LITMIR.BIZ

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up. He was, on the surface, every inch an officer: a photo shows a singularly handsome young man in uniform, but that was not the full story. During the War of Independence, Dalton had been part of Collins’ Squad and shooting opponents in cold blood had been part of their work.44 In the run up to the civil war, most of the Squad joined the new National Army. Dalton became part of the intelligence team that had grown up around Oriel House and Wellington barracks: the leafleting campaign had been directed against Dalton and that group of men. The Red Cow inquest took place in the reading room at the Carnegie Library in Clondalkin where tables were hurriedly pushed together for the lawyers and the coroner. The lawyers crammed in on one side of the table, the jury on the other with the witnesses nearly in touching distance of both. The rest of this windowless low-ceilinged room was packed with bereaved relatives and National Army men in an atmosphere that heaved with grief and anger.

      The provisional government instructed John Byrne, a tall, thin, austere advocate who had great experience of defending hopeless cases. The killings had attracted nationwide publicity and there was no mechanism to dispense with inquest juries as was done in Cork. The evidence could not be suppressed as it was in the cases of Brugha or Boland or censored as in the Mannion inquest or explained away as in the case of the Yellow Lanes killings. It was going to come out in all its tawdry detail, but Byrne would play a subtle game distancing himself and the government from the accused officer and letting the other lawyers fight it out. Michael Comyn, KC, again appeared for the families. He was joined by two barristers representing the anti-Treaty GHQ. They squeezed in around the tables alongside their main opponent, Tim Healy, KC, who acted for the accused officer. Healy, a small, pugnacious, west Cork man, hated Michael Comyn and took every opportunity to let him know.

      This was a case that was followed in the press by anyone who could read and raised issues that no one could ignore. Over the previous few months, Dublin had been assailed by ambushes; National Army soldiers shot in the back, at home or in the street. Landmines had been detonated and grenades hurled with little care for civilian life and there had been many casualties. The anti-Treaty faction now came to court to litigate the circumstances in which three of their own had been killed. All of this tended to obscure two important points: that these youths had been killed in the custody of the National Army and that it was part of a pattern which the state did not oppose or condemn, at least in public.

      At the outset, the old coroner protested that he could not allow the anti-Treaty side to be represented, but it was pointed out to him that pending the creation of the Irish Free State, the provisional government had no legal status either. The duty of the coroner was to inquire into the cause of death and not allow the lawyers to pursue a political agenda, but like most coroners, he was not a lawyer just a local doctor who carried out the occasional inquest after a car crash or a fatal accident at a farm. Out of his depth and intimidated, the coroner lost control of the lawyers who began to fight it out for a verdict that would give comfort for their cause.45 Tim Healy called witnesses to prove that Dalton had carried out four arrests that night and taken the prisoners to Wellington barracks, but none of this established a watertight alibi and just confirmed Dalton was on duty and in the vicinity looking for anti-Treaty suspects. The evidence showed that much later that night the young men were driven from the barracks by intelligence officers to a quiet spot and murdered. But which officers were involved? All at Wellington barracks and Oriel House remained silent.

      Michael Comyn argued that this was murder whether by Dalton or his colleagues, but the inquest did not go well for Comyn. During the inquest his home was raided by the National Army and he was briefly placed under arrest, and when he was at the inquest, Tim Healy, KC, was always ready with some withering put down. Comyn was heckled by a hostile gallery and questioned by exasperated jurors: ‘Why is this taking so long?’ one asked. It was not the function of the inquest jury to say whether Dalton was guilty or not, but it was part of their duty to send a suspect for trial before the criminal courts if there was a case to answer. The jury declined to indict him and perhaps that should not be surprising: Dublin was a small city and his reputation was well known. The jury did not even condemn the murders as was the custom at the time. The colourless verdicts simply recounted that the young men had died of ‘gunshot wounds inflicted by person or persons unknown’.

      Counsels’ closing speeches in the Red Cow inquest received the widest publicity, and the failure of the jury to condemn the murders probably owed much to the advocacy of Tim Healy, KC. It was an open secret that he would soon be appointed governor general of the new Free State. His voice, in a very real sense, was that of the new establishment in Ireland and he delivered his closing remarks just before the official executions began. He argued that the inquest evidence could be ignored and that the rule of law could be abandoned. He asserted the war had been started by the anti-Treaty faction and as he put it: ‘What man can place bounds on the march of extermination?’

CHAPTER 3

      The Origins of the

      Execution Policy

      The pro-Treaty side believed the war would be wound up in a few weeks and at first all went well. Anti-Treaty forces were driven out of most towns and villages with seaborne landings being a prelude to decisive offensives in Cork and Kerry. Large numbers of prisoners were taken and there were many arms seizures. Michael Collins privately intimated that modest punishments might be handed out for possession of arms and his Chief of Staff Mulcahy agreed.

      But as the weeks wore on, the anti-Treaty campaign began to develop into guerrilla warfare. For the National Army, there were no bases to attack and no set piece battles to be fought against an elusive enemy. In the weeks before his death, Collins’ attitude began to shift. He went down to west Cork for a requiem mass for National Army soldiers killed in action and that night he wrote to his fiancé about the mothers and widows ‘weeping and almost shrieking’.1 The people were ‘splendid’ wrote Collins, but the country was also beset by the looters and carpet baggers that ride on the coat tails of every revolution. A few days later, he wrote a memo to his director of intelligence that ‘any man caught looting or destroying should be shot on sight’.2 He still could not countenance summary executions of captured anti-Treaty fighters.

      The hard fighting in Cork and Kerry was driving Collins onwards. Only two weeks before his death, Collins wrote to the provisional government in Dublin suggesting ‘special punishments’ for those found in arms in areas designated special military areas.3 He did not stipulate the nature of the punishment, but no one was in any doubt what was implied. It was a poisoned chalice and it was batted back and forth in meetings and memos. In response to a note from Cosgrave, Collins wrote: ‘I am against shooting down unarmed men.’4 Such a decision, he told Cosgrave, was for the government not the army. In the emerging six county state in the North, possession of arms by anti-Treaty fighters was already being dealt with by lashes with the cat and a long term in prison.5 South of the border, policy was developing more slowly but into a much more draconian response.

      A pivotal event took place in late July. Just outside Abbeyleix on a bend in the road a National Army convoy was ambushed. Reinforcements soon arrived led by National Army Commandant Jack Collison and Divisional Commandant McCurtain: both officers died in a single volley. Very quickly their attackers threw up their hands and all twenty-eight were taken into custody.

      The next day at the old courthouse at Maryborough, the inquest jury heard evidence that the officers had been killed by expanding bullets. ‘Wilful murder’ was the verdict of the jury who added a rider, condemning the use of expanding bullets.6 The funerals followed soon after and at the graveside Executive Council member Joe McGrath praised the survivors for the ‘extraordinary forbearance they had shown after their much loved officers had been shot down’. In terms of how the conflict was fought, that quality of forbearance would soon dissipate and in the months that followed there were many well-grounded complaints of ill treatment of prisoners.

      For the provisional government, the ambush resonated of all that was wrong. Collison and McCurtain had fine records in the recent war and both were now dead, but the prisoners had gone off for internment without trial. They were mostly young – too young to have fought in the recent war but raised in an era when fighting for country was everything and there were many more like them still out there. Ernest Blythe seized the moment and suggested the surrender should not have been accepted.

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