They
were executed because their regiment had tortured, mutilated, and
murdered Volunteer Denis Springs while being held prisoner.
The Staffordshire Regiment had been involved in numerous murders and the torture of Republican prisoners in Cork.
The
night before the truce that ended the War of Independence, four British
soldiers—Harold Daker, Henry Morris, Alfred Camm and Albert Powell—were
abducted by an IRA unit in Cork. Word soon reached Connie Neenan, an
IRA officer in the 2nd Battalion Cork City Brigade, that four captured
soldiers were facing execution. He and a comrade went in search of them
in the hope of securing their release:
‘About
1.30am we gave up and shortly after, we met some men . . . [who] had
been told that the soldiers had been shot . . . I just could not believe
it . . . our efforts had been in vain, the soldiers had been executed
and we had been unable to prevent it.’
The next
morning, just hours before the ceasefire, the soldiers’ bodies were
found at Ellis Quarry on the outskirts of the city. Each of them had
been blindfolded and shot in the head. A British soldier photographed
the bodies in situ and the killings soon featured prominently in
anti-IRA propaganda.
Pointless unprovoked murder?
The
incident has repeatedly been presented in academic work, popular
histories, newspaper columns and on TV as pointless unprovoked murder
committed by Republicans in the knowledge that they would never be
brought to account owing to the impending ceasefire. In The IRA and its
enemies Peter Hart cited it as an example of the IRA’s ‘dirty war’ and
later suggested that Republicans ‘made a point of killing as many
enemies as possible up until the last minute [before the Truce]’. In the
Irish Times Kevin Myers cited the killings as an example of the IRA’s
exploitation of the announcement of the Truce for a ‘Summer Sale of
murder, guaranteed without legal consequence’. Eoghan Harris suggest-ed
in the Sunday Independent that the shootings were the result of IRA
‘blood lust’. The killings also featured in Eunan O’Halpin’s TV3
documentary In the name of the Republic.
Stories
about these killings became part of the folklore of Cork and were
embellished to emphasise that the soldiers were boys who left their
barracks to go shopping for sweets. In The year of disappearances Gerard
Murphy cited the killings as an indicator of the IRA’s ‘degradation’,
claiming that those killed were ‘teenage soldiers who had gone out to
buy sweets in view of the impending Truce’. Local historian Richard
Henchion described the killings as ‘evil’ in Land of the finest drop and
claimed that the soldiers were buying sweets when they were spotted by
IRA Volunteers playing billiards in a nearby hall. According to
Henchion, all four soldiers were shot by one republican, and he implied
that Connie Neenan was responsible:
‘While
Neenan by his own words clears himself of involvement . . . the
traditional story is adamant that he was in the hall that night playing
billiards . . . His version has never been accepted by the non-aligned
general public.’
Context
Despite
the significant attention paid to these killings by several authors,
none of them have questioned the assumption that they were sparked by
the advent of the Truce. Nor have they researched the context in
sufficient depth to know that there were direct links between the Ellis
Quarry killings and the killing of an IRA Volunteer by British forces
the previous night. Now, recently released material from the Military
Archives not only exonerates the chief suspect, Connie Neenan, but also
identifies those responsible.
There is no
evidence to support the claim that the soldiers left their barracks
specifically to go sweet-shopping. Though one of the soldiers may have
had a bag of sweets when captured, the earliest account of the shootings
from Walter Phillips’s The Revolution in Ireland (1923) states that the
soldiers ‘were being “treated” by a friendly publican in celebration of
the Truce’. The probability that the soldiers were drinking when
captured has been erased from the more recent, highly emotive accounts,
which emphasise their supposed innocence and childlike demeanour. The
soldiers were not teenagers—all four were in their twenties. Nor were
they particularly naive ‘raw recruits’. Henry Morris, for example, was a
Great War veteran with seven years’ service, who had been wounded twice
and had survived a gas attack on the Western Front.
The
verifiable facts are that the soldiers left their post at Cork Jail,
were unarmed and travelled on foot. At 8pm they were captured by seven
IRA volunteers patrolling the Western Road in search of an informer. The
only surviving account of the executions by a participant is a report
sent to IRA GHQ, which does not explain their motives nor offer any
rationale to justify the killings: ‘We held up four soldiers (2 Royal
Engineers, 2 Staffordshires) and searched them but found no arms. We
took them to a field in our area where they were executed before 9pm.’
Like
most contemporary IRA reports, it was signed with the author’s rank
(Captain H Company, 1st Battalion, Cork City Brigade) but not his name,
which made identification difficult. The recent release of the IRA
Organisation and Membership Files, however, enables us for the first
time to identify all IRA officers at the time of the Truce. The captain
of H Company who wrote this report and ordered the executions was Dan
Hallinan, a 36-year-old plasterer from Bishopstown, Cork. Not only does
the identification of Hallinan exonerate Neenan but it also suggests a
definite motive for the shootings.
Motive
The
night before the Ellis Quarry killings, British soldiers captured IRA
Volunteer Denis Spriggs at his home in Strawberry Hill, Cork. Spriggs, a
twenty-year-old plasterer, was asleep when the raiders struck. He was
unarmed and surrendered immediately when confronted. Spriggs was taken
to Blarney Street, where he was shot dead by the British soldiers. The
official British account claims that Spriggs was killed ‘while
attempting to escape’. The officer leading the raid, however, Lt.
d’Ydewalle, had a history of involvement in the killings of unarmed
prisoners and the likelihood is that Spriggs’s killing was premeditated
and deliberate.
The soldiers who killed Spriggs
were members of the South Staffordshire Regiment. Two of the soldiers
killed at Ellis Quarry the following night were also South
Staffordshires. Hallinan appears to have known Denis Spriggs personally.
As well as being members of the same IRA battalion, both men worked as
plasterers and were involved in the Cork Plasterers’ Union. All previous
multiple shootings of off-duty British soldiers in Cork were reprisals
to avenge IRA Volunteers killed in British custody. These facts suggest
that, far from being a pointless and unprovoked murder, the Ellis Quarry
killings were a direct reprisal for the killing of Spriggs.
Following
the Ellis Quarry killings, Dan Hallinan was expelled from the IRA and
exiled from Cork. He enlisted in the Civic Guard, but was later expelled
from the guards for indiscipline and resumed his previous trade as a
plasterer. In the 1930s he was charged with theft of trade union funds,
declared bankrupt and imprisoned. Although it was widely known that
Hallinan and those responsible for the Ellis Quarry killings adopted a
pro-Treaty stance during the Civil War, the incident was exploited for
anti-Republican propaganda. Neenan recalled that a priest in Cork
exploited the incident when giving sermons condemning the anti-Treaty
IRA:
‘I told him straight out that he lionised
our [Free State] opponents although he knew perfectly well that those
who shot the four soldiers were members of that very opposition of ours.
Still the priest continued his accusations that we were all murderers,
bank robbers and common criminals.’
Whilst
Hallinan’s role in this controversial incident has only just come to
light, the information linking the South Staffordshire Regiment to the
killing of Spriggs and the Ellis Quarry killings has been available for
decades. By focusing inordinately on IRA killings in the pre-Truce
period and regurgitating contemporary propaganda without verifying facts
or establishing context, generations of writers have unwittingly
produced a biased history of the last days of the War of Independence
and a narrative that ensures that those killed in eleventh-hour IRA
attacks are remembered whilst those killed by British forces in equally
contentious circumstances are all but forgotten.
Pádraig
Óg Ó Ruairc’s Truce: murder, myth and the last days of the Irish War of
Independence has just been published by Mercier Press.
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