Molly Childers - Allegation of Spying

Allegation of Spying

In 2006, historian Michael T. Foy published a book "Michael Collins's Intelligence War: The Struggle Between The British and the IRA 1919-1921" in which he suggested that Molly Childers may have been a spy for the British during the Irish War of Independence. Foy speculates that she volunteered for British intelligence before the couple moved to Ireland in 1918. The claim was described by reviewers in Irish newspapers as "dramatic", "sensational" and 'a bottle of smoke'.

The author discovered in British archives a series of intelligence reports which indicated that a woman with high-level access to Sinn Féin had been passing intelligence to the British forces. However, the name of the agent had been obscured by blue pencil in the British files stored in the UK National Archives at Kew. The author noted circumstantial evidence which, in his opinion, suggested that Molly Childers may have been the spy, including the assertion that Childers had not shared her husband's enthusiasm for Irish independence, and the spy's use of American phraseology. He proposed that Molly Childers had "the qualities to carry off such a dangerous role" and that she "consistently displayed intelligence, courage, decisiveness and single-minded determination", but acknowledged that there was no conclusive evidence. However, Foy went beyond scholarly speculation when he claimed that Childers was the only person who could fit the profile of the spy.

Nessa Childers, the daughter of Molly's son President Erskine Hamilton Childers, dismissed the evidence as "circumstantial", saying in a television interview that "it just doesn't fit with her character". She questioned the evidence that the spy was female, and noted that "Up until the day she died she had photographs of Liam Mellows, Liam Brady and Rory O'Connor on her bedside and she revered them. It doesn't follow that such a person could have put those people's lives at risk."

Historian Peter Hart, who has consistently challenged republican historiography, acknowledged that Foy's theory "does seem to fit the facts as presented", but noted that "all the other facts we know about thoroughly republican Molly suggest that it simply cannot have been true, and there are other good reasons to be cautious". Hart noted that the inaccuracy of some of the intelligence suggested a source trying to tell British "hardliners just what they wanted to hear".