By Arthur Matthews
Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State minister for justice and vice-president of the Executive, died a violent death on 10 July 1927. On his way to Mass on a sunny Sunday morning, he set off on the short walk along Cross Avenue, Booterstown. Unluckily for O’Higgins, three IRA gunmen, Timothy Coughlan, Archie Doyle and Bill Gannon, happened to be driving by in a car which they had recently stolen from an army officer. Gannon later described passing an ‘old man’, although at the time O’Higgins was only 35 years old. The heavy responsibilities that had been heaped on him since the signing of the Treaty in 1921 had clearly taken their toll. There was another stroke of bad luck for the Free State minister: he would normally have been accompanied by his personal bodyguard, but Garda O’Grady had been sent to nearby Blackrock to buy cigarettes (O’Higgins was a heavy smoker who could never conquer his addiction).
INCENSED WITH HATRED
The three men in the car passed the walker, but then, realising that they had a unique opportunity to avenge the government executions of the Civil War with which O’Higgins had been closely associated, they decided to turn back in the direction of Cross Avenue. Here they saw their target again and stopped the car. All three stepped out of the vehicle and opened fire on their defenceless victim, leaving him with seven bullets in his body. Gannon told his son many years afterwards that he and his comrades were taken over and incensed with hatred:
‘You can have no idea what it was like with the memory of the executions, and the sight of him just walking along on his own. We started shooting from the car; then, getting out of the car, we continued to shoot. We all shot at him—he didn’t have a chance.’
O’Higgins ran across the road but was still alive and able to talk to the men who had shot him. He told them that he forgave them but that the killing had to stop. The men then drove off. Of the three shooters, Doyle never regretted the killing and in fact was rather proud of it; Coughlan died in a shoot-out on Dartry Road in Dublin the following year (see ‘“A Star Chamber affair”—the death of Timothy Coughlan’ in HI 3.1, Spring 1995, pp 43–7), and Gannon was haunted by his experience for the rest of his life.
O’Higgins was brought back to his home 440 yards away. His wife, Brigid (whom everybody called Birdie), had heard the shots and knew that her husband had been shot; she had had a premonition of his death a week or so before. O’Higgins, blinded but seemingly not in pain (one bullet had severed his spinal cord), died some hours later surrounded by family, friends and government colleagues.
PREVIOUS VIOLENT DEATHS IN THE [O’]HIGGINS FAMILY
Mrs Higgins, Kevin’s mother, was obviously greatly distressed and upset by the event, but it was not the first time that her family had been affected by a violent death. Her son Michael, a lieutenant in the Leinster Regiment, was killed in action at Vimy Ridge on the Western Front in March 1917. Six years later, death came to the family farm when a group of armed Republicans arrived at ‘Woodlands’, where the Higginses lived at Stradbally, Co. Laois. (In order to appear more authentically ‘Irish’, Kevin and some of the more radical members of the family had added the ‘O’ to their name.) His father and mother and two of his sisters were present that day. Three of the men went up to the door and attempted to gain entry. Thomas, Kevin’s father, a local doctor, recognised one of the intruders and addressed him by name. Shortly afterwards, in the dining-room, he attempted to grab a revolver from one of the men and shake the bullets from the chamber. He immediately fell to the ground under a hail of bullets, as two of the gunmen shot him with their rifles. His daughter Patricia rushed to the scene, crying ‘Don’t shoot my father!’ She saw Dr Higgins on his knees, unable to speak. She then placed him on his back and, realising he was dead, told one of the men, ‘He is killed; you need not fire again’. Another gunman responded, ‘He is not killed yet’, and took aim. Patricia rushed at him as he fired, and the bullet from the gun went through the ceiling. With the doctor lying lifeless on the floor, the intruders demanded that the weapon he had seized be given back to them. One of them asked Patricia who had fired the fatal shot. ‘You did’, she replied. Then the men went to the back of the property and set a hayrick on fire. It was the thirteenth time that the Higgins home had been raided—in earlier years by Black and Tans, more recently by Republicans. The raiders finally departed as Patricia set out on a bicycle, riding frantically through the surrounding countryside in search of a priest. The sky above was reddened by the reflection of the burning hayrick.
MARTIN BYRNE
When I wrote the chapter of the book describing this event, I believed that no one was ever charged with the killing of Dr Thomas Higgins, but I was wrong. Iseult O’Higgins, Kevin’s granddaughter, in a speech to the Defence Forces Legal Services Club, revealed that a young man called Martin Byrne, aged eighteen or nineteen, was arrested and brought before a military committee. She discovered this story in Seán Enright’s The Irish Civil War: law, execution and atrocity (IAP, 2022), which quoted Cahir Davitt’s deposition to the Bureau of Military History (BMH). Davitt’s file in the BMH has many fascinating (and often amusing) anecdotes and revelations about the period. (Davitt was the son of Land League co-founder Michael Davitt and a friend of my grandfather, Arthur Matthews, TD for Meath from 1927 to 1932.) At the time of Dr Higgins’s murder he was judge advocate general of the Free State Army. Soon the case of Martin Byrne was brought to his attention.
The accused lived with his widowed mother not far from Woodlands. The young man was fortunate to have a forceful solicitor, Horace Turpin, from a respectable (Protestant) background, and Judge Davitt, after representations from Turpin, persuaded the adjutant general of the army, Gearóid O’Sullivan, that a trial was necessary. (Initially, the committee believed that Byrne was guilty of the killing and recommended a death sentence.) The trial, in front of a military court made up of army officers rather than lawyers, took place less than a month after the murder. Byrne had alibis, but the alibi witnesses appeared to be unreliable, so Patricia’s evidence was crucial. She had witnessed the killing of her father, but when it came to identifying the perpetrator she seemed unsure about whether the prisoner before her was the young man involved. She may have had cold feet, knowing that he would be executed if she positively identified him. Byrne was found not guilty but was nevertheless kept in custody. He managed to escape from prison, however, and spent fifteen months on the run, living in the countryside. As a result of this hardship and rough living, he died of untreated consumption when he was 22. His widowed mother had relied on him to work on the family farm; when he died, she was ruined and couldn’t afford to pay the legal fees she owed. She later applied unsuccessfully to the army pensions board for compensation. Many years later, in 1938, a Free State soldier called Michael Mahon said that he had been present when Byrne was brought into the army barracks after his arrest. Mahon said that the prisoner was badly beaten and that he had heard him screaming for mercy. Eventually Mrs Byrne, who doggedly pursued her claim for years, was awarded £112—about €10,000 in today’s money. She had claimed that her son had been assaulted by Free State soldiers and that his untreated injuries contributed to his early death. Some people were convinced that Martin Byrne had killed Dr Higgins while others were certain that he had not, but either way he paid a heavy price, as did his mother. It was another example of lives destroyed by the Civil War.
FAMILY MOVES TO DUBLIN
After Dr Higgins’s killing, the family sold Woodlands and moved from Stradbally to Dublin. Mrs Higgins gathered the family around her and said that they should forgive her husband’s killers. One son, Brian, ‘a fiery redhead’, felt unable to do so and left the country, living abroad in both America and Australia and unwilling to return to Ireland until he was sure that the men who had shot his father were dead. (Brian, as a pre-Treaty IRA volunteer—along with Kevin and another brother, Thomas—may well have known the men who killed his father. He may possibly even have been in the barracks when Byrne was interrogated before his journey to Dublin for the trial.) The contents of Woodlands, including the equipment in the doctor’s surgery, were sold at a public auction. Kevin, who been a TD for Laois, felt unable to represent the constituency at the next general election. Instead, he stood as a candidate in Dublin.
No doubt the fate of young Republicans like Martin Byrne played on the minds of men like Bill Gannon, Archie Doyle and Timothy Coughlan. Their hatred was still eating them up four years later when they happened upon Kevin O’Higgins walking along Cross Avenue, with his hands in his pockets, on his way to Sunday Mass at Booterstown Church.
Arthur Matthews is the author of Walled in by hate—Kevin O’Higgins, his friends and enemies (Irish Academic Press, 2024).