The Civil War in Dublin - short extract

Chapter 3

The Four Courts Occupation and the First Shots, January–May 1922 The Beggars Bush takeover

P

addy O’Connor, a former IRA guerrilla in the Dublin ASU, woke up on 31 January 1922 with the news that he would be among the first Irish soldiers to take over a barracks from the British. He recalled checking and rechecking his newly-issued green uniform and kit in the workhouse in Celbridge, County Kildare, along with the other Dublin Guardsmen, before the march into the city. The Dublin Guards only barely qualified as regular soldiers. They had to be shown how to handle their rifles before setting out for Beggars Bush, as ‘revolvers and automatics were our weapons [in the IRA]’. The rebels-turned-regulars marched with bayonets fixed through the city centre, to be greeted by a ‘beaming’ Michael Collins at City Hall, where the Provisional Government was temporarily housed, and past thousands of Dubliners lining the streets. In O’Connor’s recollection, ‘old men were weeping and praying, children cheering and waving flags, women were showering blessings on our heads.’1 They were the first pro-Treaty unit to parade in Dublin. They were addressed at Beggars Bush Barracks, which had been occupied until two days previously by the Auxiliary Division of the RIC,

by Richard Mulcahy, IRA Chief of Staff. He presented them with the tricolour flag and told them that he knew they would ‘keep up the spirit of burning patriotism handed down to them from the fires of Easter Week’.2 Officially the new Irish Army were termed the ‘National Army’, though sometimes referred to at this date as the ‘Official IRA’ or ‘Regulars’ to distinguish them from the anti-Treaty ‘Irregulars’. The force that took over the barracks was only about fifty strong, composed of Collins loyalists from the Squad and Dublin Active Service Unit and commanded by Squad men Paddy O’Daly and Joe Leonard.3 The occupation of Beggars Bush was followed by a rush of barracks handovers in and around Dublin, including the main sites at Portobello,

36 The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922–1924 Wellington and the Curragh.4 The British Army, for now, retained three large barracks in the city and an aerodrome at Collinstown to the north.5 This handover should, had things worked as Collins and the pro-Treaty leadership intended, have been a smooth process by which Irish troops took over from their British counterparts. The problem was that, in Dublin, vital nerve centre of the new Irish state, it was clear that pro-Treaty troops were in a minority. Only about 1,900 of the 4,400-plus men enrolled in the Dublin Brigade were reliably pro-Treaty.6 Mulcahy himself wrote of Dublin in April 1922, ‘In this area, as all the Brigade Staff are disloyal, the majority of Battalion and Company officers followed’. Seán MacMahon, a pro-Treaty veteran of the Dublin Brigade, agreed that, by February 1922, most of both Dublin units were anti-Treaty in sympathy. This meant that they could not be relied upon to take over the posts vacated by the British.

Oscar Traynor, the Commander of the First Dublin Brigade, ‘wanted the Dublin city Brigade to take over the barracks’; but this, according to MacMahon, would have left the posts – vital for control of the capital – ‘in unsafe hands’. All leave for pro-Treaty elements in the ‘Dublin Guard’, based on the old Squad and the ASU, was cancelled, to occupy the posts and an intensive recruiting drive began among pro-Treaty IRA personnel.7

The CID As well as the new National Army, Collins and the Provisional Government also set up an armed police unit, the Criminal Investigation Department or CID. The idea was first proposed in January 1922 at an IRA meeting called in order to try to secure the ‘maintenance of order in Dublin’, in which Mulcahy cited a glut of recent robberies and ‘general disorder’ The proposed CID unit was to have a strength of 100 men.8 Michael Collins had hoped to convert part of his Intelligence Department to become a detective force as early as August 1921. In February 1922, their status was made official and the CID, composed at this date of about fifty men, set up their headquarters in Oriel House, off Great Brunswick Street (today Pearse Street).

In the early days, there were two sections of ‘Oriel House’ intelligence service; Military Intelligence, charged with amassing intelligence on the new state’s enemies and the CID proper, which dealt with armed crime. The unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police or DMP, were unable to cope with the wave of armed crime that had accompanied the armed conflict in the city since 1919; the Irish Republican Police or IRP were ‘inefficient’ and the wellarmed CID officers detailed to combat armed robbery had ‘plenty to do’ in early 1922.9

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By 16 May 1922, the CID proper had fifty detective officers, a clerk and three drivers. Its acting OC by this time was Frank Saurin, one of Collins’ former IRA Intelligence officers.10 The Military Intelligence section of Oriel House was led by Liam Tobin, who also held the rank of National Army Director of Intelligence, and consisted of twelve men in May 1922. All were veterans of either the Squad, IRA Intelligence or both.11 There was also a coterie of even more secretive Collins loyalists among the Dublin IRA, who now also became Provisional Government clandestine operatives. Joe O’Reilly, for instance, was never a formal member of the Squad or the Intelligence Department but had been seconded from his IRA company during the ‘Tan War’ to be Collins’ personal courier. Now he became the bodyguard of William T. Cosgrave, a senior pro-Treaty politician.12 Similarly, Patrick Swanzy, who had worked with Patrick Moynihan in pre-Truce IRA Intelligence before being captured by the British, became bodyguard to Arthur Griffith, President of the Provisional Government. Both eventually received pensions as CID veterans but were never formally members of the organisation.13

‘The breakup of the Army and the defensive forces of the nation’ The ‘Irregulars’ as pro-Treatyites called the anti-Treaty faction of the IRA, felt they had been duped by the pro-Treaty side’s seizure of barracks. The IRA Dublin Brigade and not a clique, as they saw it, of Collins supporters, should have occupied the first post taken over by the Irish Army. The next round of takeovers in March 1922 provoked the first confrontations.

In Limerick city, there was a serious crisis from 3–11 March, in which anti-Treaty forces led by Ernie O’Malley, with about 700 IRA fighters from the surrounding counties, attempted to face down pro-Treaty troops who had come to occupy the military and police barracks in the city. Eventually, O’Malley was talked down by Liam Lynch into accepting a compromise whereby both sides occupied two barracks each, but it was the first indication that the rival IRA factions might come to blows.14 A worried Éamon de Valera wrote to Richard Mulcahy, warning that, ‘if let go it [the rivalry over barracks] may well be the start of Civil War and the general breakup of the Army and the defensive forces of the nation’. De Valera proposed that the ‘Army give you as Minster for Defence their full allegiance seeing that you guaranteed to maintain the army intact as the Army of the Republic.’15 During the period of barracks takeovers, according to Army Quartermaster General Seán MacMahon, ‘the anti-Treaty element’ tried to

38 The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922–1924 get their followers to join the National Army and take over posts. National Army officer, JJ ‘Ginger’ O’Connell recalled, ‘Liam Lynch constantly called to Beggars Bush and had ‘very great influence with some in GHQ’.16 Dublin was one of the most keenly contested sites. At the Bank of Ireland on College Green, central Dublin, on 27 March, the day after the IRA Convention, Seán MacMahon and Gearóid O’Sullivan got wind of an antiTreaty plan for the garrison there to defect and to bring their weapons to the ‘Irregular HQ’ in Gardiner Place. Vinny Byrne, a stalwart of the Squad and now a pro-Treaty Army officer, drove down to the Bank of Ireland garrison and ‘threatened to shoot any man who left his post’. ‘Out of a guard of fifty [men] only six stood by [pro-Treaty] GHQ’. The rest were disarmed and discharged. Byrne, MacMahon and some other officers proceeded to drive around every other post in the city and addressed the men there to try to secure their loyalty.17 Realising their weak position in Dublin, MacMahon and others went on an intensive campaign to sway their old IRA units into support for the Provisional Government and the old IRA GHQ. In MacMahon’s old company in Third Battalion, he claimed to have brought seventy out of seventy-six men back into the pro-Treaty fold. Similarly, the influence of Tom Ennis on Second Battalion (north of the Liffey) meant that that Battalion which, along with the Third, had been the most active in the war against the British, was majority pro-Treaty, with five companies joining the pro-Treaty Army. 18 Financial and employment incentives as well as political arguments were used by the pro-Treatyites. For instance, in May 1922, when the Provisional Government announced that it was funding improvements to Dublin port, Joe McGrath, the Minister for Labour, stated that half of those employed would be men recruited ‘through the [pro-Treaty] IRA authorities’.19 Elsewhere in the Dublin IRA, though, where neither personal ties nor job offers could reach, the situation was less encouraging for the Provisional Government.

Only two companies in First Battalion, three in Third Battalion and just one in Fourth Battalion, supported the government. Virtually the whole of the Second Brigade, in South County Dublin, was anti-Treaty.20 At Wellington Barracks, which was taken over on Tom Ennis’ orders on 12 April, the occupation had to be done early in the morning to precede a move by anti-Treaty forces to take over the post first. Jim Harpur, a National Army officer stationed at Beggars Bush, was told by Ennis ‘that Irregular elements were contemplating having the barracks handed over to them. He instructed me to get a company together and proceed to Wellington Barracks at 0800 hours. He undertook to inform the British O/C.’ The next morning when the pro-Treaty troops marched into the barracks, the British officer

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commanding duly presented arms, showed Harpur around the barracks and marched his men out with the band playing.21 Wellington Barracks, which was much larger than Beggars Bush, became the Headquarters of the National Army’s 2nd Eastern Division, and also the base of Army Intelligence until December 1922. Next to the Army’s GHQ in Portobello Barracks, Wellington would be the most important pro-Treaty base in Dublin during the Civil War.

The Four Courts occupation The competition over barracks escalated very quickly into violence from April of 1922. It was not long before the taboo on shooting at and even killing former IRA comrades was broken.

Two days after Wellington Barracks was occupied by pro-Treaty forces, the anti-Treaty IRA made a bold move, securing for themselves their own headquarters in Dublin. According to Ernie O’Malley, the anti-Treaty Executive had been looking around the city for a suitable building, capable of garrisoning the men they had under arms in the city. They tried the Gaelic League Hall on Parnell Square but eventually settled on the Four Courts, a spacious and elegant Georgian complex, whose green dome dominated the quays along the River Liffey. It was the centre of the Irish legal system, a highly significant fact, given that, at this very juncture, the Provisional Government was in the process of winding up the revolutionary Dáil Courts and re-establishing the legal system as it had existed prior to 1919.

A force of anti-Treaty IRA men from O’Malley’s old Second Southern Division in Tipperary was brought to Dublin under cover of darkness to take over the Four Courts, which they did without opposition, ‘rounding up’ a few unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Policemen. ‘After a few days’, Ernie O’Malley remembered, the Tipperary men went home and were replaced with, ‘less sturdy Dublin men’ commanded by Paddy O’Brien, a railway worker from Inchicore.

The IRA Executive, represented in the Four Courts by Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Joe McKelvey of Belfast, set up their headquarters in the complex and according to O’Malley, ‘barricaded the windows with heavy legal tomes, weighty ledgers and tin boxes filled with earth’. The Public Records office was made into a munitions factory, making mines and grenades.22 Gathered under the Four Courts’ immense green dome, Liam Mellows, one of the Executive members, belted out the old ballad of the 1798 rebellion, ‘Come all ye brave United Men’ as the night drew in. O’Malley himself traipsed around the complex, now emptied of lawyers, clerks and judges, until he found an office he liked. ‘We had a good strong headquarters with

40 The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922–1924 a well-known name. That counted for something. No more hole and corner work’.23 Todd Andrews came to work as clerk for O’Malley, who was now acting as IRA Director of Operations.24 On the same day, they also took over a number of other sites in the city: Fowler Hall, the Kildare Street Club and several other houses in Parnell Square.25 What all these buildings had in common was that they were sites of Dublin unionism. Fowler Hall was an Orange Order meeting hall. The Kildare Street Club had, since the nineteenth century, been a bastion of highTory unionism. Éamon de Valera, still apparently trying to salvage a middle ground, gave a speech along Dublin’s Grand Canal on 24 April, announcing that the Four Courts takeover was not ‘a coup d’état or the beginning of revolution’.26 The Press, however, were far from impressed by the Four Courts occupation.

The Irish Independent condemned ‘yesterday’s strange and startling events’.

It advised its readers to subscribe to a pro-Treaty fund and argued that ‘the only alternative to the Treaty is a military dictatorship, military despotism or anarchy’.27 The Freeman’s Journal denounced the Four Courts takeover as ‘Mexican Methods’ (a reference to the chaotic revolution there) and ‘reason dethroned’. It condemned de Valera as ‘criminal and cowardly’.28 For this and other mocking editorials – referring to Rory O’Connor mockingly as ‘Roderick’ and Cathal Brugha as Charles Burgess, for example – the antiTreatyites smashed the Freeman’s presses shortly after the Four Courts takeover.

Arming the Four Courts Soon the Four Courts garrison was to be heavily armed, with about 130 rifles, some German carbines, two Lewis light machine guns, three Thompson submachine guns, one Vickers heavy machine gun mounted in an armoured car, and quantities of explosives and detonators, along with hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition.29 This alone, not counting weapons held by the IRA in the rest of Dublin, was far more formidable than the arsenal of The Dublin Brigade before the Truce – the result of concerted arms importation and arms raids since the ceasefire with the British.

Ernie O’Malley himself was behind many of these raids. Back in February, with his Tipperary men, he had cleaned out the armoury at Clonmel RIC barracks, which been used as an arms depot, and carried off nearly 300 rifles, 270 hand guns, three Lewis machine guns, forty-five shotguns and about 320,000 rounds of ammunition.30 Not long after taking over the Four Courts, O’Malley himself seized an armoured car, supplied to the pro-Treaty Army