Читать книгу The Irish Civil War - Seán Enright - Страница 13

CHAPTER 4

Military Courts and the

First Executions

The first execution took place only a few days later and it was entirely unauthorised. It happened at the end of October in Ballyheigue, a single-street village on the edge of Kerry’s Atlantic coast. On the hill overlooking the village stood the burned-out ruins of the Crosbie castle and a little further inland the square tower of the church of Saint James and its small graveyard filled with mausoleums and stone crosses where no one lingered long. There had been intense fighting in Ballyheigue parish for some days and the anti-Treaty fighters had been driven off by the First Western Division of the National Army. During the retreat two shotguns had been left hidden in the graveyard. That evening Jack Lawlor and another man came back under cover of darkness to retrieve the firearms. Lawlor was then aged 21, a big solid young man, a farm labourer, who lived with his widowed mother on the headland. When the split came many young men from the parish had gone with the anti-Treaty faction and Lawlor had been one of them.

Lawlor and his companion were seen and fired on by a National Army patrol. Both were captured but escaped in the darkness and the maze of mausoleums. Lawlor was wounded in the arm and both were soon recaptured. He was tried that night at McCarthy’s shop where the National Army had established their base in the village. The trial, if it can be called that, was presided over by Colonel Commandant Michael Hogan from the First Western Division. Lawlor was sentenced to death.1 The National Army had no barracks in Ballyheigue and so Lawlor was held overnight in the old RIC station which was just a small terraced house with a cell built onto the rear. In the morning he was taken up to the graveyard on the hillside and shot in plain sight of the village. Lawlor’s body was left where he fell and a messenger was sent to tell his mother.2 This trial was not authorised by GHQ and the rudimentary safeguards laid down in the regulations were not followed.3 The officially sanctioned trials by military court began on 3 November and in Dublin and Kerry military courts convened at once.

In Kerry, a National Army raid netted another arms find and two more prisoners: Patrick O’Connor from Causeway and Patrick Joseph O’Halloran from Ballyheigue.4 They were tried and convicted and went back into custody while sentence was considered. In Donegal, a few days after military courts were brought in, a National Army raid had resulted in the arrest of two unlikely prisoners. The first was a formidable widow farmer, 53-year-old Catherine Johnstone from Letterkenny. She was charged with possession of bombs, detonators, ammunition and part of a stolen wireless. Her 21-year-old daughter Georgie was charged with possession of an automatic pistol. The widow Johnstone was wealthy and immediately instructed her solicitor to challenge the legality of the military courts by writs of habeas corpus and the case stalled while the lawyers prepared their case.

By mid-November only twelve cases had been tried, all for possession of arms and only a single conviction had been confirmed: twelve months hard labour was ordered.5 The Executive Council had been pressing for executions, but the Army Council delayed for many days and the sequence of events suggests that the Council had already settled on four young men who had not yet been tried. A prisoner at Wellington barracks later wrote that the young men were brought out of their cells, tried and executed the same night.6 It was not so, but the facts are only a little less grim. On 8 November, these four young men were each tried by military court at Wellington barracks for the unauthorised possession of revolvers.7 The evidence showed that each had been found in possession of a loaded revolver in a Dublin street. Their trials by military court were held in secret and lasted only minutes and all were sentenced to death. The prisoners were Dubliners: James Fisher, John Gaffney, Richard Twohig and Peter Cassidy. The oldest, Cassidy, was 21 and the youngest was 18. They were shot by firing squad on 17 November.

There were many prisoners in custody who might have been singled out for execution and the question is: why this four? It was their misfortune to be captured when the Executive Council was pressing General Mulcahy to commence the execution policy. A more important factor was that these men were suspected of taking part in an attack on Oriel House which was the headquarters of the counter insurgency operation in Dublin. The Criminal Investigation Department at Oriel House had been set up to combat the wave of armed robberies. That was a misnomer if there ever was one because it was swiftly redirected to counter the anti-Treaty forces and later amalgamated with another semi-vigilante outfit – the Citizens Defence Force. Oriel House quickly acquired a reputation for torturing and killing prisoners and for these reasons the anti-Treaty forces launched a series of attacks on the building. It was not an easy target: a substantial four-storey terrace on the corner of Westland Row and every assault was fought off.

The fighting in Dublin was now reaching a new pitch. Ernie O’Malley, the anti-Treaty deputy chief of staff had been operating from a concealed compartment built onto the bedroom of a house in the suburbs. During a raid on the house, his hiding place was found. He fired through the door and in the frenetic shoot out that followed one of the ladies in the house was wounded and a National Army soldier killed. O’Malley got out of the house, firing a rifle from his hip as he crossed the lawn and here he was shot down. A National Army soldier who tried to finish him off had his gun knocked away by another soldier. There were many attacks on the National Army that week; at Wellington barracks troops on parade were fired on from the rooftops on the other side of the canal. One National Army soldier was killed and seventeen wounded. The firing went on for some minutes and was watched by anti-Treaty prisoners from their cells overlooking the parade ground. As the attackers made off, some of the men on parade turned their guns on the prisoners.8

The following night there were attacks on both Portobello and Wellington barracks. At Portobello, the army legal team were playing poker and there was a scramble as they rushed to grab their guns and get out into the barrack square where one of the lawyers tripped and fell into barbed wire. He was the only casualty inside the barracks. The streets resounded to the rattle of Lewis machine guns and it was described in the papers as ‘twenty minutes of din’ although it was rather more than that: two civilians were killed. This was the developing context of the fight in Dublin, but it seems that Oriel House was the big issue.

Kevin O’Higgins was the minister with responsibility for that unit. The day after the attack on Oriel House he assured deputies that action was being taken, confirming ‘I have reports from Oriel House and the DMP and the Military … The situation was well in hand,’ he said and invited deputies to a private briefing. Ostensibly, no one was ever charged with the attack on Oriel House, but the provisional government issued a directive to General Mulcahy to bring the suspects to trial immediately.9 This directive has some significance because the trial regulations put control of the military courts entirely in the hands of the army, but it suggests that the usual separation of powers between those who tried criminal cases and the Executive had evaporated. The only delay was occasioned by the absence of the main witness who had gone on leave without leaving a forwarding address. The men were tried and convicted on the day he returned.10

Mulcahy and his chief of staff reckoned the executions to be ‘the most severe test on our troops’. It was feared soldiers might decline to fire on old comrades or might even mutiny.11 After some tense discussion, it was decided to bring in the best available army unit and the prisoners were moved to Kilmainham for execution. It was an odd choice on the face of it, but it may have been selected because it was a small prison and the easiest to contain if events took a difficult turn. The night before the first executions, the provisional government briefed pro-Treaty deputies and there were tremors in the ranks. The minister who gave the briefing remembered the Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille’s big face quivering ‘like a blancmange’. Some deputies called for clemency, but the genie was out of the bottle: power now lay with General Mulcahy and the Army Council.

There were no last visits for prisoners: the sight of distressed relatives may have dented the resolve of the National Army recruits. All the prisoners were allowed access to a priest and that was the case in all the executions that followed. But the absence of last visits was keenly felt by the prisoners who all lived within walking distance of Kilmainham. James Fisher, aged 18, wrote home: ‘Oh Mother, if I could just see you again.’ None of the prisoners had any property to bequeath except Richard Twohig, who wrote to his parents: ‘I send home the mouth organ to you for Paddy.’ And so, these four young men were brought out for execution into the stone breakers yard. Buoyed up by words of comfort from the priest these young men found new strength in the certainty of death. Ernie O’Malley later wrote: ‘One had the butt of a cigarette; he took a few puffs, then he handed it to his friends, who in turn took a few jerks. “Shoot away, now.”’12

Sean Mac Mahon, the chief of staff of the National Army had deployed his chosen company to undertake this duty, but the executions did not go according to plan, perhaps because the National Army was so new and because shooting by firing squad was not as straightforward as might be supposed. In this first group of executions, only three of the prisoners died instantaneously. The death certificate prepared by the army doctor hints at a different outcome for Peter Cassidy: ‘shock and haemorrhage following gunshot wounds’.13 A memoir written by the JAG recorded that Cassidy was rendered unconscious but did not die. In this scene of carnage, the young National Army officer in charge panicked and made to call an ambulance, but recovering his equilibrium, he drew his pistol and shot Cassidy dead.

Something could have been learned from the British Army’s experience of firing squads, which was extensive. In the Boer War, the British Army had executed forty-nine men and in the Great War another 329 soldiers, rebels and spies had been shot by firing squad. It had been discovered that execution by firing squad was more complicated than might be thought, in part because the average Tommy hated this duty and soldiers were induced to participate by the promise of extra leave or rations of rum. Sometimes soldiers on firing squad duty missed the target because they were nervous or because they had closed their eyes and a few fired wide or did not fire at all. Therefore, British Army firing squads utilised certain safeguards such as the presence of a provost marshal to supervise the executions and an army doctor to certify death. The usual medical certificate read ‘death was instantaneous’ or ‘practically instantaneous’, which was the desired standard. Even these safeguards were sometimes insufficient.

The new National Army had no experience of executions and replicated only some of these procedures. Where a number of prisoners were due to go before a firing squad, the practice of the British Army was sequential executions. The National Army chose to carry out executions simultaneously using a single firing squad. This was intended to be merciful so that prisoners awaiting execution were spared the sound of other firing squads at work, but it was not often effective.

British Army firing squads usually numbered twelve per prisoner, but in Ireland the practice of simultaneous executions meant there were often as few as five men firing at each prisoner. In firing squads convened by the British Army, a single rifle was loaded with a blank and men were sometimes induced to take part in the hope of being the one to fire a blank. It became National Army practice to load a significant number of rifles with blanks, increasing the chances of a prisoner surviving the volley and this would happen again and again. These difficulties were made worse because many of the executions took place in different parts of the country, so no local command ever acquired the necessary degree of competence. In a significant number of civil war executions, the prisoner survived the firing squad and lay on the ground wounded and sometimes conscious. In a small number of cases, the prisoner survived the volley and in a desperate reflex got to his feet. The presence of an officer with a pistol to administer the coup de grace was essential and soon the National Army was billing the state for whiskey for the firing squads.

After the executions, the families of the dead men were sent a typed pro forma notification. The note for the Cassidy family read as follows: ‘I am to inform you that Peter Cassidy was tried by a military court on 8 November 1922. That he was found guilty of possession of a firearm without lawful authority and that he was sentenced to death. This sentence was executed on the morning of 17th November 1922.’ This practice was challenged in the Dáil but continued throughout the civil war and it became common for parents to learn that their son had been executed through a press release or a typed memo shoved through the letterbox.14 In Dublin, the public and the Dáil learned of the first executions in the afternoon papers. Later that day there was an emergency debate in the Dáil and the decision to execute was hotly challenged by the Labour opposition and other deputies.

Mulcahy justified what was done by what he called the need ‘to stem the tide’ of lawlessness. ‘These men,’ he told the Dáil, ‘were found on the streets of Dublin at night carrying loaded revolvers and waiting to take the lives of other men.’ They had certainly been tried and convicted of possessing loaded revolvers. It is a reasonable inference that they were not charged with the attack on Oriel House because it could not be proved against them. To be tried for one reason and executed for another would become a common scenario during the war.

In the Dáil, government ministers rallied to support Mulcahy. Nothing at all was said about the men being involved in an attack on Oriel House and O’Higgins argued that in order to deter others it was best to execute the rank and file: ‘If you took as your first case some man who was outstandingly active or wicked in his activities the unfortunate dupes through the country might say Oh he was killed because he was a leader or he was killed because he was an Englishman … better to take the plain ordinary case.’ Not all the deputies were satisfied with this and some argued against the government: ‘I think they ought to have got a public trial’; and another argued that possession of a handgun could never merit the death sentence. Other deputies questioned whether the prisoners were represented by lawyers, and on behalf of the government Ernest Blythe reassured the Dáil that the prisoners had a ‘full opportunity of employing legal aid and calling witnesses in their defence’. Blythe added that: ‘Every person who will be tried under the Resolutions passed by the Dáil will have a full opportunity for conducting his defence.’ This was certainly the undertaking given to the Dáil when the Army (Special Powers) Resolution was passed. Although it should be said that the trial regulations approved by the Dáil contained no provision for legal representation at public expense.15 It does not seem that many prisoners had the money to pay for a lawyer and the trials were often carried out so swiftly and in such secrecy that the families of the prisoners had no chance to arrange a lawyer.

The provisional government survived the immediate crisis, but the deterrent effect of the execution policy remained uncertain and the daily round of shooting and killing continued. At Inchicore in the west of Dublin, four young men laying a road mine for National Army troops blew themselves to pieces. On the Monaghan border a mine detonated as a National Army lorry crossed a bridge. An officer lost an eye and five of his men were wounded.16 The following day, the attention of the country turned to Erskine Childers who had just been tried at Portobello barracks for possession of a handgun.

There were at this time only a handful of senior ranking anti-Treaty officers captured in arms after the cut-off date. One was Ernie O’Malley who was unfit for trial because of wounds and there was no enthusiasm to execute him on account of his record. Another was the burly Pax Whelan: a brigade commander in west Waterford who was captured in arms with two of his officers in a safe house.17 Pax Whelan was a man with friends on the other side, perhaps. The only other ranking prisoner was Childers who the provisional government blamed for fostering opposition to the Treaty and also believed (wrongly) that he had played a leading role in the fighting.