Chapter Twenty One: Derry, Dublin 1921--22

In September, the British Government sent over a gang of CIG men, formed in Cairo by General Sir Henry Wilson, the Army’s former Director of Military operations and now the head of Central Intelligence, whose purpose was to assassinate the political members of Sinn Fein, so to draw out the IRA leaders – particularly Michael Collins and his Squad of hand--picked assassins, jocularly known as the Twelve Apostles, whose job it was to ‘put out the eyes of the British’ in Ireland– and break their hold on the country. They became known as the Cairo Gang, and they were given carte blanche by Wilson to use any method to apprehend Mick Collins, who was at this time cycling round Dublin unarmed, with a price of £10,000 on his head; the most wanted man in Ireland. He was counted ‘extremely dangerous’ according to the police gazette Hue & Cry, and the order was given to ‘be sure he does not fire first.’ The Cairo Gang, ostensibly police detectives, were not uniformed, but went round Dublin in business suits, working only at night after the curfew, assisting the raiding parties of the Tans and Auxies. Brigadier General Crozier, the OC of the Auxiliaries, didn’t think much of them, calling them a ‘sub--rosa murder gang’, part of a ‘police plot to do away with Sinn Fein leaders and put the blame on Sinn Fein.’

They did their work well. They assassinated the seated and former Lord Mayors of Limerick, and nearly succeeded in doing in the Bishop of Killaloe, Co. Limerick. They did murder John Lynch in Dublin, an old businessman whom they mistook for Liam Lynch, OC of the North Cork Brigade of the IRA. A plot was then uncovered in October to assassinate Arthur Griffith, then acting head of Sinn Fein. The Squad managed to get wind of the plot beforehand, and Griffith held a press conference in Wynn’s Hotel, publishing the information they had gathered.

The time had come to act. Collins and his Squad had amassed mountains of information, and selected thirty--five men who were to be dealt with. At the insistence of Cathal Brugha, Dail Minister for Defence, this list was pared down on the grounds of insufficient evidence to twenty by the night of 20 November, when Mick Collins, Dick Mulcahy, and Dick McKee met with Peadar Clancy and others of the Dublin Brigade met in the rooms of the Topographical Society in Lower Gardiner Street. The Squad were given a list of names; they would go out in the morning and on the dot of nine begin their operations. At six locations, groups of eight men each carried out the order, picking off fourteen of the twenty on Mick Collins’ list; the others were not where they were supposed to be, and so escaped with their lives.

Number 28 Pembroke Street was by far the worst; eight men were killed there. Some of them refused to come out of bed, and so were shot there. Others were shot as they opened the door. Two were shot in the hall. The stairs ran with blood. One young fellow of the Squad was shaking so badly that he-- with a loaded revolver -- was a danger to everyone in the hall. Paddy Flanagan, a captain in ‘C’ company, herded the agents downstairs to the basement and lined them up against the wall. After asking their names, he shot them neatly behind the ear. One of the agents in Number 92 Lower Baggot Street tried to climb out the window in his pyjamas and was shot on the sill. By nine thirty, it was over. By ten, Dublin Castle was in a state of complete panic.

General Crozier of the Auxies had come from Number 22 Mount Street, where he had kept one of his men from killing one of the Squad, Frank Teeling, with the remark that if a spy was shot, it was part of the game; but Crozier was ex--Army. Not long afterward he resigned his commission in protest over the ‘gross indiscipline’ of his men, and the backing they had from the Government. In the Castle, a shocked officer said to him in the hall: ‘About fifty officers have been shot. Collins has done in most of the Secret Service.’

The game was up. G--men, Secret Service, RIC and regular Army all herded into Dublin Castle for protection. One poor fellow was so undone that he shot himself, rather than wait for Collins’ men to do it. Crozier wasn’t the only one without sympathy for the murdered men. Lloyd George remarked privately that ‘they got what they deserved. Beaten by counter--jumpers.’ Mick Collins had indeed put out the eyes of the British in Ireland. But it came at a terrible price: At 3.15 PM, the Black and Tans arrived in armoured lorries at Croke Park, where a Gaelic football match was in progress. The Tans were there ostensibly to search for the men and arms responsible for that morning’s shootings. The game halted. From the railway overpass at one end of the stadium, a machine gun opened fire on the crowd. There was mass panic. People poured onto the field, screaming and running. Several were trampled. The machine--gun fire went on and on. A Tan had lined up the teams on the field and was walking up and down, waving his loaded revolver. An Army officer went up to one of the team and murmured, ‘He means to finish you all off.’ One of the players, a fellow named Hogan, was shot point blank in the forehead. It was said in the papers afterward that the Tans had been fired on as they came in by ‘an IRA sniper’, but several eyewitnesses, Paddy’s brothers included, proclaimed this to be a bloody lie. In the end, there were twelve killed and seventy wounded.

In Parliament, there was no mention at all of Bloody Sunday, as the Croke Park murders were quickly called. There was much talk of the murdered officers, who had been given a State funeral, and Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Under--secretary of State for Ireland decried the massacre of ‘unarmed British officers’. This caused Joe Devlin, MP for West Belfast, to leap up and enquire whether the Honourable Member had any knowledge of the appearances of His Majesty’s Forces on the football field. He was leapt on and beaten down to cries of ‘Kill him! Kill him!’

But that was not the end. The night before the mass raid on the secret service agents, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy and an innocent man, Clure, were captured in Vaughan’s Hotel in Parnell Square and taken to Dublin Castle. There they were shot while ‘trying to escape’. Rigged photographs were sent about to support this preposterous charade. They were obviously tortured -- beaten, bayoneted, their fingernails ripped out – before they were killed. Clancy had a bullet--hole in his forehead, and on their faces were clear marks of knives and other weapons used against them when they were retrieved from the morgue of the Mater Hospital. Mick Collins was distraught at the loss of these two good friends, and risked his life by marching into the Pro--Cathedral where they lay in state with two Volunteer officer’s uniforms to dress them in. The next day, as the coffins were being removed from the church for burial, he stepped out of the crowd and stuck a note on Dick McKee’s coffin:

‘To the memory of two good friends, Dick and Peadar, two of Ireland’s
best soldiers, Miceal O’Coilleann, 25/11/1920.’

He then took his place as one of the pallbearers.

There was wild and furious rioting in the streets of Dublin by the drunken Tans that night. Rory was away at a safe house, and good thing because both the parents’ house and Ernie’s were raided. Somebody had been watching them. Rory was later arrested in the sweeps and taken to Richmond Barracks and beaten up pretty badly, but he managed to keep his mouth shut and was only given a year in the internment camp at the Curragh for being a member of an illegal organisation.

On 28 November, a week after Bloody Sunday, word came from Cork of the success of Tom Barry’s column: they had ambushed a company of Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, killing seventeen. In reprisal for this, the Auxies went on a rampage, burning most of the centre of Cork City to the ground, looting shops and killing two men, the Delaney brothers, in their beds for the hell of it. A priest was shot dead without cause or provocation. The next day, the Auxies went round with burnt corks stuck in their bonnets.

In the House of Commons, Sir Hamar Greenwood went on in full rant about how ‘there was no evidence that the fires were started by Crown forces’, claiming that the City Hall caught alight by the fires in Patrick Street; never mind that to do so, the fires would had to have miraculously leapt the River Lee, a kilometre away. A young sergeant, O’Donoghue, wrote to family from Dunmanway that he personally rounded up twenty men for the enterprise, which began with their lorries being bombed from over the barrack wall. Houses in the vicinity were set afire, and so commenced the path of destruction. Those in the company who had been in Flanders said that nothing they had experienced there was like the destruction of Cork. The British Government decided that the publication of the report on the burning of Cork would be ‘disastrous’ for its whole policy in Ireland, and so the official findings remained a dead letter.

There was some sympathy and understanding of the IRA and their cause on the British side, however. Lieutenant General Sir Henry Lawson wrote,
‘The captains of volunteers appear to have been almost all quite young men, farmers’ sons for the most part, some of them schoolmasters, most with what, for their class, must be considered a good deal of education, ignorant, however, of the world and of many things, but as a class, transparently sincere and single--minded, idealists, highly religious for the most part, and often with an almost mystical sense of duty to their country. These men gave to the task of organising their volunteers their best in mind and spirit. They fought against drunkenness and self--indulgence, and it is no exaggeration to say that, as a class, they represented all that was best in the countryside.
‘…The Irish Republican Army seems to be particularly free from ruffians of the professional type, and the killings of police and others, sometimes under circumstances which evoke our horror, were almost certainly done by members of the IRA acting under military orders…Behind their organisation there is the spirit of a nation – of a nation which is certainly not in favour of murder, but which, on the whole, sympathises with them and believes that the members of the IRA are fighting for the cause of the Irish people.’

When Dev got back from his American fund--raising tour in January of 1921, he put it rather more succinctly to the American press
‘We took office knowing that the people wanted us to be a government in fact as well as in name…One of our first governmental acts was to take over control of the voluntary armed forces of the nation. From the Irish Volunteers, we fashioned the Irish Republican Army to be the military arm of the Government. This army is, therefore, a regular State force, under the control of elected representatives and under organisation and a discipline imposed by those representatives, and under officers who hold their commissions under a warrant from those representatives. The Government is, therefore, responsible for the actions of this army. These actions are not the acts of irresponsible individuals or groups, therefore nor is the IRA as the enemy would have one believe, a praetorian guard. It is the national army of defence.’

To Paddy’s mind, reading this pronouncement in the newspapers, these were rather hopeful sentiments given their actual circumstances and the slow reformation of the Republican Army since 1917. He recognised the political imperative to legitimatise the volunteers in the eyes of international opinion. But it was also indicative of Dev’s personal need for respectability, because of his illegitimate birth. Dev was and always had been, violently opposed to the volunteers’ being called murderers or assassins, when most of them wrote such comments off to British propaganda. His insistence in this direction as regards policy matters wasted precious time, in Paddy’s opinion, which could be better spent getting on with more important things. The boycott of Belfast trade for instance, or the breaking down of the Belfast parliament, and with it the partition of the six counties. Innocent people were dying in the hundreds up here, and the pussyfooting that went on in Dublin about what the world press thought was infuriating. They had lived under the shadow of the untrammelled Unionist regime for a year now, and nothing, but nothing had been done by the Dublin Government.

‘They’ve let us out,’ he complained to Tom Kilgallen when the women were out one afternoon in March. ‘They let the fucking partition go through without a murmur of protest. Are we negligibilities, then? Half a million people!’
‘For Jaysus sake,’ Tom drawled, putting his feet up on the dining table, ‘calm down. We’ll manage.’
‘Calm down? Calm down, is it?’ Paddy exclaimed, pacing. ‘I’ll not be made a foreigner in my own country!’ He was in a fine rage. ‘How shall we manage with the noose tightening every bloody day, I should like to know?’ He raised his arm, pointing towards Belfast. ‘You heard what that jackass Craig said! He intends his boys to wipe us out, every man woman and child, if we won’t go! Well I’ll not go, bejaysus I won’t. We’ll stand to the last man if we have to, though that may not be long at this rate!’ He paced again. ‘And Dev! You heard what the Big Fellow told McKee, you heard Frank Aiken tell me what Dev said before he went off to America: ‘Let the North go, give them that and we can have our Republic in the twenty--six counties’. Traitor. Bloody, fucking traitor! And him the last Commandant from Easter Week! Jaysus, Tom Clarke is spinning in his grave this moment--’

‘We can get guns from Americkey,’ Tom reasoned. ‘Sure the Irish there are great with us.’
Paddy shook his head. ‘That’s not the point! The point is the unity of the country. Ireland is thirty--two counties and cannot be parcelled out. They can’t shunt us off without our consent. It’s a bloody dictatorship…. I won’t go backward. I won’t live in penal times in 1921. We have the right to be heard, and bloody Sinn Fein with their bloody abstentionist policies handed down from Dublin will be the death of us…. What do they know about things here? Nothing! Nothing because they care shag all! They have their bit, they have the British on the run and that’s all that matters to them. The curse of God on small--minded shoneens! They’ve been the ruin of the country since MacMurrough!’

Tom crossed his arms, undeterred by such obstacles. ‘How long do you reckon we can hold out, if we have the men and guns?’
Paddy frowned. ‘That depends on what they send against us.’
‘How long?’ Tom insisted.
Paddy considered. ‘If things stay as they are, if we have a steady supply of recruits and arms... I suppose in theory, indefinitely.’
‘Just so.’
Paddy shook his head. ‘But that’s not likely to happen. More realistically, I should say maybe six months at the longest.’ He passed a hand over his face, looking up at the ceiling cracks. ‘Christ, and then what?’
Tom’s feet hit the floor. ‘Ya worry too much, Padge. We’ll take it as it comes.’
‘I have to worry.’ He said. ‘Yez are my responsibility. And I’m thinking of those that come after. We owe them a free country.’

Tom sprang up now. ‘We owe them fuck all,’ he insisted. ‘Let them fight their own battles as we have.’
‘I’d like to spare them having to fight at all,’ Paddy smiled with weary irony. ‘I’d like to finish the job, sit--spot.’ He grinned. ‘Can ye see us, Tommy, a pair of old--age pensioners out with the Mausers and the Thompsons, eh? ‘Up the Republic’ thirty years on! That would be a fine how--do--you--do!’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Tom grinned. ‘Are you tired of it then?’
‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘And the whole bloody world. But you keep on, do what you must.’ He peered narrowly at Tom. ‘Can you honestly say you’d rather this than be out with the lassies minding a pub in some country town? I can’t.’
‘Christ,’ Tom exclaimed, ‘I’d die of fucking boredom! I’ve been at this so long there isn’t anything else.’ He grinned. ‘We’re not all bookish like you, Professor.’
‘Aye, so,’ Paddy agreed. He reached into his pocket and drew out his cigarette case, handed one over to Tom. ‘But I’ll tell you this, laddie,’ he squinted over the lighter, ‘I’ll keep on as long as it takes. I won’t ever give in to their goddamned partition, and that’s the God’s truth.’

At the end of April, Sir James Craig went to Dublin to talk with DeValera. Lloyd George already having sent Lord Derby as his emissary to propose Dominion Home Rule to no effect he now sent in the big gun of Sir James, with similar outcome. They met in Sutton, north of the city, and pleasantly enough though it was ultimately to no purpose. When Sir James returned north, he found the Belfast Newsletter to have reported in a banner headline ‘Sir James in the Camp of the Enemy.’ Sir James called Dev ‘impossible’.

This was followed close by with elections in May throughout the country for both the Belfast and Dublin parliaments. In London, Lloyd George was meeting with Sir Henry Wilson,, Chamberlain and Churchill, to explore the avenues of complete martial law throughout the twenty--six counties, his ‘peace’ emissaries having failed to do the trick. All normal life was to be suspended. Churchill urged for ‘a tremendous onslaught… the most unlimited exercise of rough--handed force.’ Two days before the Irish elections, the Cabinet declared that if matters in Ireland were not in hand by 12 July, complete martial law was to be declared in the South. For the North; such an action would have been redundant.

In the North for the elections the B Specials were brought in to ‘keep order’, which they did in their inimitable fashion, killing thirteen people and driving 150 more out of their homes. In Derry, the Nationalist balance shifted slightly at the Guildhall-- the seat of local government -- but the Sinn Fein Lord Mayor, H.C. O’Doherty, kept his year--old government together by dint of will and charm, although it was increasingly ineffective as time wore on due to the infiltration by Unionists and the moderate foot--draggers of Sinn Fein. But they could not hold out forever against the steady and inexorable force of the Unionist parliament at Belfast, where Sir James Craig had been elected Prime Minister of the six--county state. They were undermined in the Dail as well by their TD Eoin MacNeill, the Dail Speaker, who pushed the southern parliament for non--recognition of the northern one against the wishes of the majority of his constituents. This stance went hard with them, and further divided the public mind of the Northern Nationalists from that of their colleagues in the South. The bitterness against their position was growing.

On the 22 June, in an unprecedented move, King George opened the Belfast Parliament. His speech was remarkably conciliatory, if not naïve, calling for his appearance in Ireland to be,

‘The first step towards ending the strife among her people, whatever their race or creed. In that hope I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill. It is my earnest desire that in Southern Ireland too, there may, ere long, take place a parallel to what is now passing in this hall; that there a similar occasion may present itself, and a similar ceremony be performed. For this the Parliament of the United Kingdom has in the fullest measure provided the powers. For this the Parliament of Ulster is pointing the way….’

Having read out the King’s speech in the Derry Journal at the breakfast table the next day, Molly was offended when Paddy leaned back in his chair and started singing sardonically,

‘Oh, croppies ye’d better be quiet and still,
Ye shan’t have your liberty do what ye will
As long as salt water is formed in the deep
Our foot on the neck of the croppy we’ll keep
Remember the steel of Sir Phelim O’Neill
Who slaughtered our fathers in Catholic zeal
And down, down, croppies lie down…’

‘That’s a disgusting song!’ she exclaimed.
‘No more than what the King is asking of us, darlin’ girl,’ he said easily, picking up a piece of toast from the rack. ‘To be good and quiet while the Unionists wreck our homes, kill us, and bash our heads in.’ He glanced at the girls, who sat white--faced and tense, and drank his tea.
‘He’s calling for peace,’ she reasoned.
‘And so you think the Orange Lodge will go for that?’ he smirked over the teacup. ‘They’ll have us out, and nothing less. That speech was for nothing more than our capitulation.’ He crossed his arms.

‘You do him an injustice,’ she murmured. ‘It says he is appalled by what is happening here.’
‘As well he might be,’ he shrugged. ‘The puppet king of a corrupt government…’ He shoved himself away from the table and began pacing the floor in one swift movement, knocking the table askew. ‘We do not require his grace or permission for our government or our existence!’ He intoned. The patronising tone of George’s speech infuriated him. Conscious of the girls’ staring, he minded his language. ‘When will they get that through their heads?’ He rounded on her. ‘Tell me that! When will the like of your uncle get that through their heads? They don’t own us!’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘We are not slaves, but free men, and by God, they’ll be made to know it!’ He sighed and flung himself into the chair again.
‘But at what cost?’ Molly begged. He looked at her and tears glittered in her eyes. Joe was suddenly among them, his absence achingly palpable. ‘Haven’t we suffered enough? Can there never be peace?’
He regarded her grimly. ‘Not while they hold the whip hand over us,’ he said. But he took her hand on the table to soften the harshness of the words.

On the 26 June, the Dail agreed to a programme put forward by Michael Collins in preparation for the dark times foreseen ahead; agreed to, but held in reserve for implementation. This was to be all out war, in response to the threat of total martial law throughout out country. The Big Fellow had warned Dev that this new tack on the part of the British military would be ‘of the most rigorous kind and will be supported by three times the present military strength,’ something which the Volunteers would not be able to counter, even with the support of the people. He proposed the wholesale shooting of agents and Auxies, ‘a regular, all--round, thought out onslaught on all the departments which operate on behalf of foreign Governments in Ireland.’ Notices were to be issued to all parties concerned that it would be illegal to support or dispense English law in the country; they would be liable to ‘certain penalties’. No English connection would be tolerated.

On the 28 June, Lloyd George sent a public letter to Dev proposing a peace conference, ‘so that the King’s appeal for… peace in Ireland shall not have been made in vain.’ Dev could bring ‘any colleague’ he wished, a remarkable concession from the spring, when the PM stipulated that Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith were in no way to be included in the negotiations. Craig was invited to the table as well. The Government were suing for peace. In private talks with Smuts, the South African President sent over to Ireland as an emissary, Dev declared, when it was pointed out that it would be a mistake to seek a Republic of Lloyd George’s government, ‘If the status of a Dominion is offered to me, I will use all our machinery to get the Irish people to accept it.’ One Irishman was having none of it, Republic, Dominion, or Crown colony – Sir James Craig remained in Belfast. He said that he would ‘sit on Ulster like a rock. Let the PM and Sinn Fein settle it. I’m satisfied with what we have got.’ As well he might. It was to his advantage to keep out of it.

A Truce was declared, effective at noon, Monday 11 July, a fortnight hence. Dick Mulcahy issued a communiqué to the IRA that operations were to cease only as of that hour. All over the South there were bonfires, parties, and wild elation in celebration. Not everyone in the Volunteers regarded the Truce with elation, for their position all over the country was very bad, and if the Truce should fail, they were done for, for as Mick Collins said, ‘We shall be as rabbits coming out of our holes.’ In Derry there were, predictably, riots from the Unionist elements, who wanted no part of the cease--fire required. For five days after the announcement was made they had no peace whatever in the Bogside and only intermittently thereafter until the Truce went into effect. The Loyalists ran riot and the UVF and the B Specials were right there to help them out. Fourteen people died, then or afterward from wounds, twenty buildings went up in flames and nearly a hundred people decamped for the South.

Paddy and Tom nearly came to blows about the Truce during this tense period. At a meeting in Geordie Mahoney’s out in the suburbs in Waterside, Tom said to hell with the Truce, they should keep on if provoked by the Loyalists, as they were sure to be. The room stilled. Paddy was sitting facing the garden windows at the dining table with eighteen of the men, Geordie, and Joe Deeling and Michael MacRae, both Secret Servicemen. From his place near the centre of the table, Paddy looked up briefly from his papers, without moving his head. He said, tonelessly,
‘I am not authorised by GHQ to sanction such an action. If it is undertaken, this command will not take responsibility for it.’ He looked up now, slowly, towards Tom who was on his feet across the table.
‘So that’s how it’s to be?’ He exclaimed angrily.
Paddy lifted his head back. ‘That is how it’s to be,’ he agreed softly. ‘Sit down, Tom.’ He shuffled through the papers before him, indicating that the subject was closed.
Tom did not sit down. ‘So you’re Dublin’s man after all, is it?’ He baited. He picked up his cap off the table and hurled it across the room in disgust. ‘Pulling rank, toeing their line, after everything….’

Paddy was out of his chair, it crashing behind him on the floor, his expression murderous. Dinny and Jack looked ready to dive under the table; the rest were still and bloodless. ‘I would remind you who the OC is here, Tom, and where,’ he put emphasis on the words, ‘my jurisdiction lies!’
‘Oh yes,’ Tom went on recklessly, ‘bloody IRB, bloody Collins, bloody Dublin jackeen I say, lording it over the rest of us! Well, let me tell you this, Commandant,’ there was withering scorn in the word, ‘this a fucking volunteer army and not I nor none of us have to take this treatment from you!’ He looked round the table for support, but met with chagrined or carefully blank expressions.

‘If you don’t like the treatment,’ Paddy said coldly, sitting in the chair Dinny had hastily retrieved for him, ‘you can go. It is, as you say, a volunteer position.’ He looked up, coolly, the challenge clear: He glanced round the table. ‘That goes for everyone here. We’re likely to face a bad patch, make no mistake. We need the time to rearm and equip ourselves, recruit in case it goes badly. Dig in. But on the face of it, we must appear to be amenable. To be sure, it’s the other side are doing the same.’ He glanced at Mike MacRae, who nodded cautiously. ‘Any of yez who are against this policy are better out of it. There’s no room for negotiation. And that’s my word on it. If yez want to fight about it, I’ll meet ye outside….’ He waited, but no one moved or spoke. He shrugged then. ‘If yez all are against it, then I resign and ye can do what ye like, but my name won’t be on it.’ Again, there was silence. The clock ticked behind them in the parlour. Paddy waited, his eyes on the papers in front of him. Tom sat down in the thundering silence. ‘Good man, yourself,’ he murmured. It would not be the end of friction on this subject between him and Tom, but there was peace for the moment.

The trouble, as he had known since Easter Week, was that Tom had not his IRB training, loyalties, or mentality, which was that they did what was expedient under the circumstances to gain the end, which was the manifestation of the Republic. The means changed with the times, but the end, never Tom was in it for the fight; he hated the British and their Government, but it was indiscriminate; he could not see the difference between the Government and the people of Britain. He did not fight them for a purpose, save that hate. He genuinely could not envision a day when the terror would cease and the guns fall silent once for all, that was clear. For him, as he had admitted back in March, there was nothing but the fight left. Paddy had said nothing about this, even privately, not being concerned with the opinions of his men as long as they followed orders and did their duty, but, or perhaps because, he could see that it was an insoluble issue between them better left unproved. He had wondered, in odd moments, whether Tom Kilgallen called himself a Republican because it was a convenient vent for his own volatile nature. It was true that Tom was a brave man, but he reminded him of Rory, a comparison not to be taken lightly. There were certain jobs Paddy wouldn’t have trusted his brother with. He trusted neither Tom nor Rory not to let loose with the kind of torture the Auxies and Specials engaged in: hearts torn out, tongues cut out, skulls bashed in, castration by gunshot… the catalogue went on and on. They were capable of it.

In London, when the Truce was a mere week old, Sir James Craig had contemptuously declared that it was up to the British people and DeValera to come to terms with the area ‘outside his jurisdiction’ and that he was going home to carry on as Prime Minister of that Government. Dev complained and demanded an assurance that the northern issue was not a dead letter to the British Government before continuing talks, whereupon Lloyd George craftily replied that he was responsible for neither Craig’s statement nor Dev’s reply. This was not a good sign. Further indication of the British position came from Michael Collins, writing from Cork,
‘The spirit animating the enemy…in the parts of the County I visited is
arrogant and provocative. They are trying to regard the position not as
a truce but as a surrender on our part…generally speaking, I fancy the
idea is to have preparations made to attack us the moment they decide
to finish their offers.’

The offer from the British Government was Dominion Home Rule, which Dev publicly and steadfastly rejected time and again. Privately, at home, he was using every means to wrest conciliation from the Dail, arguing on 22 August that they had ‘not the power, and some of them had not the inclination to use force with Ulster.’ He would not be responsible for such a policy. He favoured, if the Republic were recognised – as he was fair certain by then it would not – letting each county decide for itself whether it wished to be part of the Republic. He was recognising the Northern State, granting Craig’s government the autonomy to remain separate. This let out the will of northern nationalists, who in no way wanted to be part of a Northern State where they were worse than second--class citizens. It was abrogating their will, their wishes, for the sake of his own political expediency. There it was: Dev publicly cutting them loose, as he had privately done two and a half years before. His fine words on each county voting its place in the Republic were a political smokescreen, as he knew he would not be called upon to make good on them. He was, after all, a politician only, a paper Republican.

Kilgallen, of course, took his old commandant at his word, ignoring his stance on the Northern Government, and stuck by Dev’s ‘hard--line’ Republicanism to the deterioration of the relationship with Paddy. After one too many nights of listening to his harangue in Pat’s, Paddy gave up on him as his second in command and in future all such communications as had previously gone through Tom went through Jack Meehan instead. Tom noticed of course, and joked with him in the lane one morning in September as they walked down from a visit to Geordie Mahoney in the city,
‘Sloughing me off, are ya?’
Paddy shrugged, taking a drag on his cigarette. ‘We need neutrality. As soldiers we cannot espouse political opinions.’
‘Ha!’ Tom crowed, ‘you’re a fine one for talking! As if you yourself have no bloody opinions!’
‘But I don’t bandy them about in the pub,’ Paddy drawled, looking out over the river.
‘Jaysus, will you listen to him!’ Tom asked the skies. ‘Paddy, it’s us, for Jaysus sake, and us only in the place.’
‘That’s not the point,’ he insisted shortly.
‘Are ya saying I’ve a big mouth, then?’ Tom asked grinning, though he was obviously hurt, behind the smile.
Paddy said nothing, but grimaced. They walked in silence until they came to their corner, and then he turned to look at Tom. ‘I’m sorry Tommy,’ he peered at him keenly. ‘But it’s the way it has to be.’ Tom said nothing, his face white, walked away into his own house, and closed the door. Paddy sighed, wincing, his mouth twitching with the effort to still the sudden rush of grief. It would go hard to lose Tom.. He sighed again, running a hand through his hair, swearing, and went into his own house then.

‘What’s the matter?’ Molly asked him when he shut the door. She was sitting in the chair beside the partition door sorting Katie’s hair ribbons in her lap.
He was grim. ‘If there was ever a time I wished we had gone to Kerry, this would be it,’ he said frankly.
She stared at him. ‘But there’s murder in the streets there even now!’ she exclaimed, alarmed. She turned in the chair. ‘What’s happened, Paidín?’
He sighed. ‘I just had a row with Tom. Things are very bad.’ He stood in the middle of the room, pensively, until she put aside her chore and came to him as she had of old, with her arms around his neck. It raised the ghost of a rueful smile from him, but her low--murmured, breathy words brought him to tears,
‘We can always go home a mhuirnin.’
He broke down and clutched her tightly, choking back a sob. ‘Can we ever?’ He murmured into her hair. ‘Can we ever?’

In November, the Loyalist element made an outright breach of the Truce in the North by attacking Sinn Fein County Councillors, disrupting Council meetings at the point of a gun, and other strong--arm tactics, in Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry principally, showing that they meant to go on as they had begun. They were unopposed by both the Northern Ireland and the British Government. Sinn Fein offices throughout the Province were petrol--bombed and known officers were tendered death threats. All this was in response to a rumour from London that the PM had agreed to reorganise the Boundary Commission. This would mean the probable loss of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and parts of Armagh, Down, and Derry. The Unionists were having none of it. In the end, it proved only a ploy of Lloyd George’s.

In the small hours of 6 December 1921, in time to make the morning papers, the British and Irish delegations in London signed the Treaty, thus creating the Irish Free State; Ulster was under ‘consideration’ as regarded the Boundary Commission, a neat phrase of the PM’s which in practice signified absolutely nothing. The word from Frank Aiken was that the wording of the Oath to the Crown had, after consultation, been handed down from the IRB to Mick Collins. The Treaty was not regarded by the Brotherhood as anything more than a device by which to gain the necessary military strength to smash the lingering British machinery in the country, including the Northern State. Mick had signed the Treaty with no intention of taking the Oath to the Crown, with every intention that as the British had broken the Treaty of Limerick in the time of Elizabeth Tudor, so would the IRB break this one when it suited their purposes. The Treaty was a means to the end.

Paddy said nothing to anyone of his opinions of the Treaty or any aspect of it. It was well known however that he was in Collins’ camp, and there was some confusion among the men as to his intentions. He told Jack Meehan to tell them one thing, and one only, ‘The fight continues.’ Jack was a Brotherhood man, so he already knew the reasons; Tom Kilgallen was another matter.

‘Haha, me boyo!’ Tom crowed on sight of him as he sauntered into Pat Halinan’s the night the news of the Treaty broke. ‘What did I tell you so? Yer man’s nothing more than British lapdog after all! Dev will never let that Treaty go through, you wait.’
With one movement, Paddy got up from where he sat hunched over the bar talking to Pat, and landed Tom a punch that laid him out flat. He had the advantage of surprise. For half a minute or so, no one in the bar moved or spoke while Tom lay out cold on the floor. Truth be known, Paddy thought he’d broken his hand on Tom’s jaw. He stood, pale and grim, looking dispassionately at Tom on the floor. Finally, Dinny Seaver whistled, murmuring,
‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, will you look at that!’
. Dinny his loyal scout, Dinny the yes--man. If the situation wasn’t so tragic, it would have been comic. But his musichall expression broke the awful spell.
‘Joe, will you get some ice,’ Pat said to his barman, ‘he’ll need it when he comes round.’ Joe went off. ‘And yourself,’ Pat said to him, ‘how are you? Will you stay or go?’
‘I’m grand,’ he said easily, though his fingers were swelling now and his knuckles were bloody. It was a bloody stupid thing to do, he couldn’t draw a gun now if he had to
‘I’ll stay,’ he nodded.

Tom came round with the ice on him – he had a couple of teeth knocked loose – and literally didn’t know what hit him. He sat up, shaking his head like a wet dog. Paddy by this time was kneeling beside him on the floor,
‘Are you alright, maneen? Am I clear to you? Do you know where you are?’
‘Aye, aye,’ Tom said, a hand going to his head. ‘Christ, I feel like three days on the spree…What the hell happened?’
Paddy smiled a little, ruefully. ‘I’m afraid my temper got the better of me. I’m sorry, Tom.’ He held out a hand. ‘Can you rise?’
‘Aye, yeah, just a minute,’ he shook his head again. ‘What the fuck did you hit me with, a shillelagh?’
Paddy shook his head. He held up his bruised and bleeding left hand. To everyone’s astonishment, Tom burst out laughing.
‘Three years in the ring and no one ever did that! Ha!’ He leaned forward heavily on Paddy as he was helped to a chair. ‘Well, there’s one up for ya, ya bloody Fenian bastard.’ Paddy had done the one thing Tom could respect. Things were easier between them after that and good thing, because by the end of the year they were back to bloody mayhem from the forces of occupation.

On Christmas Eve there were massive pogroms in Derry in response to the attempt earlier in the month to break members of the Derry Brigade, two of whom were Paddy’s own men, out of jail. The only stipulation from GHQ had been that firearms could not be used, as this would flagrantly invalidate the Truce. It went badly, thanks to an inexpert use of chloroform. Two warders were killed, and fifteen prisoners, including a former warder who was in on the job, were tried for murder; three of them were to hang. There was also a raid on the IRA training camp in the Sperrin Mountains in eastern Derry that Paddy was attending, during which he narrowly avoided both arrest and being killed. The bullet whizzed so close past his ear that it burned his hair; a fraction of an inch closer and he would have been dead.

On the 27th there was a meeting in Clones, Co. Monaghan of IRA OCs, at which Eoin O’Duffy, the new Free State Chief of Staff reiterated what Aiken had sent in communiqué, that the Treaty was only a feint. Further, he said that he would never dream of taking the Oath, nor would he ask any other man to take it. The offensive was to go forward from that hour.

Accordingly, in the middle of January, while in the South the Treaty debates were raging, a group of Monaghan men, including the 5th Division OC were arrested in Tyrone – ostensibly on their way to a football playoff – with arms and ammunition for the Derry break. They too were jailed. When the case was appealed to Craig, he suggested that if the men applied for bail, it would not be refused. This let out the Derry prisoners, of course. The trouble with this, as well Sir James knew, was that by giving bail the Monaghan men would be acknowledging the Northern courts, something they were opposed to on principle.

On Tuesday, 7 February -- the very day the British had reprieved the Derry men – forty--two Orange officials were kidnapped and taken across the border. The original plan, scheduled for a fortnight before, had been for a hundred in Tyrone and Fermanagh, but the job was delayed by negotiations between Craig and Mick Collins about the Monaghan prisoners. As Sir James put it in a telegram to Lloyd George:

‘Large bands of men crossed frontier at Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh. They attacked and occupied houses of leading citizens on Ulster side of boundary. Numerous leading citizens including a High Sheriff were wounded or kidnapped and taken across border to the South. Bridges were blown up Twenty Ulster Specials at Rosslea (Fermanagh) were kidnapped and taken across border. The Ulster police captured 11 men who were identified as members of the IRA from Longford and Leitrim. They were armed with bombs and revolvers and had transport. Sir J.Craig regards this as deliberate and organised attack on Ulster.’

As well he might, for it had been planned for nearly two months at that point.

Neither Paddy nor his men were innocent in this adventure. Their part had been to organise matters on the Derry side; arrange that the Donegal and Fermanagh men knew the addresses of the Derry Unionists; take a hand in the wrecking of bridges (the detonators at the Craigavon Bridge had not gone off, but were found by the Specials later); and to ‘keep order’. That night Paddy’s men took out all the pent--up frustration of the months of the Truce, the pogroms they could neither defend nor retaliate, and he let them. They paid the Orange lot back in their own bloody coin for six years of continual terror. He found out what he was capable of then. It was a dirty night’s work. Their targets were political and economic figures, no civilians, women or children; that was in their favour.

The British Cabinet went into shock, and in Ulster the reprisals were bloody and fierce. There were continual riots for a week, and in Belfast, after a skirmish between the B--Specials and the IRA in Co. Monaghan, a Catholic schoolyard was bombed and six children were killed. The Tommies in the South were put back on active duty, a curfew was imposed, martial law once again declared, and Craig asked for and got in excess of £5M in arms, ammunition and supplies from the British Government. This after Craig repudiated the Boundary Commission, saying his Government would resist any changes it did not like, which meant any changes at all. The truth was made ringingly clear when it was announced that henceforth the Specials would be paid by the British Government. It was a clear repudiation of the Treaty, made possible by James Craig’s earlier statement that the Treaty was between Sinn Fein and the British, and had nothing to do with him.

But that didn’t keep the Volunteer Executive down. On the 17th of February, Mick Collins instituted a programme to pay the National schoolteachers from the Secret Service fund, thus subverting the running of the newly transferred Northern Government. He also paid the Nationalist County Councils. It was all part of the plan of non--recognition of the Northern State. As Dick Mulcahy put it in a memorandum: ‘The general aim underlying all operations in Carsonia is to disorganise the economic structure of the territory and to make the hostile inhabitants realise that aiding and abetting the activities of the Enemy does not pay.’

Kilgallen was jealous that in addition to his £5 a week from the IRA Executive as an officer, Paddy received £10 from the Free State Government for his teaching work. That this went mostly to the Volunteers Dependants Fund – to people like himself who were unemployed – moved Tom not at all.
‘Trinity swank,’ he grumbled at Paddy’s comparative ease. They were frugal in the house, but by the standards of the neighbourhood they were the Sackville--Wests. Tom would have sworn blue murder if he knew that the money in the house really came from Molly’s generous allowance. That Anglo--Irish money was funding IRA operations, even in the manner of keeping them alive, troubled Paddy not at all as he did not see inherent evil in wealth, but Tom would not have swallowed it.

In March, a Northern Military Council was set up, between Mick Collins’ men in the Free State Army and the Northern units of the IRA, headed in the North by Frank Aiken, Commander of the 4th Division. In Paddy’s own neck of the woods, the 2nd Northern, the OC was then Charlie Daly, but when the looming civil war in the South began he went anti--Treaty and was replaced by Tom Morris. There was a central arms dump for the North set up in Cavan. This was a particularly dangerous enterprise as the Northern Government had outlawed the IRA with the Special Powers Act after the border incident, and had recruited 32,000 men into the Specials, who thus outnumbered the IRA in the North some ten times. Outlawed or not, under the Big Fellow and Mulcahy’s order, in April the 2nd and 3rd Northern Divisions launched a major offensive against the RIC and the Specials; there were reprisals all over the Province.

The Craig--Collins peace pact of January was in tatters, but not Collins’ determination: in April he sent 400 Lee--Enfield rifles North with a thousand rounds each, to Donegal to Joe Sweeney, the Divisional OC. There the rifles, which were British issue, had their identity codes filed off by the Donegal men and were sent to Omagh for distribution via an oil tanker. The man who was in charge of the latter operation was John Haughey. Paddy drove to Omagh in Pat Halinan’s lorry and picked up his consignment: twelve, with the accompanying rounds so that at least each man in his company would be armed. The cache was hidden under a tarpaulin and boxes of whiskey. God bless John Jameson’s, the ploy worked. For the Cavan dump, rifles were exchanged with Anti--Treaty men in Liam Lynch’s North Cork Division so to allay Government suspicions.

It was a small boost for them in the North, where the daily outrages took up to two columns in the newspapers every single day. In May, John Moylan defended the IRA in the Dail, saying,
‘Raids and acts of obstruction have been enumerated and it was stated that this work has been done under the cover of the Boycott. It has not been done under cover of the Boycott. It has been done as part of the Boycott work until this affair in the North – these murders and so on – is stopped.’

This was after Tom Morris ordered the 2nd Northern Division into action early in the month. They attacked the RIC barracks in Derry City and County and in Tyrone. Six RIC and Specials were killed. From that time until the end of July there was continual warfare. The order went out to all Brigade OCs:

‘Operations are to be continued all over the division until further notice.
These operations are,
a) General destruction of enemy property, wires, bridges, etc.
b) Destruction of property owned by prominent Orangemen living or having residences in your Brigade area.
c) Reprisal-- all reprisals must be taken at once. Reprisal must be six to one so as to prevent the enemy from continuing same.
d) Spies and informers to be shot on sight.’

In all, the IRA caused some £1M damage. The reaction was fierce. The death toll was in the hundreds. Internment was introduced and a prison ship now lodged off the Antrim coast. All nationalist and Republican organisations were banned. Every effort was made to depopulate the Nationalist city and County Councils, though Doherty stood his ground in Derry. The last straw was a Bill in the Imperial Parliament abolishing proportional representation; the gerrymandering that had gone on since the founding of the Northern State in 1920 was now institutionalised.

The summer campaign had taken everything they had. Paddy for his part had lost sixteen men, pulling his number down to eight, three of whom were in no condition to fight due to wounds. He himself had been shot up, but not too badly so as not to carry on, but they were completely without ammunition, and with the machinery of the nationalist clubs gone into hiding, it was very difficult to obtain funds for his men. Along with most of the Northern units, they were in a state of semi--starvation. An official IRA report noted,
‘Many officers and men are forced to go on the run, necessarily in their own restricted areas. They find it difficult to get accommodation with the people now… the enemy are continually raiding and arresting; the heavy sentences and particularly the floggings making civilians very loathe to keep ’wanted men’ or arms. The officers are feeling their position keenly…under the present circumstances, it would be impossible to keep our Military Organisation alive and intact, as the morale of the men is going down day by day and the spirit of the people is practically dead.’

The spirit of the people. That elusive, marvellous thing that was the real cause of their former success. With the people behind them they could accomplish anything. Hadn’t James Stephens said that back in the old Fenian days? Dick Mulcahy, as Minister for Defence, wrote to the Big Fellow late on in July,
‘Our officers seem to realise that there is no other policy for the North but a peace policy of some kind, but the situation for peace or war has gone beyond them, none of them feel they are able to face the policy of one kind or another’.

Accordingly, a meeting of the officers of the Northern Divisions was held in Portobello Barracks in Dublin on 2 August to outline the new policy. Paddy went, with Molly and the girls staying out in Baldoyle. Grace was gone to Europe but had given them leave of the use of the house in her absence. It was a kindness Paddy did not forget, given the explosive situation in Dublin where the Free State forces were busy conducting a civil war. O’Connell Street was destroyed half way down its length; the Four Courts and the Custom House were gone. The GPO never had been rebuilt. It was like after Easter Week all over again, with armoured lorries and troops and checkpoints everywhere. Better for Molly and the girls to keep out of it. The meeting at Portobello Barracks was depressing, but something of a relief. There was one consolation in the words of the Free State Army’s new Commander in Chief, Mick Collins. He was in the uniform of Commandant General, and leaned into the podium before which he stood with all the fire and sincerity of former days. The bitterness of the civil war had not soured him. He promised them all, with words as ringingly IRB as ever,
‘With this civil war on my hands I cannot give you men the help I wish to give and mean to give. I now propose to call off hostilities in the North and to use the political arm against Craig so long as it is of use. If that fails, the Treaty can go to hell and we will all start again.’

Three weeks later, Michael Collins was dead. The word came on the 23rd with the morning papers. It was a cruel irony that in Derry, being British subjects, they had the news before those in the South, for the cable from Cork where he was ambushed had gone through London. It was an ordinary summer morning. They had planned a holiday up in Buncrana on Lough Swilly through the weekend, and the girls were very excited to be getting away on a holiday twice in a fortnight. Paddy came downstairs whistling and rounded the corner of the kitchen door, kissing Molly as she stood at the stove with the breakfast fry--up, before his eye lit on the black--bordered headline in the Derry Journal:

MICHAEL COLLINS KILLED IN AMBUSH

‘Oh my God,’ he murmured, stunned, and broke into choking tears. Behind him, Molly turned, alarmed,
‘Padge, my God, what’s the matter!’
He turned into her arms, numbly, weeping uncontrollably. ‘They’ve killed Mick Collins,’ he murmured, though he could hardly get the words out. He couldn’t take it in. There was no room for questions in his mind about who or why. He couldn’t take in the bare stark fact that the Big Fellow was dead.

The girls came downstairs, curious at the uproar, but he could not be brave and stoic before them. After some time, clutching Molly in the middle of the floor, he stumbled over to the table with her and they sat and he listened while she read out the piece in her clear public--school tones. She was shocked at the news, at the killing of any public official that occurred, but it did not mean to her what it meant to him. She was patient and kind as he wept again after the piece, and sent Sally next door to the Sullivans for some whiskey for him.
‘What will you do?’ she asked, holding his hand on the table. The girls finished up the breakfast fry and took it into dining alcove, leaving them to sort themselves out.
He shook his head. ‘I have to go to Dublin,’ he murmured. ‘Pay my respects….’ His face crumpled. Joe had hurt this much, and like Joe’s death, he knew it was a wound that would never really heal. Mick had been the only one in the Dublin Government on their side, steadfast through it all. There was Mulcahy, but he was Army.
‘We’ll come with you.’ Molly said.
He looked up, into her clear grey eyes, startled. ‘Why?’
She smiled a little, tenderly, and reached out to brush away his fallen hair from his eyes. ‘Because our place is there, with you.’ She murmured. This was the woman who had come with him from Dublin, knowing nothing of what such an action would entail. She had endured it all, all the terror of the last six years, mostly without him while he was gone in defence or on the run. She was the bravest woman he ever knew. He leaned over and embraced her again, weeping in gratitude now, for that love and faith.

In Dublin, 500,000 people lined the streets and 100,000 followed the funeral cortege of Michael Collins to Glasnevin. Paddy was among them in the uniform of the Volunteers, behind Dick Mulcahy who marched alone at the head of the Army. Ten days before he and Mick had marched together at the funeral of Arthur Griffith, who had died of a stroke. He was Commander in Chief now, in Mick’s stead. Dick had issued a communiqué to the Army and the IRA:

‘Stand calmly by your posts. Bend bravely and undaunted to your work. Let no cruel act of reprisal blemish your bright honour. Every dark hour that Michael Collins met since 1916 seemed but to steel that bright strength of his and temper his gay bravery. You are left each his inheritors of that strength and of that bravery. To each of you falls his unfinished work to build a nation…’

At the graveside, he said,
‘…And surely our ‘great rock’ was our prophet and our prophecy, a light held aloft along the road of ‘danger or hardship or bitter toil.’ And if our light is gone out it is only a the paling of a candle in the dawn of its own prophecy…
‘Men and women of Ireland, we are all mariners on the deep, bound for a port still seen only through storm and spray, sailing still on a sea full of ‘dangers and hardship and bitter toil’. But the Great Sleeper lies smiling in the stern of the boat, and we shall be filled with that spirit which will walk bravely upon the waters.’

In this, Ireland’s darkest hour, all partisan concerns were laid aside, as they had been at the funeral of Parnell thirty--two years before. That it took the death of the bravest and best to effect such a union was truly a bitter shame.