glenmalure House, Rialto, Dublin – safe house for the 4th battalion, Dublin brigade.
¹¹²

CHAPTER 3

A New Leadership: 1926–1927

I would suggest
kidnapping and giving him a good hammering, tarring and feathering, or heaving him over the quay.

IRA chief of staff

We will be closed for [the Christmas] Holidays.

IRA chief of staff

At an IRA army convention in November 1925 the delegates rejected the moderate leadership of Frank Aiken and asserted the organisation's autonomy from Éamon de Valera and the politicians of Sinn Féin. They elected a new generation of leaders who were more militant than their predecessors. Andy Cooney succeeded Aiken as chief of staff but was soon replaced by Moss Twomey. Twomey remained in that position for ten years and was to become one of the most influential of the IRA's leaders. At a time of great division within the republican movement, Twomey attempted to hold the IRA together, as well as to reorganise militarily and develop social and economic policies that would resonate with the Irish people. During his tenure the greatest threat to the IRA was not the Free State and the gardaí, but the growth of de Valera's new political party, Fianna Fáil.

Historical background

In April 1923 on a windswept Tipperary hillside, a rifle shot from a Free State soldier mortally wounded the IRA's chief of staff, Liam Lynch, and effectively ended the Civil War. Lynch was a noble brave man, but his incompetent leadership had doomed the IRA to certain defeat and his obstinacy had prevented a timely end to the conflict. In his stead Frank Aiken was elected chief of staff and in May Aiken issued the order ‘to cease fire and dump arms'.
¹

The IRA's defeat in the Civil War had been absolute. Throughout the conflict the IRA possessed no coherent or consistent military strategy, it
had let the Free State's national army take the initiative and had failed to develop a supporting political programme. By the end of the struggle, considerably more IRA volunteers had been killed than in the Anglo-Irish War (though the exact number is unknown), seventy-seven had been executed and there were 12,000 in jail.
²

Over the course of 1924 the vast majority of the prisoners were released. However, they and the other IRA veterans had little prospect of employment in the Free State. This was due to a combination of factors: the economic slump that followed the First World War, the considerable hostility to the IRA that existed throughout the country and frequently the volunteers' lack of job skills. Republicans were also barred from state jobs unless they took a pledge of allegiance.
³
Frank Aiken himself wrote that ‘80% of the Volunteers living in towns, I am sure, are unemployed'.
⁴
Pax Ó Faoláin of Waterford, who was both an IRA brigadier-general and a plumber, spoke for many when he said: ‘Life was a struggle when I came home. You were trying to get a job, to pay a load of debts, to get going again. Yet everybody was boycotting you.' And he added: ‘The few people I could get work from here were the Protestants.'
⁵
Connie Neenan of Cork said that there was a ‘campaign of economic tyranny' against re-publicans.
⁶
The IRA managed to provide a small number of grants to disabled men and the Sinn Féin Reconstruction Committee made loans to help volunteers start up their own businesses – though these efforts failed to significantly alleviate much of the hardship.
⁷

During the course of the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War the IRA had prohibited the emigration of volunteers. However, as veterans were forced by economic circumstances to seek opportunity in the United States and Britain, the organisation needed to face up to the economic reality and in July 1925 reversed its ban.
⁸
Though the number of IRA veterans who emigrated was likely in the thousands, a little over 300 formally notified the organisation of their plan to emigrate and registered with its so-called ‘foreign reserves'. Of these, 200 went to America, 100 to Britain and a handful to other countries such as Canada and Australia.
⁹

In the aftermath of the Civil War, GHQ still expected IRA units to maintain a state of readiness. Officers were instructed to hold parades and training sessions, gather intelligence in their locality, regularly report
to headquarters, maintain arms dumps and recruit new members. However, relatively few officers were carrying out their duties – either finding them pointless or prevented by their need to work. Many volunteers and officers were profoundly demoralised and disillusioned with the organisation following the war. A senior officer who was also a member of the Army Executive typified the prevalent apathy: ‘He [admitted he] could not be regarded as an active Volunteer' and went on to make a half-hearted commitment that ‘he was willing to perform any duties assigned to him provided he had sufficient spare time'.
¹⁰
The only area in which the IRA was stronger than ever was in its number of top brass! In 1924 there were at least twenty-one generals in the organisation and by 1927 OCs of the thirteen brigades had been given the rank of brigadier-general – and that was in addition to the generals back at headquarters.
¹¹

Throughout 1924 and 1925 Aiken reorganised and attempted to revive the organisation; he toured the country (speaking to officers and inspecting units) and disbanded the major units such as divisions. With the decline of the IRA the divisions were no longer effectively functioning and their dissolution removed a redundant layer of bureaucracy, freeing up their staff officers to work with their local units. The thirty-seven local units – brigades, battalions and in the smaller areas companies – now reported directly to GHQ in Dublin and were referred to as ‘independent units'. Aiken hoped to decrease the duties of the officers, thereby enabling those ‘who have civil work to carry on their Volunteer work at the same time'.
¹²
The priority for now was to hold the organisation together and await more propitious times. However, despite Aiken's efforts it is estimated that membership declined from 14,500 in August 1924 to 5,000 in November 1926.
¹³

Aiken was a dour, brusque northerner, a man of few words, who held his council. During the years of fighting he had shown ‘plenty of guts'. He was a stern disciplinarian, who could be short with his men. In a characteristic exchange he wrote to the intelligence officer in Tipperary, who had wanted to set up a meeting to discuss the state of the IRA: ‘I cannot conceive what suggestions you can have for curing apathy and disorganisation and maintaining unity, that could not have been … brought up at the [army] Convention.'
¹⁴
And he wrote to Liam Pedlar in America
that ‘there is no excuse really for my delay in replying but a general disinclination to deal with [your correspondence]'.
¹⁵
Aiken's letters and the minutes of Army Executive meetings also display an irrational sense of optimism, though this may have been a
façade
he effected in the hope of improving morale. In 1924 he reported to America: ‘Things are going pretty well here: in spite of everything – unemployment and bad weather – we are gaining ground. We are consolidating our forces and the [Free] Staters are disintegrating rapidly.'
¹⁶
Though the Free State government had to weather the Army Mutiny crisis in March of that year it was the IRA and not the government that was disintegrating. Aiken was very close to de Valera whom he ‘adored' and regarded almost as ‘a holy symbol'.
¹⁷

Meanwhile, developments on the political front were to have significant consequences for the IRA. Back in November 1922 the organisation had given allegiance to the (largely imaginary) republican ‘government' presided over by Éamon de Valera, who was also the president of Sinn Féin. This ‘government' claimed its legitimacy derived from the Second Dáil which had been elected in 1921. Following elections in June 1922 to what was to be called the Third or Free State Dáil, Michael Collins and William Cosgrave dissolved the Second Dáil, and the Third Dáil became the functioning parliament of the new state. However, the legal basis for the dissolution remained at best unclear. And de Valera, with his supporters in Sinn Féin and the IRA, was to claim that the Second Dáil remained the country's legitimate parliament.
¹⁸
Sinn Féin thus boycotted the Free State Dáil and refused to recognise the institutions of the state. The republican ‘government' however was a government in name only and provided no functioning alternative to the Free State administration.

During the Civil War the IRA, under the control of Liam Lynch and the IRA Army Executive, largely ignored de Valera and Sinn Féin. In effect it was a military dictatorship, which claimed to act on behalf of the Irish people, but without their mandate.
¹⁹
It was only following the defeat of the IRA and Aiken's appointment as chief of staff that de Valera and the republican ‘government' were able to assert control over the organisation. De Valera's position was strengthened in February 1925 when another one of his supporters, Seán Lemass, was appointed republican

Minister for Defence. In addition the republican Minister for Finance controlled the IRA's budget and paid the salaries of the headquarters staff. With these developments, de Valera – in the words of Seán MacBride – ‘assumed more power [over the IRA] than had been intended'.
²⁰

By 1925 rumours began to spread that de Valera was exploring the option of entering the Free State Dáil – provided this could be done without taking the oath of allegiance to the king – and that Lemass and Aiken were sympathetic to this strategy. With de Valera in a dominant position over the IRA, this became a source of disquiet to the more militant officers, such as Andy Cooney, Moss Twomey and Seán Russell. They feared that de Valera and Aiken would compromise on the IRA's goal of a thirty-two county republic and corrupt the organisation by entangling it further in the political process. In the autumn of 1925 Cooney approached Aiken and directly asked him if he would support Sinn Féin's entry into the Free State Dáil, but Aiken was evasive and refused to give a straight answer.
²¹