The long shadow of a gunmnan: Weapon used to kill Kevin O’Higgins may still be out there

After the Irish Civil War ended in the summer of 1923, the defeated republicans, although they had dumped arms, were not in a mood to forgive and forget. They particularly despised the Free State minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins. The “hard man” of the government had developed an intense dislike of Erskine Childers – who, while on the run from government forces, had been producing the IRA propaganda publication War News – and had singled him out in the Dáil as a dangerous threat to the fledgling government.

Free State troops eventually cornered the fugitive in the home of his cousin, Robert Barton. Childers had been about to defend himself by using his revolver, but didn’t shoot as “there were ladies present”. Childers was acutely aware of the hostility felt for him by O’Higgins. He also knew that O’Higgins had singled him out in the Dáil, and seemed to blame him specifically for approving the death sentence that was soon hanging over him. But the sentence would not be carried out immediately. The pressure on O’Higgins’s colleague president WT Cosgrave to reprieve the prisoner was immense. The night before the execution a message was conveyed to Childers that if he would agree to cease all further opposition to the Free State, the death sentence would be withdrawn. Childers apparently then asked to speak to his wife before making a decision. Later that night, he responded to the proposal saying that he could not agree to the conditions imposed on him. (It is intriguing to imagine that particular conversation between the condemned prisoner and Molly Childers.)

The following morning, Childers wrote a final letter to Molly: “It is 6am. You will be pleased to see how imperturbably tranquil and normal I have been this night and a.m. It all seems perfectly simple and inevitable, like lying down after a long day’s work.” As dawn approached, the prisoner took his breakfast quietly. Shortly afterwards, he was taken outside and placed at the end of a shed where part of the roof had been removed, leaving him in the light and the firing party in the dark, where he could not easily see them.

[ Walled in by Hate. The Friends and Enemies of Kevin O’Higgins: balance, honesty and humanity ]

A friend of Childers, present at the scene, reported on his final moments. “He stood with his hands crossed behind him, tied loosely with a piece of cloth, which, had he wished, he could have easily removed. He faced the firing squad calmly, and it was only at the wish of the authorities that he was blindfolded: he had no desire to be so. An officer of high rank, I think, gave the order and before the sounds of the shots reached me, I saw him fall. Death was instantaneous. Everyone was moved by his high courage, and a highly placed officer of the Free State paid him tribute with the simple words ‘he was a brave man’.”

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In July 1927, Bill Gannon and two other republicans, Timothy Coughlan and Archie Doyle, were driving to a Gaelic football match in Wicklow in a stolen car. Suddenly, in Booterstown, Dublin, they saw an “old man” walking along the road with his hands in his pockets, on his way to 12 o’clock Mass. This “old man” was Kevin O’Higgins (although he was only 35 at the time, the trials of the Civil War seemed to have aged him greatly). The men drove on at first, unsure whether the man was, as the republican newspaper Éire called him, “the bloodthirsty tiger who cried aloud for Erskine Childers’ blood”. However, after a quick discussion, they turned back and, when the lone figure was spotted once again, still on his way to Mass, they stopped the car and opened fire. Their stricken victim managed to cross the road, but the men continued shooting, eventually putting seven bullets in his body. The assailants then fled.

One of the first people to arrive on the scene was O’Higgins’s cabinet colleague Eoin MacNeill, who had witnessed the shooting but not initially realised the identity of the victim. MacNeill had also been on his way to the 12 o’clock Mass in Booterstown. As the attackers drove off, they fired more shots. MacNeill recalled, “One of them directed his gun straight at me, and then, for some reason, turned it aside and fired past me.” MacNeill went to O’Higgins’s aid and knelt beside him. “He was still quite alive, but blind, one of the shots having gone through the front of his head.”

It was clear that the wounded man had little hope of survival, so an ambulance brought him the short distance home where his wife, Birdie, was waiting for him. She had heard the gunshots from her home. As her husband’s jacket was taken off, a bullet fell from the sleeve. He was then placed on a mattress on the drawingroom floor. “I couldn’t help it,” he said to Birdie, “I did my best.”

Many friends and colleagues began to arrive at the house, among them the surgeon and senator Henry Barniville. Although the victim had been shot many times, Barniville noted he did not seem to be in pain. The surgeon surmised that this was because a bullet had severed his spinal cord.

As his life slipped away, O’Higgins thanked everyone present for being there and said he was sorry for having caused them so much trouble.

Seeing that Barniville was still clutching his hat, O’Higgins asked him, “Are you going, Barney… or is it me?” Barniville said, in as kind a way as he could, “It’s you, Kevin.”

Just before five o’clock, a doctor felt for O’Higgins’s pulse and, not finding one, announced that he was dead.

Childers’ revolver, a .32 Spanish automatic, had a colourful afterlife when it ended up in the possession of the judge advocate general of the Free State forces, Cahir Davitt. On one occasion, after attending a dance at the recently opened Metropole Hotel, Davitt was stopped by Free State troops with the gun in his possession. Fearing that he could end up sharing the same fate as Childers, he was keen to verify who he was when taken to a nearby Army barracks. There he knew an officer called Casey, whom he hoped would identify him. But then he had second thoughts: Casey, he remembered, “was very fond of a practical joke and I was afraid that when I explained my predicament to him his sense of humour would get the better of him and urge him to deny all knowledge of me”.

Luckily another officer less prone to pranks was on hand to vouch that Davitt was a Free State official. On two other occasions, the gun was fired accidentally by Davitt; once in a taxi, and also when he was in the members’ bar at Lansdowne Road rugby ground after the final of the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. On the second occasion he managed to shoot himself in the toe. The gun was eventually handed over to Childers’ son, the future president of Ireland, Erskine Childers jnr, at a lunch in the Stephen’s Green club also attended by Robert Barton.

Unlike Childers’ Spanish automatic, Archie Doyle’s Webley revolver was still in use years later. O’Higgins’s killer, Archie Doyle, who was very proud of what he had done, gave the weapon as a present to a republican called Harry White, and it was later used by the IRA in the Troubles of the 1970s. It may still be out there somewhere.

[ ‘My grandfather was in the firing party that shot Erskine Childers’ ]

[ Erskine Childers: a strange mix of a British imperialist and an Irish republican ]

Walled in by Hate: The Friends and Enemies of Kevin O’Higgins by Arthur Mathews is published by Merrion Press. The co-creator of Fr Ted, he has scripted many other TV comedies. His grandfather, also Arthur Mathews, was a Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Meath

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