manoeuvre to Collins and Béaslaí, who were in favour of those types of actions. On 30 April, by permission of a clause emanating from the Volunteer convention of the previous October whereby the executive was empowered ‘to “declare war” if it was thought necessary’,54 Brugha travelled to London on a six-month mission to exterminate the members of the British Cabinet, should conscription be peremptorily introduced.55 And de Valera, together with most of the Sinn Féin leadership, was arrested on 17 May on the wrongful accusation that he was involved in the importation of arms from Germany, otherwise known as the German Plot; this was an accusation for which he received a nine-month period of detention in Lincoln Jail.56
From the point of view of Collins and Mulcahy, Brugha’s absence was a far more significant event than de Valera’s was. If nothing else, for the time being at least, his edgy watchfulness did not have to be endured. But also, seemingly, in hatching and bringing forward the assassination idea for the unanimous acceptance of the Volunteer national executive, his contradictory, extreme, physical force radicalism might have momentarily been an embarrassment to Collins, who otherwise was enthusiastic,57 and to Mulcahy, who harboured mixed views.58 For example, according to Sceilg, who admittedly was not a neutral observer of events, Collins and Mulcahy ignored Brugha’s request of them to accompany him on the venture: ‘I asked three times of those who were alongside me if they wanted to make the journey; but the big heroes let on that they did not hear me, and [so] I had to go in their absence.’59
The reality, however, was that Brugha needed Collins and Mulcahy, or rather he needed their IRB connections.60 The upshot was that Mulcahy was saddled with the job of getting men to sign up. He managed to locate thirteen – four from Ireland and nine from England. He personally interviewed the first four. His approach was capable but not authoritative, as if he was in awe of such physical courage:
Mulcahy gave me to understand that the chances of any of the party of Volunteers surviving subsequent to those executions would be one in a million … without saying so, [he] gave me the impression that I had the option of withdrawing from the venture should I wish to do so. Needless to say, I was appalled by the task we were expected to undertake but having volunteered I was not withdrawing now.61
In a way, therefore, Brugha and Collins were not poles apart on a number of issues. For example, both men were under no illusions about the inevitability of defeat if another insurrection was forced on the country. Also, like Brugha, Collins envisioned a role for violence, but admittedly during and not at the end of the process of brinkmanship. And there was no escaping the fact that Collins greatly admired Brugha as a fighter. (Ernie O’Malley also admired Brugha as ‘the most uncompromising of all the army officers’.62) For that reason, he prevented the IRB from publicising Brugha’s expulsion from the IRB (Brugha had already left anyway) on the grounds of his public allegations of cowardice on the part of the Organisation during the Rebellion: ‘the organisation would lose its prestige by expelling a man like Cathal Brugha’.63 He also became indignant when such a pre-eminent Volunteer as Brugha, now ‘a white man … half crippled with English bullets’, came a long way down the list in the election of the new, but moderate, Sinn Féin executive.64
Nonetheless, considerations of that type were not enough for the two to be close. A clash of temperaments was a problem, what with Collins’ bustling dynamism and Brugha’s saturnine doggedness. Much more fundamentally, Brugha, especially now that it was obvious that Sinn Féin was developing a catch-all appeal, was not a bit happy that Collins and a small group of senior Dublin-based officers were starting to bond together and to use their own version of the IRB’s traditional conspiratorial techniques. Brugha perceived this as a particularly threatening development, more especially when most members of that clique, Collins and Mulcahy especially, were now moving steadily towards becoming tribunes in a prospective Irish professional army.
But, in comparison to de Valera, who was anxious too, Brugha did not keep his thoughts to himself:
Later in the Summer of that year (1917) … I was in Limerick at Daly’s … when Cathal Brugha … came in … a discussion arose over the IRB … he got very excited and said that he was out to destroy it. He went on to say that if that organisation had ever been necessary, which he doubted, it was now unnecessary and even dangerous if it got into the hands of the wrong people.65
And, as good as his word, during a meeting of the Volunteer executive, which must have happened just before Brugha went abroad on 30 April and which makes it possible that the British had good reason for the German Plot arrests a few weeks later, he asked Michael Collins did he know of any intercourse the Volunteers or any other political group [IRB?] had with German representatives here … Collins was emphatic in his denial … Brugha stated that, ‘my friend in the Castle…warn[ed] me that the Castle knew everything …’ Brugha also stated that ‘it may be easy to fool us, but not so easy to fool the British.’66
Hence, given such a tense atmosphere, it is most likely that Collins and Mulcahy thrived during de Valera’s and, especially, Brugha’s absence. For example, even if he had not been appointed CS in March, Mulcahy was now de facto CS,67 in which capacity he was both diligent and habitual:
At this time [May–June 1918] weekly meetings of the General Headquarters staff, and the resident Executive were held, sometimes in Cullenswood House, Ranelagh … and sometimes in a room in the offices of the Dublin Typographical Society … at 35 Lower Gardiner Street, a place that had been used by the IRB for many years previously.68
Additionally, he tried to inculcate the ethos of a professional chain of command by cutting a dash and by taking himself seriously, having been, like other veterans, ‘toughened – mentally rather than physically – by his prison-camp experiences’:69
He was in a grey-green uniform. It fitted well. He wore a soft, slouch hat, one side pinned up by the Fianna Fail badge of the Dublin Brigade. He looked neat and trim, quiet. He had a shrewd cold look. There was little expression on the muscles of his mouth or cheeks when he spoke. He spoke slowly, stressing words nasally. His face was of the thin type, clean-shaven with bushy eye-brows.70
In contrast to Mulcahy, the nicer points of bureaucracy and oligarchy were not so important to Collins. Primarily, at a point of time when he was already beginning to move towards a position of near total control,71 he was interested in acquiring as many arms and ammunition as possible from IRB contacts in New York and Liverpool, sometimes rerouting the supplies through Belfast or on to the coast of Galway and then distributing them to a ‘good commandant who would fight … [in] Cork, Clare, Mayo and places where the fighting was done afterwards’.72 To those ends, he personally travelled on a number of occasions to Liverpool to meet Neil Kerr, the same IRB contact who first met Brugha on his arrival in England.73 Another interest of his, during the summer of 1918, was the creation of a county brigade system, a concept which, because of its overarching authoritative nature, challenged the well-rooted sense of independence of the local companies and accordingly slowed down the introduction of the vertical chain of command.74 Furthermore, similar to the way the Volunteers picked up on a worthwhile idea, like when the Brennan brothers of Clare, having been arrested, spontaneously refused to recognise the court75 – ‘Irish Volunteers must as heretofore refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the court’76 – so Collins was probably impressed by the topographically based, shock tactics introduced by his own West Cork people, as referred to above:
Forget the Company of the regular army. We are not establishing or attempting to establish a regular force on the lines of the standing armies of the small independent countries of Europe. If we undertake any such thing we shall fail. Our objective is to bring into existence, train and equip as riflemen scouts a body of men, and to secure that these are capable of acting as a self-contained unit, supplied with all the services that would ordinarily be required in the event of martial action in the country.77
On the other hand, and perhaps much more importantly in the long run, though paradoxical in the circumstance of Collins’ military preparations and
