Come Here To Me!

buildingsofireland.ie image of Crow Street

Crow Street is one of my favourite streets in Dublin. You could easily miss it, but if you venture down Dame Street and turn into it, you’ll find one of the most colourful streets in the capital in terms of the diversity of independent businesses there. All City Records, Classic Ink Tattoos and other long-established businesses are there. While within the Temple Bar area, it has avoided the crassness of much of the district.

The street has an interesting history,going back to the Crow Street Theatre of the eighteenth century, and it was the home of the Charitable Musical Society, centrally important to the visit of Handel to Dublin. That’s not why we’re here today though.

In revolutionary times, the street was fundamentally important to the intelligence war. At 3 Crow Street, what appeared to the public to be only a legtimate printing company was the headquarters of the Irish Republican Army’s intelligence campaign.J .F Fowler’s printers had long been in the printing business, its name appearing in 1850s Dublin editions of books, but there was other business apace in different parts of the building. Republican Frank Thornton recounted that:

The first office opened by G.H.Q. Intelligence in the city was over Fowler’s in Crow Street, Off Dame Street, which was right bang up against Dublin Castle. Here, Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen, myself, together with Frank Saurin,Charlie Dalton, Charlie Byrne, Joe Guilfoyle, started off our Operations.

The Crow Street operation was in business from the summer of 1919. By this time, things were heating up in Dublin, with IRA assassination teams (broadly remembered in Irish history as ‘The Squad’) striking against intelligence police targets on the streets. Republican Charlie Dalton, in his memoir of the period, recounted how:

…one of the Squad called on me and asked me to accompany him. ‘The assistant director of intelligence wants to interview me’, he told me. He brought me into the city and through a number of side streets to Crow Street, an alleyway off Dame Street, quite close to Dublin Castle – the stronghold of the enemy. When we came to a small printer’s shop he beckoned me up the stairs, and on the second floor he knocked on the door….After a little delay, a door was opened and we were admitted. There were three or four other Volunteers inside, some of whom I knew slightly, I noticed there were stacks of newspapers lying around.

Newspapers were the least of the material in 3 Crow Street. Intelligence workers were figuring out how to crack the codes of Crown Forces, while as Dalton (who accepted a position) remembered, “we compile a list of friendly persons in the public services, railways, mailboats and hotels. I was sent constantly to interview stewards, reporters, waiters and hotel porters to verify our reports of the movement of enemy agents.”

Race meetings, fashionable hotels like the Shelbourne Hotel, and restaurants like Kidd’s Buffet were all known to be popular spots for members of the British forces and crown services to gather. Still, the most significant job for 3 Crow Street was to get an idea of just what was happening inside Dublin Castle.

In this regard, Lily Mernin was key. Born in Dublin in 1888, but raised primarily in Waterford, Lily worked as a shorthand typist inside Dublin Castle. In 1919, she made contact with the republican movement, leading to Michael Collins meeting her at her home, where she agreed to become an intelligence agent. As Dominic Price has noted, this was an incredible coup:

Situated in the same building as Mernin was the British Army’s intelligence department. This gave her access to officially classified information such as official reports, troop strengths, British army raids and information on the identity and addresses of British secret service personnel. She also picked up a great deal of information on physical descriptions, social habits and activities of British and RIC personnel through friendships and gerneral ‘loose talk’ among Castle employees.

Lily Mernin, photographed with Piaras Beaslai. (Image: National Library of Ireland)

Mernin, codenamed ‘The Little Gentleman’, got down to work. Quickly she solved one mystery, as key republicans were being sent death threats on official Dáil Éireann notepaper. Not only did Merin discover where in the Castle they were coming from, she found the very typewriter. Bravely, she attended social functions as a means of gathering information.

Striking against British intelligence operatives, and the Dublin Metropolitan Police ‘G Division’ in particular, was of paramount importance.The much-feared ‘G Men’ had been centrally important to identifying ringleaders of the Rising, and their ‘Movement of Extremist’ files demonstrate just how much the British state knew about republican radicals. As far as the republican movement were concerned, these men either had to turn or be elimated. Collins later justified this by explaining the key difference between an intelligence officer – or a spy – and a regular soldier:

Without her spies England was helpless… Spies are not so ready to step into the shoes of their departed confederates as are soldiers to fill up the front line in honourable battle. And, even when the new spy stepped into the shoes of the old one, he could not step into the old one’s knowledge… We struck at individuals, and by doing so we cut their lines of communication, and we shook their morale.

Operations at 3 Crow Street were overseen by a team that included Liam Tobin, who had served at the Four Courts during the Rising, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton. Collins, though in almost constant contact with this team, did not frequent the premises.

Intelligence gathering was a two way street of course. Secret republican munitions factories, Dáil ministry offices and more besides were constantly being raided throughout the period. In time, the Crow Street operation folded, moving to Great Brunswick Street, where the sign “O’Donoghue & Smith, Manufacturing Agents” was over the door.

Fowler’s business survived the revolutionary period. There is nothing marking the building today as a site of such importance in the Irish revolution, but that is true of so much of the city centre core, where revolution was plotted behind quiet doors.