Michael Collins and Easter Rising

Michael Collins was born in County Cork on October 16^th, 1890 the youngest of eight children. His father died when he was young and left him at the mercies of his older siblings and the authority of figures around him. Some like Denis Lyons, his headmaster, were republicans and members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a militant secret society and introduced him to a fierce pride in Ireland. He left school when he was fifteen and took the British Civil Service exam. He moved to London to live with his sister Hannie while working first as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Banks at Blythe House and then a messenger at Horne and Company, a firm of stockbrokers. While in London, he joined the London Gaelic Athletic Association where he would meet Sam MacGuire, who would convince him to join the IRB. He stayed in London until January 1916 when he returned to Dublin to take part in Easter Rising.

When he arrived, he served as Count Plunkett’s financial advisor, helped gathered supplies and organize for the Rising, and joined the Keating Gaelic League, led by Collin’s frival, Cathal Brugha. Collins spent the Rising as Joseph Plunkett’s aide-de-camp. In this capacity, he was able to assess the different leaders of the Rising. He had a high opinion of Sean McDiarmada, James Connolly, and Tom Clarke. However, he found Pearse’s leadership lacking and the lesson he took from the Rising was that all the dead in the world were useless if they weren’t sacrificed in a strategic manner, where they could gain more than they lost.

After the Irish surrendered, the British separated the troops into those who were the ‘ringleaders’ and would most likely be executed and those who would be imprisoned and serve lesser sentences. Collins was at risk of being marked for execution, but someone called his name and he moved into the other group to identify the speaker. Instead of being killed, he was imprisoned in Frongoch instead. Frongoch was a cold, damp, rat infested prison that used to hold German prisoners before the Germans were moved to accommodate the Irish prisoners. About 1,800 Irish rebels were sent to Frongoch and they included men such as Richard Mulcahy, Dick McKee, Tomas Mac Curtain, Terence MacSwiney, and Sean Hales-all prominent future IRA men.

 When they weren’t organizing Gaelic football games and continuing their language lessons, they organized mass protests to improve prison conditions. Collins quickly made himself the leader of the Irish prisoners within Frongoch, talking to wardens and prison officials, ensuring prisoner demands were met, and rebuilding the IRB. While Collins entered the prison a no-name rebel, he left as a man who had established his name as a strong organizer and leader, who could be a bit of a bully, but took care of his people.

Michael Collins and the Resurrection of Sinn Fein and Irish Volunteers

The prisoners, including Collins, were released in December 1916 and spent 1917-1918 focusing on two goals: Sinn Fein defeating the Irish Parliamentary Party (even though they believed in absenteeism and wouldn’t actually serve in Parliament) and rebuilding the IRB/Irish Volunteers.

Collins contributed to these efforts three different ways: campaigning for Sinn Fein, managing the National Aid and Volunteers Dependent Fund, and rebuilding the Irish Volunteers and infiltrate it with trusted IRB men.

While Collins didn’t agree with everything Sinn Fein, as Arthur Griffith imagined it, stood for, he joined after he was released and became part of their executive, spending considerable time campaign for their candidates such as Count George Plunkett, Eamon DeValera, Thomas Ashe and Joe McGuinness (who was in a jail cell. Collins would campaign for him with a poster that said, “Put him in to get him out’ McGuinness would win his election, but only just and with help from a mysterious bundle of uncounted votes found at the last moment). Collins himself would win a MP seat for Cork.

When he wasn’t campaign for Sinn Fein, Collins was managing the National Aid and Volunteers Dependent Fund. The fund had been set up by Kathleen Clarke, wife of Tom Clarke, and its purpose was to assist the families of those killed during the Rising or currently imprisoned. In addition to trusting Collins with the Fund, she also provided him with information regarding the IRB and whatever else her husband trusted her to guard. Collins would use the funds to ensure that those afflicted would be cared for, but also to expand his list of contacts and his sphere of influence all over Ireland and with Clan na nGael in the United States.

Even though Thomas Ashe was the IRB’s president as the time, Collins played a central role in recruiting, organizing, and establishing arms-smuggling networks. He also placed trusted allies in England such as Sam Maguire in London, and another Frongocher Neil Kerr in Liverpool. While the IRB was reforming, local initiatives led by men like Ernest Blythe, Eoin O’Duffy, and Sean Treacy were resurrecting the Irish Volunteers. Units would pop up in local communities, organized and armed by their local leaders and eventually meeting with GHQ which consisted of men like Collins, Mulcahy, and Brugha (broo ah). While local units were rebuilding themselves, Collins took advantage and used members the IRB to form a strict corps of officers, a growing source of personal power as well as military power that men like Brugha and De Valera (who were IRB during Easter Rising, but renounced their membership after the rising failed) distrusted.

Collins would replace Ashe as president of the IRB when Ashe died on September 25, 1917. He went on hunger strike in prison and died after being brutally force fed. Richard Mulcahy organized his funeral, turning into a massive Sinn Fein and IRB demonstration where Ashe was honored by a three-volley salute, the last post was sounded, and Collins’ eulogy:

“There will be no oration. Nothing remains to be said, for the volley which has been fired is the only speech it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.”

On October 26^th, 1917 both Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers would hold their first national convention, allying the two groups with each other. During the Sinn Fein convention, Arthur Griffith was replaced by Eamon DeValera as president of Sinn Fein and Sinn Fein dedicated itself to Irish independence with the promise that after independence was achieved the Irish people could elect its own form of government. The Irish Volunteers convention elected DeValera as president, Brugha as the chairman of the executive with Collins as director of organization.

  Sinn Fein’s rise to power was aided by the British when they passed the Military Service bill, extending forced conscription in Ireland in 1918. Sinn Fein, IPP, and the Catholic Church pledged to resist Britain’s efforts to conscript Irishmen and introduced the concept of boycotting the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). While Sinn Fein used the crisis to springboard themselves into political power, the Irish Volunteers conducted intensive recruiting and introduced the idea of militant resistance into the greater Irish consciousness. They threatened mass slaughter should Britain try to enforce conscription and both Collins and Mulcahy recruited men for a special plan concocted by Brugha to assassinate the British Cabinet. They went so far as sending Brugha and a handful of men to London to carry out the dark deed.

But the British back down on conscription in mid-May, making the assassinations unnecessary. Instead, they arrested 73 nationalist leaders from May 17-18 under the Defense of the Realm Act, including Eamon DeValera, Constance Markievicz, Arthur Griffith, and William Cosgrave. They claimed there was a German plot i.e. Sinn Fein was working with Germany-like the 1916 rebels. Collins was warned of the plot via two spies he recently recruited, but the others decided to risk arrest. Collins, Brugha, Mulcahy, and Harry Boland would avoid arrest and, in the end, the German Plot boosted Sinn Fein’s cause and destroyed any chance IPP had in reclaiming the national narrative.

DeValera’s Cabinet

The first Dail convened on January 21^st, 1919, but Collins and Boland missed it because they were rescuing DeValera from Lincoln prison. DeValera while exercising in the yard noticed a door which led to the outside-if only he could get a key. At the time, DeValera was assisting the prison chaplain who owned a set of keys. He was able to make an impression of the key in a wedge of wax but how to get it to Collins? DeValera was helped by fellow prisoner Sean Milroy who drew a seemingly harmless postcard showing a drunken man trying to use a large key to unlock a tiny keyhole-the large key being the actual design of the key Dev needed copied. A key was made and smuggled to DeValera in a fruit cake (it’s said Fintan Murphy did the smuggling).

The key did not fit the lock.

This was because the wax shrunk, so Sean Milroy drew a new postcard, this time the key was disguised at the center of an ornate Celtic pattern and Fintan Murphy smuggled this key in through another fruit cake. This failed as well, so Murphy smuggled one more cake in, this time with a blank key and files to make it the right shape. Fellow prisoner Peter DeLoughry turned the key into master key capable of opening any door in jail.

On February 3^rd, 1919 at 7:40 pm Dev, Milroy, and Sean McGarry used the new key to unlock the door and made their way to the gate. Collins and Boland were waiting on the other side of the door. Collins brought a blank key and tried to open the door, but it snapped in the lock. DeValera used his key to push Collin’s key out and unlocked the door on his side. It is said that Dev was then dressed into a fur lined coat and walked arm in arm with Boland to the getaway car to avoid suspicion.

With DeValera free, he was named president of the Dail and formed his cabinet, which included Collins as Minister of Finance as well as Director of Intelligence. This was in additions to his duties as the President of the IRB, and the shared role of Director of Organization and Adjutant General. This meant Collins worked closely with both Cathal Brugha and Richard Mulcahy, but also placed him in the bizarre position of being their subordinates, colleagues, and an independent actor when he felt like it. His heavy-handed behavior (he once told Austin Stack “Your department, Austin, is nothing but a bloody joke’), need for absolute personal secrecy but complete disregard for other people’s privacy, and seemingly reckless, careless, horseplaying ways ruffled many feathers and created many enemies. While his relationship with Brugha seems to have been functional initially, Collins’ growing fame, his power over IRA strategy and the Squad, and his continued association with the IRB raised Brugha’s suspicions. Brugha would try to curb the IRB’s control over the IRA by forcing the IRA to take a vow to the Dail specifically, but both Collins and Mulcahy resisted implementing this policy until August 1920. Brugha wasn’t the only one who feared that Collins was creating a mini-fiefdom within the IRA and needed to be brought down a peg or two, but he was definitely the most vocal (which I’ll get into later in the episode).

Right now I want to focus on two key pillars of the Collins legacy: the National Loan and his intelligence network

Michael Collins: Minister of Finance

The Dail and the IRA faced a seemingly impossible challenge when it came to funding their efforts. It wasn’t like they could tax the people they were claiming to serve. So, the Dail decided to elicit voluntary taxation through a national loan scheme. The idea was that citizens would purchase bonds that would later be redeemed by a newly-declared Irish Republic. According to Andrew McCarthy in his article, Michael Collins Minister of Finance 1919-22, DeValera described the fund as follows:

It is obvious that the work of our government cannot be carried on without funds. The Minister for Finance is accordingly preparing a prospectus, which will be shortly published, for the issue of a loan of one million sterling – 500,000 pounds to be offered to the public for immediate subscription, 250,000 pounds at home and 250,000 pounds abroad, in bonds of such amounts as to meet the needs of the small subscriber.

Collins was determined to make a big show of it both to encourage people to contribute but also to prove that the Dail was the legitimate government of Ireland and could fend for itself. He established a finance office at No. 6 Harcourt Street and worked with Gearoid O’Sullivan, Diarmund O’Hegarty, and Joe O’Reilly. He also established a finance committee to assist with the issuing the loans and collecting subscriptions.

He implemented a modern media campaign including the use of newspaper advertisements, public events, door-to-door canvasing, and even a short film featuring Collins, Arthur Griffith, and Eoin MacNeill seated before the entrance to St Enda’s College. They were issuing bonds from a table that was actually the block on which patriot Robert Emmet was beheaded in 1803.

The British quickly caught wind of Collins’ efforts and suppressed any and all newspapers who ran the advertisements. They also sent Alan Bell, an investigator, to trace the money back to Collins. Collins responded by having Bell pulled from a Dublin tram and assassinated. The British constantly raided Collins’ offices, so the Finance office rotated amongst at least ten different locations.

Collins could organize all the advertisements, bond drives, and videos he wanted, but he was dependent on local TDs who served as the principal loan agents. Collins had mixed feelings about the TDs. While he had superstars like Terence MacSwiney who would raise 4,817 pounds in notes and 500 pounds in gold by February 1920 there were others who would “simply drive you mad”. He once told Boland that he had ‘never imagined there was so much cowardice, dishonesty, hedging, insincerity, and meanness in the world’

By October 1919, the loan would raise 10,000 pounds. By April 1920 it would raise 150,000 pounds. They would raise the same amount in May and June of that same year. It is estimated by September 1920, the first national loan raised 370,163 pounds, plus another 55,000 pounds from the Self Determination Fund (which was made up of pure donations-no promise of payment at a later date)

Once the loan donations became consistent, Collins was able to create department budgets and pay governmental employees. Collins would also help create the Commission of Inquiry into Resources Industries, which was to provide the nation with ‘exact information in regard to the national resources and the best methods by which they could be brought into service’ as well as the Land Bank, which tried to break the financial bonds between Britain and Ireland and foster a program of land reoccupancy. He would also create the position of an auditor of the Loan accounts and an Accountant General to the Finance Ministry in charge of all accounts except the Defense accounts. He demanded that all departments send an estimated budget at the end of the month plus a statement of expenditure and current balance from the previous month.

Of course, not all collections were made voluntarily, and the precise methods employed to collect these donations was brought under scrutiny during the truce of 1921. It got to the point that GHQ wrote

“Will you please have it hammered into the heads of all O/Cs that Truce time collections must be collections pure and simple, and neither loans nor extortions.”

This caused confusion as citizens thought it was a backdated order and asked for their money back and others stopped donating all together. Mulcahy confirmed this was only for the truce period, but officers wanted it confirmed that any past efforts to raise funds were approved by the government. This problem made its way to Brugha and Collins and Brugha began to question how much it was actually costing the Dail to run an army. Mulcahy’s ‘very skimpy estimate’ was 200,000 pounds and that was only to cover ‘training and administration’ not arms and munitions and that expenses had grown at least 4 times during the true period.

This dire financial state put additional pressure on the IRA and the Dail and may have contributed to Collins’ thinking as he went into peace negotiations in London (which we’ll talk about in a little bit).

While Collins’ work as Finance minister is not as exciting or well-known as his intelligence work, it may have been more important than anything he did as a spy chief. Because of Collins, the Dail was able to support itself for three years as the British raid their offices, tried to disrupt their funds, and intimidate Ireland into submission. Without that money, the Dail and IRA would not have been able to pay its men, buy ammunition, or win over the hearts and minds of the people. Collins’ efforts to implement a strong sense of financial policy and procedure not only assisted the IRA but would pay huge dividends as the IRA transitioned from being a revolutionary body to forming a government while engaged in a civil war.

Michael Collins: Spy Chief

Collins is certainly more famous for his intelligence network and the Squad, his network of assassins.

The Squad seems to have been Dick McKee’s idea and was formed incrementally from 1919 to the end of the war. The members were handpicked by Collins, Mulcahy, McKee, and Mick McDonnell. It started with four members and eventually grew to a consistent Twelve, earning the nickname the Twelve Apostles. The original members were Jim Slattery, Paddy Daly, Frank Saurin, Ben Barrett, Joe Leonard, Pat McCrea, Bill Stapleton, Joe Dolan, Tom Keogh, Vinny Byrne, and Charles Dalton. By the end of the war at least twenty men had served in its ranks one way or another and included men such as Dan Breen, Sean Treacy, Emmet Dalton, Sean Doyle, and Joe McGuinness. Most of the original members were in their teens or early twenties, single, and came from middle-class backgrounds. Each man had a .38 caliber revolver and were paid 4 pounds a week. While they answered to Collins directly and protected many of his intelligence operations, they were also responsible for assassinations of enemy agents, vehicle hijackings, raids, kidnappings, jail breaks, and protecting senior officials.

While most people know about the Squad, Collins’ greatest intelligence achievement was the network of spies that infiltrated almost every level of the British administration. They could be broken up into two categories: double agents and women.

In the G Division his double agents consisted of Ned Broy, a sergeant and clerk who warned Collins of the German Plot and smuggled him into the G Division’s Archives. Joe Kavanagh an elderly sergeant who also warned Collins of the German Plot and recruited James MacNamara before he died. James MacNamara would serve as a double agent until 1921 when he would join the IRA and participate in some Squad operations. David Neligan who resigned from the police before Collins sent him back and he was recruited by MI5. After both Broy and MacNamara were dismissed, Neligan would become Collins’ most important spy in the castle.

Of the women who worked for/with him there was

His own second cousin, Nancy, O’Brien who decoded messages in Colonial Undersecretary James MacMahon’s office, Piaras Beaslai’s cousin, Lily Merin, who was a typist in the castle and would recreate reports for Collins, using the carbon paper of the reports, Evelyn Lawless who served as Collins’ secretary before joining a convent in late 1920, Patricia Hoey who had her mother fake a heart attack during a police raid, called another republican Kathleen Lynn, and slipped her a note to get to Collins warning him of the raid, Dr. Brigid Thorton who served as a courier for Collins to Longford and Galway, carrying documents and weapons, and Molly O’Reilly who worked at the Hibernian United Services Club and spied on the British Officers who frequented the establishment.

Eileen McGrane, Maeve McGarry and Nora O’Keefe let Collins and other members of the IRA sue their houses and restaurants as offices/meeting places.

Collins wasn’t the only one who had double agents and he knew that the British were trying to find him. Even though some of those double agents, such as Harry Quinn, Fergus Bryan Molly, and Jack Byrne, would come close to tricking Collins and truly jeopardize IRA operations, a combination of luck and caution would reveal the agents for what they really were, leaving them to the mercy of the IRA. Still Collins was known for his close calls and sometimes even seemed to court them as he road all around Dublin in the broad daylight, on his bicycle. There are stories of Collins bluffing his way out of arrest, berating the police as they raid his offices, and taking advantage of British low opinion of the Irish to convince them there was no way he could be the Michael Collins. When all that failed, Collins wasn’t above escaping via rooftops and quick dashes out of backdoors and windows.

Bloody Sunday

Since Dublin was the center for the IRA’s GHQ and the Dail executive, Collins and Mulcahy knew they had to neutralize all RIC and G Division men within the city and permanently break British Intelligence. The first step was to eliminate and discourage informers, which meant intimidation, reprisals, and executions of fellow Irishmen.

The next step was eliminating dangerous British agents. For months, the IRA developed dossiers on British officers and by November 1920 they created a hit list. Collins was growing fearful of how effective the British were becoming (they had arrested Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen, and Frank Thornton in October and had almost captured Mulcahy during a raid on November 10^th – he escaped by running across rooftops as the British raided his office). Collins needed to do something that would hurt British operations and prove that the IRA were not close to breaking.

Collins brought a list of 35 British agents he wanted assassinated to Mulcahy and Brugha. After some arguing they trimmed the list down to 23 officers (most of whom served in D Branch). After approving the assassinations, Collins, Mulcahy, and McKee planned the operation, enlisting additional men to assist the Squad in their missions.

On November 21^st, eight teams of IRA men ambushed seven separate private residences at 9am sharp.

At 28 Upper Pembroke Street, the IRA killed Major C. M. C. Dowling, Temporary Captain Leonard Price, Lt. Randolf George Murray, and LT. Colonel Hugh Montgomery while wounding infantry commander W. J. Woodcock. Woodcock was on his way to report to his barracks for parade duty when he saw gunmen outside Montgomery’s door. He tried to warn the LT. Colonel, but Montgomery opened his door and was immediately shot. The IRA turned and shot Woodcock in the twice in the back. He would make it back to his flat and collapse in front of his wife.

At 119 Lower Baggot Street, G. T. Baggally was shot dead by a group of IRA men which included Sean Lemass, a future prime minister.

At 28 Earlsford Terrace, Temporary Captain John Fitzgerald was killed.

At 92 Lower Baggot Street, the IRA shot Captain W. F. Newbury in front of his wife, as he tried to escape outside the window. His body was left dangling over the window ledge.

At 22 Lower Mount Street intelligence officer C. R. Peel survived the shooting by barricading himself in his flat while Temporary Captain Henry R. Angliss was killed. Auxiliary officers, Frank Garniss and Cecil Morris, heard the gunfire and sent for reinforcements form Auxiliary HQ at Beggar’s Bush. A gunfire ensued with two more Auxiliary officers killed and Volunteer Frank Teeling was wounded and captured.

At 38 Upper Mount Street the IRA were driven away by the gunfire of Major Frank Carew, the same man responsible for Sean Treacy’s death.

At 117 Morehampton Road, the IRA killed Donald Lewis MacLean and his brother-in-law T. H. Smith while wounding ex-army officer John Caldow.

At Gresham Hotel, the IRA killed two alleged spies L. A. Wilde and Major Patrick McCormack, some historians believe in error.

Not only did the IRA fail to kill a majority of its targets, but Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy, and Conor Clune were picked by the Auxiliaries and were shot while in jail. The British defended their deaths by claiming they were shot by trying to escape, but we all known that’s bullshit.

At 3:00pm a combined force of Auxiliaries and army troops surrounded Croke Park and shot into a Gaelic football game, killing fourteen civilians, including one of the players.

For his part, Collins would justify Bloody Sunday by saying:

“My one intention was the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of the ordinary decent citizens. I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed. Perjury and torture are words too easily known to them. If I had a second motive it was no more then a feeling such as I would have for a dangerous reptile. By their destruction the very air is made sweeter. That should be the future’s judgment on this particular event. For myself, my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting and destroying in wartime the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.”

It is hard to assess the ultimate success of the Bloody Sunday because the reasons for the attack are murky. It seems that Collins and GHQ truly believed the British were planning a major attack and that the best way to disrupt their intelligence gathering was to assassinate key spies. But upon review of who was killed, it is hard to discern what made these particular targets truly deadly. Additionally, when adding the people killed at Croke Park and the loss of Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy, and Conor Clune it is hard to say the British lost more than the IRA. While it is false to say that Collin’s operation eradicated the British Intelligence service, it was a shock that caused massive panic within the Castle. In anything, it proved once and for all that the IRA were not an untrained, uncoordinated mass of madmen. They were armed, dangerous, efficient, and could reach the British in their own flats and shoot them in front of their wives. When the British still didn’t even have a picture of Collins, that knowledge must have been chilling.

Bloody Sunday was also embarrassing for the British because their officers had been so easily tracked and caught off guard. The agents who were killed practiced poor spy craft and did not act like men being targeted by hostile enemy forces. Bloody Sunday wasn’t the final move that checkmated British intelligence efforts, nor did it single-handedly win the war, but it was a masterful propaganda and political weapon and sticks in our minds for its brutality and its brazenness.

Overall, Collins’ intelligence network is a thing of beauty, but it really served him and him alone. He wasn’t one to share intelligence with GHQ but would rifle through their files when it suited him. Many members of the Squad, such as Liam Tobin, would take part in the 1924 Mutiny and would be responsible for some of the most egregious actions of the Civil War. While it certainly made sense to create a cadre of spies and assassins to fight the British Empire (the largest and maybe most powerful empire at the time), its existence also ran the risk of serving as a praetorian guard for Collins himself. It is true that McKee and Mulcahy took part in the creation of the Squad and helped in picking its targets, but Collins also welcomed men like Dan Breen and Seamus Treacy into the Squad-men who thought GHQ and Mulcahy in particular weren’t committed to the fight. One of the reasons Collins had to take them in was because Mulcahy didn’t want them in the field after they initiated the Soloheadbeg attack without consulting GHQ. So, it is questionable how much control Mulcahy really had and if he was listened to because Collins approved of most of his orders. Yet at the same time, Mulcahy and Brugha were heavily involved in the Squad’s most famous attacks: Bloody Sunday, so Collins was the military dictator some, like Brugha, seemed to fear.

We’ll never know how Collins would have handled the transition from revolution to civil war to peaceful politics, but in creating a cadre of armed people that answered only to him and were devoted to him, Collins was playing with fire.

Collins and Brugha

We’ve spent a lot of air time talking about the Collins-Mulcahy-Brugha crisis on our other episodes (which you can listen to on Spotify), but it basically comes down to Brugha distrusting Collins’ judgment and the extent of his power (and there may have been some jealousy involved, but I find it hard to parse that out from the cult that’s formed around Collins and a lot of post-Civil War bitterness).

Things came to a head when Eamon DeValera returned from the United States and also disapproved of how the war was being fought. The key issue was the lack of control the Dail had over the IRA, which was purely within Collins’ and Mulcahy’s control. There was a desire to establish a strict separation of government and military with the military staying out of political affairs and answering to the Dail, but that was impossible when the chief of staff was a member of Dail Eireann, the Director of Intelligence was Minister of Finance, and the Director of Organization was the Secretary to the Dail. There was also a great distaste for the assassinations and ambushes favored by the IRA (DeValera would go so far as to push for standing battles) but both Collins and Mulcahy would bend over backwards to prove that guerrilla tactics were the best tactics for the IRA.

 DeValera would try to send Collins to America to repair relations there and raise the funds, seemingly in an attempt to neutralize him or limit his power to financial matters only, but Collins refused to leave. The matter was dropped. Then Brugha came after Collins for misappropriating funds over irregularities in the accounts relating to importing arms from Glasgow. Brugha seemed to suspect that Collins was siphoning funds for his own IRB related projects.

Things only grew worse between Collins and Brugha after a Truce was agreed to. He attacked Collins and, this time Boland, once more for misappropriating funds in buy arms. Then he changed tracks and asked about W. G. Robbie. Robbie had been an ex-British Officer who owned typewriters. These typewriters had once been property of the British so the IRA took them. Robbie fired his secretary, thinking she had snitched to the IRA, and he was forced to leave the country. Mulcahy handed the complaint to Collins and Brugha wrote back claiming that “the handling of this case from start to finish displays an amateurishness that I thought we had long ago outgrown”. He asked Mulcahy to take action against Collins. Mulcahy thought Collins handled the matter find so he wrote back to Brugha stating, “I consider the tone of your letter of 30^th July is very unfortunate.” This just further enraged an already livid Brugha. According to Townshend in his book, The Republic, Brugha wrote back

“What good purse was served by your writing 5 weeks after the event is probably best known to yourself. To me it seems a further development of that presumption on your part that prompted you to ignore for some months past the duly appointed Deputy Chief of Staff [Stack]. However, before you are very much older, my friend, I shall show you that I have little intention of taking dictation from you as to how I should reprove inefficiency or negligence on the part of yourself or the D/I [Collins] as I have of allowing you to appoint a Deputy Chief of Staff of your own choosing.

In regard to your inability to maintain harmony and discipline among the staff: it was scarcely necessary to remind me of the fact, as your shortcomings in that respect – so far at least as controlling the particular member already mentioned (Collins) is concerned – have been quiet apparent for a considerable time”

Exasperated and most likely furious, Mulcahy brought the matter up to Dev. Brugha gave half-hearted apology and Mulcahy rescinded his protest and then Brugha suspended him. DeValera interceded and Mulcahy and Brugha met again, in which Brugha wept tears and explaining he could do no wrong.

 But Brugha did not stop there. In December, right before the Treaty debate, Brugha dismissed Mulcahy and replaced him with Stacks. The dismissal did not stick.

   For his part, Collins was aware of Brugha’s doings and while Brugha certainly frustrated him, it doesn’t seem he held the same level of animosity. According to Tim Pat Coogan’s biography on Collins, Fintan Murphy believed that the issue was that Collins “was running the show”, and he “wanted to hold power and he was not going to surrender his power to the M/D” While negotiating in London, Collins once wrote “I have often said that Brugha commanded respect and I still say the same. I respect a fighter and B. is one. Only he is misguided. Yet even in enmity he is capable of sincerity.”