that would be responsible for the conduct and administration of military law. As the Civic Guard was still being organised and a system of district courts set up to replace the old petty sessions, Davitt believed ‘the only instrument at the immediate disposal of government with which to protect life and property was the National Army’.103
On 15 September, Richard Mulcahy sought the introduction of military courts from the provisional government and within ten days, the Army (Emergency Powers) Resolution was drafted and approved. Introducing the bill on 27 September, W.T. Cosgrave denounced ‘murderous attacks’ by republicans and assured TDs ‘we are not going to treat rebels as prisoners of war’.104 The ‘general regulations as to discipline’ were published in the first week of November, setting out procedures for arrests, investigations, detentions and punishments for military offences for the duration of the conflict; these were based upon the British manual of military law with adaptions and modifications.105
The bill granted the state the power to execute prisoners, which commenced with the execution of four IRA Volunteers in Kilmainham Jail on 17 November.106 Eighty-one prisoners (including four non-republican prisoners) would be executed in twenty-eight rounds of executions between November 1922 and May 1923. Executions took place in Kilmainham Jail, Mountjoy Jail and Beggars Bush Barracks (all Dublin), the Curragh Camp, Kilkenny, Dundalk, Roscrea, Carlow, Tralee, Limerick, Athlone, Waterford, Birr, Portlaoise, Cork, Mullingar, Wexford, Drumboe (Donegal), Tuam, Tralee and Ennis. Military courts could be convened by the general officer commanding any of the eight command areas of the National Army with sentences subject to the approval of a confirming authority composed of two members of the Army Council of the Free State. Trials were held in secret with news of the sentences communicated to relatives after the executions were carried out.
The IRA responded to the severity of the Free State’s new powers by warning that drastic measures would be taken against members of the Dáil who voted for the bill if the killings continued. The names of the TDs who originally voted for the bill were printed in the republican daily, Poblacht na h-Éireann: War News, under the heading ‘The Murder Members’, ‘Every one of these men, by his vote, supplied the murder gang with what they call their “authority” for the secret trials and executions. Every one of them is as much responsible for the deaths of these republicans as the Minister who devised the Courts, the men who constituted them, and the men who formed the firing parties.’107
The pretext for the executions of Mellows and his fellow commanders, Rory O’Connor, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett was the shooting of Sean Hales TD by the IRA on the Dublin Quays on 7 December. A farmer’s son, Hales was at the forefront of the independence struggle as a member of the West Cork flying column and experienced some of the most brutal episodes of the War of Independence, including the torture of his brother, Tom. In retaliation for the destruction of their family home in the aftermath of the Crossbarry ambush in March 1921, he burned Castle Bernard, the residence of the earl of Bandon, with Lord Bandon held hostage until the British guaranteed that no more Volunteers would be executed in Cork Jail. Hales was exceptional in that he was the only senior republican commander in Cork to support the Anglo-Irish Treaty and during the Civil War he defied local sentiment by organising the expulsion of the anti-Treaty IRA from his native district. His brother Tom supported the anti-Treaty IRA and, along with Mellows, was a member of the IRA executive and imprisoned by the Free State in November 1922.
Hales’ shooting provoked the National Army leadership into a hastily convened crisis meeting, with Cahir Davitt brought before them in the hours after the killing:
Mulcahy had decided to set up a system of military committees to deal summarily with persons arrested in possession of arms, ammunition or explosives, while maintaining the military courts to deal with cases other than those caught red handed, so to speak, and where there might be a real and disputed question of fact to be decided. Such a person when arrested would be brought as quickly as possible before a Committee of Officers.108
The new ‘committee system’ was established alongside the pre-existing military courts and had the power to investigate and arbitrarily sentence chosen cases without recourse to the legal procedures provided for under existing legislation. All sentences of such committees were subject to Army Council approval only and the Council was entitled to impose any sentence, including death, as it saw fit. The new military committees represented the reactive, de-centralised operation of military, rather than judicial procedure. Davitt objected to the new committees on the grounds that they were not judicial in nature and his department would not take part in their operation.
For the National Army leadership, the execution of Mellows and his comrades was justifiable in terms of the threat posed by republicans to the foundation of the new state and the members of Dáil Éireann, in particular, and the potential collapse of the state itself in the face of a fracturing of its authority. Rather than protecting them from retribution, the military records of Mellows, O’Connor, McKelvey and Barrett, and their role in the establishment of the Four Courts IRA Executive, was to seal their fate. A senior member of the new administration defended the killings as ‘an act of counter-terror, not of vengeance, and though just, not primarily an act of justice but an extreme act of war’.109 Ernest Blythe believed his fellow government ministers ‘took the view that the lives of the men who had been in the Four Courts were forfeit as rebels’110 and the selection of the republican leadership was influenced by the desire to inflict reprisals upon ‘men whose execution would be most calculated to have the maximum warning effect on members of the irregular forces in all parts of the country. Personal feelings did not come into the matter at all. I was always myself on the best of terms with Liam Mellows.’111
The executions represented the determination of the new state’s leadership not to allow old ties of comradeship to blind the new state to its responsibility to protect itself from attack. In a wider sense, the killings signified, as Blythe described, ‘an end to sentimentality’ that had characterised the discourse of revolution and republicanism, ‘We had ourselves got over the various types of sentimentality and softness and regard for what might be called rebel tradition which had heretofore prevented us from discharging our full duty as independent Irish rulers in Ireland such as had not existed for centuries.’112 Davitt explained the prerogatives that determined the selection process for execution:
It was clear that it was punishment which was the main purpose of the executions; and their justification as a policy had to be sought in their efficacy in helping to crush their insurrection. This I think must have been quite considerable; but I have no doubt that even without them the Anti-Treaty forces would have been completely defeated in any event; though quite possibly it would have taken longer; and might have involved no less, and probably more, loss of life. The persons who were most responsible for the Civil War were, in my opinion, the members of the Four Courts Executive.113
This collection of writings is not a coherent body of work left by Mellows with the intention of creating a political legacy or justifying his actions, rather it is the disparate public and private utterances of a young man who lived an itinerant life during a time of rapidly changing political realities. Prone to depressive introspection, the contrast between the public face of Mellows, the fearless revolutionary, and the anguish and insecurities revealed in his private letters, highlights the personal toll the revolution took on a generation of young militants.
Mellows wrote articles for a series of republican papers, beginning with Fianna, the newspaper of the Republican boy scouts, Na Fianna Éireann, published between 1915 and 1916, and was part of the IRB milieu involved with the Brotherhood’s newspaper, Irish Freedom, published between 1910 and 1914. While in the United States, he was initially associated with the Gaelic American, edited by John Devoy in New York, and subsequently the Irish Press, edited by Patrick McCartan in Philadelphia. Over twenty of Mellows’ speeches and interviews while in the United States were published in the Irish Press and the Gaelic American. During the Civil War, he was involved in the initial foundation in January 1922 of An Phoblacht: The Republic of Ireland, the republican newspaper founded by anti-Treaty republicans but, again, it is
