Many killings were both brutal and unprovoked

IF Michael Collins hoped the Northern Offensive would concentrate the political focus on Northern Ireland, he must have been sorely disappointed, because the orgy of murder was not confined to the North.

Former policemen were targeted throughout the country.

“Many of the greatest successes we gained were gained entirely by true men who stood for us in the enemy service,” Collins declared in April. But all the police appeared to become targets for those sunshine patriots known as “the Trucileers”.

On the weekend after the RIC pulled out of Galway in Mar 1922, three RIC men left behind in hospital were murdered by the IRA, even though one was terminally ill. In the following weeks there were scattered attacks on former RIC men.

On the third weekend in May, for instance, three other former RIC men and a former British soldier were shot dead. Timothy O’Leary was killed on the way to visit his mother in Kilbrittan, near Bandon, Co Cork. Former RIC Sgt J Walshe was murdered in the presence of his wife at their home in Newport, Co Tipperary, and a couple of nights later Patrick Galligan, an ex-soldier, was shot dead in the town. In the interim, Head Constable Joseph Ballantine, 50, was murdered in front of his wife at their home in Raphoe, Co Donegal.

The following weekend colonial secretary Winston Churchill received an alarming telegram from James Craig, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, that “the townships of Belleek and Pettigo have been seized and occupied by the Irish Republican forces”. Belleek was in Northern Ireland, while Pettigo was on the Donegal side the border.

“Great Britain is in the presence of one of the gravest crises in her history,” The London Times declared in an editorial next day. “She is faced with an anarchic movement.”

Collins, who happened to be in London at the time, assured Churchill that there were no Free State troops poised to attack the North. On his return to Dublin, Collins persuaded the provisional government “that a policy of peaceful obstruction should be adopted towards the Belfast government and that no troops from the 26 counties, either those under official control or attached to the executive, should be permitted to invade the six counties”.

In other words, the Northern Offensive was now being called off in favour of a passive approach. British prime minister Lloyd George was worried that Churchill might spark off another war.

“Our Ulster case is not a good one,” he warned Churchill.

“In two years, 400 Catholics have been killed and 1,200 have been wounded without a single person being brought to justice. Several Protestants have also been murdered, but the murder of Catholics went on at a rate of three or four to one for some time.”

The British were alarmed about reported activity on the border. “It was reported to us on the authority, I believe, of the Ulster government that there were concentrations of Free State troops against Londonderry, Strabane, and the Pettigo salient and a serious invasion was predicted,” Lloyd George wrote. It was on the basis of this information Churchill insisted on sending in British troops, despite the reservations of the prime minister.

“If war comes out of this, will it not make us look rather ridiculous?” Lloyd George asked Churchill. “I beg you not to be tempted into squandering what you have already gained by a precipitate action, however alluring the prospects may be.”

Churchill insisted on the British army taking Belleek, which it did without difficulty because nobody was actually holding the town. Lloyd George produced champagne to celebrate victory at “the great bloodless Battle of Belleek”. Of course, he quickly realised that the whole thing was a sham.

“On investigation,” Lloyd George wrote to Churchill on June 8, 1922, “it was discovered that there were no troops massing against either Londonderry or Strabane and when we got to the Pettigo salient and threatened it by an elaborate manoeuvre with two brigades of infantry and one battery of artillery we found 23 Free Staters on Free State territory in Pettigo of whom seven were killed and 15 captured.”

Think of the outcry that there would be today if the British army crossed the border into Donegal and killed seven Irish soldiers and kidnapped 15 others, or if they had done that during 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. There would have been a massive outcry and a full-blooded international incident. Collins did object but in such a manner that seemed to betray a realisation that he was compromised by his own behaviour.

In an interview with a correspondent of the New York Herald, Collins contended that the attack on the Free State forces in Pettigo had been unprovoked. “Those drastic operations were not directed against irregular forces, but against official Irish troops, who were in quite and legitimate occupation of their barracks in the Co Donegal town of Pettigo, and who were quite unprepared for a sudden and unwarranted attack.”

Collins called for “impartial investigators” to examine what happened in Pettigo. “The attacks would appear to have been entirely unprovoked. The whole object of the Belfast government and their advisers was to deflect world attention from the worse than Armenian atrocities that are daily occurrence in Belfast, and concentrate it on their order in the hope that the situation would arise such as may confront us day by day now.”

The Dublin press was particularly critical of the events in Donegal. It tended to blame the former chief of imperial general staff, Henry Wilson, who was employed as a security adviser by the Stormont government.

“The whole unwarranted occupation of Southern territory, was part and parcel of the plot concocted by Sir Henry Wilson to embroil British and Irish troops in a border quarrel, in the hope of precipitating an outbreak that would divert attention from the horrors of Belfast and might pave the way for a new attempt to re-conquer Ireland, by force of arms,” the Freeman’s Journal contended.

COLLINS was using the Northern Offensive as a means of promoting Republican unity in the South. To some extent it was working, because he managed to agree to an election pact with Éamon de Valera.

In accordance with the pact, which was approved by the Dáil, the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty wings of Sinn Féin put forward a united panel of candidates in proportion to their existing strength. In theory, the Treaty would not be an election issue, but the pact specifically stipulated “that any and every interest is free to go up and contest the election equally with the national Sinn Féin panel”.

Nevertheless anti-Treaty elements violated the pact by engaging in blatant intimidation to force many potential candidates — independents, or of the Labour Party, and Farmers’ Party — from contesting the election. When Darrel Figgis, a former national secretary of Sinn Féin, insisted on standing as a pro-Treaty independent, three young men forced their way into his Dublin apartment. They cut his beard. In the process they injured and traumatised his wife.

Collins called on Figgis and his wife, Millie, afterwards, and gave them a pistol for protection. Figgis was reluctant to keep it, but Millie “felt greater safety and comfort in her mind knowing that the revolver was in the house”. This was to have tragic consequences the following year when she took her life with the pistol. In a note, she blamed the trauma of that night’s events.

Collins visited Cork on the final weekend of the campaign. On the night of Friday, June 13, he delivered probably the most significant speech of the whole campaign from a window of Turner’s Hotel.

“I am not hampered now by being on a platform where there are coalitionists, and I can make a straight appeal to the citizens of Cork to vote for the candidates they think best of,” he said. “You understand fully what you have to do and I will depend on you to do it.”

Whatever government was elected would have to deal with the criminal activity.

“Let that be clearly understood,” Collins told a gathering in Clonakilty next morning. “The things that have disgraced our nation for the past six months must be put an end to.”

In the week leading up to the election there had been considerable intimidation, not only of candidates, but also against former policemen, their families, and business people. Shots were fired through the windows of former RIC men in Tipperary and Galway.

The thatched roof of Denis Carroll’s home was torched near Nenagh, in the early hours of Monday morning. His son, Patrick, rushed from the house and was shot dead.

“People in the neighbourhood, who knew the deceased personally informed our representative that he was one of the most harmless and inoffensive young men in the parish and that the foul deed met with the strongest condemnation from the people of the parish,” according to the Nenagh Guardian. His brother John had been in the RIC and was killed after a visit home the previous year.

Denis Carroll broke down in tears at Patrick’s inquest. “I have neither family nor home now,” he said.

The coroner told the inquest that he had never before been called upon to investigate such a harrowing and heart-rending case.

There were also vile examples of cowardly sectarianism. Shots were fired into the Ballinasloe home of a Protestant businessman who had recently been warned to leave town. A Guinness representative, who happened to be a Protestant living in Cleaghmore with his wife and family, was also given a final notice to quit, as were a Protestant widow and her teenage daughter. They were ordered to get out, supposedly to make room for Belfast Catholics.

There were attacks on six Protestant-owned businesses in Mullingar. Fr PJ Heenan condemned the outrageous intimidation as uncharitable, un-Christian, and un-Irish.

* This series of articles was based on research for T Ryle Dwyer’s forthcoming book, Michael Collins and the Civil War, to be published by Mercier Press this month.

* For more pictures and commentary, click here