Espionage and Assasination with Michael Collins' Intelligence Unit: With the Dublin Brigade Read Free

were the men who brought it about, what were the aims and methods of the leaders, and the men who followed them?
    As yet many essential details have remained hidden in mystery, known only to the actors themselves. There had been months and years of endurance, days and nights of agony, yet illumined by a spirit of exultant faith and the joys of comradeship. One or two frank, unadorned pictures by the men who in the humbler positions played an essential part will tell more than any second-hand history, and will enable persons and events to stand out in their truth. This story by a young Irish soldier who took part in the decisive stage of the struggle must appeal to readers who are interested in human character, or appreciate drama, or are concerned with the history of nations. But for those who are not well acquainted with the history of Ireland leading up to and including the period covered by this memoir, the following summary may serve as a prologue.
    The Irish people as a nation had never acquiesced in the British occupation. They were never willing citizens of the United Kingdom.
    But for half a century before 1916 Ireland’s claim to nationality had been represented chiefly by the Irish Parliamentary Party. Its members sat as Ireland’s representatives in the British House of Commons. Though always in a minority there, they claimed that by holding the balance of power they would some day be able to force an English Government to restore the Parliament in Dublin, which had been abolished in 1800 by the Act of Union. In the meanwhile, they assisted legislation, especially Land Acts, with a view to ameliorating conditions in Ireland.
    But there were always Irishmen who had no such faith in the British Parliament, in its ability to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas, in its right to determine Ireland’s destiny, or in its will to listen to the national demand. Consequently, there had been in nearly every generation an armed revolt. Few in numbers, and with inadequate arms (which had to be procured secretly), the insurgents were always defeated. But when they had been hanged, imprisoned, or transported, they became the heroes and martyrs of Ireland, and the faith for which they had suffered remained alive in the imagination of the people.
    In 1858, a secret society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known as the Fenians, was founded by James Stephens. The Brotherhood was a militant organization which inherited the ideas of John Mitchell, an earlier patriot-convict. He had asserted that the physical force argument was the only one to which England had ever listened in her relations with Ireland. Any alleviations of the miseries of the Irish under English rule had come only after violence or preparation for violence. The Fenians, further, shared his view that unless a people from time to time asserted its right to freedom by force of arms it surrendered its claim to be a nation.
    The existence of the Irish Republican Brotherhood was in due course discovered by the police (the Royal Irish Constabulary, who were trained to act as political detectives), and Stephens and most of the Executive Council, including the writer and patriot, O’Donovan Rossa, were arrested and sentenced to long terms of penal servitude.
    The Fenian policy was embodied in the phrase ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. The organization survived the arrests of 1865 and was kept in being secretly all through the era of the Irish Parliamentary Party. It was part of its policy that there should be at all times at least a few men who would be prepared to strike a blow for Irish independence whenever a suitable opportunity arose.
    In the United States there was a branch of the Brotherhood. It was known there as the Clan-na-Gael. Its leader was John Devoy, who had been arrested with the other Fenians, and who had emigrated to America after serving a long sentence in an English penal prison. Through John