The Great Cover-Up

The Truth About the Death of Michael Collins

Gerard Murphy

• Publisher: The Collins Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788410427
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Why were both sides of the Civil War divide so evasive when it came to the death of Michael Collins? Why were they still trying to effect cover-ups as late as the 1960s?

Determined to find the truth despite the trails of deception left by many of the key players, Gerard Murphy, a scientist, looked in detail at the evidence. Previous researchers have tended to concentrate on the reminiscences of survivors. Murphy instead focuses on information that appeared in the immediate wake of the ambush, before attempts could be made to conceal the truth. He also examines newly released material, and has carried out a forensic analysis of the ambush site based on photographic evidence of the aftermath recently discovered in a Dublin attic.

These investigations have unearthed significant new evidence, overlooked for almost a century, that seriously questions the version of events currently accepted by historians.

1

In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

The general circumstances surrounding the Bealnablath ambush are well known. On 22 August 1922 while on a visit to Cork, Michael Collins – the Commander in Chief of the army of the Provisional Government of Ireland, and the man who had more than anyone else led the fight against the British in the earlier War of Independence and then negotiated a treaty settlement with them – was shot dead during an ambush near the small village of Bealnablath in County Cork. It is now pretty much accepted by historians that Collins was in Cork that week for a number of reasons, one of which was that he was hoping to meet some of the leadership of the opposing anti-Treaty Republicans in an attempt to bring an end to the Civil War, which by then had been going on for just under two months.

The accepted version of events is that Collins was spotted passing through Bealnablath by a scout of the anti-Treaty forces early that morning on his way to west Cork and that the Republicans in the area, consisting mostly of officers and men of the 3rd West Cork Brigade, then decided to set up an ambush in the hope that he might return later in the day by the same route. The glen to the south of Bealnablath, through which the road passed, provided an ideal ambush spot, since one side of the road consisted of a steep incline to the east, while to the west across a narrow stream ran a boreen roughly parallel, which provided perfect cover for the ambushing party. If the ambush had gone according to plan, the attackers would have been able to rain down fire on Collins’s convoy, pinned in as it would have been by the high ground on the opposite side, where it would have provided perfect targets. As one young man on the Republican side put it: a bird could not have escaped from the trap if everything had gone according to plan.

However, it did not go according to plan. Collins spent the day travelling around west Cork and when around 6.00pm there appeared to be no sign of him returning, the Republicans – originally between thirty and forty in number – decided to withdraw. Some of them headed to the small hamlet of Bealnablath to the north and the rest to Newcestown to the south. But withdrawing was not easy. They had a hastily constructed mine consisting of a box of gelignite under the road and, farther along, a brewer’s cart disabled and placed across the road as a barricade, and broken bottles scattered everywhere. According to local lore, they felt obliged to clear the barricade and remove the mine so as to have the road clear for farmers going to the creamery the following morning.

Some six men were detailed to clear the obstructions, remove the mine and act as lookouts. Around 7.30pm – accounts vary as to the precise time – while the clearing-up operation was in progress, Collins’s convoy arrived from the south. The convoy consisted of a motorcycle outrider, Lieutenant J.J. Smith, followed by an army lorry – a Crossley tender, manned by two officers and around eight soldiers. Some distance behind, Collins was travelling in a bright yellow Leyland touring car. As the IRA report on the ambush stated at the time, making what was no doubt a salient point: ‘During the journey Ml. Collins travelled in the touring car and made himself very prominent.’¹ Collins was indeed clearly visible in the car, sitting in the back seat along with General Emmet Dalton, his commandant in Cork. The car had two drivers, Privates Michael Corry and Michael Quinn. Behind these and bringing up the rear of the convoy was a Rolls-Royce armoured car manned by two drivers, two officers and a machine-gunner, Scotsman John McPeak.

According to Republican accounts, the men on the boreen opposite fired a few shots at the convoy to warn their comrades who were down the road in the narrowest part of the valley and thus were vulnerable if the convoy were to suddenly come upon them. Dalton, on the other hand, claimed the touring car was hit by the initial volley and the windshield shattered and a clock on the dashboard broken. Members of the Free State party are adamant that while Dalton wanted his men to drive on ‘like Hell’, it was Collins who overruled him and opted to stand and fight. The battle, such as it was, was an entirely one-sided affair, with the convoy heavily armed with machine guns and significant manpower using rifles against half a dozen IRA men armed only with rifles.

There were in effect two battles going on: one between several IRA men and the men from the Crossley tender, who were stopped down the road near the barricade and were trying to move it out of the way; and, several hundred yards back, a second involving Collins’s party. This consisted of himself, Dalton and the two drivers. They appear to have been joined at some point by Joe Dolan, Collins’s personal bodyguard, who had been travelling on the armoured car. They took cover by a low ditch on the left-hand side of the road while the armoured car moved backwards and forwards spraying with lethal machine-gun fire the boreen opposite where the rest of the IRA party, no more than three or four, were hidden.

After about twenty minutes of this intermittent shooting – again the length of time varies, depending on who is telling the story – the armoured car’s Vickers machine gun jammed. This allowed the IRA men on the boreen opposite to make their escape. At this point, it appears, Collins spotted them retreating and pointed them out to the other members of his party. He stood up, moved initially behind the armoured car for cover and then, inexplicably from a military point of view, appeared to walk on his own some 15 yards up the road and around the bend to the south of the armoured car in the direction of where he had seen the enemy retreat. He was, it seems, reloading his rifle to continue shooting when he was killed by a single shot that came – and most accounts agree on this – during a lull in the firing brought about by the jamming of the Vickers gun. There was then another burst of firing, presumably from both sets of forces and, according to the accounts of several of the Free State party, including Emmet Dalton himself, from Republicans on both sides of the road.

It took Dalton and Seán O’Connell, the officer in charge of the Crossley tender, some minutes to get to Collins, who by this time was dead, the back of his head blown off in what Dalton called an ‘awful’ ‘gaping’ wound. As they were trying to get his body onto the armoured car, there was a final outbreak of firing from the Republicans, in which Lieutenant Smith was hit in the neck. Though only slightly wounded, Smith was the one other casualty on the Free State side. After many stops and starts, mainly because of trenched and blocked roads, the Free State convoy, minus Smith’s motorcycle and the touring car, managed to get back to Cork, where Collins’s body was brought to Shanakiel Hospital, a former British army hospital on the north side of the city. Dalton and O’Connell were broken-hearted and would never live down the night when their leader was killed.²

In December 2012 a small item appeared in the Irish newspapers. It concerned the discovery of a photograph of the Bealnablath site taken on the day after the ambush (see page 15). The photographer was a local sixteen-year-old, Agnes Hurley, who – unusually for that time – owned a camera and had taken several hundred photos around the area over the years. It was apparently found in an attic in Dublin by her niece, who submitted it to an exhibition in Clonakilty organised by the History Department of University College Cork. All expert opinions consulted agree that the photograph is genuine. Cork City and County Archives archivist Brian McGee described the find as ‘extraordinary’, adding: ‘The fact that it survived is remarkable.’ This is especially so since it is often stated that no picture was taken of the site at the time of the ambush. (In fact, another photo taken by Agnes Hurley, showing a broader view of the ambush site, has been available since the early 1990s. See page 16.) ‘Aggie went to Beal na Blath to see what had happened because they’d heard gunshots the previous day,’ her niece said. ‘She took hundreds of photographs over the years and dated the back of every single one.’ The photo, date and all, can now be found in Cork City and County Archives.³

The photograph shows the road at Bealnablath where the ambush took place. It is taken facing north, with the higher ground beside the road to the east of the site clearly visible. The photograph tells us a number of things. It shows a white and almost certainly dry road surface with a mottled dark area that may correspond to bloodstains, and what appears to be a piece of white cloth on the grass margin on the right-hand side of the road, which is claimed to be Collins’s shirt collar. From the slope of the hill behind, it is clear that the spot is more or less where the Collins monument now stands, which means that, when it was built, those who erected it knew where their Commander in Chief had fallen. In other words, all speculation that Collins was killed either farther north or farther south of that position – and several books written on the topic claim that this was the case – are working on a false premise.

It is fair to assume that when Agnes Hurley took the photos, this is where she believed Collins had died; it is also fair to assume that she herself saw the collar and the bloodstains and identified them as such. Indeed, Father Patrick Twohig, in his book The Dark Secret of Bealnablath, quotes Agnes Hurley’s sister Julianna, who accompanied Agnes along with their brother, as having seen a large congealed bloodstain, ‘like a bastable cake’ across the road from where the monument now stands.⁴ As for the collar, of the detachable type worn by men in Ireland until the 1960s, Julianna Hurley claimed it had a bloodstained bullet hole on its left side, though it lies across the road from the big bloodstain.⁵ This suggests that it belonged to Lieutenant Smith rather than Collins since, as we have seen, Smith was shot on the left side of his neck while trying to get Collins’s body onto the armoured car. Another local girl, Ellen Allen (née Long), who was nineteen and who went down to the ambush site after the combatants had left, confirmed the scale of the bloodstain. ‘’Twas not a very nice sight. Blood all over the road, and brains.’⁶ Allen suggested that an attempt was made to clean it up the next day, but clearly that had not been done by the time Agnes Hurley got there.

The spot at which Michael Collins fell as photographed by Agnes Hurley on the morning after the ambush. Note the extended dark area on the left, which is probably Collins’s blood spattered along the road. Also note the white collar on the other side of the road, which was most likely Lieutenant Smith’s. (Cork City and County Archives)

The position where Michael Collins was killed photographed from another angle by Agnes Hurley. Again note the apparent bloodstain on the spot where he died – marked by a cross – and the fact that the bloodstain runs parallel to the road. (Father Patrick Twohig)

But the prime importance of the photograph – apart from the fact that it pinpoints the place of Collins’s death – is that, when viewed in conjunction with the second surviving photo Agnes Hurley took that morning, it shows the bloodstain spread for what looks like up to two metres along the road. We can tell this because at the lower left-hand side of the bloodstain a footprint is clearly visible. This must have been made when someone stood in Collins’s blood, either trying to minister to him or during attempts to move his body. And before anyone thinks this is a gratuitously gruesome detail, try imagining the effort it would take to move a man as big as Collins and doing that without standing in his blood, which was spattered widely over the road.

Another myth that the picture puts to bed is that it was raining during the ambush. Apart from the fact that the road is bone dry, the footprint is perfectly defined on the road surface from the night before. It would have been far less defined if it had been raining and would have been at least partly, if not entirely, washed away.

Yet the most important detail is not the footprint or the collar, but the scale and the direction of the bloodstain. The stain is large and diffuse and it is clear that Collins suffered a catastrophic head wound. But what is most significant about it is the direction in which it lies: it is aligned in a north–south direction, almost exactly parallel to the road.⁷ This is easy to see in the photograph since there is the track of a wheel running right through the middle of it. Also, if we are to go by Julianna Hurley’s description of the human material on the road as resembling a bastable cake, who would bet against the dark mass at the top of the stain being a part of Collins’s skull? To judge from the size of the footprint, the stain is at least a metre and a half and probably well over two metres in length. It is also clearly visible on the second photograph since it extends down the road from the black cross that indicates where Collins had fallen.⁸ What all this tells us is that Collins suffered a most appalling wound that resulted in his blood and brain matter being blown for up to two metres along the road.⁹ Only a high-velocity bullet could have caused such a wound and scattered blood over such a distance. It also suggests that the shooter was not too far away, since even a high-velocity bullet when fired from a long distance would have lost much of its power and would not have caused such extensive damage. This also precludes the possibility that Collins was killed either by a ricochet or by a revolver bullet, neither of which would have had the power to inflict such damage.¹⁰ (Again, the suggestion that the enormous stain of blood and brain matter could have been caused by the body being dragged along the road is contradicted by the fact that Smith’s collar is on the right-hand side, indicating that the car was there at the time. Indeed, there is a much thinner line crossing the road in that direction in the photograph which may indicate where the body was dragged.)

What this means is that the bullet that killed Collins – almost certainly a high-velocity bullet – was travelling along the direction of the road. According to most accounts of the ambush, Collins had spotted two IRA men across the glen at the far side of the stream to his right just before he was shot and was beginning to walk in their direction. He was moving south around the bend from where the armoured car – the last vehicle in the convoy – was parked and was therefore out of sight of most of his party when he was killed. As such, he was the farthest south of the entire convoy, which indicates his reckless bravery, and was out of the cover of his own men and thus extremely vulnerable.

Most accounts have Collins reloading his rifle and preparing to fire on the departing men on the lane to the west when he was killed. If so, he could not have been killed by any of these men – despite the fact that several of them claimed they may have done so – because if that were the case, the direction of the bloodstain would have been across the road rather than parallel to it. The occasional suggestion that he was shot through the forehead is disproved by the fact that on his death mask his forehead and the hairline above it show no trace of a wound. Furthermore, the damage to Collins’s cap – a jagged rip at the back towards the right-hand side of the seam – shows no hole or other mark of entry at the front. Since his cap was always well pulled down over his forehead, this more or less precludes that he could have been hit from the front.¹¹ What is more, the greatcoat he wore at Bealnablath is on permanent display in the National Museum of Ireland. It shows the right-hand wing of the collar and the epaulettes on the right shoulder to be bloodstained. All this shows that the bullet that killed him came from his left and exited the right side of his skull.

Michael Collins’s greatcoat on display in the National Museum of Ireland showing bloodstaining on the right epaulette and collar. (A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the author
• Contents
• Map of County Cork
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
• 2. Bealnablath: Some Essential Facts
• 3. Evasive Actions
• 4. Some Orchestrated Manoeuvres in the Dark
• 5. The Lead-Up to Bealnablath
• 6. Words, Too Many Words
• 7. The IRB and the Shooting of Collins
• 8. The Great Divide (the IRB and the Treaty)
• 9. Army Matters
• 10. Not a Shred of Evidence
• 11. ‘Mick turned and fell’
• 12. Snipers and Drivers
• 13. Doctors, Drivers and Wounded Plotters
• 14. Doing Away with Michael – the Aftermath
• 15. Blinding the Fool’s Eye
• 16. The Evidence of Garda Hickey
• 17. Kerry Connections
• Acknowledgements
• APPENDICES
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Imprint Page
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