By Brian Hanley
In April 1955 the artist Seán Keating presented a new work to Dublin’s Municipal (now Hugh Lane) Gallery. It was a portrait of an ‘Old’ IRA man who had played a leading role in the war against the British in Dublin between 1919 and 1921. Speaking at the unveiling, the man’s former chiefof-staff, Richard Mulcahy, hoped that the painting would remind Dubliners that they lived in a ‘free country’ because of ‘very great citizens’ like the artist’s subject, Paddy O’Daly.
As a senior figure in the National Army, however, O’Daly had been involved in several brutal atrocities during the Civil War, including the Ballyseedy massacre. This went unmentioned. That is not surprising at a ceremony attended by his friends and allies, but there seems to have been no discussion at all about whether it was appropriate that a war criminal’s portrait be displayed by the Municipal Gallery. None of the obituaries that followed O’Daly’s death just two years later discussed his record in Kerry either. When Kevin Brannigan and I were researching our podcast series Dirty War in Dublin, what first struck us was the lack of accountability for the war crimes carried out during 1922–3. There were no tribunals in later decades where the members of pro-government death squads had to explain what they did and why they did it. Indeed, while the broad outline of this story is well known to those who study the Civil War, it is still not central to popular consciousness. People are usually surprised to hear that it was men from Michael Collins’s ‘Squad’ who were responsible for most of the kidnappings, torture and assassinations. But what also became apparent to us was that, though the names of the ‘Murder Gang’ were well known to contemporary republicans, they never became hate figures in the way in which some Free State politicians did.
While it is a cliché that the Civil War engendered enduring hatred between those on opposing sides, there exists intriguing counter-evidence that this was not the case for at least some former combatants. In January 1950, for example, surviving members of the Dublin IRA’s Active Service Unit were presented with certificates of service. In the group photograph, along with men who fought against the Treaty, there were most of those who had made up the core of the Free State ‘Murder Gang.’ Also present were some of those directly involved in the Ballyseedy massacre, including O’Daly.
A benign interpretation might be that many of these men regarded the Civil War as a great tragedy and had no desire to keep its bitterness alive. Indeed, a number of those present had recently seen service together in the Defence Forces during the Emergency. But the fact that some anti-Treatyites could mix with men whom they knew to have tortured and killed their comrades seems remarkable. Indeed, while republicans assiduously commemorated the ‘77’ and other victims of the war, they rarely pointed fingers directly at those who pulled the triggers. W.T. Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins were despised far more than O’Daly, David Neligan or even Joe McGrath. In one sense this was justified. After all, the Free State cabinet were ultimately responsible for the measures used to crush the anti-Treatyites. But the IRA was capable of seeking revenge for far less grievous crimes than those committed by the ‘Murder Gang’. Perhaps anti-Treatyites found it difficult to accept that the worst atrocities against them were carried out by men with very substantial national records. Even modern republican commentary on the Civil War tends to fixate on the number of ex-British servicemen in Free State uniform. In History Ireland 16.3, May/ June 2008 (pp 38–41), veteran Kerry IRA man Dan Keating seemed convinced that men who had served in the Great War were responsible for the brutality of the National Army in his county, but this does just not seem to have been the case. Maybe it was easier to blame ‘ex-Brits’ than to imagine that some of the heroes of Bloody Sunday and the Custom House could have been the culprits.
The reality is that the ‘Murder Gang’ was made up of men who fought bravely in the war against Britain. This raises difficult questions about the legacy of Michael Collins. As John Borgonovo asserts, ‘one of the uncomfortable realities … is that people who are close associates and very personally loyal to Collins are guilty [of] some of the worst killings of the Civil War’. Collins personally recruited many of them, they were his shock troops and most of them seem to have supported the Treaty because he did. And they were also, far more than the average IRA Volunteer, seasoned killers. Much of the independence struggle involved popular mobilisation in which IRA members essentially played the role of political activists. The IRA was also a mass movement, numbering over 100,000 men. Many of its Volunteers never killed anybody, in part because they had very limited access to weaponry. But there were, of course, important exceptions.
The role of Collins’s men in Dublin, on the run and under huge pressure, was significant. Their contesting control of Ireland’s capital helped force the British to concede at least a measure of independence. But as Joe Dolan, one of the most active gunmen during the War of Independence, explained, he and his comrades ‘had to learn to kill in cold blood and we got used to it’. There is no doubt that this explains some of their later behaviour. At the Army Mutiny Inquiry during 1924 (after the abortive coup in which many of the ‘Murder Gang’ were involved), Major-General Charles Russell asserted that ‘these men (had) carried out the most objectionable side of pre-Truce operations … the very nature of their work … left these men anything but normal … if such a disease as shellshock existed in the IRA … the first place to look for it would be amongst these men’. Charlie Dalton was one veteran who struggled with what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But their victims and their families suffered trauma too, far more than the perpetrators. Indeed, most of the ‘Murder Gang’ do not seem to have been especially troubled in later life. Seán Lemass is supposed to have declined to talk about Bloody Sunday because ‘firing squads did not have reunions’, but in fact the Squad had several, where many men with brutal reputations were fêted publicly by their old comrades. Perhaps this tells us something about the nature of such ‘élite’ units. Republican journalist Frank Gallagher noted how ‘the men who came to worship the gun before 1921 … afterwards became those who committed the most terrible outrages on captured Republicans’. Essentially soldiers do not become members of such units because of their exceptional physical fitness but because they are more willing to kill than their colleagues. Whether the close-quarter shooting of the Squad was any more immoral than drone strikes or aerial bombing is debatable. Nevertheless, fighting this type of war clearly damaged the men involved. We can no longer laud Collins for his strategic genius without considering what he asked his men to do and how this influenced the crimes that some of them later committed.
Brian Hanley is the presenter of the Dirty War in Dublin podcast, supported by a Royal Irish Academy Decade of Centenaries bursary.