The ‘Drumboe Martyrs’ were four republicans executed on 14 March 1923, when the Civil War had already ended in Donegal. They included three men from Kerry and one from Derry, most notably Charlie Daly, who spent most of the Irish Revolution as an I.R.A. commander in Tyrone. This article analyses Daly’s position as a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) Supreme Council (S.C.) and his prominent role in a pro- and anti-Treaty I.R.A. campaign against the Belfast government between the Treaty and the southern Civil War.
The research is based on retrospective witness statements and pension claims alongside contemporary accounts and documents. The analysis of Daly’s time in Tyrone and Derry involved reading 300 I.R.A. pension claims. Since its release in 2014, the Military Service Pensions Collection has offered a mine of information for those tasked with writing the history of the I.R.A. The pensions collection helps to elucidate Charlie Daly’s agency in Tyrone and Derry from the July 1921 Truce up until the outbreak of civil war. This research involved a trawl of every application from those counties to supplement research on the area carried out by the author before the collection’s release.Footnote 1 The testimony from initial pro-Treaty and ‘neutral’ I.R.A. veterans proved particularly useful due to the short period between the application and the events they described.
Later material gathered from republican claimants, the Ernie O’Malley notebooks and Daly’s own extensive primary papers in the Kerry County Library are also deployed here to gather a more selective sample of testimony from pension claims in Cork, Kerry and Donegal. The O’Malley interviews (1948–54), initially contained in fifty-three notebooks in the U.C.D. Archives, but now increasingly available in published form, provide a great deal of granular subjective detail, which can be triangulated against evidence produced closer to the time. This process helps establish Daly’s S.C. membership and generates a timeline of his activism during the interregnum between the signing of the Treaty and outbreak of the southern Civil War. Charlie Daly’s letters (1916–23) represent one of the most significant republican collections of the period, particularly in terms of the build up to civil war. Alongside the other sources, they help elucidate the nature of the post-January 1922 I.R.A. split and failed joint northern offensive. Daly’s position as an I.R.B. S.C. member, and his prominent involvement therein, also sheds light on the intentions and conduct of the Free State’s emergent military leadership and more speculatively suggests that his execution constituted an exercise in conspiratorial housekeeping.
Peadar O’Donnell told Ernie O’Malley that ‘Charlie Daly was on the Provisional [sic. Supreme] Council of the IRB. It is strange that important IRB men were killed off.’Footnote 2 Elsewhere, he claimed the Drumboe ‘executions, carried out by men whom I despised and [to] whom Tirconaill [sic.] meant nothing, shamed and enraged me’.Footnote 3 O’Donnell believed the Free State executed Dick Barrett because he knew Collins’s ‘plans in detail’ to ‘use the Treaty to get strength’, while wielding ‘a dark hand’ to assassinate ‘undesirables.’Footnote 4 Furthermore, Liam Deasy told O’Malley that Daly, Liam Lynch and Joe McKelvey were anti-Treatyite S.C. members.Footnote 5 Doubt, however, emerges with a reference in Jack Fitzgerald’s interview with O’Malley. Daly apparently told him that he ‘had been at a Supreme Council meeting by accident: and often he said to me “If I’m caught, I’ll pay for that meeting”’.Footnote 6
Nevertheless, Michael Collins’s diary entry of 18 March 1922 recorded ‘Charlie D’ at a S.C. meeting.Footnote 7 Indeed, the secretary, Seán Ó Murthuile’s, account details an army unity meeting on 19 April 1922 between Martin Conlon, Diarmuid O’Hegarty and himself (Free State) and Daly, Lynch and McKelvey (Executive) — all S.C. mentioned in Collins’s diary.Footnote 8 In December 1922, Lynch wrote to the head of the Clan na Gael, Joseph McGarrity, that two anti-Treaty S.C. members had been killed (Harry Boland and McKelvey) and one was in prison (Daly). Apparently, Treatyites were eliminating republican S.C. members to ensure the true history of ‘the Organisation’ never emerged.Footnote 9 Daly’s execution that March apparently confirmed Lynch’s conspiracy theory.
This article begins by contextualising the I.R.A’s abortive northern offensive in spring 1922 within the wider framework of the Treatyite settlement. It then details Daly’s position as a S.C. member who initially co-operated with the emergent Free State army’s northern policy and his subsequent removal from his command of the 2nd Northern Division (N.D.) as evidence of Collins, Mulcahy and O’Duffy’s manipulation of the issue of partition to avert civil war and neutralise the northern I.R.A. Between the March and May offensives, the Beggars’ Bush headquarters deployed the new state’s resources and ultimately empty promises to that end. The analysis then examines Daly’s role as anti-Treaty vice-commandant in Donegal during the May offensive, arranged through the I.R.B., but abandoned by the pro-Treaty forces. The article concludes that Daly’s execution alongside Seán Larkin may have been partly due to their knowledge of the no longer expedient northern conspiracy, and the disingenuous way the Free State military leadership removed Daly from his command to achieve its ends.
I
The Treaty granted dominion status, which many republicans, including Daly, viewed as a clear subversion of the Republic proclaimed at Easter 1916.Footnote 10 It also permitted the unionist government in Belfast, created under the Government of Ireland Act (1920), to opt out, thereby triggering the Boundary Commission, which would redraw the border ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions.’ Many historians characterise this outcome as the establishment of ‘two ethnic majority Irish states.’Footnote 11 Alternatively, the border marked ‘the line of retreat’ of the British imperialist state — a situation retrospectively confirmed by the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Northern Ireland, a region founded amidst ‘pogromist violence against the minority’, also comprised a territory whose scope appeared ‘manifestly unjust in relation to conceptions of self-determination’.Footnote 12
Between the Treaty and southern Civil War, four principal tendencies operated on the island under the British threat of ‘immediate and terrible war.’Footnote 13 Firstly, a reactionary unionist mindset — or colonial tendency — underpinned the new one-party government in Belfast.Footnote 14 An argument exists that the Sinn Féin revolution hardened unionist intransigence.Footnote 15 Yet, partition had already emerged as British policy before the First World War, an initiative ‘informed both in Ulster and Britain by a supremacist unionism which argued that Protestants in north-east Ireland were superior to the native Irish’.Footnote 16 Daly realised that legal provisions for boundary changes counted for little against the reality of loyalist boots on the ground. Neither had he any illusions about the north, writing just before the Treaty that ‘The more I see & know it & its people the more I hate it & them’.Footnote 17 He died fighting in Donegal to overturn partition or at least ensure that majority nationalist areas like Tyrone and South Derry would not remain within James Craig’s ‘new impregnable Pale’.Footnote 18
The relative lack of attention afforded to partition during the Treaty debates in Dáil Éireann merits attention. This partially rested on a naïve assumption that the Boundary Commission would transfer the majority nationalist counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh, as well as portions of Armagh, Down and Derry, to the Free State, potentially rendering Northern Ireland an unviable rump.Footnote 19 It also hinted at republican intrigues set to challenge partition militarily. Yet, undoubtedly, even the Dáil contained an assimilationist and ultimately pro-imperial tendency that comfortably acquiesced to partition; a conservative nexus within the Sinn Féin movement that coalesced with the pre-revolutionary southern Catholic elite and elements of the old unionist establishment to form the Free State ruling class. Daly identified a similar tendency amongst Tyrone nationalists after Dáil Éireann accepted the Treaty in January 1922, for while all ‘the [I.R.A.] fellows and a big number of the people’ were against the Treaty, ‘of course nearly all the clergy and all the old politicians are pleased.’Footnote 20
This second, assimilationist tendency, a reconfiguration of Irish constitutional nationalism across the long nineteenth century, argued that Ireland should gain autonomy on equal imperial terms. Kevin O’Higgins’s famous quip that under the Treaty ‘the Irish could go into the Empire with their heads held up’ surely echoed a ‘particular form of liberalism that had its roots in the Home Rule era’. Yet, Bill Kissane’s assumption that, across the short twentieth century, Britain sought merely to influence its former colonies ‘in a democratic direction’ or that with ‘hindsight’ these assimilationists ‘ultimately won the Treaty argument’ ignores the ‘underside’ of liberal imperialism so comprehensively exposed by Caroline Elkins.Footnote 21 The assimilationists constituted the majority on the provisional government, which ‘forked the flow of authority, in effect neutering the nominal Dáil’. The ‘unmoved’ and ‘hawkish’ Griffith and O’Higgins continually pushed their chairman, Collins, ‘to press on with implementing the terms of the Treaty’, which ultimately ‘meant confrontation and conflict’ with republicans.Footnote 22
The third and fourth tendencies emerged from a split in the republican, anti-imperialist strand of the Sinn Féin movement. Although challenged by more recent research, a historiographical trend persists, which decontextualises the southern conflict, thereby characterising anti-imperialist republicans as almost uniquely militant, anti-democratic and irrational.Footnote 23 This reading often downplays British strategic interests, underpinned by structural violence, and minimises the conduct of the supremacist northern government. Rather than entering the British Empire with heads held high, anti-Treatyite republicans claimed that the Irish went in ‘with their hands up’.Footnote 24 Such a structural awareness best explains British willingness to ‘strengthen’ the Free State army, to guarantee the anti-imperialists’ defeat, even if this risked ‘nurturing a strong southern army which might ultimately turn its guns on Northern Ireland — as Collins planned in the spring of 1922’.Footnote 25
This anti-imperialist tendency sought full independence and reconquest and, thus, diverged from a fourth, gradualist republican tendency, personified by Collins. The imperial elite arguably groomed Collins to decapitate and destroy the anti-imperialist movement, which his assimilationist successors duly went on to do.Footnote 26 While in London, Collins ruminated on the potentiality of dominion status, effectively abandoning the republican universalism of 1916 for a conception of empire based on his reading of Jans Smuts, the eminent South African statesman and primary intellectual force behind twentieth-century imperial white supremacism.Footnote 27 Collins clearly believed that he could not secure better terms without provoking a war with Britain that the I.R.A. could not win. His objective abandonment of the Republic operated within the context of threatened reinvasion from an empire that had subjugated a quarter of the globe.
After Dáil Éireann narrowly accepted the Treaty on 7 January 1922, Éamon de Valera and Richard Mulcahy assured the I.R.A. Divisional Staff that they would remain the Army of the Republic. Mulcahy then met the majority anti-Treaty I.R.A. on 18 January and consented to a Convention.Footnote 28 The provisional government established under the Treaty owed its survival to its chairman, Collins’s, ability to convince sufficient republicans to win the Dáil vote and then negate an immediate I.R.A. split, for which the fledgling Free State army appeared ill-prepared. Collins headed a government of assimilationist politicians distinctly uncomfortable with his overt military power and conspiratorial role within the I.R.B. Yet, in March, John Dillon perceptively noted that ‘without Collins, Griffith would not last a fortnight’.Footnote 29
Collins argued that the Treaty provided the freedom to achieve freedom, espoused a pessimistic assessment of the I.R.A’s chances under ‘immediate and terrible war’, and promised a republican Free State constitution, all the while engaging in a covert, northern offensive in conjunction with anti-Treatyites through the I.R.B. Nevertheless, within the I.R.A. more generally, the pro-Treaty G.H.Q. faced an anti-Treaty majority, which established the executive on 26 March after Mulcahy belatedly banned the proposed Army Convention agreed on 18 January 1922. In the interim, both factions agreed to co-operate in a northern campaign to avoid a complete breach.Footnote 30 This article investigates the nature of this campaign and argues that rather than Collins’s death in August 1922 representing a break in the Free State’s northern policy, the evidence suggests that, much earlier, the structural realities of accepting the Treaty meant that a conflict between anti-imperialist and gradualist republicans represented the most likely outcome.
In short, the gradualists defeated the anti-imperialists to secure the interests of the assimilationists and colonists at the behest of the metropole. By September 1922, Britain had supplied 27,400 rifles, 6,606 revolvers, and 246 Lewis guns to the provisional government, which had made provision for an army of 35,000.Footnote 31 From this perspective, the creation of the Free State army did much more than establish ‘the tenet of civil control of the military’.Footnote 32 In the six counties, the British also financed 48,000 paramilitary police for a further two years to the tune of £6 million.Footnote 33
If the intention all along was a twenty-six-county British dominion, then the creation of a military dictatorship in the opening phase of the Civil War and the deployment of extra-judicial murder under parliamentary government during its final phases constituted the regrettable but necessary birth pangs of Irish democracy. Yet, the Treaty was neither sold nor accepted on these terms. A new brush sweeps clean, and the emerging Free State political elite quickly jettisoned talk of steppingstones and oversaw a policy of extra-judicial and non-official killings.Footnote 34
II
Born in August 1896, near Firies, County Kerry, Charlie Daly (pronounced Dálaigh) grew up in a Fenian household and rose through the ranks of the Irish Volunteers and I.R.B.Footnote 35 After Easter 1916, he spent considerable time in prison and on I.R.B. business in Dublin, as well as helping in the reorganisation of the Kerry I.R.A. in 1920.Footnote 36 G.H.Q. sent Daly to Tyrone as part of a wider policy of activating ‘quiet’ areas in August 1920.Footnote 37 As O/C of the Tyrone Brigade, Daly played a significant role in the I.R.A’s divisional reorganisation the following March, a process again carried out through I.R.B. channels. He initially held the position of vice-commandant of the 2nd N.D. until Eoin O’Duffy’s promotion to G.H.Q. in May 1921.Footnote 38
The areas and individuals involved in the 2nd N.D. and Ulster I.R.A. more generally require elaboration. The reorganisation broke up the old Tyrone Brigade, which mostly transferred to the second of the five new Northern Divisions. The 1st N.D. under Joe Sweeney covered much of Donegal. The 3rd N.D. included the Belfast Brigade, commanded by Joe McKelvey until his removal in March 1922.Footnote 39 Frank Aiken, who adopted a ‘neutral’ position before the Civil War commanded the 4th N.D., which centred on south Armagh and crossed the eventual border into north Louth. The 5th N.D. centred on the old Monaghan Brigade under the command of Dan Hogan. The 1st Midland Division, under Seán Mac Eoin, also contained units in Fermanagh.
The 2nd N.D. contained four brigades spanning most of Tyrone and Derry and, like the 3rd N.D., remained within the eventual six-counties’ border. Although initially appointed as vice-commandant, Daly led the 2nd N.D. for most of the period. The No. 1 (East Tyrone) Brigade was led by William John Kelly, who followed Daly to Donegal during the Civil War. Michael Gallagher from Dromore, who temporarily sat on the anti-Treaty I.R.A. executive until his arrest on 10 April 1922 led the No. 2 (West Tyrone).Footnote 40 Seán Larkin was O/C of No. 3 (South Derry) Brigade until he left for Donegal to join up with Daly in April 1922, leaving his command to Paddy Diamond who was pro-G.H.Q.Footnote 41 The No. 4 (Maghera) Brigade barely existed before the Truce and was commanded by John Haughey, who also sided with G.H.Q.
The 11 July 1921 Truce represented a period of I.R.A. consolidation and growth.Footnote 42 By October 1921, the 2nd N.D. had doubled in number due to an influx of so-called Trucileers.Footnote 43 O’Duffy described the training as ‘on a very elaborate scale’.Footnote 44 Daly reported ‘a big improvement all round’, the volunteers ‘at last, beginning to realise that they are soldiers and form part of an army’.Footnote 45 Daly confided that during his next trip home, he would not ‘have cause to be ashamed of this part of the country’ as had been the case previously, adding that even though it was ‘not my fault that twas so but I felt it all the same’.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, the division remained pitifully armed: only 109 rifles with seventy bullets per weapon, thirty-nine automatics with five bullets a piece, 153 revolvers with six bullets each, 204 shotguns and ninety-two grenades.Footnote 47
The 2nd N.D. was also bankrupt, with volunteers paying for their own training and equipment. O’Duffy later admitted that the division had a £500 debt and since formation ‘had not received one penny from GHQ’.Footnote 48 Unable to impose a levy because of the Truce, Daly organised a series of fundraisers, such as sports, dances and concerts.Footnote 49 Ironically, this formed the basis of criticism by Dan McKenna, who allegedly had a ‘personal animosity’ against Daly because of ‘the levy money and running around having a good time’.Footnote 50 O’Duffy would promote McKenna to divisional vice-commandant and John Haughey later recounted how McKenna then ‘organised the IRA in Derry and Tyrone in favour of GHQ and was responsible for the number that remained loyal’.Footnote 51 McKenna’s allegations appeared baseless, however. In August 1921, Daly recommended the ‘immediate’ removal of the officers of the No.1 Brigade for pocketing £200 from a destroyed mail train. Ironically, the Dungannon officers accused of ‘doing wrong’ would remain Daly’s staunchest supporters.Footnote 52
While the Truce largely held across Ireland, loyalist violence persisted in the six counties and demobilised ‘B’ Specials looked on in fury as the I.R.A. established a truce-time counter state.Footnote 53 The Specials launched a campaign of intimidation in the Cookstown and Dromore areas.Footnote 54 In October, Daly complained to G.H.Q. that ‘Truce or no Truce the Volunteers must take action to protect themselves and their people’ against ‘Orange aggressiveness and cowardly attacks on defenceless people’ who were ‘absolutely at the mercy of the armed Orange mob which patrols the roads at night and holds up and abuses defenceless Catholics’. Daly again made a desperate appeal for arms, before concluding that ‘unless steps are taken immediately to cope with these outrages, they will develop to such an extent that it will be very difficult to deal with them later’.Footnote 55 Daly ordered the drawing up of a blacklist of the ‘most actively hostile Orange houses’ in readiness for hostilities. ‘The intention is to do as much damage to property and inflict as many casualties as possible at the very outset.’Footnote 56
Before the Treaty and in direct breach of the Truce, the Belfast police chief, Charles Wickham, issued a circular ‘for the co-ordination into military units of unauthorised’ loyalist paramilitaries.Footnote 57 Craig’s government then disbanded ‘recalcitrant’ county councils in Fermanagh and Tyrone on 1 December.Footnote 58 The police and Specials then suppressed all republican courts and attacked I.R.A. training camps, including the 2nd N.D. camp at Sperrin on 21 December.Footnote 59 On 6 January, they raided an I.R.A. battalion review at Dromore, arresting most of the No. 2 Brigade officers.Footnote 60 Operating ‘under what were practically war conditions’, Daly claimed that ‘Since Xmas it was impossible to carry on with the same regularity or exercise the same supervision’. This security clampdown resulted in ‘a loss of twenty important officers to the Division since upwards of twenty-five men in all have been arrested in the area’.Footnote 61 The poorly armed I.R.A. in Tyrone and Derry never lifted a hand in opposition, still honouring a notional truce the unionists never recognised in the first place.
The subsequent northern offensive should, therefore, be placed within its legal context. The Truce represented ‘the first sign of official British recognition’ for the I.R.A.’Footnote 62 O’Duffy operated as truce liaison officer for all Ulster from St Mary’s Hall in Belfast before his appointment as G.H.Q. chief-of-staff. The Treaty effectively legitimised the Truce and acted as the basis of Free State authority to petition on behalf of northern nationalists. Yet, Craig’s government never recognised it and signalled their coercive intent even before its signing. In short, the Truce had not operated in Tyrone since before the turn of the year, while it rapidly unravelled across the north in a similar fashion.Footnote 63 By early spring, it was ‘open season’ for sectarian killings in Belfast. Within this violent context, the I.R.A. was living ‘in cloud cuckoo land’ honouring a nominal Truce with crown forces while the Specials instigated ‘a pogrom’.Footnote 64
Daly’s sister later related how, ‘during the entire months of the Truce period’ Charlie ‘could visit us only for two days’ as he ‘was kept busy trying to organise the IRA in Derry and Tyrone’ against the ‘British Government in Belfast.’ She continued that, ‘when the Treaty was signed’, Charlie ‘was overcome with despair. He spent nearly every day at the debates in Dublin, in January 1922. He was terribly anxious about the outcome.’Footnote 65 Daly most likely attended the S.C. meeting on 3 December in the Gresham Hotel, while Collins himself discussed the proposed Treaty’s terms with the Dáil cabinet.Footnote 66 Daly confided to his brother in a letter of that date that ‘I had to go to Dublin twice. I might say within a week and during the time between have been very busy’ since ‘there may be a burst up at any moment.’Footnote 67
On 6 December, after Collins signed the Treaty, Daly and the leading I.R.B. officers in Ulster attended a céilí in Clones.Footnote 68 Tom McNally, a Belfast anti-Treatyite, claimed that Joe McKelvey ‘was pro-Treaty just at the time’ when O’Duffy convinced him ‘that all our areas [even the Falls Road] could vote themselves out so there would be little left of the northern government and … they would have had to come in with the rest of Ireland’. Aiken recounted how ‘O’Duffy assured us with great vehemence that the signing of the Treaty was only a trick; that he would never take that oath and that no one would (be) asked to take it. He told us that it had been signed with the approval of GHQ in order to get arms to continue the fight.’Footnote 69 Similarly, Daly told his brother that they had a ‘close shave’ in Tyrone, but now they might not have to fight ‘the Orange braves’.Footnote 70
Collins’s ‘magnetic’ personality undoubtedly convinced many brothers to give the Treaty a chance, even though each had ‘freedom of action in the matter’.Footnote 71 Mary MacSwiney later wrote to McGarrity that Collins alone was ‘responsible for the split. All the young men who follow him — the young soldiers of the I.R.B. — would not have followed Griffith two steps. But they believed and still believe in Mick.’Footnote 72 Daly appeared impervious, however, and opposed the Treaty after apparently scrutinising the final document while in Dublin, confiding to his mother that he could ‘never imagine that some of our most prominent republicans would turn out such ardent Free Staters, but after these days nothing will ever surprise me again’.Footnote 73
Indeed, he attended the final Dáil vote on 7 January with Liam Lynch.Footnote 74 Lynch claimed to have initially stood alone against the Treaty on the S.C., but later wrote to McGarrity that
Two of the Governing Body stood against the Treaty; one of these was in America at the time [Harry Boland arrived in Dublin 5 January 1922]; two others a short while afterwards also stood against it [Daly and McKelvey]. Of the four, two have been killed [Boland and McKelvey] and another is in jail [Daly]. These executions may be intentional in these cases, to make history … of Organisation impossible.Footnote 75
After the Dáil vote, Daly claimed to have been ‘delayed a whole fortnight in Dublin in January to attend meetings’. These included I.R.A. gatherings with Mulcahy on 10 and 18 January and an S.C. meeting on 12 January. While opposed to the Treaty, Daly ‘did not sign the [10 January] document demanding a Convention because my views weren’t representative of my division’.Footnote 76 Daly later explained the 2nd N.D.’s opposition to any split: ‘my area is in a state of war … the police and Specials are out to get us. It would not matter one little bit, but it seems curious we must risk our lives for the sake of a cause that has been handed over to the enemy. Of course, the Northerners must fight for their existence under whatever government is in power.’Footnote 77
In parallel to the public I.R.A. meetings, the I.R.B. S.C. agreed that the Dáil would be recognised as the government of the Irish republic until ‘the proposed Irish Constitution is published’.Footnote 78 Shortly after, Boland lamented how the majority believed Collins’s stepping-stone analysis, even though the ‘rank and file of the organisation detest and abhor the Treaty’. Boland argued that acceptance by the ‘Irish people will inevitably render the struggle for complete independence more difficult for those who come after us’.Footnote 79 The gradualists rationalised their acceptance since the I.R.B. always sought ‘to make use of all instruments’ to achieve ‘a Free and Independent Republican Government in Ireland’.Footnote 80 Even during the Civil War, leading anti-Treatyite and neutral brothers accepted that this position partially reflected I.R.B. tradition.Footnote 81 Ó Murthuile, as S.C. secretary, wrote to McGarrity that the question of the ‘abandonment of the Republican Policy’ is simply an ‘election cry’ and that the only difference rested on ‘the means by which complete Freedom may be achieved’.Footnote 82
On this basis of temporary unity, Daly agreed to participate in preparations for a campaign against Craig’s unionist government. As already outlined, during the debates surrounding the I.R.A. convention, Daly made it clear privately that he had held his counsel and cooperated because he understood the gravity of the situation in Ulster. During the Civil War, he appealed to his former comrades to take the republican side, however, and publicly reiterated his previous position. After the Treaty, ‘I might have returned home and enjoyed even temporary peace amongst my comrades and friends in Kerry’ but chose to remain ‘with you. Even after the ratification of the “Treaty”, when my remaining in the Army might appear a weakening of my Republican principles, I was still willing to remain in Ulster’ because ‘it was still war for the “Six Counties”.’Footnote 83
III
The following two sections deal with Daly’s agency and Free State intrigue across the spring and early summer of 1922. Between the Dáil vote and his removal as 2nd N.D. commandant on 2 March 1922, Daly registered his forthright opposition to the Treaty but also co-operated with the emerging Free State Army elite through the I.R.B. network and the ‘Ulster Council’. This partially rested on Daly’s genuine desire to support the I.R.A. in Derry and Tyrone in its struggle with the new unionist administration. Daly essentially planned the 2nd N.D.’s attacks during the first joint-I.R.A. offensive, which took place a fortnight after his replacement. Even though Collins, Mulcahy and O’Duffy connived to remove him, Daly’s position in the I.R.B. appeared to have been crucial in further attempts to organise a second offensive in May. In April, Daly took part in high-level I.R.B. negotiations to maintain unity, with the north as a key area of mutual concern. As a result, he recruited I.R.A. men from Kerry to bolster the anti-Treatyite 1st and 2nd N.D. on the Donegal border under the command of Seán Lehane and himself. The abortive May offensive essentially destroyed the I.R.A. in the six counties and led to a rupture between anti-Treaty and Free State forces in Donegal. The outbreak of civil war saw Lehane trapped in the Four Courts attempting to secure weapons for a spurious third joint-offensive, and Daly marooned in Donegal, facing the reality of conflict with his former comrades.
It is, therefore, necessary to set out the context for Daly’s dismissal as 2nd N.D. commandant. Seán Ó Murthuile recounted how through the I.R.B. network, the Ulster Council, which initially included Daly, encompassed all I.R.A. companies in the province ‘under the direction of Frank Aiken’.Footnote 84 Although he chaired meetings, Aiken later claimed to have refused command on several occasions because Mulcahy refused to give him ‘a free hand’.Footnote 85 Arguably, Aiken’s position may indicate that a lack of ability, rather than individual politics, best explains Daly’s subsequent dismissal. This, however, ignores the fact that Aiken ‘did not deviate’ from ‘the political aims and objectives of Collins and the pro-Treaty leadership’ until his temporary arrest by the Free State army in July.Footnote 86 As Matthew Lewis points out, the ‘Ulster Council ultimately served a dual purpose; conciliating Aiken and his fellow northern divisional commandant, while pre-emptively ensuring a degree of influence over their future actions.’Footnote 87
This promised co-operation and his own centrality to negotiations within the I.R.B. apparently placated Daly, who sent O’Duffy a detailed plan of operations on 25 January, again stressing the dire need of weapons.Footnote 88 Ostensibly in earnest, the I.R.A. in Tyrone and Derry ‘expected to witness … the horrors of war more so than any part of Ireland’.Footnote 89 The northern government had already signalled its intention not to recognise the Truce. As outlined previously, on 6 January, Specials in sixteen Crossley tenders raided an I.R.A. battalion review at Dromore, arresting most of the officers in the No. 2 Brigade in the process.Footnote 90 When the U.S.C. arrested Henry McCusker, the Dromore quartermaster, in March 1922, they also seized a list of the company’s arms. The Dromore unit had a grand arsenal of three rifles, six shotguns and three revolvers.Footnote 91
Yet, the Ulster Council’s first initiative on 8 February 1922 sought to consolidate Treatyite support in the 5th N.D.Footnote 92 On 2 December, a prison warder had died from chloroform asphyxiation after a failed prison break in Derry Gaol by I.R.A. prisoners. On 14 January, again in Dromore, U.S.C. had arrested ten members of the Monaghan Gaelic football team on its way to the Ulster final in Derry, including the team captain, Dan Hogan. The ‘Monaghan footballers’ were heading north to release failed I.R.A. escapees, now under sentence of death for killing the warder. Recently appointed I.R.A. chief-of-staff, O’Duffy was also the Ulster G.A.A. secretary who selected Derry as the venue for the final, with the suggestion that he may have arranged the fixture to facilitate the mission.Footnote 93 Once again, the I.R.A. officers on the team protested that under the Truce they were entitled to carry arms and should not be arrested — the controversy led to three weeks of violence and acrimony between Dublin, London and Belfast until the footballers’ release in March.Footnote 94
In any event, O’Duffy sought to ‘take immediate action to bring public opinion to bear on the situation’ and told Collins that he had ‘arranged the kidnapping of one hundred prominent Orangemen.’Footnote 95 This initiative formed part of accelerating efforts by Collins, Mulcahy and O’Duffy to build up the ‘National’ army to rival the anti-Treaty I.R.A. G.H.Q. had moved its headquarters to Beggar’s Bush to the south of Dublin city and the new command worked hard to place Treatyites in key positions. Pádraig Quinn claimed that Beggar’s Bush developed a ‘policy to let the I.R.A. run into a position of bankruptcy’.Footnote 96 Likewise, Mary MacSwiney alleged that G.H.Q. were trying to ‘use the power of the purse over us’ and ‘to seduce the Army loyal to the Republic by offers of good salaries and other good things’. Collins also ‘claimed that he was ‘still a Republican and means to use the Treaty as steppingstone’, by ‘getting the English army out, getting our own army equipped and then when he was ready declaring the Republic again’.Footnote 97
G.H.Q.’s approach to the 2nd and 3rd N.D.s — the only two isolated within the border — appears to confirm this. When Joe McKelvey went anti-Treaty, O’Duffy removed him from his command and gave promotions, money and guns to Roger McCorley and Seamus Woods. Amidst atrocious sectarian violence, Beggar’s Bush’s decision to set up the Belfast City Guard on 22 February 1922 appeared crucial in securing the support of most of the city’s I.R.A.Footnote 98 McCorley attended the executive in March and threatened to go with them ‘unless G.H.Q. would make at least as good an offer of supplies’.Footnote 99 O’Duffy promised that Beggar’s Bush would pass on everything they needed.
Similarly, the way ‘the 2nd Northern [Commandant] — C. Daly — (since executed) was removed by Gen. O’Duffy and Comdt-Gen. Morris was appointed in his stead’ shows how G.H.Q. manipulated the northern offensive to avert civil war and deployed the Free State’s resources and empty promises to engineer the support or at least neutrality of the northern I.R.A.Footnote 100 As part of planning for the proposed offensive, G.H.Q. exchanged British rifles with Lynch’s 1st Southern Division, the first instalment travelling north through Dundalk in Aiken’s 4th N.D. on 17 February. To consolidate Treatyite support, O’Duffy diverted arms intended for 2nd N.D. to Monaghan and then manipulated the issue to replace Daly with Morris, cautioning Mulcahy that the move should not be made ‘immediately’.Footnote 101 Morris had joined the British army before leading the Irish Volunteers in south Derry until his arrest in September 1920. O’Duffy claimed that Collins, ‘who had a very high opinion of Major Morris … requested me to place him in charge’ after ‘Charlie Daly was relieved of responsibility’.Footnote 102 In short, because of his vocal opposition to the Treaty, Mulcahy and O’Duffy had planned Daly’s removal since February, with Collins’s support.Footnote 103
Events came to a head at the ‘Beggar’s Bush Inquiry’ into Daly’s ‘alleged incompetence’ on 2 March 1922. Daly claimed, with good reason, that O’Duffy had engineered his dismissal in anticipation of the I.R.A. convention and a public rupture on the Treaty. In his pension application, Mick Gallagher, the O/C No. 2 Brigade, described ‘the Beggars’ Bush inquiry’ as ‘a plot by O’Duffy to replace Daly with a mercenary ex-soldier [Morris] having little or no pre-Truce service but who was Treatyite and pliable’.Footnote 104 At the time, Daly claimed that O’Duffy ‘knew … where I would be in the event of a division at the Convention’. He then claimed that O’Duffy had ‘interviewed junior officers and civilians at Beggars Bush from my area without my knowledge’. O’Duffy was allegedly ‘in direct communication with one of my Brigade O/C’s [John Haughey], also without my knowledge’.Footnote 105
Daly secured this information from his adjutant, Frank Stronge, who was ‘astonished’ by Haughey’s complaints as ‘the lack of supplies’ was clearly ‘the fault of GHQ’. Stronge, who Daly did not privately rate, outlined his investigation into G.H.Q.’s intrigue and felt Daly would ‘have no difficulty in dealing with the charges’ since the men generally accepted that ‘GHQ were to blame for not supplying arms’.Footnote 106 Clearly, having diverted the arms, O’Duffy manipulated discontent in Derry to engineer Daly’s replacement. Two days after the ‘enquiry’, O’Duffy cleared the division’s debts and contacted Lynch to send 100 rifles and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.Footnote 107 O’Duffy then communicated to Collins that ‘we have set up a military council for the North’ with Aiken as chairman, which included Morris instead of Daly ‘whom I found it necessary to displace’.Footnote 108
O’Duffy subsequently informed Mulcahy that Daly told the assembled officers: ‘Lads, I knew this was coming,’ and that his dismissal was ‘entirely because of his politics’. O’Duffy then remarked that none of the 2nd N.D. officers were ‘politicians’ and ‘could not understand their commandant’s references’.Footnote 109 Daly claimed that discontent resulted from ‘the increasing demoralisation’ because ‘of Partition and disappointments about supplies of arms’. He was ‘not at all surprised’ by complaints in Derry, as they ‘found that I had deceived them about arms. On the strength of promises made by you I had told them time after time that supplies were coming.’ Daly was offered a job at Beggar’s Bush as compensation. He retorted:
I was not in the Army for a job or for any salary connected with one. If it were not otherwise, I would only be too glad to be relieved of a dangerous position in the North – no matter with what circumstances my removal was attended – for the safer and more comfortable one which you offer me at Beggars Bush. I joined the Volunteers in 1913 through patriotic motives and for an ideal.Footnote 110
In a subsequent letter, Daly claimed that Haughey ‘expressed regret for his part in the affair and said he has now realised that he had been fooled’. O’Duffy apparently told him that he ‘had to’ dismiss Daly ‘on instructions from’ Mulcahy, ‘who had taken exception to’ Daly’s conduct at the I.R.A. meetings in January’.Footnote 111 Seán Larkin, O/C No. 3 (Derry) Brigade, claimed that O’Duffy had ‘told’ Morris he ‘had only been waiting for an opportunity to remove’ Daly. Larkin ‘was disgusted with the whole business’ and said that ‘if he saw anymore of this crookedness, he would make a clean breast of what he knew’.Footnote 112
On 19 March, the ‘neutral’ 2nd N.D. seized Pomeroy Barracks as part of a general northern offensive.Footnote 113 The British cabinet appeared aware of Collins and Mulcahy’s involvement.Footnote 114 Daly had planned the Tyrone attacks and thus ‘felt it very much to have to leave the fellows [2nd N.D.] up there now when the trouble is just commencing. There are a good many decent fellows there and I would like to have taken my chances with them.’ He regretted having to leave ‘when my work was just commencing to bear fruit’.Footnote 115 Elsewhere in the division, Nicholas Smyth recounted how Daly had decided ‘that the I.R.A. would strike back’ against local U.S.C.Footnote 116 The vicious loyalist response resulted in the No. 2 Brigade’s practical elimination. By May, Daly, now in Donegal, noted that
their own people … the civil population would not feed them. The doctors and hospitals had refused to attend to the sick and wounded without payment, the men were without boots and clothes. We could give them practically no help so it is no wonder that they should go over to Beggar’s Bush.Footnote 117
As a result of escalating violence, especially in Belfast, Churchill brokered the second Craig-Collins Pact on 30 March. Nevertheless, in preparation for a further offensive, G.H.Q. continued to arm the 2nd N.D. through the pro-Treaty 1st N.D. in Donegal and Aiken’s ‘neutral’ 4th N.D. in Dundalk.Footnote 118 Mick Gallagher shipped forty service rifles from Drumboe to Dromore by horse and trap in ‘pursuance of the arrangement with Pro-Treaty forces’.Footnote 119 It has been claimed that Collins and O’Duffy ‘took a staggering risk in supplying’ British rifles as well as southern republican weapons. Tom Kelly specifically remembered 200 Lee-Enfield rifles heading to Donegal from Beggar’s Bush and then transported into Tyrone ‘in a compartment of an oil tanker’ driven past the U.S.C. patrol on the Lifford-Strabane bridge by Haughey.Footnote 120 Sweeney recalled how his men worked for ‘two days with hammers and chisels’ removing British serial numbers from four hundred rifles, which he delivered to Dan McKenna and ‘Charlie Haughey’s father’, high in the Sperrins.Footnote 121
O’Duffy did not send arms to the 2nd N.D. before March because it was anti-Treatyite. That month Patrick McCartan, who led the Tyrone I.R.B. until 1916, wrote that ‘the I.R.A. in the six counties are all anti-Treaty almost to a man. They, however, are out against partition rather than the Treaty. They feel they have been let down.’Footnote 122 The 2nd N.D. sent representatives to the anti-Treaty army convention on 26 March, although, by 1923, it was ‘not functioning’. Seán Larkin represented Derry, while the divisional Q.M. represented Tyrone.Footnote 123 Mick Gallagher also temporarily sat on the executive before his arrest.Footnote 124 G.H.Q. would hardly arm anti-Treatyite forces in a region where conflict could wreck the entire agreement. Yet, Collins told the Tyrone I.R.A. in March that ‘although the Treaty might have an outward expression of Partition, the Government had plans whereby they would make it impossible … Partition would never be recognised even though it might mean the smashing of the Treaty.’Footnote 125 By April, O’Duffy reported that No. 1 and 2 Brigades in Tyrone had ‘went with the Four Courts due to a misunderstanding’ but were ‘returning just as rapidly’.Footnote 126 In fact, most Tyrone Volunteers adhered to the executive until May. Seán Corr recounted how No. 1 Brigade sent ‘a courier to Charlie Daly, who was then in Donegal, for money’. The ‘courier came back to inform us that he could not get any money from Daly’. The No. 2 Dungannon Battalion led by W. J. Kelly remained anti-Treaty, while the No. 3 Carrickmore Battalion under Corr sent a courier to Morris, who ‘brought us back a sum of money to cover our pay as officers’.Footnote 127
Daly claimed the republican side was ‘losing ground here every day because we are unable to do more. This is the case especially within the Border. We have only one brigade [No. 1 East Tyrone] now in the old 2nd Northern.’ While Morris’s No. 3 Derry Brigade went ‘at the start … The others held out for a long time, but when they saw that the Free State brigade was getting more assistance from GHQ than we were able to give then they went over.’ Daly wrote that ‘the last [No. 2] Brigade that went ‘twas only last week, remained loyal to the Executive until ‘twas almost impossible for it to carry on. It had three of four flying columns of about 100 men who were being hunted for their lives.’ Daly concluded that ‘Tis in order to be in a position to fight that they have gone to that side. We are certain to have them later when they have got the arms because it is well known that Beggar’s Bush will not risk the Treaty by carrying on the fight in Ulster.’Footnote 128
IV
Daly nevertheless co-operated with O’Duffy, through the I.R.B. network, in preparation for a second proposed northern offensive in May. He attended a S.C. meeting on 18 March 1922, arguing that the I.R.B. should be ‘kept the supreme republican party’ with Collins, who assured those present that the I.R.B. would remain supreme, noting that the Kerryman viewed the ‘Organisation’ as ‘more military than political’.Footnote 129 Having essentially dismissed Daly as 2nd N.D. Commandant in March, Collins cooperated in sending him to Donegal with Seán Lehane, Maurice Donegan and other leading Cork I.R.A. veterans. The anti-Treaty 1st N.D. would coordinate with ‘neutral’ and pro-Treaty divisions in what Robert Lynch has described a ‘virtual full-scale invasion of Northern Ireland’.Footnote 130 Donegan later stressed Collins’s centrality to the scheme but added that the republicans sought to ‘create war in the North’ so ‘that the rest of the country would become involved and do away with the Treaty’.Footnote 131
On 15 April, Lynch and Lehane met Beggar’s Bush officers at the Four Courts to arrange ‘one of many’ arms exchange in which Collins and Mulcahy were ‘deeply implicated’.Footnote 132 An almost incredible public exchange between O’Duffy and Lynch on 22 April about arms transfers for the North demonstrates the extent of co-operation by both factions.Footnote 133 Lehane provided a detailed account of Lynch and Collins’s joint plan that officers from the 1st Southern Division would lead Volunteers (mostly stationed in Donegal) to operate under ‘orders directly’ from the Ulster Council chairman, Aiken. Furthermore, due to the Orange ‘reign of terror’, both I.R.A. elements ‘decided to recognise no truce situation in the north’.Footnote 134
On 19 April, Daly attended further I.R.B. peace talks between G.H.Q., the I.R.A. executive and the Four Courts garrison. Again, peace apparently hinged on co-operation against the northern government and Collins’s proposed constitution.Footnote 135 Daly had spent the interim recruiting in Kerry for the northern campaign.Footnote 136 He arrived in Donegal in late April as Lehane’s vice-commandant, commanding ‘a couple of hundred’ southern fighters and 2nd N.D. men who had fled west.Footnote 137 Nicholas Smyth detailed how, when he reported for duty, Daly had embarked on a ‘tour of inspection of the Donegal area with General Sean Mac Eoin. I had great hopes they were planning something big for the Six Counties.’Footnote 138
On 21 April 1922, Aiken told the Ulster Council in Clones that the offensive was scheduled for 2 May. The 2nd N.D. would seize enemy positions in preparation ‘for occupancy by 1st, 5th, and 4th N.Ds.’Footnote 139 By now, the 2nd N.D. ‘had plenty of stuff’.Footnote 140 Morris ordered Thomas Martin south to Portobello Barracks, where he joined a convoy delivering arms ‘handed over by the Southern [anti-Treaty] I.R.A. from lorries’ for transit to Tyrone via Donegal.Footnote 141 O’Donoghue later confirmed this, adding that Lehane’s men would also take part, supplying experienced leadership for local units.Footnote 142 Aiken apparently told Quinn that ‘Collins was the inspiration of this general offensive’.Footnote 143 Certainly, from the anti-Treaty and ‘neutral’ I.R.A. perspective, Quinn felt that ‘determined action in the North would bring the whole country behind us, Provisional Government forces and I.R.A. and so bring about unity’.Footnote 144
Then, on the request of the Belfast I.R.A., O’Duffy apparently postponed the 2 May rising. The 2nd N.D., however, went ahead.Footnote 145 Morris later recalled that ‘a dispatch rider through from Belfast’ arrived ‘the day before’, but it was ‘impossible to get round my division and cancel’.Footnote 146 John McCoy claimed that cancellation orders ‘came to us [4th N.D.] with only sufficient time to enable the operations to be called off’. Yet, in Tyrone and Derry ‘the cancellation did not reach the men in time and the operations commenced’.Footnote 147 The republican 1st & 2nd Northern Division under Lehane and Daly represented the only unit outside the 2nd N.D. to engage in any fighting. Indeed, this led to a complete breakdown of relations between Sweeney and Daly after a republican ambush on Free State troops at Newtowncunningham on the Donegal side of the border, ten miles west of Derry city.Footnote 148
While the 2nd N.D.’s premature mobilisation can be put down to incompetence, the decision to allow the 3rd N.D. to proceed unassisted a fortnight later smacked of treachery. Matthew Lewis has already noted the ‘intriguing’ outcome ‘that the only two divisions … allowed to proceed … were those with command areas … based entirely within Northern Ireland’.Footnote 149 Neither Aiken’s 4th N.D. nor the three explicitly pro-Treaty divisions took any action; a Free State memorandum later stated that ‘a decision appears to have been taken that there would be no fighting on the Border’.Footnote 150 Daly’s impassioned correspondence suggested that Sweeney frustrated the northern offensive.Footnote 151 Sweeney himself later claimed that he ‘had no use for the North for I thought they were no good. I got no encouragement from Collins or from GHQ about helping the North, nor had I any instructions to back them up.’Footnote 152
After the May offensive, the Unionist government introduced internment, rounding up prominent republicans on 20 May. The 2nd N.D. reported to G.H.Q. that ‘the morale of the population … in the greater part of Co Tyrone … is not good. Since the burnings and murders became general several families have been living in terror. Many don’t go to bed at night fearing they may be burned out under cover of curfew.’Footnote 153 As McCoy powerfully recalled, when southern support ‘fell through, and when the ferocity of the Orange mob was unleashed without any restraint … the rape of Republicanism in Northern Ireland was consummated.’Footnote 154
In early June, Morris moved the nominally neutral 2nd N.D. to Donegal. O’Duffy provided barracks ‘for the purpose of training some hundreds of men, with the intention of an invasion of the six counties in the late summer’.Footnote 155 Lehane claimed that Morris actually ‘co-operated with the Staters’, a fact borne out by Free State pension applications by ‘neutral’ 2nd N.D. officers.Footnote 156 In July, Daly publicly challenged Morris, who ‘without the least shadow of a doubt’ had ‘made up his mind not to fight for, or protect, his own and your people in the “Six Counties”. He means to fight against the Republic.’Footnote 157 Following the abandonment of the northern offensive, Morris took his men to Keane Barracks, Curragh, where most remained idle until disbandment after the Civil War or took up the offer to join the Free State army.Footnote 158 Yet, he always believed Collins’s pledge to destroy the Treaty rather than accept partition.Footnote 159 Morris refused to let Thomas Martin leave the Free State Army in March 1923 because ‘there was a possibility that the attack on the North would be resumed’. Martin replied that ‘he couldn’t see much hope of that’.Footnote 160
Collins, however, had clearly chosen to fight the I.R.A. rather than Craig or the British. The Belleek-Pettigo affair (4–7 June 1922) demonstrated that, even if both factions could take on the U.S.C., the military reality of British army battalions questioned the feasibility of the entire northern project. Pro-Treaty Free State troops from Donegal occupied Belleek Fort, an elevated position just on the Donegal side of the border, while anti-Treaty troops garrisoned Cliff House just to the north-west. A combined force of ‘neutral’ Tyrone I.R.A. and Free State troops, alongside around thirty anti-Treaty I.R.A., garrisoned Pettigo — a small unionist village on the Donegal side of the border. On 27 May, after a flotilla of Specials under the future northern prime minister, Basil Brooke, attacked the Free State forces, the anti-Treaty I.R.A. advanced on Belleek which lay within Northern Ireland but was only accessible by road from the Free State. A two-hour gun battle ensued between all sections of the I.R.A. and the U.S.C., which lost four men. Collins, negotiating in London, denied responsibility, partially giving the green light to Churchill to send in British troops and artillery, who duly cleared out Pettigo on 4 June, killing two ‘neutral’ Tyrone Volunteers, before moving on to Belleek and taking the fort, which was not returned to the Free State until 1924. Yet, outside focusing Free State minds, the Belleek-Pettigo incident exposed the utter confusion within I.R.A. ranks, with one eyewitness describing the situation on the Donegal border as reminiscent of a ‘South American revolution’.Footnote 161 Viewed retrospectively, the objective position appears that, incredibly, most of the northern I.R.A. sided with the Treaty and partition. Yet, subjectively, in the welter of mixed messages and commands that spring, the wood begins to emerge from the trees. Ultimately, the Free State-I.R.B. military elite secured northern support with money and empty promises.
The British then exploited the assassination of Henry Wilson on 22 June to press Collins into bombardment, after Churchill’s order that Macready attack the Four Courts was rescinded. The following day, Daly set up headquarters in Glenveagh Castle, with Lehane trapped in the Four Courts, whose garrison claimed to still be discussing northern arms’ transfers with Collins ‘right up to the hour of the’ shelling.Footnote 162 Daly’s letters during the Civil War give a harrowing account of the challenges faced by republicans, the growing antipathy between former comrades and the miserable circumstances of the ordinary people of Donegal. In September 1922, he lamented that the Donegal Gaeltacht was ‘very bad’ for flying columns ‘on account of the poverty of the people. You have no idea how very poor most of the country is. We hate to have to billet on them, but they are very generous.’Footnote 163 On 2 November 1922, Ernie O’Malley ordered their evacuation. Before they could leave, however, Free State forces captured Daly and his party near Gaoth Dobhair. The court-martial did not convene until 18 January 1923, at which eight republicans were convicted of having arms without proper authority. The death sentence was not enacted, however, until after the unaccounted-for death of Captain Bernard Cannon on 10 March 1923. Daly was executed on 14 March 1923, with fellow Kerrymen Daniel Enright and Timothy O’Sullivan and the Derryman, Larkin. The four other republicans escaped firing squad but signed public letters warning that they would be next.Footnote 164
V
During the Civil War, the Free State killed every senior republican brother party to the northern intrigue, including Joe McKelvey and Daly, the latter of whom was shot alongside Larkin, the witness to G.H.Q. ‘crookedness’ the previous March. On 20 March 1922, Daly told his brother that O’Duffy appeared ‘disappointed’ that he had not accepted the training position with G.H.Q., adding that O’Duffy’s disappointment seemed ‘more for his own safety than for mine’.Footnote 165 Daly and Larkin had evidence that O’Duffy and Mulcahy manipulated their positions and resources to dismiss Daly and buy-off the Northern I.R.A. Morris recollected that the Free State selected Larkin for execution ‘by mistake’ and that Dan McKenna, John Haughey and Patrick Diamond attempted to secure a last-minute reprieve.Footnote 166 Beggars’ Bush insisted on Larkin’s execution, despite Joe Sweeney also requesting confirmation. When Bishop Patrick O’Donnell directly contacted Mulcahy asking that the men be reprieved, he was ‘grossly insulted for his unwarranted interference in the course of justice’.Footnote 167
Kissane has noted how Collins’s assassination led to the ascension of ‘a small group of men, insecure in their power, and sceptical of the civic virtues of the population they ruled’.Footnote 168 The extra-judicial killing of four commanders from the Four Courts — Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Dick Barrett and Joe McKelvey — on 8 December 1922 in reprisal for the I.R.A.’s assassination of a pro-Treaty politician clearly demonstrated the political calculations behind some early executions. Yet, on 11 January 1923, the government devolved responsibility for executions to officers at the battalion level.Footnote 169 Thus, Daly and Larkin’s executions diverge from Kissane’s analysis of the devolution of ‘responsibility to local commanders’ wherein executions ‘were administered not as a response to national politics but to shape local political and military realities’.Footnote 170 In short, as a S.C. member, Daly’s execution ‘in dubious circumstance’ marked him out because, like Childers and the Four Courts’ leaders before him, he did not rank amongst O’Higgins’s ‘small fry’.Footnote 171
Rather, Drumboe represented a recurrence of political executions. Larkin, the son of a magistrate and prosperous farmer, also appeared exceptional in relation to the post-January 1923 cohort, who shared ‘ordinary, mainly rural backgrounds’.Footnote 172 In fact, Joe Sweeney did not initiate the executions but received orders directly from Dublin, and did not deliver the coup de grâce himself, instead delegating the responsibility to a junior officer. Other historians have inferred a link between the Kerry background of three of the victims and the ‘murder month’, where Paddy Daly and Dave Neligan, formerly of the Dublin Guards, undoubtedly exhibited local initiative in a campaign of state terror.Footnote 173 The Drumboe executions may well have killed two birds with one stone, erasing the memory of the I.R.B.’s northern policy and exerting further coercion on the Kerry I.R.A., but they were qualitatively different from the general pattern in 1923 identified by Kissane.
Back in the twilight between Treaty and Civil War, Charlie Daly’s dealings with O’Duffy and Mulcahy suggest that the Free State military elite manipulated the issue of partition to avert premature hostilities with the anti-Treaty I.R.A. Furthermore, O’Duffy deployed the new government’s resources to nurture a ‘dependency culture’ within the Ulster I.R.A., before abandoning northern republicans to their fate in the ‘common sense’ interests of securing the partitionist Free State.Footnote 174 After his release from prison in 1924, Daly’s brother, Tom, claimed that the enmity between Charlie and O’Duffy represented the real cause for his execution.Footnote 175 With the outbreak of the southern Civil War, the G.H.Q. elite postponed the northern offensive and then, after Collins’s assassination, not only was it abandoned, but its very existence embarrassed the state’s new assimilationist political masters. Rory O’Connor made allegations to that effect in a public letter from Mountjoy Gaol in August 1922: ‘the lies and hypocrisy of the Free State leaders are astounding, especially to those of us who took part in the Army negotiations for unity and those who know the whole inner history of those negotiations.’Footnote 176 The Drumboe executions can be understood then, not merely as one of a series of extra-judicial Free State killings, but more speculatively as an exercise in conspiratorial housekeeping.
Years later, Moss Twomey wrote Florence O’Donoghue that Joe Sweeney ‘has a very interesting story on the executions’.Footnote 177 Sweeney told O’Malley that Larkin was ‘the man shot by mistake with Charlie Daly’.Footnote 178 Yet, Sweeney is only on record as saying that he confirmed the order with fellow senior IRB member, Gearóid O’Sullivan, at G.H.Q. in Beggars’ Bush.Footnote 179
One of our officers … Cannon was killed in the barracks at Creeslough [10 March 1923] … We reported it and back came an order to execute four men, one of them Larkin. I sent a wireless message back for confirmation. The same message came back to me. Then I sent a message direct to the Adjutant General Gearóid O’Sullivan. Larkin’s name came back again. He was from the six counties and I didn’t want to shoot a man from the six counties. I was very fond of Charlie Daly. He had been tried shortly after he had been arrested, but the sentence had not been confirmed.Footnote 180
The historian’s task is hardly helped, however, by the then minister for defence, Desmond Fitzgerald’s, order to burn all documents relating to the executions before Fianna Fáil entered government in 1932.Footnote 181 Nevertheless, O’Duffy and Mulcahy connived to remove Daly from his command of the 2nd N.D. in March 1922. Furthermore, Larkin’s prominent role therein lends some credence to the notion that pro-Treaty elements within the I.R.B. used the Civil War as cover for silencing republican brothers party to their conspiracy against Craig’s government and witness to the empty promises deployed to neutralise the northern I.R.A.
VI
On 10 August 1922, the Free State Army took Cork city unopposed. On the wall of the Windsor Hotel on McCurtain Street, graffiti artists posed a telling question: ‘Collins marches on Cork. Why not Belfast?’ A view persists that, above any other southern leader, Collins tried hardest to overturn partition. Yet, objectively, Collins broke up the Sinn Féin coalition that rejected the British empire and gained a democratic majority for an Irish republic. Through O’Duffy, he bought the support, or at least neutrality, of the northern I.R.A. with guns, wages and empty promises. As Jimmy McDermott argues, whatever the Free State’s ‘inducements on policy’ towards the northern I.R.A., ‘history tells us that they were certainly not honoured’.Footnote 182 After the attack on the Four Courts, for Daly at least, the ambiguity had cleared: ‘What is the difference now between Mick Collins and James Craig? Both are out to maintain the Empire. The only difference is that Craig will try and maintain it through the murder of Catholics and Collins through the murder of Republicans.’Footnote 183 Interestingly, at the same time, Churchill felt confident in assuaging Craig’s fears regarding his administration’s security, now that ‘Collins had definitely drawn the sword against the enemies of the British Empire’.Footnote 184
Robert Lynch argues that Regan and McGarry’s suggestions ‘that the [northern] offensive was a pro-Treaty conspiracy designed to fatally compromise the I.R.A. in the north are based on little supporting evidence.Footnote 185 Charlie Daly’s story appears to fill that lacuna. As S.C. member, Daly helped plan the abortive offensive, wagering that opposition to partition might form the basis for unity between anti-imperialist republicans and gradualists. As confusion reigned in early 1922, Daly threatened to take an entire I.R.A. division within Northern Ireland’s boundaries over to the republican side. His dismissal partially averted this eventuality. O’Duffy cynically fostered discontent around a lack of arms to remove Daly, before arming and paying these units, while Collins promised military action against Craig’s government. Furthermore, as camouflage for his removal, Beggar’s Bush offered Daly a comfortable paid position. As his personal correspondence after the Treaty and letters to G.H.Q. suggest, Daly could not be seduced by the power of the purse.Footnote 186
What were the objective outcomes of G.H.Q.’s northern policy? Treatyite policy neutralised the northern I.R.A. in areas where most of the inhabitants wished to join the Free State. As Daly declared, ‘the sham campaign had served its political purpose’ and its results left northern nationalists ‘hopelessly and helplessly at the mercy of the Orange Specials’.Footnote 187 When the Boundary Commission eventually wound up, the Free State accepted the existing border in return for the cancellation of its contribution to Britain’s war debt. As de Valera put it, the Free State ‘sold Ulster natives for four pound a head’, to clear ‘a debt we did not owe’.Footnote 188 Cosgrave’s government also singularly failed to exact any concessions in terms of reducing discrimination against the northern minority, O’Higgins admitting to the British that the charge of having sold northern nationalists was ‘no more than a half-truth’.Footnote 189
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was partly carried out with help from the St Mary’s University College, Belfast staff research fund. I would like to thank John Regan, Kieran Glennon, Kerby Miller and Brian Hanratty for reading various drafts. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas ó chroí a ghabháil fosta le mo chara mór Diarmuid Ó Tuama — go raibh suaimhneas síoraí air. I am also indebted to the staff in the various archives consulted, but especially those at Kilmainham Gaol Museum and the Kerry County Library for their generosity.
