By Lorna Siggins
No Taoiseach. No British prime minister. No armed security. No jostling hordes of press. Not even one international jurist was present yesterday to witness the decommissioning ceremony in a south Dublin house.
There was just one weapon, bearing little resemblance to a late20th-century Armalite. ‘Destroyer’ read the inscription on the barrel. Wrapped in tissue and blue cardboard, the .32 Spanish automatic pistol was once an innocent present from Michael Collins that led to the owner’s tragic execution.
That was all of seventy-three years ago, when Erskine Childers, TD for Wicklow and owner of the yacht Asgard, was shot by firing squad at Beggars Bush Barracks on a November morning.
Not a fortnight previously, he had been seized by Free State troops at his cousin’s house in Annamoe, County Wicklow. He was charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death for unlawful possession of the little Spanish gun.
Yesterday the military historian, Col. John P. Duggan, could not believe his eyes. After years of research into the whereabouts of the weapon, he had received a telephone call in response to a letter he had sent to The Irish Times. ‘It is trouble,’ Col. Duggan had written in a last, desperate appeal to the unknown holder. It had ‘pixilated poltergeistic potential’, he warned.
To discover that it was only a pistol-shot away from his house left the colonel speechless. Mrs Rita Childers, wife of the late President and daughter-in-law of the gun’s owner, had located it this week in an Italian walnut cabinet at home. She had been under the impression that it was with her step-son, also Erskine, who is a retired United Nations diplomat.
Presenting it on behalf of her step-son to Col. Duggan yesterday afternoon, Mrs Childers appeared visibly relieved. The pistol had taken on a strange, almost supernatural, life of its own after the Childers execution.
As recorded by Col. Duggan in the current edition of History Ireland [Autumn 1995], it was acquired by the then Judge Advocate General, Mr Cahir Davitt, and resulted in his temporary detention, on the way home from a dance; a bruise on his thigh, when it accidentally went off; and a wound in his big toe, when he shot himself in the foot after a rugby match.
Confirming that it was unloaded yesterday, Col. Duggan pledged to handle it with care. The pistol is to be displayed by the Defence Forces in the military history wing of the new National Museum at Collins Barracks.
by Lorna Siggins
Irish Times, 18 October 1995.