The Squad by T. Ryle Dwyer Read Free Book Online Page B

Volunteers uniform. It was a show of bravado that went down well with most of the gathering, though some felt that the Big Fellow was showing off again. ‘By this time everybody should know that it is by naked force that England holds this country,’ Collins wrote with obvious satisfaction. ‘Our American friends got an exhibition of the truth while they were here.’
    Tim Healy, the old parliamentarian, happened to be in the vicinity and saw the raid in progress. ‘Nothing that the wit of man could devise equalled the Mansion House raid of the military in folly,’ he wrote. ‘Every damn fool seems to be in the employment of the British government in Ireland.’
    Meanwhile Collins was growing ever more impatient for a fight. He encouraged local units of the Volunteers to raid police barracks for arms. This, in addition to affording an opportunity of acquiring much needed weapons, had the advantage of acting as a kind of training operation for the Volunteers. It soon led to the withdrawal of the RIC from isolated areas and the abandonment of hundreds of police barracks throughout the country.
    He complained in a letter to Austin Stack about Sinn Féin politicians making things ‘intolerable’ for militants like him. ‘The policy now seems to be to squeeze out anyone who is tainted with strong fighting ideas, or should I say the utility of fighting,’ he grumbled. He was particularly critical of the party’s executive committee, which he described as ‘a Standing Committee of malcontents’ who were ‘inclined to be ever less militant and more political and theoretical’. In short, they were talkers and thinkers, rather than men of action, and he was a man of action. ‘We have too many of the bargaining type already,’ Collins grumbled. ‘I am not sure that our movement or part of it at any rate is alive to the developing situation.’
    Describing himself as ‘only an onlooker’ at the executive committee meetings, he complained that the moderates were in control. When Harry Boland went to the United States to make preparations for de Valera’s forthcoming tour, the party replaced him as national secretary with Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, the wife of a pacifist murdered during the Easter Rising. Collins was appalled. Not only had Boland been replaced by a woman, but the party also went on to announce that his replacement was necessary because he was out of the country. With this announcement, Collins fumed: ‘our people give away in a moment what the Detective Division had been unable to find out in five weeks.’
    He clearly felt a lot of hostility towards himself and his militant views. There were ‘rumours, whisperings, suggestions of differences between certain people’, he wrote, describing this as ‘rather pitiful and disheartening’. It belied the national unity of which de Valera boasted and it tended towards confusion about the best way of achieving the national aims. ‘At the moment,’ Collins exclaimed, ‘I’m awfully fed up.’
    ‘Things are not going very smoothly,’ he was still writing three weeks later. ‘All sort of miserable little under currents are working and the effect is anything but good.’
    He would soon have a freer hand to do his own thing though, as de Valera was to set out for the United States in early June.

CHAPTER 4
‘ALMOST A MIRACLE I WAS NOT LANDED’
    In the spring of 1919, de Valera had restrained the Big Fellow’s desire for a military campaign by ensuring that the political wing of the movement had a big say in policy. Shortly after de Valera went to the United States however, Brugha and Mulcahy authorised Collins to kill one of the DMP detectives who had refused to be cowed by the Volunteers.
    Many policemen were resigning because of their social ostracisation. Those who were nearing retirement, having spent the bulk of their working lives in the police force, were too old to find other employment. They stayed on but most kept their heads down and ignored