The Squad (30 page)

Collins was anxious that he should be dealt with as soon as possible, and intelligence made concerted efforts to locate him. Ned Bolster, who believed that Lees had a reputation for using torture to extract information from suspects, learned from his contacts that the 6’3” tall Lees was staying in St Andrew’s temperance hotel in Wicklow Street. Tom Keogh and Ben Byrne kept an eye on the place but saw no sign of Lees. He seemed to vanish for about three weeks and they suspected that he must have returned to Britain, before they picked up his trail again.

‘Tom Keogh and I were in the dress circle of the Scala picture-house, and just prior to the commencement of the programme a lady and gentleman proceeded to their seats,’ Ben Byrne recalled, ‘Keogh nudged me and said, “I think that is Lees”. We decided to keep a watch on this gentleman and, whether he was Lees or not, find out where he was living. After the show was over we followed him and found that he was staying in St Andrew’s.’

Next morning, 29 March, Keogh succeeded in rounding up Ned Bolster and Mick O’Reilly to join Byrne and himself to wait for Lees, because they knew that if it was him, he would be heading for Dublin Castle about 9.30. ‘Bolster and myself were detailed to do the actual shooting,’ related Byrne. ‘Lees appeared without any undue delay, and, as he was already known to me, there was no need for any further identification. He was accompanied by a lady, but we had no interest in her. We opened fire on Lees, and he fell mortally wounded.’

Temporary Cadet McCarthy had been passing on information about F Company of the auxiliaries based at Dublin Castle since he was recruited following the transfer of Temporary Cadet Reynolds to Clare. McCarthy gave documents to Tobin and Dan McDonnell in return for money. ‘On a few occasions he brought out files which we were able to copy and hand back to him,’ remembered Mc Donnell. ‘All went well for some time until about May 1921, when an incident occurred which shook our confidence in Mc Carthy and, as a matter of fact, rather convinced us that he had started to double-cross us.’

Tobin, Cullen and McDonnell had been having lunch regularly in La Scala restaurant, which was attached to the La Scala cinema (which later became the Capital theatre). ‘We went there for lunch every day and we went to the one waitress,’ McDonnell explained. One Friday Tobin was wearing a new brown suit. ‘Sit ting across the room from us was McCarthy, the auxiliary, with two other fellows whom we didn’t know. McCarthy made no attempt to recognise us, which didn’t create any suspicion in our minds at the time.’ Next day the three of them were discussing operations in their Crow Street headquarters, along with Frank Saurin and Charlie Dalton, when Tobin was called away for a meeting with Collins. Cullen then went somewhere else and McDonnell headed off for lunch at La Scala with Saurin.

Crossing the Halfpenny Bridge he noticed a convoy of army and auxiliaries crossing O’Connell Bridge, heading north, but he did not take much notice as it was by then a regular occurrence. ‘I went on towards the La Scala, crossed over towards the old
Independent
office and went up on the left-hand side of Middle Abbey Street going towards O’Connell Street,’ McDonnell said. ‘When I reached the narrow laneway running between Middle Abbey Street and Princes’ Street two auxiliaries stepped out and held me up, demanding to know where I was going. I was searched, and on informing them that I was on my way home, was propelled by their boots.’ He found O’Connell Street occupied by soldiers and auxiliaries. Later he learned that they had raided the La Scala restaurant and detained the patrons there for up to two hours.

‘When the raiding party entered the Restaurant they immediately went to the table that we had been at for the previous week and demanded of the waitress the names of the three men, giving a very accurate description of the three of us, and particularly describing the tall thin man wearing a new brown suit,’ McDonnell noted. ‘They insisted that we must have come into the building and that we must be hiding somewhere. However, they ransacked the place from cellar to garret, but needless to remark they didn’t get us because we weren’t there.’ Paddy Morrissey, the volunteer who had first introduced the auxiliary McCarthy told McDonnell that he had an uneasy feeling about McCarthy. ‘These, however, were the chances which had to be taken when dealing with men of the McCarthy type, who after all were only working for the pay they received,’ McDonnell concluded. ‘One possibly couldn’t expect anything else to happen, and we can only congratulate ourselves that we escaped so luckily on occasions like this.’ They were not sure that McCarthy had betrayed them, so they did not retaliate against him, but they never used him again.

Ever since the capture of Seán MacEoin, Collins was particularly taken up with plans to arrange his escape. The first attempt was to be made immediately after his capture. He was known to have been wounded and assuming that he would be transferred to King George V military hospital the Squad was sent to intercept the convoy bringing MacEoin from Mullingar to Dublin.

‘We left Morelands and got the tram as far as Lucan,’ Vinny Byrne recalled. ‘We proceeded along the road towards the Spa hotel. A few yards beyond the hotel the road takes a sharp turn, with a high bank on the left-hand side.’ They decided to lie in ambush there behind a hedge, as the position commanded a good view of the road.

They lay there for four or five hours, but no cars or trucks of a military nature passed, and they decided to call off the attack.

‘We observed a small car coming along the road, going towards the city and we held it up, ‘ Byrne said. ‘We ordered the driver to take us to town. He refused point-blank, stating he was an ex-British army officer. I must admit he was a brave man.’

‘If any of you can drive, you can have the car and I will travel along with you,’ the driver said. ‘I promise on my word of honour I will not draw attention to anyone, or give any trouble whatsoever.’

They put him in the back seat with one man on either side of him but none of them could drive. Ben Byrne said that he knew a little about driving.

‘I am not going to risk my neck,’ Tom Keogh said. ‘I am going to walk home.’ He handed over his gun to those in the car and took off across the fields and walked home along by the canal. The others drove to Islandbridge, where they ordered the British officer out and told him that he could collect the car in Park Gate Street, at the entrance to Phoenix Park.

A number of efforts were planned to rescue MacEoin from King George V hospital. While he was in Dublin (before his capture) MacEoin had met Brigid Lyons and asked her to visit him if he was ever captured. So hearing that MacEoin had been shot, she assumed that he would have been taken to King George V hospital, and she went to visit him. ‘I met the officers in charge there and I told them I wanted to see General MacEoin,’ she recalled. ‘There were a few little titters.’

‘She wants to see
General
MacEoin,’ they remarked to one another in amusement.

‘I told them that I wanted to write to his mother to tell her how he was, so they had a little pow-wow and they said it would be all right and they would bring back an answer,’ she continued. He responded to her message with a note assuring her that he was all right but add facetiously that he could do with sugar as the place tended to be rather sour. She called at the hospital a couple of other times, and then someone told her that MacEoin had been moved to Mountjoy Jail.

MacEoin wrote to her suggesting that she get permission from Dublin Castle to visit him in prison. She pleaded with the authorities there for permission. ‘Why do you want to see MacEoin?’ they asked. She was pretending to be a girlfriend. As she was a medical student she said she wished to assess his condition for herself, so that she could inform his mother. This worked and she was given permission to visit him in the hospital area of the prison, which was on the ground floor.

Shortly afterwards Joe O’Reilly asked Brigid to meet Collins at 46 Parnell Square, the Keating’s branch of the Gaelic League, at 11 o’clock the following morning. Collins often used the building for intelligence meetings.

‘I took to the air,’ she said at the thought of meeting Collins. ‘I was never so thrilled or excited in my whole life.’ She cut class to race over to Parnell Square for the meeting.

When she arrived at the house in Parnell Square there was a little girl taking dancing lessons in one of the rooms. Collins charged in to meet her and greeted her with a firm handshake. ‘Have you seen Seán?’ he asked.

She said that she had.

‘I want you to get detailed information on where he’s confined in Mountjoy,’ he said. ‘Pay particular attention to exactly where you see him – the room, where it’s situated, how you get in, where you go inside, the number of locked doors, the number of sentries, who is present at the interviews, and all the details concerned with your visits.’

The interview with the Big Fellow lasted about three minutes.

Each time she went to the prison wardresses searched her. ‘They were courteous enough, but they made certain you couldn’t carry anything in,’ she noted. He had asked for sugar ‘to prevent him going sour,’ but she had to leave that at the gate. ‘I usually held a written note between my fingers and I managed to slip that to him, and collect his note when I first went in or as I was about to leave. Once while he was in the prison hospital, I failed to get the note to him.’

‘Brighid, have you nothing to say to me,’ Seán asked in desperation with an auxiliary guard looking on.

‘I have,’ she replied, ‘but I can’t say it with that fella looking on.’

‘Get on with it, Missie, and be quick,’ the auxiliary said, turning his back.

She quickly slipped the note under his pillow.

‘Tell me more and get every detail,’ Collins would say to her when they met, ‘because I must get him out.’

In mid April Dublin Castle refused permission for further visits. Collins surmised this was because of the impending execution of T o m Traynor. The IRA took RIC District Inspector Gilbert N. Potter hostage and offered to exchange him for Traynor, but this was rejected. After Traynor’s execution, Potter’s captors apparently did not wish to kill him but they received orders from headquarters in Dublin to carry out the reprisal.

When Brigid Lyons was next allowed to visit MacEoin he had been transferred from the prison hospital to the top floor of the prison, and she saw him in the office of the deputy governor. As she was parting the deputy governor and the auxiliary present discreetly turned their backs and she palmed him a note from Collins, who was well advanced on the escape plans.

Ted Herlihy, one of the friendly warders, gave Seán Kavanagh one of the prisoners, a .38 Webley. ‘This was brought around for Seán MacEoin,’ Herlihy explained. Kavanagh was to hide it in his cell until it was needed. He did this by burying it in a box of sand that surrounded the pipes by the cell wall to deaden the sound as the men tried to send messages to each other in Morse code on the pipes.

Collins was working on an elaborate plan to send an armoured car into the prison to pick up MacEoin, supposedly from Dublin Castle. The first part of the plan involved highjacking an armoured car. Michael Lynch, a volunteer and superintendent of the corporation’s abattoir on North Circular Road, suggested that they could seize the armoured car that called at the abattoir. Each morning at around 6 a.m., it escorted a lorry bringing meat to Porto bello barracks. Lynch was ‘on the run’ himself, but his wife and family were living in a house attached to the abattoir. Tobin instructed Charlie Dalton to report this to a meeting at the Plaza hotel in Gardiner’s Row one night in late April.

‘When I walked into the room I saw several staff officers assembled. Among them was the director of intelligence, Michael Collins,’ Dalton recalled. ‘I knew Michael by sight, but this was the first occasion on which I met him face to face. He was sitting at a table, and he gave me a friendly nod when I reported to him. I felt very important to be in such company, but at the same time the presence of Michael completely overawed me. I was very vexed with myself not to be able to be at my ease, as I was most anxious to make a good impression.’

‘I want you to go to the Superintendent’s house,’ Collins told Dalton, ‘and observe the movements of the crew and see if there is any possibility of capturing the car.’

‘The next night, shortly before curfew, I went to the house,’ Dalton said. While talking to Lynch’s wife he was looking out the window for a possible escape route in the event the house was raided during the night. The area was bathed in moonlight and to his horror he saw shoals of rats moving about. ‘I withdrew hastily from the window, making up my mind that, if that were my only way out, I would cheerfully allow myself to be murdered in my bed,’ he said.

Mrs Lynch called him in the morning in time to witness the arrival of the armoured car, which parked in front of the drawing room window. ‘Kneeling down, I could see through the lace fringe at the bottom of the blind all that was going on,’ Dalton explained. ‘I saw the arrival of the armoured car. It accompanied two lorries and pulled up exactly on the spot opposite the window, only a dozen paces away.’ The lorries went further up the yard to be loaded with the meat.

‘I saw the door of the car opened,’ Dalton continued. ‘Four soldiers got out. They were dressed in dungarees and each had a revolver on the holster of his belt. Lighting cigarettes, they stood chatting. It was a double-turreted car, and I knew the crew consisted of six men. On getting out, one of the soldiers had locked in the other two by fastening a small padlock on the door.’

Each morning Dalton took up his position at 6 a.m. and watched the process. ‘Every morning I made observations and every day I reported them to Liam [Tobin],’ he said. ‘After a week I was summoned to another meeting at brigade headquarters. On this occasion we met at Barry’s hotel, a few doors from the Plaza, where to my surprise, and gratification, I again saw Michael Collins.’

‘I described the arrival of the car, the several journeys it made, and the conduct of the crew. I produced a sketch of my own, showing the position usually occupied by the car when in the abattoir. They heard me out without interruption.’