Decoding the IRA (21 page)

A holdover from the Civil War was that much of the IRA's weapons remained in the possession of units in Munster. Even as late as 1930, sixteen of the organisation's twenty-nine machine guns were in Cork, and the three counties of Cork, Kerry and Tipperary possessed 588 (68 per cent) of its 859 rifles.
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During the second half of the 1920s the organisation lost much of its weaponry, due to the success of the gardaí and the defection of IRA volunteers to Fianna Fáil or their emigration abroad. In 1926–7 alone the gardaí seized 385 rifles, five machine guns, 609 bombs, 6,644 lbs of explosives and almost 80,000 rounds of ammunition.
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Their success in uncovering weapons may in part have been due to intrepid police work, but they were also facilitated by two other factors. Firstly, many of the Special Branch had themselves been IRA members in the recent past and were familiar with the volunteers and the location of hiding places, while, secondly, the gardaí regularly offered IRA volunteers money for each weapon or arms dump located. Indeed one of the largest seizures of the period, that of the arms dump found in the basement of St Enda's college in Dublin, occurred after a member of a gang associated with the IRA sold its location to the gardaí.
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The IRA's inability to safeguard its weapons was even reported to Joseph Stalin in Moscow, who in 1925 provided an IRA representative with precise details of the seizures and commented that he was reluctant to supply the IRA for fear that the weapons would be captured and traced back to the Soviets.
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By the late 1920s many arms dumps were under the control of men who had jumped ship to Fianna Fáil, while the whereabouts of others became unknown following the emigration of the local IRA quartermaster. In 1927, Connie Neenan wrote to GHQ with information on an arms dump in Cork:
‘[I] met Collins re. [the] dumping of arms in Cork 1 Brigade. Guns and [a] matchless motorcycle were dumped near White's Cross, Coole. Mick Kenny, Saint Lukes, Cork city is aware of [the] exact
location.'
He added: ‘ I did not see
Murphy, who sold guns before he left.'
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The arms seizures, together with the poor morale, dissension and weak leadership of the IRA rendered it more an irritant to the Free State and the state of Northern Ireland than a mortal threat. It was capable of causing outrages but not of overthrowing either state.
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Most IRA activity was of a low level as typified by incidents such as the shooting and wounding of Garda Hanly in the village of Ballinakill, County Laois after he tried to stop two cyclists for not having a light on their bikes.
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Indeed many incidents had an element of thuggery and the IRA was used as a cover to settle personal disputes.

Following an inspection tour in early 1927, Moss Twomey reported to the Army Executive and to his imprisoned comrade, George Gilmore, that he was
‘quite pleased'
.
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Based on the actual state of the organisation and the reports reaching him at GHQ, this was not an accurate assessment. On the other hand he had already badly over-estimated the capability of the IRA when he authorised the barrack raids in 1926.

The following sections help illustrate the state of the army in various localities.

Dublin

Dublin was a major focus of IRA activity, with GHQ and most of the leadership based in the city. Leaders like George Gilmore and Mick Price who were passionately committed to the organisation were an inspiration to the local volunteers, whereas elsewhere there was a dearth of such commanders. There were two independent units in the county: the Dublin brigade which was the IRA's largest unit and the South Dublin battalion in the Dun Laoghaire area with fifty members.
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Both units played a leading role in the anti-imperialist campaigns. In November 1925 George Gilmore helped lead the spectacular rescue of nineteen IRA prisoners from Mountjoy prison. However, most IRA activity in the city lacked the drama and ‘wholesomeness' of the rescue.

In October 1926 an IRA volunteer, Patrick Morrissey, who worked as a chauffeur, was part of a gang that held up a horse and trap at the South Circular Road. After a revolver was pointed at the driver, Morrissey
pistol-whipped the passenger, Maurice Boland, on the head and arms. The gang then escaped with the horse and trap. Later that afternoon Detective-Sergeant Mark Byrne of the Special Branch questioned Morrissey and noted that the radiator of his car was warm, and he found traces of blood on a wheel of the vehicle. Morrissey claimed that he had been held up by armed men who had taken the car. He was arrested and brought before court in Dublin a week later. Maurice Boland wasn't well enough to attend but a witness, George Browne, testified that he saw Boland scream in pain as the IRA men held him on the ground and beat him.
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The purpose of this brutal assault is not clear – were the IRA men merely trying to seize the horse and trap, or were they out to punish Boland? Twomey, however, wanted to teach Browne, and anybody who would testify against the IRA, a lesson, and in a letter titled ‘case of P Morrissey in enemy custody' wrote to the OC of the Dublin brigade:
‘If no action [has] already [been] taken against Brown [
sic
], have him visited in his home, interrogated, threatened, and a few shots fired over his head, or even wound him.'
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The following March an IRA party of twenty-five carried out one of the largest ambushes of the time. On a Sunday morning a group of nine Free State soldiers and two non-commissioned officers were returning by bicycle to Portobello barracks, having been relieved of guard duty at Tallaght camp. The advance party of four, rounding a bend in the road near Terenure, ran into a roadblock of two cars. A group of armed and masked men then sprang upon them and disarmed them, while a second group pointed revolvers from the walls overlooking the road. However, a fifth soldier, Private Thomas O'Shaughnessy, came around the corner and, seeing what was happening, reached for his rifle. One of the attackers shot him in the ankle, which alerted the other soldiers and in the ensuing fire fight the soldiers fired forty rounds as the IRA beat a retreat with the four captured rifles. One IRA volunteer on the wall fell after he was shot near the mouth and a bloodstained handkerchief was later found at the scene. Soldiers from Portobello barracks and Special Branch officers soon arrived and arrested three men in a car, after a loaded Colt revolver was found under the seat. The three arrested volunteers were Benjamin Cole (21), his brother, Francis (17) (both grocers' assistants) and a medical
student, Michael Keohane (20).
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Twomey reported to Connie Neenan:
‘[The] disarming of Free State troops recently near Dublin was [an] official [action], [though] not quite successful.'
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Another action that occurred in November 1925 illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing IRA operations from criminal activities. In what was at the very least an ‘unauthorised operation' a gang of ten, including seven bakers, attempted to blow up Landy's bakery in Rathfarnham. There was an ongoing industrial dispute at the bakery and a number of employees had been fired. The gang decided to make a bomb and first raided Thom's pharmacy in Kimmage to acquire potassium chlorate. Armed with revolvers, they demanded the explosive ‘for the cause', but were only able to get half a pound, instead of the needed seven pounds. As they left they handed Mrs Thom a receipt signed by the OC of C company of the Dublin IRA. With insufficient explosives the plan was changed to burning down the bakery, and that evening they seized a Chevrolet motorcar ‘in the name of the IRA'. They loaded the car with petrol and drove to the bakery, but when they arrived, Arthur Kelly, the gang leader, decided that the bakery wall was too high to scale and aborted the operation. The car was abandoned that evening in the Dublin Mountains.

A few months later, in March 1927, a fire broke out in the bakery causing ‘considerable damage' to the value of £1,757. The fire was deemed to be arson. The following month eight of the original gang were charged in Dublin District Court with conspiracy to blow up the bakery. The driver of the seized car and his passenger (not surprisingly) were unable to identify the defendants. A Special Branch officer produced confessions from two of the defendants who had incriminated their comrades; one of these was Thomas Gerrard. During the Civil War Gerrard served as a medical orderly in the Free State army. While stationed at Portobello barracks he smuggled out a letter for the badly wounded IRA leader, Ernie O'Malley, who was under arrest in the infirmary. Gerrard was discharged from the army in 1924. Following his attempt to blow up the bakery, he ironically landed a job at Landy's, and having heard there was a £100 reward for information on those involved in attacking the bakery he went to the gardaí. In court he admitted that it was the reward that prompted him to come forward. He also confessed under cross-examination that he was
prepared to ‘stick up' a motor car as part of a robbery. There were a number of inconsistencies in Gerrard's evidence and the only defendant convicted was Patrick Hogan, who was identified by the two women in the pharmacy. Hogan was sentenced to six months in prison.
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While this attack largely appears criminal, the gang were possibly associated with the IRA. They had a number of revolvers and ammunition in their possession, knew how to make a bomb, used the name of the IRA and handed over a receipt signed by the IRA. Arthur Kelly was also the name of an IRA operative in Dublin. Alternatively, they could have been men who left the IRA following the Anglo-Irish War. Whatever they were, this was not the type of publicity the IRA needed.

Munster

There's a certain truism to the words of the song ‘the boys who beat the Black and Tans were the boys from County Cork'. During the Anglo-Irish War one-third of all British army and police casualties occurred in Cork.
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However, the Cork IRA's enthusiasm and performance in the Civil War was decidedly mixed. And in the years following the conflict the majority of its most admired leaders, who hadn't already resigned, joined Fianna Fáil. One exception was Tom Barry, who in 1924 became inactive and didn't fully rejoin the IRA until 1932.
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Without Barry's participation there was little IRA organisation in the west of the county in the late 1920s.

The result was that in 1926 IRA strength was down to 200 members in Cork 1 brigade, which was centred in the city, sixty members in Cork 2 brigade in the north of the county and twenty members of the Clonakilty battalion in the west.
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Seán MacSwiney (Cork 1's assistant adjutant) was one of the few senior leaders from the Civil War era who remained active in Cork 1 brigade.
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MacSwiney was a brother of Terence who, as brigade OC and lord mayor of Cork, had died on hunger strike in an English jail in October 1920. His sister Mary was a leader of Sinn Féin. At this time Seán was described as ‘drinking and jobless … [and] a drain both emotionally and financially' on Mary, who wanted him to emigrate to Canada.
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In April 1926 he reported to GHQ that ‘at present things are not working to our satisfaction' in the brigade and that the OCs of the two city battalions hadn't bothered
to turn up at the recent IRA commemoration for the 1916 Easter Rising. The volunteers retained a distrust of GHQ which dated back to the Anglo-Irish War when the IRA in Cork felt that the Dublin leadership provided insufficient support and weaponry to the county that was doing the lion's share of the fighting.
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The chief of staff urged the brigade's OC to remove all arms from dumps in the vicinity of the village of Ballyvourney, due to recent captures in the area, adding that ‘it should be possible to lay hands on the machine guns'.
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Ballyvourney had been one of the last republican strongholds during the Civil War and considerable arms and munitions were hidden there, some of which likely came under the control of supporters of Fianna Fáil.

In 1927 Twomey wrote to the OC that he had ‘great apprehensions [
sic
] with regard to the general spirit prevailing in your Unit. There is too much of the politician amongst a number [of the officers and men].' He blamed the poor morale on the ‘defeatist influence … [and] insidious intrigue and propaganda' of officers like P. A. Murray, Mick Murphy and Tom Crofts, who had distanced themselves from the organisation following the barrack raids.
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At the IRA officers' meeting in April 1927, which was called to discuss the proposed republican election pact, Cork 2 brigade and the Clonakilty battalion didn't even send a representative, suggesting that they were largely inactive, while the OC of Cork 1 took a hard line, saying that the IRA ‘should have nothing to do with present politics' and voted against the pact.
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The Limerick brigade, which had a paper strength of a mere sixty volunteers, reported that ‘everything [is] in a state of disorganisation, communications scattered etc.'
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The IRA cast a greedy eye on the estimated 200 tons of industrial explosives stored locally for use in the construction of the hydroelectric power plant at Ardnacrusha on the River Shannon, known as the Shannon Scheme. The brigade adjutant sent an indignant note to Twomey: ‘Reports have reached me that there are men taking explosives from [the] Shannon Scheme who are not in our organisation and as far as we know are ex-Free State soldiers.'
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Seán Carroll had been OC of the Mid-Limerick brigade during the Civil War but, finding his fellow Limerick officers uncooperative, had linked up with the Tipperary brigade.
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The director of intelligence's of fce reported to Twomey that:
‘Seán Carroll informs me that he has several rifles, revolvers, and lots of ammunition badly hidden and wants to have it handed over to the Tipp. Brigade. He asked the local officers to take it away, long ago. They did not.'
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