of having killed a National Army Officer, Captain Burke, who had been a friend of the colonel of the First Westerns. At least one National Army officer recognised the threat to Galvin and placed him at the centre of a group of prisoners clearing trees. Galvin was unfit to work because of a broken arm and soon became separated from the prisoners and was found shot dead soon after. David Robinson finished his request with a comment that resonates through the ages: ‘You may imagine what the result will be if this goes on.’ The killing of Jack Galvin raised a bit of a storm among National Army troops and the colonel of the Kerry 1st Brigade wrote to General Mulcahy and threatened to resign unless a full inquiry took place to vindicate ‘the honour’ of the National Army. He added that if these incidents were allowed to continue, ‘We would soon find ourselves in arms against a hostile population.’
The General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Kerry was W.R.E. Murphy. A photo of the time shows a tall scrawny officer with a small moustache. He was from Wexford, but like many of his generation, he had served with distinction in the British Army during the Great War and went back to his old career as a school teacher until he was recruited to the National Army. W.R.E. Murphy also wrote to Mulcahy about Galvin’s death but advised against any inquiry: ‘This scoundrel shot capt Burke. Signed a form and got out and took up arms again. He was the terror of the countryside.’ Therefore, the GOC wrote: ‘I will not sacrifice any officer or man of the 1st Western Division (a splendid lot of troops).’41
There was no army inquiry into the death of Galvin or Bertie Murphy and their deaths became part of a pattern that was already taking shape. Sean Moriarty from Tralee was killed the month before. He had been removed from his home late at night by armed men. He and another man, Healy, were taken to waste ground outside Tralee where they were questioned about their involvement in attacks on National Army troops. Moriarty was shot dead and although Healy was riddled with bullets, he recovered consciousness and crawled off to get help. He later told the full story at the inquest into the death of his companion.42 Some historians have described these events as part of ‘a ruthless counter insurgency campaign’.43 It is hardly an accurate description. Even in the extreme circumstances that existed, the law provided no special dispensation for soldiers or policemen.
There was one last organised effort to hold the government to account for killing suspects in custody. It was the inquest into the killing of three teenagers who had been posting anti-Treaty leaflets. The leaflets laid the blame for the recent spate of killings on CID officers attached to Oriel House and army intelligence and in turn, incited the murder of those officers. These young men were picked up by National Army men late one night and the following morning the bodies of two were found dumped by the roadside near the village of Red Cow. The bodies were still warm and it seemed they had been killed around dawn. The trajectory of the bullet wounds suggested they had been shot while lying down. The third had run for his life and was discovered in the quarry, lying in a clump of nettles riddled with bullets.
Witnesses soon came forward identifying Charles Dalton, a National Army officer, as having arrested the youths the night before. Dalton lived a few streets away from where the young men were picked up. He was, on the surface, every inch an officer: a photo shows a singularly handsome young man in uniform, but that was not the full story. During the War of Independence, Dalton had been part of Collins’ Squad and shooting opponents in cold blood had been part of their work.44 In the run up to the civil war, most of the Squad joined the new National Army. Dalton became part of the intelligence team that had grown up around Oriel House and Wellington barracks: the leafleting campaign had been directed against Dalton and that group of men. The Red Cow inquest took place in the reading room at the Carnegie Library in Clondalkin where tables were hurriedly pushed together for the lawyers and the coroner. The lawyers crammed in on one side of the table, the jury on the other with the witnesses nearly in touching distance of both. The rest of this windowless low-ceilinged room was packed with bereaved relatives and National Army men in an atmosphere that heaved with grief and anger.
The provisional government instructed John Byrne, a tall, thin, austere advocate who had great experience of defending hopeless cases. The killings had attracted nationwide publicity and there was no mechanism to dispense with inquest juries as was done in Cork. The evidence could not be suppressed as it was in the cases of Brugha or Boland or censored as in the Mannion inquest or explained away as in the case of the Yellow Lanes killings. It was going to come out in all its tawdry detail, but Byrne would play a subtle game distancing himself and the government from the accused officer and letting the other lawyers fight it out. Michael Comyn, KC, again appeared for the families. He was joined by two barristers representing the anti-Treaty GHQ. They squeezed in around the tables alongside their main opponent, Tim Healy, KC, who acted for the accused officer. Healy, a small, pugnacious, west Cork man, hated Michael Comyn and took every opportunity to let him know.
This was a case that was followed in the press by anyone who could read and raised issues that no one could ignore. Over the previous few months, Dublin had been assailed by ambushes; National Army soldiers shot in the back, at home or in the street. Landmines had been detonated and grenades hurled with little care for civilian life and there had been many casualties. The anti-Treaty faction now came to court to litigate the circumstances in which three of their own had been killed. All of this tended to obscure two important points: that these youths had been killed in the custody of the National Army and that it was part of a pattern which the state did not oppose or condemn, at least in public.
At the outset, the old coroner protested that he could not allow the anti-Treaty side to be represented, but it was pointed out to him that pending the creation of the Irish Free State, the provisional government had no legal status either. The duty of the coroner was to inquire into the cause of death and not allow the lawyers to pursue a political agenda, but like most coroners, he was not a lawyer just a local doctor who carried out the occasional inquest after a car crash or a fatal accident at a farm. Out of his depth and intimidated, the coroner lost control of the lawyers who began to fight it out for a verdict that would give comfort for their cause.45 Tim Healy called witnesses to prove that Dalton had carried out four arrests that night and taken the prisoners to Wellington barracks, but none of this established a watertight alibi and just confirmed Dalton was on duty and in the vicinity looking for anti-Treaty suspects. The evidence showed that much later that night the young men were driven from the barracks by intelligence officers to a quiet spot and murdered. But which officers were involved? All at Wellington barracks and Oriel House remained silent.
Michael Comyn argued that this was murder whether by Dalton or his colleagues, but the inquest did not go well for Comyn. During the inquest his home was raided by the National Army and he was briefly placed under arrest, and when he was at the inquest, Tim Healy, KC, was always ready with some withering put down. Comyn was heckled by a hostile gallery and questioned by exasperated jurors: ‘Why is this taking so long?’ one asked. It was not the function of the inquest jury to say whether Dalton was guilty or not, but it was part of their duty to send a suspect for trial before the criminal courts if there was a case to answer. The jury declined to indict him and perhaps that should not be surprising: Dublin was a small city and his reputation was well known. The jury did not even condemn the murders as was the custom at the time. The colourless verdicts simply recounted that the young men had died of ‘gunshot wounds inflicted by person or persons unknown’.
Counsels’ closing speeches in the Red Cow inquest received the widest publicity, and the failure of the jury to condemn the murders probably owed much to the advocacy of Tim Healy, KC. It was an open secret that he would soon be appointed governor general of the new Free State. His voice, in a very real sense, was that of the new establishment in Ireland and he delivered his closing remarks just before the official executions began. He argued that the inquest evidence could be ignored and that the rule of law could be abandoned. He asserted the war had been started by the anti-Treaty faction and as he put it: ‘What man can place bounds on the march of extermination?’
CHAPTER 3
The Origins of the
Execution Policy
The
