The Squad Read Online Free PDF Page B

meekly succumbing to such an arrogant display. Tapping the table in front of him with a pencil, Griffith emphasised that the decision was one to be taken by the meeting, and by no other body.
    ‘For two hours the debate raged fiercely,’ according to Figgis. Going ahead with the announced plans would undoubtedly lead to trouble, while abandoning them could have disastrous implications for the morale of the whole movement. Parallels were drawn with the disastrous consequences of Daniel O’Connell’s decision to accede to the British decision to ban the monster meeting at Clontarf some seventy years earlier.
    De Valera was consulted and he duly requested that the welcoming demonstrations be cancelled rather than risk a confrontation in which lives might be lost. ‘I write to request that you will not now persist in your idea,’ he explained. ‘I think you must all agree with me that the present occasion is scarcely one on which we would be justified in risking the lives of the citizens. I am certain it would not.
    ‘We who have waited, know how to wait,’ he advised the executive. ‘Many a heavy fish is caught even with a fine line if the angler is patient.’
    Thus Big Fellow’s plans to provoke an early confrontation with the British were frustrated and he was obviously disappointed. ‘It is very bad,’ he wrote to Stack. ‘The chief actor was very firm on the withdrawal, as indeed was Cathal. I used my influence the other way, and was in a practical minority of one. It may be that all arguments were sound, but it seems to me that they have put up a challenge which strikes at the fundamentals of our policy and our attitude.’
    Whatever harm Collins had done to his own standing by his arrogant display at the party’s executive meeting it was more than offset by the mass escape from Mountjoy Jail on Saturday afternoon, 29 March. The plan was to spring Piaras Beaslaí, J. J. Walsh, Paddy Fleming, and Thomas Malone. Paddy O’Daly was involved in the escape plans from the inside, though he had no intention of trying to escape himself. His wife was dying in a Dublin hospice and he had only been sentenced to six months in jail. If he escaped and went on the run, he would not be able to visit his wife. In the circumstances the prison authorities accorded him parole to visit his wife, and he used this to contact republican leaders on the outside, including the chief-of-staff of the Volunteers, Richard Mulcahy, and Peadar Clancy who was in charge of those designated to help the escape from the outside.
    They selected a Saturday afternoon because they had more freedom then than on any other afternoon, as there were fewer warders on duty than on other days. ‘I had a feeling that there was something in the air,’ Joe Berry noted. ‘I had been carrying dispatches between them and Michael Collins and one heard bits of conversation.
    ‘I used to meet Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen, Frank Thornton, Mulcahy and others who spoke openly to me,’ he added. ‘But there was no actual statement to me by either Collins or the prisoners of the proposed escape.’
    ‘All the criminal sections of the prison were locked up from dinner-time, and we had the grounds to ourselves, with only one or two warders,’ O’Daly explained. ‘We were supposed to be good boys then and were not causing any trouble.’
    He made final arrangements with Clancy on the Friday. ‘Clancy would go to Whitworth Road to find out if he could see my signal, which was the wave of a handkerchief, and he would give a signal in return,’ O’Daly recalled. ‘We fixed the time and everything else. I wanted to make sure that anyone on Whitworth Road could see the window at the end of the corridor on C Wing, from where I was signalling. The rehearsal went off perfectly, he saw my signal all right.’
    On the afternoon of the escape there was a snow storm and for a time it looked like the men would not be allowed out to exercise, but then it cleared. There were just