member of the Executive Council. He remains an enigmatic figure who was not attached to any clique within the government.
Eoin MacNeill. Formerly a professor of early Irish history. In 1916 he was chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers and famously signed the countermand when he became aware that the Volunteers had been jockeyed into rebellion by Pearse and his followers. He narrowly avoided execution after the Rising. In 1922 he became part of the Executive Council of the provisional government and held the education portfolio. He was a man of considerable intellect.
Tom Johnson. A Liverpool-born self-educated trade unionist. He was leader of the Irish Labour Party during the civil war and effectively head of the opposition. He was an eloquent critic of the execution policy.
Gavan Duffy, then a solicitor and a member of the Dáil, he had made his reputation by representing Casement at his trial for treason and bringing a test case in the High Court in London to challenge the legality of the 1916 trials: R v The Governor of Lewis Prison ex parte Doyle [1917] 2 KB 254. He was briefly a member of the Executive Council of the provisional government where he was nicknamed ‘sore toes’. After failing to achieve POW status for captured anti-Treaty prisoners he left the government in the summer of 1922 and became one of the most vocal back bench critics of the execution policy. In later years he became a distinguished but reactionary justice of the Irish High Court.
Éamon de Valera narrowly avoided execution after the 1916 rising. He was later prime minister and president of the Dáil until January 1922. Tall and thin, his egotistical nature only really became apparent during the Treaty debates and he was blamed by many for allowing the civil war to come about. During the civil war he became the head of state of the anti-Treaty Republic but remained in hiding – a marginal figure. All real power was exercised by Liam Lynch Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty army.
Liam Lynch at only 29 was chief of staff of the anti-Treaty army. He had formerly been a Divisional Commander during the War of Independence. He kept the civil war going long after it had been lost. On 10 April 1923, during a National Army sweep across the Knockmealdown mountains he was wounded and died later that day. This precipitated the end of the civil war.
The lawyers
Sir Charles O’Connor, Master of the Rolls. During the War of Independence, he gave judgment against the British Army and in favour of the prisoners in a landmark case that brought executions to a halt in the martial law area: Egan v Macready [1921] IR 265. He was one of the judges kept on by the new provisional government after the Treaty. It was said rather cynically, he had ‘acquired merit’ in the eyes of the new administration. He also gave judgment in the case which resulted in the execution of Childers: R (Childers) v the Adjutant General of the forces of the Irish Free State [1923] 1 IR 5. He was a member of the O’Connor clan – a subject on which he would bore anyone who cared to listen.
Cahir Davitt. Son of the land leaguer, Davitt had been a judge of the Dáil courts in 1920-1. In the summer of 1922, he was recruited by Collins to be judge advocate general of the new National Army. He had a supervisory role in respect of all trials by military courts.
Thomas Francis Molony – a long-time home ruler. He was appointed chief justice of Ireland in 1918 and steered the law through the most difficult times. The courts over which he presided were partially supplanted during the War of Independence by the new Dáil courts and also by the martial law courts set up by the British Army to try those captured with arms. In this era he gave judgement in many of the leading cases, notably R v Allen [1921] 2 241. During the civil war the new Irish Army would also set up military courts to try civilians and once again the courts over which Molony presided were marginalised. It was not until after the civil war in the summer of 1923 that Molony was able to reassert the rule of law.
Michael Comyn, KC. Comyn was anti-Treaty. He used his legal skills to try and discredit the actions of the provisional government through a series of inquests into the deaths of men killed in the custody of the state.
Tim Healy, KC. A pro-Treatyite from west Cork. Healy was an author, journalist, barrister, MP. Small in build and red haired with a foul temper he was a formidable defence advocate with a pungent wit. At an early stage in his career he was responsible for the Healy Clause in the Land Act of 1881 which meant that increases in rent could not be levied as a result of improvement to land made by a tenant. He helped bring down Parnell. He made his career as a constitutional nationalist politician although there were long-standing suspicions that he was an IRB man and also a British spy. He was one of a handful of lawyers who helped shape the policy of the provisional government and the drafting of the Irish Constitution. He would become the first governor general of the Irish Free State in December 1922.
Author’s Note
It was the worst possible start for a small state that had just secured a measure of independence. After the death of Collins, the new commander in chief of the National Army, General Mulcahy, urged his men not to retaliate, and, on the anti-Treaty side, Liam Lynch also urged his men to adhere to recognised standards of warfare. Both sides fell far short of this ideal.
The war was a complex and multi-layered event that cannot be recorded in a single volume and this book deals only with one dimension – deaths in custody of the state. By focussing on the execution policy and the fate of prisoners killed in custody, it should not be thought that the death and suffering of so many others is considered less important or not highly relevant to the context in which these events took place. One distinguished historian has argued that all that took place allowed the losing faction to assert ‘victimhood’ and the full context of all that took place should be acknowledged.1 The anti-Treaty forces perpetrated killings that still shock. Not just civilians shot in the crossfire but during attacks on the National Army in Dublin that sometimes showed a reckless disregard for civilians. Others were killed in the flood of robberies that overtook the country although not every robbery or even most robberies can be safely ascribed to the anti-Treaty faction.
The attacks on the railways also claimed the lives of civilians: the Liscahane train derailment is an example. At Ballyconnell, a column of anti-Treaty fighters killed two civilians, wounded a third and left a trail of arson and robbery in their wake before disappearing into the hills. There were also occasional killings of unarmed national soldiers on leave like National Army Private Denis McCarthy who was shot in the back as he was taking leave of his wife, and the assassination of Commandant Peter Doyle at Wexford Cathedral. In a final category was the occasional shooting of prominent or outspoken Free State supporters like Old Doctor Higgins, the Coroner of King’s County. This perhaps gives the flavour of events, but what follows is not a comparison of the conduct of both sides.
This book explores the execution policy and unauthorised killings in custody which were closely connected. It examines how a climate emerged in which prisoners could be tried by rudimentary military courts and then executed, how so many other prisoners were killed without any trial and why so much of what took place was simply blanked out of the public consciousness.
CHAPTER 1
Jock McPeake
His name was Jock McPeake. He had been the machine-gunner on the armoured car Slievenamon on the day Michael Collins was killed.
A few months later, McPeake drove the Slievenamon out of the barracks and handed it over to anti-Treaty fighters. One cynical account implied that he was a good-looking young man with an eye for the ladies and he had been suborned by a girl from a local Cumann. Others said that McPeake had become disillusioned with the civil war; he had taken part in some hard fighting in the summer of 1922.1 He witnessed a landmine explosion in west Cork that killed seven National Army soldiers and afterwards watched as an anti-Treaty prisoner was put to death by officers of the Dublin Guard. Although McPeake had served in the British Army he was still only 20. He had been recruited in Glasgow and seems to have realised, too late, that he had got himself involved
