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place where he can be useful to Ireland is in America.’ Although some people were already saying the American president would not look for justice for Ireland, de Valera called for patience. ‘Pronounce no opinion on President Wilson,’ he advised. ‘It is premature, for he and his friends will bear our country in mind at the crucial hour.’
    De Valera was spirited back to Britain to await a ship to the United States.
    Meanwhile Collins was active in assisting the escape of others, especially Robert Barton, from Mountjoy. The two had developed a close relationship. In December 1918 they had been part of an Irish delegation, along with Seán T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy, which had tried to meet the American president, Woodrow Wilson, to make the Irish case for independence. ‘We went over to London and tried to get in touch with Wilson,’ Barton recalled. ‘We never got any nearer to him than a second secretary in the American embassy. We had no success at all.’
    Collins was so annoyed he suggested kidnapping the American president to make him listen. ‘If necessary,’ he said, ‘we can buccaneer him.’ Fortunately nobody took the suggestion too seriously, but the proposal provided an insight into why some colleagues thought Collins was sometimes inclined to allow his enthusiasm to get the better of his judgment.
    ‘I was on very friendly terms with Michael Collins and we used to see one another almost every evening,’ Barton recalled. ‘Collins had an office under Cullenswood House, which was known to us as the “Republican Hut”. Here he was relatively safe and Tom Cullen and Joe O’Reilly could always find him at 9 p.m. and bring persons he wanted to see. Cullenswood House was in the street where I was living and, if I did not turn up, he often sent down for me. I used to hear from him all that was going on. We discussed things in general and he used to urge me to join cabinet meetings to support his point of view.’
    Soon after his incarceration in Mountjoy Barton managed to re-establish contact with the Big Fellow. ‘Through friendly warders I got in touch with Michael Collins,’ he explained. ‘Joe Berry, a plumber warder, was one of them. I devised the means of escape. If I had a saw with which to cut one of the bars, I could get out of my cell, they could throw over a rope ladder, and I could climb up the ladder over the wall and get away.’
    Collins arranged for Dick Mulcahy, the IRA chief-of-staff, to visit Barton in the jail. He went in posing as a clerk to Barton’s solicitor. ‘These two came to interview me about my pending court martial and they brought me the tools I was asking for. While the warder was not looking, Dick Mulcahy pushed the tools towards me and I hid them in my riding breeches. I was not in prison garb. With the saw, I cut out the bar.’
    On the night of 16 March Barton rigged up a dummy in his bed so that when the warder checked during the night he would think Barton was still in bed. He threw a bar of soap over the wall at a certain spot, which was a prearranged signal for volunteers, led by Rory O’Connor, to throw a rope over the wall with a weight attached. By pulling on the rope Barton was able to pull over a rope ladder attached and use it to scale the twenty foot wall and then jump into a blanket being held by the volunteers. ‘Mick Collins was in a street nearby waiting to congratulate me,’ Barton added.
    ‘This is only the beginning,’ a jubilant Collins declared at Batt O’Connor’s home at 1 Brendan Road, Donnybrook, that night. ‘We’re going to get Beaslaí and Fleming out next.’
    ‘At this time,’ Beaslaí noted in his biography of Collins, ‘he was sending letters to me continually in which he discussed plans of escape.’ He had big escape plans, but then de Valera, who had re turned to Britain en route to the United States, decided to return to Ireland again. Pierce McCan, one of the prisoners arrested in the ‘German Plot’