A badge of the Citizens Defence Force 1922-23
Based in Oriel House, Westland Row, Dublin. They were an armed organisation and were composed of some 101 former British officers (full time), and 50 part time, organised on military police lines and semi-secret, but concerned with special guard and intelligence work or duties.
They duplicated some of the work of the Protective Corps (who guarded Government buildings, the GPO, large banks and several government Ministers, Senators and their homes). They never revealed their names when submitting reports, using a personal number instead. (see File S1411, Taoiseach's Dept. at National Archives)
The cost of the CID and the Protective Corps was provided for in the CID estimates. The CDF was provided for under the Secret Service estimates. (File S.1681, Taoiseach's Dept, NA)
On 27th March 1923 Frank Teeling (a member of the IRA assassination gang that carried out the Bloody Sunday murders in November 1920) was drinking heavily in the Theatre Royal when he shot dead William Johnson of the CDF. Teeling had a long standing drink problem and there has been a suggestion (it was passed down through my own family lines) that he had mental issues also. At any rate an argument had started over a bag of tomatoes that Johnson had brought into the bar which led to the killing. Teeling received a prison sentence for manslaughter.
In 2007 a photograph album was sold purporting to show a member of the CDF in action during the Civil War. The description casts these men as loyal (to the new Irish Free State) which needs to be contrasted and examined against the claim that these were ex-British officers living in Dublin. Both claims need not be mutually exclusive:
Based in Oriel House, Westland Row, Dublin. They were an armed organisation and were composed of some 101 former British officers (full time), and 50 part time, organised on military police lines and semi-secret, but concerned with special guard and intelligence work or duties.
They duplicated some of the work of the Protective Corps (who guarded Government buildings, the GPO, large banks and several government Ministers, Senators and their homes). They never revealed their names when submitting reports, using a personal number instead. (see File S1411, Taoiseach's Dept. at National Archives)
The cost of the CID and the Protective Corps was provided for in the CID estimates. The CDF was provided for under the Secret Service estimates. (File S.1681, Taoiseach's Dept, NA)
On 27th March 1923 Frank Teeling (a member of the IRA assassination gang that carried out the Bloody Sunday murders in November 1920) was drinking heavily in the Theatre Royal when he shot dead William Johnson of the CDF. Teeling had a long standing drink problem and there has been a suggestion (it was passed down through my own family lines) that he had mental issues also. At any rate an argument had started over a bag of tomatoes that Johnson had brought into the bar which led to the killing. Teeling received a prison sentence for manslaughter.
In 2007 a photograph album was sold purporting to show a member of the CDF in action during the Civil War. The description casts these men as loyal (to the new Irish Free State) which needs to be contrasted and examined against the claim that these were ex-British officers living in Dublin. Both claims need not be mutually exclusive:
AN IRISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL WAR PERIOD SCRAP BOOK.
Containing printed photographic postcards with views of the destruction to Liberty Hall, 1916, the shelling of the Four Courts, 1922, etc, along with a good range of newspaper clippings regarding the events of the day, including the takeover of Dublin Castle in 1922 by Michael Collins, group shots of Black and Tans, Royal Irish Constabulary, etc.
One particularly interesting postcard in this album depicts two pro-treaty soldiers taking cover at a barricade and returning fire in Dublin, July 1922, and being directed by a man in civilian clothes with a pair of binoculars and a pistol. The civilian at the barricade would have been a member of what was known as the Citizens Defence Force. The Citizens Defence Force was a small secret armed paramilitary force which had approximately 150 members. In addition to acting as bodyguards for important figures in the Free State, whose lives were threatened, they also organised the guard posts at important public buildings and, more importantly, were inserted into Irish Free State Army units, to ensure discipline and loyalty, and see to it that those units carried out their instructions to the letter, in the same way that the Russian communist regime inserted Commissars into their army units. This force was essentially an extension of Michael Collins's "Twelve Apostles" unit, but now modelled on the scheme adopted by Trotsky. They were hand picked men whose loyalty was beyond doubt, and whom Collins could trust to ensure that the various units in the army remained loyal (needless to say, following the defection of many Volunteer units at the start of the Civil War, Collins had every reason to be suspicious of army loyalty). The Citizens Defence Force was a subject for discussion when the 1923 Finance Bill was discussed in the Senate on 31st July of that year, the then Minister for Finance confirming that the unit had been raised early in the spring of 1922, and was being financed out of the Secret Service Fund. Photographs of members of the Citizens Defence Force in action are very rare. This album was compiled by a Waterford unionist, as evidenced by some of the manuscript annotations to photographs and clippings contained in the album.
Adams lot 168, 17 April 2007
and also -
Reference - Survivors, by Uinseann MacEoin, first published 1980, second edition, with additional accounts, notes and appendices pub-1987.
Publisher: Argenta Publications, 19 Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1, Ireland. Printed by The Leinster Leader Ltd, Naas, Co Kildare.
- Sean Dowling, Surviving Staff Commd't I.R.A. ..........
'The British were engaged in moving taxation and other papers that pertained to the Six Counties to Belfast, I wanted it stopped; I did not see why they should be allowed to set up the apparatus of partition in Belfast. I called on Seamus Dwyer, the Sinn Fein T.D., in our area, 'not to worry', said he, but nothing was done about it. Later in the Civil War, the same Seamus Dwyer was shot dead behind the counter of his shop by the I.R.A. He was behind something called the Citizens Defence Force whose purpose was to keep a watch upon Republicans'. (page 404)
Then there was Bobbie Bondfield, the only son of his family, from Moyne Road, who was in the Tramway Office with us. He got away from that, was active in Dublin, was arrested and imprisoned then, but escaped. With the war still continuing he went to the shop of Seamus Dwyer, T.D. in Terenure, and shot him dead behind the counter. If he did, he had good reason because Dwyer was carrying on undercover work through a group the Citizens Protection Association. But poor Bondfield was run to earth, and this time he was not spared. He was a dental student, and he had to get in his attendance at the hospital in Lincoln Place. Foolishly, around March 1923, he resumed there again. Cosgrave with his bodyguard was visiting Westland Row church on Holy Thursday when they ran into him.
Sometime later he was found around the Tongue fields in Clondalkin on the last day but one of March with eighteen bullet wounds. (page 410)
