One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  James Stephens, a veteran of France’s revolutionary underground, founded a new organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in 1858. Unlike the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders, the IRB established a lasting presence on the Irish political scene, surviving well into the twentieth century. Its supporters became popularly known as the Fenians. Backing for the movement came predominantly from the working and lower-middle classes, giving it a strong egalitarian flavour, although the movement’s radicalism was largely pre-socialist, pitting the people against the aristocracy, not the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.10 The Catholic Church responded to the Fenians with ferocious hostility, and they were the nearest thing to an anti-clerical force in a deeply religious society. However, in contrast to the French republicans who had inspired James Stephens, the IRB tried to avoid a head-on clash with the Church.11

  The IRB’s Irish-American allies pressed hard for an uprising against British rule, and even mounted raids of their own into Britain’s Canadian possessions: the first time a military force calling itself the ‘Irish Republican Army’ went into action. In 1866 the American branch accused Stephens of foot-dragging and ousted him from the leadership. Yet after another failed insurrection the following year, the IRB’s Supreme Council decided to adopt a more cautious strategy.12 A revised constitution published in 1873 promised that the organization would ‘await the decision of the Irish nation, as expressed by a majority of the Irish people, as to the fit hour of inaugurating a war against England’, in the meantime offering its support to ‘every movement calculated to advance the cause of Irish independence’.13 For the rest of its history, the IRB had one foot in the world of conspiracy, and the other in the realm of open mass politics.

  The IRB’s main rival in the latter sphere was the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), founded by Isaac Butt in 1874, but given real impetus by Butt’s successor Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landowner who deployed his aristocratic hauteur to good effect against Britain’s ruling class. It later became customary to refer to two different strains of Irish nationalism: the ‘constitutional’ and ‘physical-force’ parties. However, those labels obscured some basic facts about Irish political life. The reformist, parliamentary approach favoured by the IPP ran up against two main obstacles. Restrictions based on class and gender prevented the majority of Irish men and women from voting, even after franchise reform trebled the Irish electorate in 1885. Moreover, Irish MPs took their seats in an overwhelmingly British parliament, with no guarantee their voices would be heard. Parnell recognized as much by pursuing obstructionist tactics in the House of Commons, to the displeasure of Isaac Butt.

  The IRB gave some tentative backing to Butt’s party, and one member of its Supreme Council, John O’Connor Power, won a seat at Westminster for the IPP.14 IRB activists also played a central part in the genesis of the Land League, a movement for agrarian reform founded in 1879.15 The League spearheaded a bitter struggle against ‘landlordism’ in the midst of a deep agricultural depression, demanding the right of tenants to buy their plots. The British prime minister William Gladstone prohibited the League in 1881 and had Parnell imprisoned. A series of land acts went some way towards addressing the grievances of rural Ireland, enabling many tenants to become small proprietors, although agrarian discontent remained a live issue well into the twentieth century, especially in the western counties.

  After his release from jail, Parnell began pivoting towards a parliamentary alliance with Gladstone’s Liberal Party. He cemented that pact after the IPP’s electoral triumph in 1885, when it swept the boards outside Ulster. Meanwhile the IRB wilted under the onslaught of Britain’s political police.16

  Parnell accepted a proposal for self-government within the United Kingdom that fell a long way short of what the IRB was prepared to accept. Even in this diluted version, Home Rule still faced resistance at Westminster. Gladstone’s first bill in 1886 was voted down in the House of Commons; a second bill seven years later passed the lower chamber but faced uncompromising opposition from the House of Lords. In the intervening period, revelations about Parnell’s private life had seen him ejected from the IPP’s leadership at the behest of Gladstone and the Catholic bishops. As a consequence, the Home Rulers split, and Parnell turned back to the Fenians for support – an alliance that his followers continued for some time after Parnell’s death on the campaign trail in 1891.17

  As late as 1909, one-quarter of the IPP’s parliamentary group had a background in the IRB.18 But by the turn of the century, the Brotherhood itself was a greatly diminished force.19 The revolutionary tradition in Irish politics appeared to have been extinguished, while the IPP’s reunified caucus waited for the stars to align in its favour once again.

  The Home Rule Crisis

  That moment looked to have finally arrived in 1910. The Liberal Party had returned to power four years earlier after a long period of Conservative hegemony that took Home Rule off the agenda at Westminster. A snap election deprived the Liberals of an overall majority and left them relying on Irish MPs to pass legislation that stripped the aristocratic upper chamber of its veto power. In return for this support, Herbert Asquith’s government reluctantly pledged to grant Ireland self-government.20

  That happy consummation could not come soon enough for the Home Rulers and their leader John Redmond. The IPP’s near-monopoly of electoral representation had left the party flabby and complacent. Its MPs rarely had to face a serious challenge at the ballot box, and their average age had risen sharply since Parnell’s time.21 If the movement began to falter, there were new forces ready to challenge Redmond’s authority as national leader. The journalist Arthur Griffith, a former IRB man, led a rival party that called itself Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’).22 Griffith called for a ‘dual monarchy’ on the Austro-Hungarian model as a halfway house between Home Rule and full independence, to be achieved by the abstention of Irish MPs from Westminster. A rising tide of cultural nationalism, channelled through organizations like the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association, frequently spilled over onto the political field. The IRB also began to revive under the leadership of Young Turks like Denis McCullough, who in his own words ‘cleared out most of the older men (including my father) most of whom I considered of no further use to us’.23

  Most alarmingly for the IPP, with its conservative, Catholic stamp, the promising turn of events at Westminster coincided with a dramatic surge in labour militancy as syndicalism took root on Irish soil. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) sought to mobilize unskilled workers who could only hope to better their condition through tactical militancy and the strength of numbers.24 The ITGWU leader Jim Larkin was a strong supporter of Irish independence who believed that the working class would be its only reliable champion.25 Larkin’s socialist ally James Connolly expressed the same viewpoint in works like Labour in Irish History, with such eloquence that many came to believe he had invented it from scratch.

  The business tycoon William Martin Murphy saw ‘Larkinism’ as a mortal threat to the interests of property. He organized a lock-out of union members in 1913 that became a struggle of unparalleled bitterness and intensity. When police attacked strikers at a rally in Dublin, the ITGWU leaders formed a working-class militia, the Irish Citizens’ Army, to protect their members in future clashes.26 The lock-out ended in victory for the employers, leaving the Irish workers’ movement to lick its wounds and prepare for the next round.

  Murphy’s appetite for the battle had been whetted by his belief that Ireland would soon have its own parliament. A strong supporter of Home Rule, he wanted his class to hold the initiative at the dawning of a new age. However, the IPP’s confidence that a smooth road to self-government lay ahead proved to be disastrously misplaced.

  At Westminster, the Conservative Party wanted to use Ireland as a lever to return it to government, and its leader Andrew Bonar Law threw his full weight behind Unionist opposition to Home Rule.27 In Ireland itself, the Ulster Unionist Pa
rty began making preparations for war, pledging to establish a provisional government on the day Home Rule came into effect. With enthusiastic support from Bonar Law, the Unionist leaders Edward Carson and James Craig set up a private militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and armed it with weapons from Germany.28 There was a large element of shadow-boxing in these manoeuvres, however. With the Tories on their side and regular briefings from sympathetic generals, the Ulster Unionists knew there was little danger they would have to face the British Army. This was confirmed by the Curragh mutiny of March 1914, when British officers defied orders to ‘coerce Ulster’.29

  The Tory–Unionist alliance wavered between opposing self-government for the entire country and demanding Ulster’s exclusion from the new dispensation. Carson, a southern Unionist, would have preferred to block Home Rule altogether, but his lieutenant Craig was ready to fall back on the north-eastern counties, the only real stronghold for Unionism in an age of mass politics. As partition began to seem inevitable, the definition of ‘Ulster’ itself became rather hazy: the term could refer to the full nine-county province, where there was a small unionist majority, or a more compact area of six counties. A slimmed-down, manageable territory had obvious attractions for Unionism, although two of the six counties still had more nationalists than unionists.

  Supporters of Home Rule observed these developments with fury, contrasting the indulgence bestowed on the UVF with their own rich experience of British coercion. John Redmond’s inability to respond to the crisis sapped his authority, and the IRB saw a chance to intervene. Its members took the lead in establishing the Irish Volunteers as a counterweight to the UVF. Although the Volunteers formally pledged to support the IPP leader, who made sure to place his own men on their executive, the implicit challenge to Redmond’s cautious parliamentary tactics was unmistakable.30

  The outbreak of a European war in August 1914 postponed a head-on clash. Asquith’s government put Home Rule on ice until the conflict was over, while the UVF enlisted in the British Army; Redmond urged the Irish Volunteers to do the same. The majority heeded his call, leaving behind a militant rump under strong IRB influence. As the war dragged on, becoming deeply unpopular, Redmond’s standing among the nationalist population declined sharply.31

  During this period, a close-knit group of IRB leaders began making plans for an uprising against British rule. They kept their scheme secret, not only from the general public, but even from the nominal head of the Irish Volunteers, Eóin MacNeill. Fearing that the socialist leader James Connolly would mount a separate insurrection of his own, the conspirators brought him into their confidence. Jim Larkin’s departure for the US had left Connolly in charge of both the ITGWU and the Irish Citizens’ Army. The collapse of European socialism into support for the war effort horrified Connolly, and he was desperate to strike a blow of some kind against the slaughter in the trenches.32 In the past, Connolly had argued that the working class should lead the struggle for national independence; now he decided to join an uprising with a more ambiguous social content, leaving future generations of left-wing activists to puzzle over his legacy.33

  The Easter Rising of 1916 lost any real chance of success when Eóin MacNeill discovered that the conspirators had tricked him and sent out instructions for the Volunteers to stand down. Knowing they would be prosecuted anyway, even if they abandoned their plan, the leaders of the rebellion decided to go ahead, in hope rather than expectation of victory, with a fraction of the manpower they had been counting on, and none of the anticipated German support. Outside Dublin, there was little action of note.34 The capital itself saw intense street fighting that far surpassed the impact of 1848 or 1867. After six days Patrick Pearse, the rebel commander, surrendered to avoid further loss of life. Pearse became the first of sixteen men to be executed under martial law, including a badly injured James Connolly.

  The steady trickle of executions helped convert a general feeling of bewilderment at the Rising into popular admiration for its leaders. Sinn Féin played no direct part in the rebellion, but Arthur Griffith’s party became a channel for the new mood, winning a series of by-elections and choosing Éamon de Valera, one of the most senior rebels to have escaped the firing squad, as its leader.35 De Valera, whose US birth and part-Spanish parentage gave him a dash of exoticism, went on to dominate Irish politics for the next half-century, combining the appearance of rigidity with a readiness to dance around awkward principles when the situation demanded it.

  An attempt by the new Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, to impose conscription on Ireland completed the work that the Rising had begun. The anti-conscription movement, supported by Sinn Féin, the IPP and the Catholic bishops, climaxed with a general strike in April 1918 that shut down the country outside Ulster.36

  Eight months later, the United Kingdom held the first general election since 1910, with the taste of victory over Germany still fresh. Franchise reform had nearly trebled the size of the Irish electorate, and Sinn Féin took full advantage to mobilize support. De Valera’s party promised to boycott the parliament in Westminster and secure international recognition for an Irish Republic.

  It won 73 of 105 seats, wiping the IPP off the electoral map. The Unionists held their own in Ulster, the only bulwark against Sinn Féin’s hegemony, winning 23 of the region’s 37 seats.37 On 21 January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs gathered in Dublin’s Mansion House to inaugurate a new assembly, Dáil Éireann, and declare Irish independence. After a century of disappointment, the dream of Tone and Stephens looked to have become a reality.

  A Nation Once Again?

  On the same day, a group of Irish Volunteers began the War of Independence with an attack on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Tipperary. By now, the reorganized Volunteers were generally known as the Irish Republican Army. The maxim of their new campaign might have been drawn from words attributed to John MacBride, one of those executed in 1916: ‘If it ever happens again, take my advice and don’t get inside four walls.’38

  Guerrilla tactics had been used before in struggles against foreign occupiers, most famously in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, but never in such an effective and systematic manner to achieve a political goal. The British government denounced the IRA as cowardly murderers because its Volunteers refused to meet highly trained, professional troops in open combat. The bitterness of the attacks underlined how difficult it was for a powerful state to crush a much weaker enemy that chose not to play by the rules. Anti-colonial militants in the rest of Britain’s empire took careful note.

  The IRA began by targeting members of the RIC, an armed police force recruited overwhelmingly from the Irish Catholic population. Many rural police stations shut down altogether, leaving much of the countryside outside government control. Fear of assassination and communal pressure combined to produce mass resignations, obliging the authorities in London to rely on outside recruits to fill the gap. Reprisals against civilians by these auxiliary troops deprived British rule of such moral authority as it still possessed.39 In November 1920, Lloyd George boasted to a society banquet in London that his government had ‘murder by the throat’. By the end of the month, the IRA had killed fourteen men it identified as British intelligence officers on a single morning in Dublin, while its 3rd Cork Brigade wiped out an eighteen-strong company of auxiliaries in an ambush at Kilmichael.40 British troops responded to the assassinations in Dublin by opening fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match, killing twelve. Soon afterwards, the government declared martial law in the south-west.

  For the most part, the IRA fought its war in Dublin and Munster, with rural chieftains such as Seán Moylan, Liam Lynch and Michael Brennan operating at some remove from the national leadership. The relationship between the Volunteers and the IRB was never fully clarified: on paper, the Brotherhood had no input into IRA decision-making, but the last president of its Supreme Council, Michael Collins, was also one of the IRA’s most charismatic and influential commanders.

  Sinn Féin
politicians like Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera did their best to maintain that the IRA took orders from the Dáil and its cabinet. In practice, the military wing of the movement paid little attention to its nominal superiors, and Sinn Féin’s main contribution to the struggle lay elsewhere, in a system of ‘republican courts’ that by-passed the British legal system.41 Organized labour also played a significant part in this campaign of civil resistance: there was a short-lived Soviet in Limerick to protest against martial law, railway workers blocked the transport of British soldiers, and a general strike in April 1920 forced the authorities to release hundreds of republican prisoners.42

  Facing a choice between negotiation and wholesale repression, Lloyd George put out feelers to the Sinn Féin leadership, leading to a truce in July 1921.43 A delegation headed by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins went to London to discuss the terms of an Anglo-Irish Treaty.

  Lloyd George had already moved to secure the Unionist position in Ulster by partitioning the island. The IRA was less active in the province than in other parts of the country. In Belfast, it had to play the role of communal defence force, facing off against loyalist militias as the city descended into a maelstrom of sectarian violence. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act created two Home Rule parliaments for a twenty-six-county ‘Southern Ireland’ and a six-county ‘Northern Ireland’. Opposition from Sinn Féin made the first of those parliaments a dead letter, while the second took on a life of its own. The Unionist leader James Craig now saw regional self-government as a vital safeguard against the threat of British perfidy.44