Cork spy files shed light on killings during War of Independence
THE Cork Spy Files have for the first time shed some light on one of the darkest periods of Irish history and reveal the true extent of the violence during the War of Independence in Cork.
The research project, headed by Dr Andy Bielenberg, senior lecturer in history at UCC, and James S Donnelly Jr, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in partnership with the Irish Examiner, chronicles the killings of 78 suspected British spies at the hands of the IRA during the War of Independence.
Following extensive searches of a wide array of archival and printed sources, the two researchers have assembled a database of all members of the Crown Forces (soldiers, regular RIC, and RIC Auxiliary cadets), all volunteers or members of the IRA, and all civilians killed in Cork city or county during the conflict.
From this material, a special set of entries dealing exclusively suspected spies executed by the IRA in Co Cork in 1920 and 1921 (to the Truce) was also compiled. The names of almost 80 victims appear in the database.
Bielenberg and Donnelly explained the scope, purposes, and character of their project. The Cork Spy Files, they say, are exhaustively documented. They scoured local and national newspapers, archival records, and printed sources for every sort of information about the victims, including the full circumstances in which they died, the manner of their deaths, and what was done with their bodies after death.
They said they were aware that publicly releasing the names of those who were killed and detailing the exact circumstances of their deaths might cause some upset and pain for their families and relatives.
However, they said the central aim of the project was to record an accurate, transparent, and meaningful account of the controversial events within the context of the War of Independence in Cork.
“In the aftermath of the conflict, there were perhaps justifiable reasons to suppress information about these killings for the benefit of all directly concerned (especially both the victims’ families and the killers), who were often neighbours.
“Three generations later, however, and after the passage of almost a century, it has now become highly important to establish the truth about these events as far as possible,” they said.
Not surprisingly, records or reports coming from the IRA on one side and those compiled on the other side by the British military forces or the RIC very frequently give contradictory accounts of specific events.
Sifting through the records and documents, they compiled a complete list of all suspected Cork civilian spies executed in 1920-21.
They have invited members of the public who may have additional information, or who question some of the findings, to contact them.
IRA’s greatest strength in the city was its intelligence network
FEW books have shaped our understanding of the War of Independence in County Cork more than Peter Hart’s intensively researched volume The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923, first published in 1998.
Yet few books on this subject have received as much sustained criticism in the years since then. Most damaging to many of Hart’s central arguments has been John Borgonovo’s 2007 book Spies, Informers, and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’: The Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920-1921.
At the centre of both books is the treatment of spies by the IRA. More civilians were executed by the IRA in Co Cork in 1920-21 than in any other county, and the number of such fatalities was nowhere higher than in Cork city, where Borgonovo found that members of the Cork No 1 Brigade of the IRA executed 26 civilian spies from the start of 1920 to the Truce. But Hart maintains the volume of killings in the city and county maybe far more numerous. “Scores of bodies’, Hart insisted, “were dumped in fields, lanes, or ditches tagged with messages like ‘Spies and informers beware’ or ‘Convicted spy’.
At least 204 civilians were shot by the IRA in Cork city and county in the course of the revolution, the vast majority of whom were alleged to be spies or informers.
Even if we make a generous allowance for civilians killed as spies in County Cork by both the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War of 1922-23 (Hart’s sweeping statements and specific numbers include these later victims), the reputed tallies are too high. These exaggerations have a great deal to do with Hart’s highly critical view of the quality of IRA intelligence and with his strong disposition to believe that IRA leaders and members were prepared to act against suspected informers on the basis of very slender evidence.
The IRA reputedly had a very low threshold for evidence sufficient to warrant executions and possessed a highly cavalier attitude towards the killing of suspected civilian spies.
And how could the IRA think or act differently when, according to Hart, its system for gathering intelligence was so poor. These arguments and assumptions, when rigorously tested in 2007 by John Borgonovo, were shown to be without foundation for Cork city. The city IRA possessed a sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus, with its own operatives serving within the British military and police.
“The IRA’s greatest strength in Cork city,” Borgonovo concluded, “was its intelligence network. . . Republican claims regarding civilian informers in Cork city must be seen through the prism of the IRA’s intelligence capability. Did the IRA have the means to identify its civilian enemies? This study has shown that the answer is yes.”
Now a thoroughgoing scrutiny of every known killing of suspected civilian spies in the county as a whole — set forth in the Cork Spy Files — leads to similar conclusions.
More recent research published by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc in his book on the Truce has identified most of the suspected civilian spies and informers killed across Ireland in these years (including 66 in County Cork).
He has specified the religious affiliation of these victims. Since the great majority were Catholics, he has challenged the contention by Hart that much of the killing of such spies during the War of Independence was carried out for sectarian reasons.
The longer list of Cork civilian spies presented here, which also identifies the victims’ religion, provides further support for Ó Ruairc’s argument, though Protestants were overrepresented, accounting for almost 31% of executed spies in this new extended list for County Cork. But this overrepresentation is likely to have stemmed from the relatively higher share of the Protestant community who remained loyal.
The most notable feature arising from our table, however, is the number of ex-soldiers killed, who accounted for almost 53% of the total. The great majority of these (35 out of 41) were Catholic. It was this group associated with past service in the crown forces who were by far the largest group of suspects executed as spies. This important finding further weakens any contention that there was a sectarian dimension to these killings. Our research chronicles the names, personal details and graphics accounts of the killings of close to 80 suspected spies for the first time.
One of those was civilian Michael (‘Mickaroo’) Walsh, aged 43, of Kearney’s Lane, Cork. He was killed outside Cork Union Hospital on 18th February, 1921. He was an ex-soldier. Previously a foreman over workers at Ford’s Tractor Works and a builder’s labourer, Walsh was taken from the Cork Union Hospital by six armed and disguised men.
His body was found outside the Union gate. A card pinned to his clothing read: ‘Caught at last. Spies and informers beware. — IRA.’ Aged 43, Walsh was a Boer war veteran and a jobless construction worker who was being treated in hospital for a ‘functional disorder’. The raiders literally carried him down the stairs from his ward, out the workhouse gate, and onto the road, where they riddled his body with bullets.
According to city Volunteer leader Michael Murphy, “information about this spy was discovered by us in captured mails. He was also observed by some of our intelligence men going into police barracks”.
Murphy also told Ernie O’Malley that ‘Mickaroo’ Walsh ‘was a definite spy and a low type. He was shot in Blarney Street [Cork], but he wasn’t killed and he was removed to the South Infirmary [and] to the Union Hospital. He was suffering badly from venereal disease.
Tom Crofts pulled him out and he was shot outside of the hospital. He [Walsh] knew who was who, and he had given information about prominent officers in the Irish Volunteers.
Walsh had previously been ordered out of the country by the IRA. Members of British military intelligence in Cork had helped him to escape to England, but he returned and paid with his life. After his return and about a month before his death, while staying with his sister, 14 shots were fired into their house, and a squad of IRA gunmen chased him into another house, in the process trampling on a child that his sister was nursing and mortally injuring the child.
According to the 1911, Walsh (then aged 34) was married to to Maryann for 10 years. They were then childless. He was a Catholic. Walsh had been prosecuted in a Sinn Féin court in Cork city, as a result of which he was evicted from one of the houses owned by the father of Commandant PJ Murphy at 63 Blarney Street.
Murphy recalled this set of events many years later: “After the trial he [Walsh] gave the names of the court and the local Volunteers to the police. He was rewarded with money for this information. His sister got the draft and went to cash it in the local shop, where it was reported to the local Volunteers. He was arrested by the Volunteers and sentenced to be deported.
“He left the country and went to Wales. After a few months he returned. We made two attempts to arrest him, and on each occasion he got away from us, on the first occasion by diving into a shop full of women and children, and the second time [by] throwing himself off a high wall. On each occasion he went to the military barracks and brought the military to our homes. While with the British in Cork [Military] Barracks, Walsh fell into bad health, and they transferred him to the Cork workhouse.”
This episode appears to have provided much of the inspiration for Frank O’Connor’s short story Jumbo’s Wife.
Ex-soldier shot nine times for being a spy
Tory Top Lane, Cork City
February 18, 1920
An ex-soldier, Timothy Quinlisk was shot in nine different places at close range; his ‘head and body were literally torn with revolver bullets’. The body was found at Tory Top Lane, which became a place favoured by the IRA for carrying out such executions.
Quinlisk claimed to have been a member of the brigade formed in Germany by Sir Roger Casement. He was well educated and spoke French and German fluently. After the war he was discharged from the British army. He lived for a time in Dublin and then in Cork city.
Quinlisk was an inept spy. City Volunteer leaders had quickly placed him under close surveillance and found more than enough reason to execute him.
The Cork No 1 Brigade Council agreed that he should be shot. The execution party from the Second Battalion consisted of Michael Murphy (O/C) and two others. Murphy coldly recalled of the not-quite-dead Quinlisk: “I then turned him over on the flat of his back and put a bullet through his forehead.”
Murphy later cited some of the damning evidence against Quinlisk in his witness statement to the Bureau of Military History.
“I might here state that on the same evening that Quinlisk was executed, following a raid on the mails by some of our lads, one of the letters written by ‘Quinn’ (as he called himself)… addressed to the County Inspector, RIC, was found.
“The letter said that Quinlisk ‘had information about Michael Collins and would report again in a few days when the capture of Collins seemed imminent...
“The Cork No 1 Brigade Commandant Seán Hegarty got in touch with GHQ, Dublin, immediately following the identification of ‘Quinn’ as Quinlisk, and word was received back from Mick Collins that Quinlisk was definitely a spy in the pay of the British.”
Hundreds of people went to view the body while it lay for identification purposes at the Cork city morgue for ‘at least three days’ under the guard of an RIC man.
“But, of course,” said Murphy, “nobody identified him. He was then taken from the morgue by police and military and buried in the burial ground for paupers at the top of Carr’s Hill, Cork.”
When Quinlisk’s father came from Waterford to claim the body about two weeks later, he had a confrontation with Murphy, who had been informed by the clerk of Cork poor-law union of the father’s application to the workhouse authorities.
“I asked the man his name but he refused to give it to me. I said to him: ‘Now, Mr Quinlisk, I know you well; your son John [sic] was shot here as a spy, and you had better take him and yourself out of this town within twenty-four hours or you will meet with the same fate.”’
At the time of the 1911 census the victim’s father Denis had been an ‘acting sergeant’ in the RIC residing at 10 Cathedral Square in Waterford City.
He and his wife Alice were then the parents of five children, three sons and two daughters, ranging in age from 7 to 16, all of whom lived with them. Timothy Quinlisk — then aged 16 — was their eldest child. The Quinlisks were Catholic.
Hanged himself after being abducted by IRA
Aghada near Midleton
August 14, 1920. Abducted and executed as suspected spy by IRA
It must have been Coughlan’s body that washed ashore at Ballybranigan Strand, seven miles from Midleton, Co Cork, on September 3, 1920. Although the body was too decomposed for identification, the fact that it was tied to a cart axle pointed to Coughlan. His remains were buried in Knockgriffin Cemetery.
Coughlan allegedly hanged himself while being held in IRA custody for having allowed his daughters to be used as ‘prostitutes’ by British forces. Those who executed him tied his body to a cart axle and threw it into the sea, but it was washed up shortly afterwards and identified. The IRA claimed later to have obtained evidence that Coughlan was a spy. He died in IRA custody at Aghada near Midleton.
The only John Coughlan listed in the 1911 census as resident in Queenstown resided in Barry’s Lane with his wife Anne, a son, and three daughters whose ages in 1920 would have been about 24, 19, and 14. Coughlan was a Catholic and a ‘general labourer’.
This ghoulish story finds an explanation in an interview given by former Volunteer Michael (Mick) Leahy to Ernie O’Malley sometime in the early 1950s: “The strangest thing about the first spy who met his death through us was that we didn’t shoot him. In Cobh we arrested this fellow [John Coughlan] for using his two daughters as prostitutes for the British and we took him to Aghada and we wanted to [illegible] for a while. He was kept in May Higgins [house] in a loft and there was a girl there. She was bringing him up his breakfast when she found him hanging to a rafter, dead.
“I got four lads to bury him. Paddy Sullivan from Cobh, who was later executed in Cork Gaol after he had been caught in [the Battle of] Clonmult, [was one of them.] Later on he asked me did we see the Examiner. And when I read it, I found that a body, which had been tied to an axle, had washed ashore. The lads had not buried him. They had tied him to a car axle and had flung him out into the sea. He was in the morgue in Midleton, I was told, in the workhouse.
“We visited the morgue, but at the time the bad flu was raging and the morgue was full of corpses. We went from corpse to corpse with a flash lamp, pulling up the clothes to look for our man.
“At last we came to a corpse and when we pulled back the cloth, we found that the crabs had got hold of his face and that there was nothing of it left. A month later, we got evidence that this man had been a spy and that’s why he hanged himself.”
Protestant home ruler murdered for no reason
Douglas
February 9, 1921. Killed as suspected spy by IRA in a ‘shocking murder’.
Alfred Reilly, managing director of a large bakery and restaurant business in Cork city (HH Thompson and Sons, Ltd), was shot dead very near his home in the Cork suburb of Douglas.
Pinned to his chest was an envelope on which the words ‘Beware of the IRA’ had been written in pencil.
He had left his office in Cork city at about 5pm on Wednesday, February 9, 1921, and had driven in a pony and trap towards his residence in Douglas.
“Some time later, the female lodge-keeper saw the empty trap standing outside the avenue gate, and she went along the road for some distance until she found Mr Reilly lying on the ground face downwards.”
Aged 58 and a Methodist, Reilly was a member of the Cork business establishment. He had earlier organised a Methodist Church petition calling for the release of Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney when he was on hunger strike. He had Home Rule and Liberal political sympathies.
Though he had been a JP, he had not undertaken any police-court work for six years and had been fined for refusing to carry out jury duty early in 1920 when republicans were beginning to face British courts.
Nevertheless, he was suspected of being part of a civilian unionist intelligence group operating out of the Cork YMCA.
He was also thought to be a Freemason. In fact, however, he was neither a Freemason nor a YMCA member.
The killing was carried out in especially chilling fashion by three members of D Company (Second Battalion, Cork No 1 Brigade), including its captain William Barry, who recalled the deed.
“On the evening of February 9, as Reilly was returning from work in King Street [now MacCurtain Street] in his pony and trap, four of us, armed with revolvers, got into the trap and drove him to his home at Rochestown.
“We shot him outside the gate of his house and affixed a card to the body with the words ‘Spies and Informers Beware’ written on it.”
A widower aged 48 in the 1911 Census, Reilly resided at Monfieldstown in the Douglas suburb of Cork with his elderly mother (then aged 70) and his son Percival (aged 21).
Father and son listed themselves as ‘manufacturing confectioners’ in the census. The family also had three Catholic servants.
Alfred Reilly later remarried and had a daughter with his second wife Agnes. She claimed compensation for the killing of her husband on February 9, 1921, near his residence - Hill House.
The Recorder of Cork city awarded £4,500 to her and another £4,500 to their daughter.
Man cashed British Army cheques
Knockpogue near Mallow
July 7, 1921 Ex-soldier kidnapped and killed as suspected spy by IRA
Formerly a sergeant major in the British army, Macpherson was bundled into a car or a pony and trap on July 7, 1921, and taken a short distance outside Mallow, Co Cork.
After two days of detention at Gleanndine, he was taken to Patrick O’Connor’s house at Pendy’s Cross, Dromahane, where he was tried by brigade officers, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
“He was removed later the same night to a spot about one mile from Mallow on the mountain road, where he was executed by members of the column.”
His body was found at Knockpogue with a bullet in the chest and with a label declaring ‘Convicted spy, spies and informers in Mallow beware, we are on your track, I.R.A.’ Soldiers and police in lorries visited the Knockpogue location and removed the body to Mallow Military Barracks.
Macpherson had held the rank of ‘colour sergeant’ with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and lived in Mallow with his wife (a native of the district) and four children. Macpherson had been a target of the IRA since mid-June 1921, after a transactions in a shop brought him under suspicion.
As Joseph P Morgan of the Mallow Battalion Flying Column later recorded: “While other members of the column moved off towards the Millstreet area to take part in the Rathcoole ambush, I was ordered to make arrangements to proceed to Mallow to execute a spy — McPherson [sic], an ex-British army sergeant major — who was supposed to be seen on Mallow Bridge each morning at 7 am.
“I think that his activities as a spy were discovered when he cashed some cheques, made payable to him by the British, in some shop in town (Mallow).
“I visited Mallow on two mornings, but there was no trace of McPherson, so other arrangements were made at a later date, when he was captured and executed early in July 1921.”
The Recorder of Cork, sitting at Mallow in October 1921, awarded £900 in compensation to the victim’s widow, Mrs Margaret Macpherson, and an additional £400 to each of her four children, “for the death of her husband, an army pensioner, who was taken away in a trap by three men, and next morning his body was found 2 miles from Mallow, with the label ‘Convicted spy”’.
In 1911 William Macpherson (then aged 34) and his wife Margaret resided with her widowed mother Ellen Lyne (a farmer aged 61) at Lower Lavally (Rahan) near Mallow. At that point the Macphersons had only one child (a son aged 6), but three others were born later. Ellen Lyne’s adult son Thomas (aged 40) and his wife Norah probably took the principal role in managing the farm.
William Alex Macpherson was an Anglican.
Woman who held loyalist views killed for informing on planned ambush
Rylane in Aghabullogue parish
February 17, 1921. Kidnapped and later killed as suspected spy and in reprisal by IRA
Maria Lindsay was kidnapped on February 17, 1921, and later executed by the IRA on March 11, along with her chauffeur James Clarke.
Her status as an informer was a matter of certainty for Florrie O’Donoghue, the intelligence officer of Cork No. 1 Brigade: “In her case the death sentence [passed by the IRA] followed a flagrant and deliberate action against the Army, that of conveying information to the occupation forces in regard to the Dripsey ambush.”
Even after sentence had been passed, an official letter from the Cork No 1 Brigade to Major General Sir EP Strickland indicated that the sentence would not be carried out if the prisoners taken at Dripsey were treated as prisoners of war. The communication was ignored and Mrs Lindsay was shot.
Mrs Lindsay was executed by the IRA partly for having given information to the crown forces at Ballincollig Military Barracks that led to the capture of eight republicans (five wounded) in the abortive Dripsey ambush of January 28, 1921, and to the execution of five of them (plus a sixth Volunteer from Tipperary town) at Victoria Barracks in Cork city on February 28, 1921.
The ambush took place outside Dripsey, on the road to Coachford. In retaliation for the six executions on February 28, the IRA shot twelve unarmed British soldiers in the streets of Cork city that night.
According to a reliable account of the Dripsey ambush and its immediate background, “That morning, Mrs Mary Lindsay of Leemount House, who held strong loyalist views, heard of the ambush during a visit to Coachford.
“She was on her way to Ballincollig for a newly introduced military inspection of her car (a measure introduced by the British to cut down on the commandeering of cars by the IRA). When she told Mr Sheehan, a local grocer, of her plans, he advised her not to go through Dripsey and Inniscarra, and when she asked why, he told her of the intended ambush.
“She told the local priest, Father Ned Shinnick, what she had heard before returning home. From there her chauffeur James Clarke drove her to Ballincollig to warn the army authorities.
“Meanwhile, Father Shinnick informed the local IRA command to tell the ambushers that the British had been informed of their plans. Father Shinnick was known to be anti-IRA, and the leaders of the IRA ambush party decided that the warning was just a ruse on the part of the priest to get them to abandon their ambush.”
Had the priest’s warning been heeded, the disaster of the Dripsey ambush and all of its tragic consequences might have been avoided.
In 1911, Maria Georgina (Mary) Lindsay (then aged 50) and her husband John (aged 66) had been married for 23 years. They were childless. They resided at Leemount, a modest mansion with 13 rooms, along with their butler (and later chauffeur) James Clarke, a housemaid, a cook, and a coachman.
They were adherents of the Church of Ireland; they did employ two Catholic servants. Very shortly after the IRA executed Mrs Lindsay and James Clarke, a party of Volunteers burned down their house.
The ill-fated IRA commander of the nearly seventy Volunteers gathered near Godfrey’s Cross between Dripsey and Coachford on 28 January 1921 was Frank Busteed, captain of the Blarney Company of the Sixth Battalion of the Cork No 1 Brigade. He was involved in the kidnapping and execution of Mrs Lindsay and James Clarke as well as in the burning of Leemount House. According to Busteed, even Michael Collins did not know that Busteed and his comrades had executed Mrs Lindsay, and there is evidence that Collins and other IRA leaders wanted to save her.
