the day he returned.10
Mulcahy and his chief of staff reckoned the executions to be ‘the most severe test on our troops’. It was feared soldiers might decline to fire on old comrades or might even mutiny.11 After some tense discussion, it was decided to bring in the best available army unit and the prisoners were moved to Kilmainham for execution. It was an odd choice on the face of it, but it may have been selected because it was a small prison and the easiest to contain if events took a difficult turn. The night before the first executions, the provisional government briefed pro-Treaty deputies and there were tremors in the ranks. The minister who gave the briefing remembered the Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille’s big face quivering ‘like a blancmange’. Some deputies called for clemency, but the genie was out of the bottle: power now lay with General Mulcahy and the Army Council.
There were no last visits for prisoners: the sight of distressed relatives may have dented the resolve of the National Army recruits. All the prisoners were allowed access to a priest and that was the case in all the executions that followed. But the absence of last visits was keenly felt by the prisoners who all lived within walking distance of Kilmainham. James Fisher, aged 18, wrote home: ‘Oh Mother, if I could just see you again.’ None of the prisoners had any property to bequeath except Richard Twohig, who wrote to his parents: ‘I send home the mouth organ to you for Paddy.’ And so, these four young men were brought out for execution into the stone breakers yard. Buoyed up by words of comfort from the priest these young men found new strength in the certainty of death. Ernie O’Malley later wrote: ‘One had the butt of a cigarette; he took a few puffs, then he handed it to his friends, who in turn took a few jerks. “Shoot away, now.”’12
Sean Mac Mahon, the chief of staff of the National Army had deployed his chosen company to undertake this duty, but the executions did not go according to plan, perhaps because the National Army was so new and because shooting by firing squad was not as straightforward as might be supposed. In this first group of executions, only three of the prisoners died instantaneously. The death certificate prepared by the army doctor hints at a different outcome for Peter Cassidy: ‘shock and haemorrhage following gunshot wounds’.13 A memoir written by the JAG recorded that Cassidy was rendered unconscious but did not die. In this scene of carnage, the young National Army officer in charge panicked and made to call an ambulance, but recovering his equilibrium, he drew his pistol and shot Cassidy dead.
Something could have been learned from the British Army’s experience of firing squads, which was extensive. In the Boer War, the British Army had executed forty-nine men and in the Great War another 329 soldiers, rebels and spies had been shot by firing squad. It had been discovered that execution by firing squad was more complicated than might be thought, in part because the average Tommy hated this duty and soldiers were induced to participate by the promise of extra leave or rations of rum. Sometimes soldiers on firing squad duty missed the target because they were nervous or because they had closed their eyes and a few fired wide or did not fire at all. Therefore, British Army firing squads utilised certain safeguards such as the presence of a provost marshal to supervise the executions and an army doctor to certify death. The usual medical certificate read ‘death was instantaneous’ or ‘practically instantaneous’, which was the desired standard. Even these safeguards were sometimes insufficient.
The new National Army had no experience of executions and replicated only some of these procedures. Where a number of prisoners were due to go before a firing squad, the practice of the British Army was sequential executions. The National Army chose to carry out executions simultaneously using a single firing squad. This was intended to be merciful so that prisoners awaiting execution were spared the sound of other firing squads at work, but it was not often effective.
British Army firing squads usually numbered twelve per prisoner, but in Ireland the practice of simultaneous executions meant there were often as few as five men firing at each prisoner. In firing squads convened by the British Army, a single rifle was loaded with a blank and men were sometimes induced to take part in the hope of being the one to fire a blank. It became National Army practice to load a significant number of rifles with blanks, increasing the chances of a prisoner surviving the volley and this would happen again and again. These difficulties were made worse because many of the executions took place in different parts of the country, so no local command ever acquired the necessary degree of competence. In a significant number of civil war executions, the prisoner survived the firing squad and lay on the ground wounded and sometimes conscious. In a small number of cases, the prisoner survived the volley and in a desperate reflex got to his feet. The presence of an officer with a pistol to administer the coup de grace was essential and soon the National Army was billing the state for whiskey for the firing squads.
After the executions, the families of the dead men were sent a typed pro forma notification. The note for the Cassidy family read as follows: ‘I am to inform you that Peter Cassidy was tried by a military court on 8 November 1922. That he was found guilty of possession of a firearm without lawful authority and that he was sentenced to death. This sentence was executed on the morning of 17th November 1922.’ This practice was challenged in the Dáil but continued throughout the civil war and it became common for parents to learn that their son had been executed through a press release or a typed memo shoved through the letterbox.14 In Dublin, the public and the Dáil learned of the first executions in the afternoon papers. Later that day there was an emergency debate in the Dáil and the decision to execute was hotly challenged by the Labour opposition and other deputies.
Mulcahy justified what was done by what he called the need ‘to stem the tide’ of lawlessness. ‘These men,’ he told the Dáil, ‘were found on the streets of Dublin at night carrying loaded revolvers and waiting to take the lives of other men.’ They had certainly been tried and convicted of possessing loaded revolvers. It is a reasonable inference that they were not charged with the attack on Oriel House because it could not be proved against them. To be tried for one reason and executed for another would become a common scenario during the war.
In the Dáil, government ministers rallied to support Mulcahy. Nothing at all was said about the men being involved in an attack on Oriel House and O’Higgins argued that in order to deter others it was best to execute the rank and file: ‘If you took as your first case some man who was outstandingly active or wicked in his activities the unfortunate dupes through the country might say Oh he was killed because he was a leader or he was killed because he was an Englishman … better to take the plain ordinary case.’ Not all the deputies were satisfied with this and some argued against the government: ‘I think they ought to have got a public trial’; and another argued that possession of a handgun could never merit the death sentence. Other deputies questioned whether the prisoners were represented by lawyers, and on behalf of the government Ernest Blythe reassured the Dáil that the prisoners had a ‘full opportunity of employing legal aid and calling witnesses in their defence’. Blythe added that: ‘Every person who will be tried under the Resolutions passed by the Dáil will have a full opportunity for conducting his defence.’ This was certainly the undertaking given to the Dáil when the Army (Special Powers) Resolution was passed. Although it should be said that the trial regulations approved by the Dáil contained no provision for legal representation at public expense.15 It does not seem that many prisoners had the money to pay for a lawyer and the trials were often carried out so swiftly and in such secrecy that the families of the prisoners had no chance to arrange a lawyer.
The provisional government survived the immediate crisis, but the deterrent effect of the execution policy remained uncertain and the daily round of shooting and killing continued. At Inchicore in the west of Dublin, four young men laying a road mine for National Army troops blew themselves to pieces. On the Monaghan border a mine detonated as a National Army lorry crossed a bridge. An officer lost an eye and five of his men were wounded.16 The following day, the attention of the country turned to Erskine Childers who had just been tried at Portobello barracks for possession of a handgun.
There were at this time only a handful of senior ranking anti-Treaty officers captured in arms after the cut-off date. One was Ernie
