Free State Intelligence Department – Oriel House


The Irish Free State Army Intelligence Department – Oriel House Criminal Investigation Department waged a lethal-force policy, especially in Dublin, against those who opposed the newly created Irish Free State.
At least twenty-five Irish republicans were assassinated in County Dublin in the period that the Oriel House CID was in existence, from early 1922, when under the control of the Free State Army Intelligence Department and later under the Ministry of Home Affairs, to November 1923 when it was finally abolished. Most of these deaths, or the circumstances leading to them, were not witnessed, but several witnesses were there when the two Fianna Éireann, Alf Colley and Sean Cole were killed at Whitehall, and again when three more Fianna members were arrested at Clonliffe Road and found dead the next morning at Clondalkin.

Irish Free State Army Intelligence Department

When the Truce of July 1921 came about there was a great relaxation of activity. Michael Collins, however, kept the pressure on his intelligence people and expanded intelligence gathering. As the months went by and the Anglo-Irish Treaty neared, Collins feared that in the not-too-distant future his enemies would not be the British, but those who had fought alongside him and were now sensing a betrayal of the Republic. When the Treaty was accepted, Collins gave his Intelligence Department a new headquarters at Beggars Bush Barracks on Haddington Road, and later transferred the department to Wellington Barracks, on the South Circular Road as the Civil War developed.
All of the former IRA Intelligence people were present, Liam Tobin, Joseph MacGrath, Tom Cullen, Charlie Saurin, Ed Flood, Charlie Dalton, et al. The complete 'Squad' was also here, although some were now in uniform and commanding troops. Also at Wellington Barracks were the 'G' men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police who had covertly assisted the IRA from 1919–1921: people like Ned Broy, David Neligan, Joe Kavanagh and Jim McNamara. Lastly, there was a large group of former Irish Republican Police, led by Peter Ennis, brother of General Tom Ennis. Even though Collins had castigated the IRP in the past, he now accepted them into the new Free State Army Intelligence Department. A few new people were also recruited to the department, young men like Michael Joe Costello and Daniel Bryan, both of whom would rise to high office in later years in the army.
The anti-Treaty IRA was now faced with this substantial set-up at Wellington Barracks as the Civil War loomed. They had now formed an Executive and had barricaded themselves into the Four Courts buildings on the Quays as an assertion of their defiance of the status quo.

Organisation

The origins of the CID at Oriel House are vague. The earliest mention of this organisation is in the form of an application for membership from Peter Ennis of the Irish Republican Police. It was a non-statutory body, an adjunct of the Intelligence Department of the pro-treaty section of the IRA. Its activities were veiled in secrecy, and today it is proving impossible to locate any files on the actual work that it carried out. From being a quasi-military body in early 1922, it transmuted into a quasi-police force in August of the same year and remained so until it was disbanded in the latter months of 1923.
The FSA Intelligence Department took over the spacious Oriel House early in 1922. Liam Tobin, now a Major General in the FSA, was installed here as Director-General of the newly established CID. One of the first decisions made was to appoint a deputy to Tobin in this new organisation. Collins now installed as Director, Patrick Moynihan, with the rank of Captain. Moynihan had been head investigator in the Postal Service and was seconded to the new CID. He had been a valuable intelligence contact in the Post Office during the 'Tan War' and was close to both Collins and Griffith. The next appointment was that of Peter Ennis of the Irish Republican Police, also with the rank of Captain. Ennis then moved from his office at 24 Great Brunswick Street and transferred some of his IRP personnel to the building known as Oriel House. The building would also be used later on by the Protective Corps, whose job it was to guard all government buildings, the GPO, large banks and several government Ministers, Senators and their homes. A further organisation would also use Oriel House as a headquarters later in 1922. This was the CDF a very secretive body composed mostly of ex-British soldiers. They, too, were an armed organisation and numbered about one hundred members. They duplicated some of the work of the Protective Corps, guarding banks and cinemas, and patrolling the streets of the city. They never revealed their names when submitting reports, using a personal number instead.
The cost of the CID and the Protective Corps was provided for in the CID estimates. The CDF was provided for under the Secret Service estimates.

Oriel House CID

In the beginning, for the first six months of its existence, the CID was under the control of the FSA Intelligence Department. It had a Major General in charge, a Captain as his deputy, and the lower ranks were sergeants, corporals and privates. They also had the use of army vehicles and motorcycles. The CID was set up to 'combat the rise in armed crime in the city', as many robberies and assaults had occurred. The question has to be asked here- What was the necessity of a CID, when there was a ready-made detective force down at the 'G Division' of the DMP at Great Brunswick Street? However, there was still great animosity to the 'G men', and they in turn were not proving to be reliable and had been moribund since the Truce of 1921. In reality, the CID was set up specifically to hinder the Republicans by any means from organising and progressing. 'The end would justify the means', as the old adage goes.
Oriel House was built in 1872 and served several purposes. It was at one time the head office of the Dunlop Company. It also served as a police station for the DMP, when Great Brunswick Street station was being renovated. It is an imposing building and served the purpose well for the CID. It had an unobstructed view right up Merrion Square and of many of the government buildings there. It was also on a corner of two main thoroughfares, with no rear entrance, and easy to defend. There were also a number of cells in the basement area of the building for holding prisoners.

Early Activity

In the early months of its existence, the newly formed CID kept its activities low-key. Gathering intelligence, making contacts and performing bodyguard duties were the day-to-day duties of the members. One file shows the whole complement of Oriel House divided into three groups. Each group had Lieutenants, Sergeants and Corporals in charge. Possibly there were three shifts operating at the time. Fifty-two revolvers, with 1000 rounds of.45 ammunition, six Lee–Enfield rifles with 200 rounds of.303 ammunition, and one Lewis Light Machine Gun with 14 pans of ammunition, were issued to the CID. At one stage there were over one hundred and twenty men on the CID pay sheets, so not everyone would have been armed all of the time.
Transport was provided by the FSA at Portobello Barracks and consisted in the early months of one Crossley tender, one motor-car and one motor-bike. In later months the CID ran into an amount of trouble when it commandeered cars from the public at will. The CID maintained and serviced its own vehicles and had a mechanical staff specifically for that purpose.
There are several files at the NA showing the amount of money that was paid weekly to the CID.
Moynihan was also in receipt of his Post Office salary during his tenure at Oriel House.
Over one hundred and twenty sheets are on file giving background information on candidates to the CID. The average age was thirty-three years, and most of the men were Dublin born. The majority had prior service in the IRA, but there were at least three ex-RIC men, one ex-American cop, and two ex-British Army people. The oldest recruit was forty-seven years of age and the youngest was sixteen years old. There was one non-national in the CID. This was Charles Wineman, a German national, who was the manager of Barry's Hotel, Dublin, and claimed that he was a confidant of Michael Collins.

Changeover

A government decision was made after the fall of the Four Courts and Oriel House CID was transferred from the FSA Intelligence Dept. to the Ministry of Home Affairs on 21 August 1922 Major General Joe MacGrath now became the Director-General, answering to Kevin O'Higgins, the Minister of Home Affairs.
"Collins appointed him Director of Intelligence in July 1922, and in that capacity, he presided over some of the more grisly aspects of the treatyites counter-insurgency policy".
Patrick Moynihan was retained as Director, holding the rank of Captain. All the other subordinates now adopted police ranks. Ennis became Chief Superintendent, and so on down the ranks, where the Privates became Detective Officers.
"It rapidly earned itself an unenviable reputation for toughness, unscrupulousness, and violence".
O'Higgins is on record as saying,..."what was needed to put down the 'Irregulars', were more local executions, and we should just kill them anyway". This was premeditation, and this outburst must have given his agents in Oriel House the confidence to go out and be assured that there would be little outcry when they carried out extrajudicial killings. The worst excesses of the killing squads took place under O'Higgin's stewardship of the CID.
In 1926 MacGrath was accused of knowing who had killed Noel Lemass, whose body was dumped in the Featherbeds in the Dublin Mountains, and three teenaged Fianna members, Edwin Hughes, Joseph and Brendan Holohan, who were murdered in Clondalkin, and with having failed to pursue the matter. This charge against him was in a book, "The Real Ireland", published in Britain by a Morning Post journalist named Brethetron. MacGrath was in retirement at this time and he brought a civil action against the author for libel. He won his case, because the Irish State would not attend the court, or produce the relevant files to the defendants. The case was won on this point, but the accusation remained.
In February 1923, Oriel house CID took up residence at 88 Merrion Square. The Protective Corps had now come under the command of the CID also at this time. File H169/3, Justice Dept. shows that there were now;
After the fall of the Four Courts Garrison and the defeat of the rearguard action in central Dublin, the IRA adopted new tactics in the metropolitan area. A low-intensity guerrilla war was conducted against the army of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State. This was proving very hard to combat, so the FSA adopted the policy of rounding up and interning all known activists that opposed the new state. When this measure failed to stop attacks on FSA troops and installations, a new policy was brought in – 'Remove the leaders by any means and the war will end'. When the FSA was attacked in any area, they took their revenge on those who may have been responsible in that particular area.
The following is a list of known Republican leaders that were killed in Dublin by;
Also included here are the accounts of three CID men who were killed in action with the IRA.

Republican

This is the list of Republicans that were eliminated by agents of the Provisional Government and the Free State Government in the period that the CID was in existence in Oriel House and at 88 Merrion Square. Memorial stones at the site where the bodies were found are situated all around Dublin at what was then the city limits. Most are documented on the website Irish War Memorials. http://www.irishwarmemorials.ie/
In the same period, four CID men were killed in action, three by the IRA and one by Free State Army soldiers during a robbery at a factory.
In addition to the above, a member of the Citizens' Defence Force named William Johnson was shot and killed March 27, 1923 by IRA Lt Frank Teeling who had objected to Johnson bringing a bag of tomatoes; Teeling was found guilty of manslaughter and served 18 months in prison.

Abolition of Oriel House CID

The IRA called a cease-fire in April 1923. All arms were dumped and the Civil War officially came to an end. It is now estimated that twenty-two thousand republicans were interned at various camps around the country. Oriel House had become an embarrassment to the FS Government because of its extrajudicial killings, so a decision was taken to terminate the CID. A problem arose now on how best to dispose of this large organisation that had served the government during the ten months of the war. There were three organisations disbanded at the one time: the CID, most of the Protection Corps and the Citizens Defence Force.

Disbandment

The CID was finally disbanded in November 1923 and a selection of its members was transferred to the DMP. The following extracts are taken from a letter from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Executive Council of the Irish Free State.
"....."the CID shall be disbanded at an early date. This Department has no statutory constitution and its continued existence is not desirable......into this new body there can be absorbed a selection of Oriel House men and such members of the "G" Division as may be suitable." The new Detective Branch was put under the control of Colonel David Nelligan, Director of Intelligence in the FSA.
At the point of disbandment, there were still seventy-three personnel in the CID at 88 Merrion Square. Of these, twenty-eight were amalgamated with the DMP. Those that were disbanded got four weeks wages. Captain Moynihan returned to the Postal Service at the GPO, but his position had been filled in his absence and he was therefore reduced in the ranks. He was despised by his colleagues in the Postal Service because of his interference in the postal workers strike earlier in 1922.
"After the Civil War, this now notorious unit was disbanded because of its uncontrollability and murderousness"
"He had no confidence in the Special Branch of An Garda, the hard men of the police who gruesomely murdered Seán Lemass's brother, and who were essentially the remnants of Collins' old squad organised in Oriel House."

Conclusion

To Republicans in Dublin, during the Civil War period, the name Oriel House was synonymous with beating, torture, terror and death. The participants on both sides of the Civil War are all long departed to their final reward now, but much oral evidence was given over the years to help build up a picture of the Oriel House CID and its activities. This article, however, uses only reliable primary sources.
Files obtainable from the National Archives give a short history of the setting up of the CID and personal details of over one hundred members of applicants to that agency. There are accounts of the deaths of CID members in action, lists of injured CID men, and finally a list of those suitable for retention for a new CID to replace the Oriel House model in 1924. Nothing remains of the activities of the CID against those who remained Republican after the Treaty or, of its association with the Free State Army Intelligence Dept.
Unless relevant files on the activities of the FSA Intelligence Dept. and of those of the Oriel House CID are made available, historians will be left guessing. No in-depth study has ever been made on this subject and it now appears that a great cover-up was made when the CID of Oriel House was abolished. Even Seán Lemass, when he became a government minister in 1932, failed to find any files, information, or any clue that would point to the murderers of his brother Noel. As Sean McEntee stated in the Seanad in 1933, over 100,000 files had been destroyed in the Justice Department by those that had controlled Oriel House.
Michael Collins initiated the CID as a counter-revolutionary step. His FSA Intelligence Dept. ran and controlled the organisation for six months until the Home Affairs Ministry took over in August 1922. All along, however, the CID appears to have kept up a strong relationship with the FSA Intelligence Dept: they worked hand-in-glove, and many of the murders in Dublin appear to have been joint ventures.
The murderous activities of the Oriel House CID remain a great stain on the political scene of the time. In 1962, Brian O'Higgins, author, scholar and former Sinn Féin TD from the Second Dáil of 1922, dedicated his 'Wolfe Tone Annual' to "The men of '22". This booklet enumerated all the Republicans that had been killed and executed by agents of the Free State Government during the Civil War period. Twenty-five of these deaths occurred in Dublin County, and it is in this area that this article is concentrating on.
It was stated in Dáil Éireann on 30 November 1922, during a debate on the financing of the CID, that over 2500 files had been gathered on the activities of opponents to the new state. None of these files are available today. In later years,1933, when Minister Seán MacEntee was addressing Seanad Éireann during the debate on the Garda Síochána estimates, he stated that over 100,000 files had been burned by the Home Affairs Dept. at the changeover of government in 1932. There may yet be Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks not cleared for the public to view.