In Mountjoy jail, on December 8th, 1922, at the height of the Irish Civil War, four men were executed in what was to become one of the most controversial episodes in modern Irish history.
Their names were Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey and Richard Barrett, prominent IRA leaders. All four had publicly opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. All four had been imprisoned by the National Army shortly after the defeat of the IRA’s Four Courts garrison at the beginning of the Civil War.
They were not the first republicans to be executed, nor the first high-profile individuals to face this fate. (Erskine Childers had been shot by firing squad more than a week before.) By the end of the conflict, the four would number among 81 republicans executed on the orders of the Irish government.
What makes these executions a particular flashpoint of historical controversy is not only that they were of dubious legality, but also that they were in response to an event not one of the men was involved in.
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On the previous day, December 7th, Seán Hales, an elected TD and former prominent Cork IRA leader, was assassinated in Dublin by members of the anti-Treaty IRA. Hales had been due to attend a sitting of Dáil Éireann. Liam Lynch, the anti-Treaty IRA chief of staff, had issued an order for the IRA to assassinate members of the Dáil such as Hales, who had voted for what republicans termed the “Murder Bill”. This was a reference to the Army Powers Resolution passed by the Dáil that September. The resolution allowed for the introduction of military courts of tribunal and introduced the brutal, draconian executions policy of anti-Treaty Irish republicans on the part of the Free State government.
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Close to midnight on December 7th, the Free State cabinet had an emergency meeting to determine a response to the killing of Hales. Richard Mulcahy, both minister for defence and commander-in-chief of the National Army, asked the cabinet to acquiesce to a collective decision on the executions of the four named prisoners as a reprisal for the death of Hales.
One by one the cabinet agreed, one of the final votes being that by Kevin O’Higgins, minister for home affairs. O’Higgins found himself in a deep moral quandary, as he and Rory O’Connor had been close friends within the revolutionary movement before the split over the Treaty, and O’Connor had been best man at his wedding the previous year.
The effect of the executions carried their own grim logic, arguably having the desired psychological effect on the anti-Treaty IRA
O’Connor was perhaps the best known of the four to be executed. His background suggested an unlikely revolutionary. The product of a Clongowes education – like O’Higgins – and the son of a prominent civil servant in the former British administration, he had risen in the ranks of the Volunteers and became the IRA’s director of engineering. He also masterminded several prison escapes and IRA operations in Britain. He was the first of the IRA’s general headquarters staff to oppose the Treaty.
During the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, both O’Connor and O’Higgins had worked closely in the underground Dáil’s Department of Local Government. There, O’Higgins was the assistant minister and O’Connor was his secretary. O’Higgins at one point wrote to his then future wife, Brigid Cole, in reference to O’Connor: “It’s a great relief to have a thoroughly reliable secretary ...”
Kevin O’Higgins was born in 1892 and hailed from Stradbally in Co Laois, the fourth son of a prominent local doctor. Two of O’Higgins’s brothers served in the British army during the first World War. One was killed in action. Despite this, O’Higgins joined the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin and even served a five-month imprisonment in 1918 for his involvement in protests during the conscription crisis.
Only correspondence from O’Higgins has survived but it is clear from it that the friendship between O’Connor and O’Higgins was a genuine and close one. O’Higgins often warmly refers to O’Connor in letters to his fiancee, Cole, including where he takes pride in O’Connor referring to him in a prison letter as “[putting] on record I was his very good friend – and comrade”.
As he later honeymooned with Cole in London, O’Higgins wrote to O’Connor, expressing warmth from the couple to his dear friend: “very best wishes to the bestest best man that ever rounded up a bridegroom”. One contemporary later remarked on being struck at the closeness between the two men, given that O’Higgins had selected O’Connor as best man, not one of his own brothers.
By December 8th, 1922, whatever about O’Higgins’s reluctance over the prospect of his former friend being executed, he acquiesced to the collective cabinet agreement proposed by Mulcahy. Thus, that morning, the four IRA leaders were taken from their cells in Mountjoy jail and brought to a holding area. O’Connor had suspected they were going to be deported, and quickly sewed into his coat two gold guineas O’Higgins had given him as a gift on the day of the latter’s wedding.
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The four were then given the following typed notice: “You are hereby notified that, being a person taken in arms against the government, you will be executed as a reprisal for the assassination of Brigadier Seán Hales TD ... and as a solemn warning to those associated with you who are engaged in a conspiracy of assassination against the representatives of the Irish people.”
In one of his final letters, O’Connor expressed forgiveness to his enemies.
As controversy raged in the Dáil the next day over the executions, O’Higgins made a notable contribution. He argued, “all government is based on force ...” Perhaps his most famous words came at the end when, on becoming emotional, he made reference to his former close friendship with O’Connor: “Personal spite, great heavens! Vindictiveness! One of these men was a friend of mine.”
Nonetheless, the effect of the executions carried their own grim logic, arguably having the desired psychological effect on the anti-Treaty IRA. While the conflict continued to see extraordinary violence, the mass shooting of politicians ordered by Lynch, the IRA chief-of staff, never followed.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, O’Higgins emerged as one of the most capable and formidable members of the victorious Free State government. Ironically, despite his conflict over the execution of his former friend, O’Higgins became the government figure most publicly associated with the Civil War executions. During an election rally in 1925, on a public platform in Sligo, O’Higgins shouted down a group of hecklers making reference to the executions – “I stand by the 77 executions – and 774 more if necessary.”
Yet, republicans never forgot, nor forgave.
On July 10th, 1927, members of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade shot O’Higgins dead while he was walking to Mass in Booterstown. In later years, O’Higgins’s death was revealed to have been an impromptu, unplanned action by three IRA members – Bill Gannon, Archie Doyle and Timothy Coughlan – who just so happened to spot him walking along the street. Gannon had been given a hand-carved chess set by Rory O’Connor shortly before the latter’s execution.
O’Higgins’s death is often regarded as a seminal event in the early years of the Irish Free State.
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Amid the surviving letters and cards of condolences sent to the O’Higgins family that are among O’Higgins’s papers, one immediately stands out, from O’Connor’s sister, Eily:
Dear Mrs O’Higgins,
Words are of little avail in times of grief – but I would like to offer you from myself & the whole family our most heartfelt sympathy. May God console you as He alone can.
I remain,
Yours very sincerely,
Eily O’Connor
In the surviving papers of Kevin O’Higgins, there is no indication of any further correspondence between O’Connor’s sister and the O’Higgins family, but even if this was the only letter, its very existence and poignancy, despite its brevity, is remarkable.
In Irish public memory, O’Connor and his three executed comrades remain celebrated and eulogised by republican parties and groups. O’Higgins is the only government minister ever to have been assassinated in the history of the State. Yet, his grave in Glasnevin cemetery has fallen into disrepair and is no regular site of pilgrimage.
A relief of his side-portrait was added to the Collins-Griffith cenotaph in front of Leinster House, yet a memorial plaque installed at the site of his shooting in 2012 was damaged by persons unknown and later permanently removed.
Many, it seems a century later, still neither forget nor forgive.
Rory O’Connor – To Defend The Republic, by Gerard Shannon, is published by Merrion Press
