Free The Squad by T. Ryle Dwyer Page A

boarding a tram outside while the raid was still in progress. The staff working in the building were arrested and each member was sentenced to two months in jail. They included Dick McKee, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, Fintan Murphy, Frank Lawless, Seán Hayes, Seán O’Mahony, Patrick Sheehan, Michael Lynch and Dan O’Donovan. ‘They made a clean sweep of the entire male staff, with the exception of the writer [himself] who evaded them,’ Collins wrote. ‘You will be pleased to know that they got no documents of importance, so that the only disorganisation is through the seizure of the staff.’
    Detective Sergeant Thomas Wharton, whose regular beat in cluded Harcourt Street was shot and seriously wounded a couple of days after the raid. He, along with the ill-fated Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth, had previously arrested Beaslaí. Wharton, who was from Ballyhar near Killarney, was walking on the western side of Stephen’s Green towards Grafton Street. He had come down Harcourt Street when a lone shot rang out.
    This seemed very different from the shooting of Smyth or H o e y . Wharton was not shot by a gang acting in concert, but by a lone gunman, with an unarmed accomplice. There had been plenty of backup firepower when Smyth and Hoey were shot, but in this instance the would-be assailant’s gun jammed after he got only one shot off.
    Learning on the night of 10 November that Detective Sergeant Wharton was supposed to be in Harcourt Street, O’Daly and Leonard had gone to look for him, but he was not there. They then went to the vicinity of G Division headquarters. ‘After spending some hours around College Street waiting for Wharton’s return to barracks, we decided to give it up as a bad job,’ O’Daly said. ‘Joe Leonard got into the No. 15 tram to go home, and he had only just gone when I saw Wharton going up Grafton Street with two other detectives. I followed them as far as Harcourt Street. I immediately went to Joe Leonard’s house, No. 3 Mount pleasant Avenue, Ranelagh.
    ‘When I got there I discovered that Joe had no gun in the house, so we decided to go down, get Joe’s gun and then go after Wharton. On our way down we met Wharton face to face at the corner of Cuffe Street, with three other detectives. I told Joe it would be a pity to let the opportunity pass; that one of the detectives walking side by side with Wharton was the man we were not to shoot.
    ‘I fired at Wharton and he fell,’ O’Daly continued. ‘The other detective turned round but seemed to make very little effort to draw a gun. I discovered then that the parabellum I had was choked and I could not fire the second shot. I kept my eyes on the other three detectives as we made for Cuffe Street, and I noticed that the friendly detective walked between me and the other two detectives. I saw the gun in his hand but I did not hear him fire it. I think he tried to get between the other detectives and myself in order to prevent them firing.’
    O’Daly added that they were surprised to hear the following day that the bullet had hit Wharton in the back of the right shoulder, passed through his right lung, exiting in the front and had then struck Gertrude O’Hanlon, a young female student from Sligo who was walking in front of him. She was particularly lucky because although the bullet tore through her velvet cap and drew an amount of blood from her scalp, it was fortunately only a scalp wound.
    Later James Hurley, an innocent news vendor and veteran of the First World War, was charged with the attempted murder be fore a military court. He had spent fifteen years in the British army before he was discharged in 1917 having been wounded, shell shocked and gassed. The main witness was William F. Bachelor, a former British army officer living on South Circular Road. He testified that a week earlier he had seen Hurley standing at the corner with three other men whom Bachelor had confronted after some remark was made. Bachelor testified that he