Archie Doyle

With the end of the IRA's alliance with de Valera and the increasing confrontation between them, Doyle – now a veteran highly respected in the IRA circles – became deeply involved in the organisation's 1940s campaigns. "Harry", the memoirs of IRA man Harry White, make repeated admiring references to "Archie Doyle of Dublin, the Tan War veteran who had fought through it all".^[4]

During the IRA's Northern Campaign, Doyle is said to have participated in the abortive raid on the British barracks at Crossmaglen, County Armagh, on 2 September 1942, in retaliation for the execution of Tom Williams earlier that morning.^[5] The IRA unit – some twenty men in a commandeered lorry and accompanying car – was discovered by a passing RUC patrol near the village of Cullaville. Doyle is mentioned in White's memoirs as having "jumped out of the car, Thompson in hand, and started shooting at the RUC". (Since the element of surprise was lost, the attack on the barracks had to be cancelled.)

A week later, on 9 September, White mentions Archie Doyle as having commanded the assassination of Sergeant Denis O'Brien, Irish Special Branch detective and himself a former IRA man, near Dublin. It was a highly controversial affair, opposed by the IRA GHQ in Belfast as damaging to the Northern Campaign, and precipitating a massive manhunt by the Irish police. It was IRA Chief of Staff Charlie Kerins who was two years later caught, charged with the O'Brien assassination and eventually executed for it. White, however, claims that it was Doyle who actually commanded that action, on Kerins's orders. (Doyle, who openly spoke of his part in killing O'Higgins, seemed far more reticent about this part of his career).

In 1943 Doyle was assigned as the IRA's Quartermaster General in Belfast.^[6]

On 1 July 1943 Doyle is mentioned as having participated, together with Kerins and with Jackie Griffith – both of them much younger men, who were only born when Doyle was already a full-fledged fighter against the British – in an operation of "fund-raising" for the hard-pressed IRA (i.e., robbery). The three men arrived on bikes at the gates of Player Wills factory on the South Circular Road, Dublin, and with scarves around their faces stopped at gunpoint a van loaded with some £5,000 for wages, and drove away with the van and the money.^[7]

Griffith was shot down by the police in Dublin less than a week later, in what was charged to be an extrajudicial assassination, and Kerins – as mentioned – was caught in 1944 and executed, becoming a major IRA martyr. Doyle, however, continually survived decades of a very dangerous way of life and managed to die of old age. He died in St. James's Hospital in 1980.^[8]

In April 1987, the Irish Nationalist "New Hibernia" magazine noted: "(...)Joe McGrath and Jack O'Sheehan are dead; Archie Doyle went – though not before telling us how they had shot Kevin O' Higgins".^[9]