There is no crime in detecting and destroying in wartime the spy and informer... I have paid them back in their own coin. Michael Collins Michael Collins’ development of a formidable intelligence network transformed, for the first time in history, the military fortunes of the Irish against the British.

The Dublin Brigade of the IRA was pivotal to this defining strategy. In 1919, Collins formed members of the brigade into two Special Duties Units. They eventually joined to form his ‘Squad’ of assassins tasked with immobilising British intelligence. Eyewitness testimonies and war diaries lend immediacy and insight to this thrilling account of the daring espionage and killings carried out by both sides on Dublin’s streets.

Dominic Price reveals how the IRA developed Improvised Explosive Devices, and experimented with chemical weapons in the form of poison gas and infecting water supplies. When the Civil War erupted, the devotion of a significant cohort of the Dublin Brigade to Collins, forged during the darkest of days, was unbreakable. Many of them formed the backbone of the Free State in key intelligence and military roles. While not shying away from the revulsions of the Civil War, neither does Price abandon the brigade’s story at its conclusion.

As well as revealing the disenchantment of some, who took part in the 1924 army mutiny, he exposes the personal horrors that awaited in peacetime, when psychological trauma was common.