page_title: Death squad
section_title: Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Death squad / By continent / Europe / Ireland
caption_attribution_description: A prisoner under escort at the South Western Front during the Irish Civil War. Given the situation, everyone looks remarkably relaxed... Date: 22 July 1922 NLI Ref.: HOG106
context_page_description: A death squad is an armed group that conducts extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances of persons for the purposes such as political repression, assassinations, torture, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. These killings are often conducted in ways meant to ensure the secrecy of the killers' identities. Death squads may have the support of domestic or foreign governments. They may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary militia groups, government soldiers, policemen, or combinations thereof. They may also be organized as vigilantes. When death squads are not controlled by the state, they may consist of insurgent forces or organized crime, such as the ones used by cartels.
context_section_description: Irish War of Independence
  During the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Republican Army under Michael Collins made use of death squads and targeted killings. At the beginning of the conflict, Collins recruited a group of men from the IRA's Dublin Brigade, who were dubbed "The Twelve Apostles". At Collins' orders, the Twelve Apostles strategically assassinated members of Crown security forces, British Intelligence spymasters, and moles within IRA ranks. Collins was assisted in this by IRA moles within Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Furthermore, several secretaries working for the British Army High Command in Dublin were also working as spies for Collins.
  As British authority in Ireland began to disintegrate, Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared a state of emergency. In order to break the IRA, Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, suggested the recruitment of World War I veterans into paramilitary death squads. Lloyd George agreed to the proposal, and advertisements were filed in British newspapers. Former enlisted men were formed into the Black and Tans, so called because of their mixture of British Army and police uniforms. Veterans who had held officers rank were formed into the Auxiliary Division, the members of which were higher paid and received better supplies. Members of both units, however, were despised by Irish civilians, against whom the "Tans" and "Auxies" routinely retaliated for IRA raids and assassinations.
  To make matters worse, it was also far from unheard of for the regular British Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, or the Dublin Metropolitan Police to use the same tactics. In many cases, mixed forces of Army, policemen, and paramilitaries would abduct, torture, and summarily execute Irish civilians who were unconnected with the IRA. This further eroded support for the British rule among the Irish people.
  On 20 March 1920, Tomás Mac Curtain, the nationalist Lord Mayor of Cork, was shot dead in front of his wife and son by a group of RIC officers with blackened faces.
  Enraged, Collins ordered the Twelve Apostles to hunt down and assassinate every one of the RIC officers involved in Mac Curtain's murder. On 22 August 1920, RIC District Inspector Oswald Swanzy, who had ordered the assassination, was shot dead with Mac Curtain's revolver while leaving a Protestant church service in Lisburn, County Antrim. This sparked a "pogrom" against the Catholic residents of the town.
  On Bloody Sunday, Collins' men set out to assassinate members of a British army intelligence known as the Cairo Gang, killing or fatally wounding fifteen men, some of whom were unconnected to the Gang. In one incident, the IRA group was heard to scream, "May the Lord have mercy on your souls", before opening fire.
  Collins later said of the incident,
  My one intention was the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of ordinary decent citizens. I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed. If I had a second motive it was no more than a feeling such as I would have for a dangerous reptile. By their destruction the very air is made sweeter. For myself, my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting in wartime the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.
  That afternoon, British security forces opened fire into the crowd during a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing 14 and wounding 68 players and spectators.
  The hostilities ended in 1921 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which guaranteed the independence of the Irish Free State.
  Irish Civil War
  After independence, Irish nationalist movement divided over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which granted a partitioned Ireland Dominion status within the British Empire. Furthermore, all officials of the new Irish State were required to take an oath of allegiance to King George V of the United Kingdom.
  As a result, the Irish Civil War was fought between those Irish n
caption: Irish Army soldiers escorting a captured IRA member
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