I want to try a quick word association game with
you. OK, sure. If I say G -Men, what is the very
first image that pops into your head? Just be
honest. It's pretty immediate, actually. I see
black and white footage right away. Right, like
the Prohibition era stuff. Exactly. 1930s Chicago,
fedoras, Tommy guns. and probably Elliot Ness
smashing a barrel of whiskey somewhere. Yeah,
that is the pop culture default, for sure. You
know, we think of the FBI, we think of American
federal agents chasing down Al Capone. It's a
really strong brand. It is, but looking at this
massive stack of source material you've brought
in for us today, it seems like we have the geography
and the timeline completely wrong. We really
do. Because the original G -Men weren't American
at all. and they weren't federal, and they existed
nearly a century before the FBI was even a concept.
That's exactly right. We are actually going to
Dublin, Ireland for this. And we are going way
back to the Victorian era. So welcome to today's
Deep Dive. Our mission today is to trace the
complete evolution of the G Division of the Dublin
Metropolitan Police. The original G -Men. The
original G -Men? And I have to say, just reading
through the historical documents and the firsthand
accounts we've pulled together, their arc is...
They really are. I mean they go from checking
pawn tickets to fighting a full -blown spy war.
Yeah. And we're gonna impartially look at exactly
how that happened based on the historical records
left behind by both sides. It's a perfect case
study in how a police force evolves and honestly
how it can completely collapse from the inside
out. Yeah, because you have a unit that starts
out fairly mundane, right? dealing with pickpockets
and petty theft. But under the pressure of history,
it mutates into this high -stakes political intelligence
agency. Right. It shifts from criminal policing
to political espionage. And it's not just about
the policing. It's about the espionage, the double
agents, the secret archives. So let's set the
scene for the listener. Let's do it. It's 1842.
The Dublin Metropolitan Police or the DMP is
just being set up. How exactly does G Division
fit into this? Was it just their detective branch?
It was. But the structural setup is really important
to understand here. If you look at London at
the exact same time, their detectives were completely
decentralized. Meaning what exactly? Meaning
they were attached to local stations like divisions
A, B, C and so on. They answered to the local
boss of whatever neighborhood they were in. Oh,
OK. So they were just neighborhood cops, essentially.
Exactly. But in Dublin, the British administration
did something completely different. They centralized
the detectives. Interesting. Yeah, they created
G Division as a single unified force based out
of Exchange Court in Dublin Castle. And for anyone
who doesn't know Dublin Castle isn't just a regular
police station. No, not at all. It's the nerve
center. It was the absolute seat of British colonial
power in Ireland. So by physically placing the
detectives right there, the administration was
sending a message. They were saying, this unit
answers directly to the center. They were the
only plain clothes unit in the entire city. Everyone
else was in uniform walking a regular beat. So
G Division was the shadow force from day one.
Now you'd expect with that kind of intense setup
that they'd immediately start hunting down revolutionaries,
right? But I was looking at their early caseload
from the 1840s and 50s in our sources and it's...
Well, it's pretty boring. It is incredibly mundane.
It says here they had a superintendent, two sergeants,
and 14 constables. And their primary directive
was literally just watching pawnbroker's offices.
Yeah, I know it sounds dull, but think about
the nature of crime in a poverty -stricken city
in the mid -19th century. Lots of petty theft,
I imagine. It's almost exclusively property crime.
Theft burglary. If you steal a silver pocket
watch in 1845... You can't eat it. You have to
turn it into cash somehow. You have to fence
it. Right. And the pawn shop is the absolute
choke point for that. So the early G -men weren't
exactly Sherlock Holmes. No, they were just guys
standing on street corners. Literally standing
there watching who went in and out of pawn shops
looking for receivers of stolen goods. Which
I guess when you think about it is actually a
pretty amazing foundational training for what's
to come. Oh, it's excellent training. For 20
solid years, these guys learned the faces of
the Dublin underworld. They learned how to blend
into a crowded street. They learned how to track
people without being noticed. Exactly. They were
building a highly sophisticated surveillance
skill set, even if they were just looking for
stolen soup spoons. But then the target changes.
We get to 1858 and 1859 and suddenly stolen spoons
are not the priority anymore. No, definitely
not. The Fenian movement begins to rise. This
is the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Yes. They
want an independent republic and they're willing
to use physical force to get it. And based on
the letters from the administration at the time,
this must have absolutely terrified the folks
in the castle. Oh, it did. They realized very
quickly that uniformed cops on the street couldn't
fight a secret society. Because you can't arrest
an idea. Exactly. You need to know what the Finians
are planning before it actually happens. So they
looked at G Division, this centralized group
of very experienced watchers, and they repurposed
them. They became a full -fledged political police
force. Right. Which brings us to what we might
call the first golden age of the G -Men. In the
1860s, the division is run by a man named Superintendent
Daniel Ryan. And looking at the operational results
he got, he seems like an incredibly effective
operator. He was very effective. And Chief Commissioner
Sir Henry Lake supported him completely. Ryan
understood that to fight a network, you need
your own network. You need spies. And he landed
a really big one, a guy named Pierce Nagel. Nagel
is such a fascinating figure in the historical
record because to the public, he's just a regular
guy working at the Irish People newspaper. But
the Irish People wasn't just a regular paper.
No, it was effectively the Fenian headquarters.
It was their main propaganda arm. So having an
informer in there is massive. Secretly, Nagel
is on Ryan's payroll, feeding information directly
back to Dublin Castle. Exactly. And in 1865,
that investment. really pays off. Nagel tells
Ryan about a specific message sent to Fenian
units down in Tipperary. The message was simply
action this year. Wow. So the balloon is going
up. The rising is imminent. It's the smoking
gun Ryan needed. But then G Division gets a piece
of pure luck that honestly feels like bad screenwriting.
You mean the lost luggage incident. Yes. The
lost luggage. I had to read the source document
on this three times to make sure it wasn't a
myth. Tell the listener about this because it's
crazy. So it's July 15th, 1865. An emissary for
the Fenian movement is at Kingstown railway station,
which is what we call Dunlog here today. And
in the general chaos of traveling, he loses a
bag. And this isn't just a bag containing a change
of clothes. No, it contained the highly detailed
plans for the entire uprising. Written documents.
Lists of names specific locations imagine that
feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize
you've literally left the revolution Sitting
on a train platform. It's an absolute disaster
for them because that bag Predictably finds its
way straight to G division So now thanks to Nagel's
tip off from the inside and the lost luggage
from the outside Daniel Ryan has the who the
where and the when so he strikes he does on September
15th He executes a massive coordinated raid on
the newspaper offices They arrest the staff,
they seize all the files, and the 1865 rising
is completely crushed before it can even start.
It's a total decapitation of the movement. It
really is. And it's cemented G Division's reputation
for decades. After that, they look completely
invincible. They were seen as the all -seeing
eye of the British Empire in Ireland. And that
reputation just continues to grow under the next
superintendent, right? In 1874, John Mallon takes
over. Now, if Ryan was a solid administrator,
Mallon seems like a totally different beast entirely.
Mallon is legendary. He is arguably the most
famous detective in Irish history, and his background
is just full of incredible contradictions. Like
the fact that his father was actually a member
of the Ribbon Society. Yes, exactly. We give
the listener a quick refresher on the Ribbon
Society. They were an agrarian secret society
in Ireland. Very anti -landlord. anti -authority.
So Malin actually grows up in a house that is
culturally opposed to the police. Yet he joins
the force anyway and becomes the ultimate hunter
of Republicans. Right. Do you think that specific
background gave him an edge? Oh absolutely, without
a doubt. He deeply understood the mindset. He
knew the families. He knew the local feuds. He
understood the hidden connections out in the
countryside. He built up this personal network
of informers that was just untouchable. But reading
about his methodology, he had a very strange
way of operating a modern police force. Very
strange. He almost never used files. He refused
to write things down, right? Correct. He refused
to write down the names of his sources or the
specific details of his intelligence gathering.
That sounds incredibly inefficient. I mean, for
a government bureaucracy, at least. For bureaucracy,
it's a total nightmare. Right. But for a spymaster
operating in Dublin, it was brilliant security.
Because paper trails get leaked. Exactly. Malin
knew that clerks talk. If he wrote down the name
of an informer on a piece of paper, that man
would likely be dead in a week. So he kept it
all locked in his head. He was just a walking
human database. Literally. He could walk down
a street in Dublin, spot a random face in the
crowd, and instantly know the man's political
history, his cousins, and what secret meeting
he attended last Tuesday. That is terrifying.
And he was incredibly successful with it. He
took down the invincibles. Oh, those were the
guys who assassinated the chief secretary in
Phoenix Park, right? That's them. a very dangerous
and violent splinter group. Malin rounded them
all up. He also fought the Land League during
the agrarian unrest, and he even arrested Charles
Stuart Parnell in 1881. So as long as Malin was
in charge, G Division remained this terrifying
secure force. Yes. But there is an obvious problem
with relying on a human database. Humans eventually
retire. Precisely the issue. Malin retires in
1902. And when he walks out the doors of Dublin
Castle for the last time, he takes all that institutional
knowledge with him. So he inadvertently leaves
this massive blind spot in the intelligence network.
He does. And this brings us right into the 20th
century and the absolute core of our deep dive
today. We skip forward to 1919. The Anglo -Irish
War begins. But the G division of 1919 is not
the G division of John Mallon. No, they're in
serious trouble now. How so? Well, the regular
uniformed police, the DMP, they saw which way
the political wind was blowing. They realized
the IRA was a serious, highly organized military
force. So the uniformed cops mostly just stepped
back. They essentially went on strike without
going on strike. Exactly. They did traffic control.
They investigated regular burglaries. But they
tried very hard to stay politically neutral.
Just don't look at us. We're just directing traffic
kind of vibe. Right. But G Division couldn't
do that. Their entire reason for existing was
political. Their one job was to hunt the rebels.
But they were operating completely in the dark
now. They didn't have Malin's brain to rely on
anymore. Right. And the British administration
tried to fix this intelligence gap by bringing
in outside help. Ah, the so -called Cairo Gang.
Yes, which was a fatal miscalculation. Let's
talk about them, because it's a fascinating choice.
They recruited all these intelligence officers
who had served in World War I, often in the Middle
East, hence the Cairo nickname, or in other parts
of the empire. Right. Now play devil's advocate
for me here for a second. These are highly experienced
military spies. Why is bringing them in a bad
idea? Spycraft is spycraft, isn't it? You would
think so, but context is everything in intelligence.
You cannot take a man who was running local agents
in Egypt or operating behind German trench lines
and just drop him into a crowded Dublin pub and
expect him to function effectively. Because he
sticks out too much. Like a sore thumb. They
dressed differently. They spoke with very distinct
upper -class English accents. They didn't know
local slang, and they didn't really know the
geography of the city. So they were highly conspicuous.
Very conspicuous. And in an urban guerrilla,
War being conspicuous makes you a target. Meanwhile,
while G Division is struggling to integrate these
outsiders who don't know the city, the IRA is
doing something incredibly clever. This is the
real turning point of the conflict. Yeah, because
they aren't just hiding from the police anymore.
They are actively infiltrating them. Exactly.
This is where G Division truly loses the war.
They were so intensely focused on looking outward
at the streets that they didn't bother to look
at the desks right next to them. Enter Ned Roy.
Detective Sergeant Edward Broy. A massively pivotal
figure in all of this. Broy was a confidential
clerk inside G Division. And clerk sounds pretty
low -level, but in this specific context, it's
everything. It is the absolute keys to the kingdom.
Because Malin was gone, remember. The new administration
was writing everything down again. They were
typing up detailed reports, compiling huge lists
of suspects. And Broy is the guy physically typing
them. He is. So he sees every single piece of
paper, and he quietly starts making carbon copies
of the most sensitive files. How did he even
get them out of the castle? I assume he wasn't
just walking out the front gate with classified
files tucked under his arm. No, he was very smart
about it. He used a cutout. There was a librarian
named Thomas Gay who worked at the public library
on Capel Street. Breu would subtly slip the documents
to Gay at the library, and then Gay would secretly
pass them along to IRA leader Michael Collins.
It's just so remarkably mundane, isn't it? A
local public library acting as a deadly intelligence
pipeline. It was devastating to the British efforts.
But Broy didn't just stomp at carbon copies.
On April 7th, 1919, he does something that honestly,
if you put it in a spy movie, people would say
it's way too unrealistic. Oh, you mean the lock
-in? The lock -in. Yeah, tell this story because
it's incredible. So Broy is working the night
shift at the G Division headquarters over on
Great Brunswick Street. And he decides to smuggle
Michael Collins into the station. Just pause
and think about that for a second. The most wanted
man in the entire British Empire. The man literally
every single police officer in Ireland is actively
hunting for and he just walks right into their
own police station. Right through the door. Broy
brings him straight into the highly classified
archives room and literally locks the door behind
them. And Collins just spends the entire night
in there with a flashlight reading his own files.
Why take that kind of massive risk though? Was
it just ego? Did he just want to see what they
had on him? No. Not at all. It was pure cold
calculation. He wasn't just in there reading
the incident reports. He was carefully looking
at the signatures at the bottom of those reports.
He needed to know exactly which detectives were
currently active, which ones were actually efficient,
and most importantly, which ones were getting
dangerously close to him. He was connecting the
names to the faces of the men hunting him. Exactly.
He was building a prioritized target list. Up
until that specific night, G Division was essentially
a faceless, monolithic institution to the IRA.
But after that night, Collins knew exactly who
was who. And this intelligence directly leads
to the formation of the squad. Right. Collins'
own counterintelligence unit, a dedicated group
of young men whose sole purpose was assassinating
the specific G men on that list. And once Collins
has that verified information from the archives,
the timeline of events just becomes completely
brutal. It's immediate. July 30th, 1919, the
very first name on the list is crossed off. Detective
Sergeant Patrick Smith. Right. They call him
the dog. The dog. He was shot and killed near
Drumcondra. And then it's just the domino effect
after that. In September 1919, Detective Daniel
Hoey is killed. In October, Michael Downing.
In November, Sergeant John Barton. January 1920,
Inspector William Redmond. It's just a relentless
pace. It is the systematic destruction of an
intelligence agency. Collins famously called
it blinding the British. Blinding the British,
that makes total sense. Because if you take out
the plain clothes detectives, the eyes and the
ears... The whole administration goes completely
blind. Exactly. They can have tens of thousands
of armed soldiers stationed in Dublin, but if
they don't have the intelligence to know exactly
who to arrest, that entire army is functionally
powerless. There's one specific incident in the
source material from April 1920 that really drives
home just how intensely personal and psychological
this whole war got. The shooting of Harry Kells.
Ah, yes. Detective Constable Harry Kells. Now,
Kelz wasn't just out on the streets investigating.
He was actively doing something that the IRA
feared more than absolutely anything else. He
was conducting the identity parades. Yes. So
he was physically going into the prisons. He
would go into Mount Joy Prison, look at the lines
of Republican inmates, and personally identify
them for the state. Wow. He'd put and say, that's
the guy who read at the post office, or that's
the guy who shot the soldier last month. So he
was the direct human link between a prisoner
and a long jail sentence or even a hangman's
noose. Exactly. So he absolutely had to go. Kells
was shot on Camden Street on April 14th. And
the authorities were completely rattled by this,
right? Because Kells was so uniquely valuable
to them. They were panicked. They went out and
arrested over 100 people that very same night
in mass retaliation. Honestly, the message had
already been clearly sent to the rest of the
division. And that message is simply, if you
do your job effectively, you die. Yes. And think
about the profound psychological impact that
has on the surviving G -Men. It must have been
paralyzing. You're sitting at your desk in Dublin
Castle. You know perfectly well your colleague
was shot in the street last week. You know the
IRA somehow seems to know your movements before
you even make them. Do you really go out and
aggressively investigate? No way. You stay safely
inside. You stay inside. You push papers around
your desk. You actively avoid meeting your street
informers. And just like that, the entire intelligence
network completely collapses. They were just
paralyzed by the fear of assassination. So we
finally get to the end of the Anglo -Irish War.
It's 1921. The treaty is signed and the Irish
Free State is established. What officially happens
to G Division? Well, this is perhaps the ultimate
irony of the entire story. The division is formally
dissolved. And then in 1923, the new Irish government
decides they need to create their own new detective
branch out of Oriole House. Right. And obviously,
they need an experienced intelligence man to
run it. Oh, don't tell me. They appoint Colonel
David Nelligan. Nelligan. The exact same guy
who wrote the critique of G Division being unprofessional
earlier in our sources. The very same man. Because
Nelligan was actually another one of Michael
Collins' top double agents. Wow. He had deeply
infiltrated G Division right alongside Ned Broy
during the war. That is quite an ending. So the
man who spent the entire war actively undermining
the police force from the inside is now officially
put in charge of rebuilding it for the new state.
The Foxes are completely running the henhouse
at that point. It really highlights the absolute
total victory. of Collins' intelligence war.
He didn't just defeat G Division. In the end,
he absorbed it. That is fascinating. So when
we step back and look at this whole arc, from
the guys watching the pawn shops in 1842 to this
lethal spy war in 1920, what would you say is
the big historical takeaway here? I think it's
really a lesson about the profound fragility
of intelligence networks. You know, we tend to
think of surveillance states as these monolithic,
incredibly powerful things. And under someone
like John Malangy division, truly was powerful.
They completely controlled the flow of information.
They had total information asymmetry over the
public. Exactly. But the very moment that flipped,
the moment Broanel again started sharing those
secret files with the enemy, that power just
evaporated overnight. It shows that a state can
have all the resources. the fortified castle,
the legal authority. But if you don't have absolute
internal loyalty, you really have nothing at
all. It's the classic who watches the watchman
scenario playing out in real life. And in this
specific case, the watchmen were quite literally
being watched by the guys sitting at the exact
next desk over. That is such a great way to put
it. Now, as we wrap up this deep dive, I want
to leave everyone listening with one final provocative
thought to mull over on your own. We talked a
lot today about how Superintendent Malin kept
everything strictly in his head to protect his
sources' rights. We usually look back at that
kind of behavior as being old -fashioned, and
we view writing things down as modern bureaucratic
progress. But in this specific story, modernization
was actually the fatal flaw. Think about it.
If G Division hadn't started systematically creating
those modern paper files that Ned Broy was able
to carbon copy Michael Collins never would have
gotten his hands on that hit list, which means
sometimes the old -fashioned ways really are
the safest ways. That is a very provocative thought
to end on. And that is going to do it for our
deep dive into the historical sources of the
G -Men of Dublin. Thanks so much for listening.