In my latest book in the Stefan Gillespie series, The City Underground, a man is committed to a mental hospital, suffering from hallucinations about gunmen. It is 1941. The man had been a gunman himself, one of Michael Collins’ Squad. He is suffering what we call PTSD. He has forgotten the glory. There is just darkness.
The man is based on Charles Dalton, brother of the better-known Emmet. Charlie was a Volunteer at 14. At 17 he was in Collins’ Squad. It is unclear from his book on the War of Independence, With the Dublin Brigade, when he first killed. Mostly he was an Intelligence officer, sending others out to do the shooting. In November 1920 he joined the raid on 28 Pembroke Street, on Bloody Sunday. He gives a vivid account of that morning, but there is less about what happens in the house than the before and after. The before is sober. He spends the night with men from the Squad. ‘I was wrought up, thinking of what we had to do the next morning. I could feel that the others were the same.’ There is reflection, not relish.
At Pembroke Street Charlie’s job is to collect information, not shoot. He says little about the chaos in the house, though he does not lose his sense of what it means. ‘In the hall three or four men were lined up against the wall, some of our officers facing them. Knowing their fate I felt great pity for them.’ But there is more beneath the surface. We feel it afterwards as Charlie escapes. ‘I could no longer control my overpowering need to run, to fly.’ There is as much anguish as fear.
An account by the wife of one of the British officers fills out what Dalton skips - panic, wild firing, screaming, bodies, the blood on the floor and the flock wallpaper. Many IRA men were young Volunteers. The operation was too big for the Squad. If some killings were clinical that morning, in Pembroke Street it was a very bloody Sunday. But even with the anger that came after the killings at Croke Park, Charlie Dalton ends his Bloody Sunday as soberly as he began it. ‘I heard a bell ringing. It was the Angelus. In the silence before the altar, I thought over our morning’s work, and offered a prayer for the fallen.’ The prayer is for everyone.
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Charlie Dalton’s war kept him in Intelligence. The book he wrote ends with the Treaty, like many accounts. The Civil War was not for memorialising. But it is for an event in that war that Dalton is now remembered. In October 1922 the bodies of three teenage boys, arrested putting up anti-Treaty posters, were found near the Red Cow. What happened remains unclear to this day, but probably they were murdered by Free State Intelligence officers. Dalton has been accused. There is no evidence to support this view. However, he was second in command of Free State Intelligence. It is entirely possible his men were carrying out orders for indiscriminate reprisals and it is very unlikely he didn’t know who killed the three teenagers. He was certainly instrumental in blocking any serious investigation.
What happens next is peace and the increasing isolation of many of those who came out of the years of war an ill-fit for ordinary life. That applied to the pro-Treaty side as well as the anti-Treatyites. Charlie took part in the Army Mutiny of 1924. He got a pardon and a resentful and bitter exit from the service. For years he struggled with mental health and continual unemployment, with only his family for support. Whatever the rights and wrongs of what was done in a war that gave ordinary men the duty of terror, there were scars no one comprehended. Charlie Dalton represents what those years did to many thousands of young Irish men.
Around 1940 the struggle overcame him. He would spend almost three years in mental institutions. We see the symptoms of PTSD but at the time there was no real diagnosis. Charlie’s breakdown was an extreme manifestation of his recurring anxieties. He believed he was constantly watched. He locked himself in his house, hiding from the non-existent gunmen who were coming to shoot him. He had hallucinations of men he killed or sent others to kill.
There were voices in his head too. Dead RIC men, British officers, informers, IRA comrades and maybe the accidental victims of something he no longer even understood. It may have been less about what he did than what took possession of his head. With the Dublin Brigade rarely sees him fire a gun. That may be less than honest. The worst accusations, the Red Cow murders, are by no means proven, though he may carry some of the responsibility. Yet other deaths, as on Bloody Sunday, whether he pulled the trigger or not, surely made Charlie a hero? Weren’t those about duty?
When killing is face to face, distinctions over what is justified may be very fine. Charlie Dalton lost the ability to distinguish. He wasn’t alone. Men as well-known as Ernie O’Malley were treated for what they could not get out of their heads. Paddy Flanagan, who led the Bloody Sunday raid in Pembroke Street, was in St Patrick’s himself. For thousands the descent into alcoholism was the commonest response to the same journey.
If the shadow of the gunman disappeared from Irish life, there was a shadow on many gunmen no one could help with. It’s probably a good thing most of them chose not to talk about it. If duty was terrible enough to threaten your sanity, who would want to listen? There were songs to be sung, after all, and medals to be worn. It wasn’t that people weren’t grateful. But when it came to the darkness, as Seán Lemass once said, there was one response. Silence.
The City Underground by Michael Russell is published by Constable at £13.99
