Authors: T. Ryle Dwyer
Sir John Anderson warned Greenwood next day that repressive policies would fail. ‘We have not in my judgment the instruments at our command which would be essential to secure success,’ Anderson warned. A couple of days later, on 22 July, the Irish Situation committee called on the government ‘actively to assume the offensive in its Irish policy’ and to introduce martial law immediately. When the cabinet met with members of the Dublin Castle regime for the first time the next day, William E. Wylie warned that the British government would be unable to restore law in Ireland because the RIC, bolstered by the Black and Tans, would soon be little better than a mob capable only of terrorism. It was a prophetic warning.
* ‘The town has been one of the quietest, if not the quietest in all Ireland,’ the
Irish Times
reported the next day. ‘Up to the present nothing has occurred’.
* It would seem that he did not heed the advice, because he was later responsible for one of the worst revenge killings in Irish history: the Ballyseedy massacre in March 1923 during the Civil War when his men took nine prisoners from jail, tied them around a mine and blew them up. One survived to tell the story. While the evidence that O’Daly ordered the killings may not be conclusive, he was the commanding officer and he unquestionably covered up for the culprits and made no effort to reprimand them.
Neither the Squad nor intelligence at headquarters had any operational involvement in the killing of Smyth, but Collins did have direct input in the subsequent killing of District Inspector Swanzy in Lisburn, County Antrim. Roger E. McCorley of Belfast was given the task of preparing the groundwork to kill him and he concluded that the best time to shoot Swanzy was coming from church on Sunday, 15 August 1920. A team of five men from MacCurtain’s own brigade was selected to kill Swanzy. They were: Seán Culhane, Dick Murphy, Leo ‘Stetto’ Ahern, C. McSweeney and Jack Cody.
‘I met Mick Collins and, after a frank discussion, he remarked that the job was much too big for me,’ Culhane recalled. ‘I probably looked immature as at the time I was not yet twenty years of age. He said it was a job for experienced men and mentioned about picking selected men from Dublin. I made a strong protest to him and informed him that my orders were very emphatic and that it was solely a Cork brigade job. After thinking it over he said he would leave the decision to the Minister for Defence.
‘Later I accompanied Dick Mulcahy to the Minister (Cathal Brugha), where Mick Collins had already arrived,’ Culhane continued. ‘The Minister questioned me very closely as to my proposed plan of action, which I fully detailed to him.’
After many questions, Brugha relented. ‘Go ahead and do the job,’ he said.
Culhane stayed at the home of Joe McKelvey and his widowed mother in Belfast. The assassination team hired a taxi to Stoney ford, which was not on the road to Lisburn. They highjacked it at a certain spot and the driver was held in a house nearby while they headed for Lisburn in the taxi. That part of the plan went well, but before they had got very far, the car broke down and they had to abandon the plan. All of the Cork men left Belfast that evening, but McKelvey decided that it was too dangerous using so many strangers.
The following Wednesday Culhane and Dick Murphy returned. It was decided that Culhane would fire the first shot, using MacCurtain’s pistol for which Jim Gray, posing as a loyalist, had obtained a permit from Swanzy himself in Cork.
This time they decided to use the taxi of a volunteer, Seán Leonard of Tubbercurry, County Sligo, who worked for a Belfast garage owned by a loyalist. Leonard was acting as driver and would then report to the police that his taxi had been highjacked. Leonard brought Culhane, Murphy and Tom Fox of the Belfast IRA to Lisburn, where McCorley was keeping an eye on Swanzy.
‘Everything worked like clockwork,’ Fox recalled. ‘Swanzy was at church when we arrived. Our taxi was parked about two hundred yards away and as fortune would have it in front of a doctor’s house. The engine was kept running. After waiting some time Swanzy appeared, walking in company with two other men.’
‘I pointed him out and as had been agreed the first shot was fired from the lord mayor’s own gun which had been brought up from Cork,’ McCorley explained. Swanzy was in the middle between his father and an army major. The major and his father were knocked to either side from the rear as Culhane moved in for the kill. ‘I fired the first shot getting him in the head and Dick fired almost simultaneously into his body,’ Culhane recalled. The first shot, fired from almost point blank range, hit Swanzy behind the right ear and the bullet exited on the other side of his head be tween his ear and his eye.
‘Immediately after, we all opened fire on him,’ McCorley said. ‘When we were satisfied that the execution had been carried out we started off for the taxi.’
As they ran towards the taxi a mob started to run after them. ‘I halted and fired back into the mob which then cleared off,’ McCorley said. ‘This left me a considerable way behind the others. I was then attacked by an ex-British Officer called Woods who seemed to have plenty of courage. Although I was carrying a revolver in my hand he attacked me with a blackthorn stick and by a fluke I shot the stick out of his hand.
‘When I got within twenty yards of the car it started off and I was unable to make the necessary speed to catch it,’ McCorley continued. The taxi was only capable of reaching 30 mph so McCorley continued to run after it.
When Fox looked into the back seat he realised that McCorley was missing, so he called on Leonard to stop. By that time McCorley had reached the car and he got in one door as Fox was getting out another to look for him.
‘I got out of the taxi, which was moving slowly ahead, and as I did so McCorley climbed in on the other side,’ Fox recalled. ‘The jerking of the car as he climbed in caused him to discharge the last round in his revolver which went through the seat I had just vacated.’
There was only one car around for the police to follow them in. It was a taxi and they had talked about disabling it before leaving. ‘But in the excitement it was forgotten,’ Fox continued. ‘The police commandeered it and followed us. Our car could not exceed 30 m.p.h., while the taxi with the police was much faster. We had a good start, but must have been overtaken before long, if in going round a sharp corner too quickly, the pursuing car had not pulled off two tyres.’
‘We had been expecting that we would be pursued immediately and we had grenades and heavier arms in the car to enable us to carry out a running fight or to meet the police on foot if our car was put out of action,’ according to McCauley. After the tyres came off the pursuing taxi with the police however, the escape was surprisingly easy.
Culhane and Murphy took the train to Dublin that evening. ‘On the train passing through Lisburn we noticed a number of houses on fire, which we heard later were houses of Catholic sympathisers,’ Culhane recalled. The killing actually sparked eight days of rioting in which thirty-one people were killed and some 200 injured in Lisburn and Belfast.
‘Inspector Swanzy and his associates put Lord Mayor Mac-Curtain away,’ Collins later said, ‘so I got Swanzy and all his associates wiped out, one by one, in all parts of the Ireland to which they had been secretly dispersed.’ The following Friday the Squad killed Frank Brooke. He was another of those who advised Lord Lieutenant French, and was a frequent overnight guest at the viceregal lodge.
Tom Keogh, Jim Slattery and Vinny Byrne were sent to kill Brooke, a railroad executive, at the company’s offices at Westland Row on 30 July 1920. ‘I do not know much about him except that we received instructions to shoot him,’ Jim Slattery explained. ‘Brooke was sitting at his table when we entered his office. We immediately opened fire on him and he fell.’
Brooke was actually armed with a loaded revolver in his right pocket but he never got the chance to use it before he was hit repeatedly. As the three were going back down the stairs they wondered if Brooke was actually dead. ‘I said I was not sure,’ Slattery said.
‘What about going back and making sure?’ one of the others asked.
‘Keogh and myself went back,’ Slattery continued. By then another railway executive, A. T. Cotton, had entered the room.
‘When I went into the room I saw a man standing at the left of the door and I fired a shot in his direction at the same time looking across at Brooke on the floor,’ Slattery said. ‘I fired a couple of shots at Brooke and satisfied myself that he was dead. Although I did not wound the other man who was in the room, I was in formed afterwards that it would have been a good job if he had been shot, as he too was making himself a nuisance.’
The killing of Smyth in Cork had sparked a pogrom against Catholics in the Belfast area, and the killing of Swanzy in Lisburn further inflamed the situation. Roman Catholics were burned out of their homes in mixed areas, and some 8,000 Catholic workers were expelled from the shipyards and other industries. The dáil retaliated by sanctioning a boycott of goods from Northern Ireland.
The same day that Swanzy was killed, there was a shooting in Bandon, Cork, that caused particular revulsion. Sergeant William Mulhern, the RIC crimes special sergeant who had been looking for Collins in the Bandon area back in January was shot as he entered the local Catholic church for eight o’clock mass. Daniel Cohalan, the Catholic bishop of Cork, roundly denounced the killing of Mulhern: ‘His murder was singularly heinous, for he was murdered in circumstances which added to murder awful irreverence and disrespect to God.’ He pronounced the murderers as excommunicated from the Catholic church.
Michael Collins had set out to undermine the morale of the police in order to knock out the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle. Largely with the help of his own agents within the DMP, Collins had managed to uncover the early operation of identifying and killing prominent activists, such as Tomás MacCurtain and had the Squad kill Redmond, Jameson, Bell and Brooke. He also had a number of the politically active police shot, such as Kells, Revell, Dalton and Swanzy.* The British were essentially back where they had been the previous December, before they began reorganising.
While they were building up their forces and introducing new intelligence people, Collins was building up his own counter intelligence. The boycott against the police was intensified. ‘Volunteers shall have no intercourse with the RIC and shall stimulate and support in every way the boycott of this force ordered by the dáil,’ IRA headquarters ordered on 4 June 1920. This did not just apply to Volunteers, it applied to everyone. ‘Those persons who associate with the RIC shall be subjected to the same boycott, and the fact of their association with and the toleration of this infamous force shall be kept public in every possible way,’ the circular order continued. ‘Definite lists or such persons in the area of his command shall be prepared and retained by each company, battalion and brigade commander.’ In short, anyone associating with the police should be blacklisted. This of course was making life intolerable for the police and their families.
Constable David Neligan, the officer who had counted the roses on the wallpaper in the upstairs room during the raid on the Sinn Féin headquarters in November 1919 wished to get out of the DMP but feared that he might be targeted if he returned to his native west Limerick, because local republicans were liable to suspect him of being a British spy. His brother, Maurice, a member of the IRB and a transport union organiser in Tralee, tried to help Neligan by seeking the assistance of Tim Kennedy, the IRA’s intelligence officer for north Kerry.
Kennedy, the accountant for Kerry county council, was a small man with a cherubic face and bright eyes. He had already recruited Thomas O’Rourke, the crime special sergeant in Tralee, to provide the RIC cipher on a regular basis. The Neligan brothers met Kennedy one day and explained that Neligan was looking for Collins to secure a safe conduct so that he could return home. Kennedy, who spent much of his time working in Dublin between March and October 1920, was unable to locate Collins, so he turned to Stack with unfortunate consequences.
‘I saw Stack and said that this fellow should not resign,’ Kennedy related. Stack arranged for an aide, Paddy Sheehan, to meet the Neligan brothers. After Sheehan questioned Neligan, however, Stack dismissed the idea of using Neligan as a spy.
‘Get him to resign,’ Stack told Kennedy. ‘He’s no good.’
Neligan duly resigned from the DMP on 11 May 1920 and was provided with a note from the IRA for his own protection. Collins was furious when he learned what happened.
‘I got a flaming letter from Mick asking why the hell did I take Stack’s/Sheehan’s advice,’ Kennedy noted. ‘The result was that I went to Maurice and I told him that I had been sacked for letting Dave leave.’ Kennedy also set up a meeting for Neligan with Stack at the Clarence hotel in Dublin. ‘He told me that Collins wanted to meet me and that arrangements would be made,’ Neligan wrote.
Neligan suggested that he would have an excuse to get back into the force if the IRA pretended to intimidate him by sending him threatening letters to get out of Limerick. This was done and he even burnt some hay that his father had at the back of the family home as a supposed warning. Neligan re-applied to the DMP and produced the threatening letters that had been sent to him. That was good enough and he was accepted back.
‘I thought he was the best intelligence officer I ever met in my life,’ Tim Kennedy explained. ‘I discussed plans with Michael Collins for the re-establishment of Neligan into favour with the castle authorities.’ Collins had stuff planted in Findlaters, a loyalist business house. When the auxiliaries raided the place and found the planted material, they nearly wrecked the building, much to the amusement of Collins and company. ‘A number of such stunts put up Dave’s stock with the castle people,’ Kennedy explained, ‘and when the castle were looking for one of their G men to train and lead the military raids, they asked for volunteers and Dave came to me, and he volunteered, and I understand with dire consequences to the military.’