A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process
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In effect, Count Plunkett, ex-internees, Irish Volunteers and other advanced nationalists formed a new Sinn Féin in 1917—an umbrella party catering for a wide range of people from disgruntled Home Rulers to out-and-out militant republicans. Arthur Griffith, recently released from jail, agreed to lead the party. For the present there was no suggestion of renewing the armed struggle.
Thousands of nationalists, particularly young people, clamoured to join the new Sinn Féin. By July 1917, the police reported, 336 Sinn Féin clubs flourished across the island. Sinn Féin was clearly on the crest of a wave. This became particularly apparent during two further by-elections in 1917.
PUT HIM IN TO GET HIM OUT
JOE McGUINNESS, THE MAN IN JAIL FOR IRELAND
McGuinness, a republican prisoner in Lewes Jail, defeated the Irish Party candidate in South Longford in May. Then Major Willie Redmond MP, brother of the Irish Party leader, fell mortally wounded on the battlefield of Messines on the Western Front; men of the Ulster Division, fighting alongside southerners in the 16th Division, carried him back from no-man’s land. A by-election followed in Willie Redmond’s constituency of East Clare. And the Sinn Féin candidate was Eamon de Valera, the only surviving male commandant of the 1916 rising.
Armed Volunteers paraded the streets and formed escorts, and de Valera, freshly released from prison, spoke without restraint:
You have no enemy but England.... Although we fought once and lost, it is only a lesson for the second time.... Every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom.
The result of the election was a foregone conclusion, though few predicted the wide margin of de Valera’s victory. Arthur Griffith now stepped aside to allow de Valera to become the president of Sinn Féin.
Behind the scenes Sinn Féin activists squabbled with each other over what should next be done. Then the government swiftly provided the bonding solution required.
Episode 222
THE FIRST DÁIL
In a desperate attempt to find a way of implementing Home Rule while the Great War still raged, Prime Minister David Lloyd George called an Irish Convention. The conference, which met in Trinity College Dublin from the summer of 1917 to the spring of 1918, proved futile. The rising separatist party, Sinn Féin, refused to attend. In any case, northern and southern Unionists fell out. At a crucial meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1916 it had been agreed to seek partition of the six north-eastern counties. Unionists in the Ulster counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan accepted this majority decision with heavy hearts. According to one Unionist MP, ‘Men not prone to emotion shed tears.’
Southern Unionists, not wanting to be cut off from the support of northern Protestants, campaigned vigorously to stop partition. They came close to clinching a deal with John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Ulster Unionist MP Adam Duffin wrote in disgust to his wife on 28 November: ‘The Southern Unionist lot ... want to capitulate & make terms with the enemy lest a worse thing befall them. They are a cowardly crew & stupid to boot.’
Redmond died in March 1918, and when his successor, John Dillon, failed to hammer out an agreement, the Convention dissolved.
At that moment Field Marshal Lüdendorff’s storm-troopers dramatically broke through on the Western Front and surged towards Paris. By this time recruitment in Ireland had fallen to a trickle. A contemporary anti-recruiting song caught the prevailing sentiment:
Sergeant William Bailey’s looking very blue,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra-loo ...
Some rebel youths with placards
Have called his army blackguards
And told the Irish boyhood what to do.
He’s lost his occupation,
Let’s sing in jubilation
For Sergeant William Bailey, too-ra-loo.
In 1916 Westminster had introduced conscription in Great Britain. Now it was about to be imposed in Ireland. Nationalists of every variety closed ranks to resist conscription. Dillon led his MPs out of Westminster in protest. Catholic bishops described the Conscription Act as ‘an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist by every means that are consonant with the law of God’. A general strike, highly effective in all parts of the country outside the north-east, paralysed transport.
In May 1918 the newly arrived viceroy, Lord French, announced the existence of a ‘German Plot’. Police arrested seventy-three prominent Sinn Féiners. Knowing that it would only strengthen their cause, Sinn Féin activists still at large made no attempt to avoid arrest. In fact not a shred of solid evidence had been presented to show that Irish nationalists were conspiring with Imperial Germany.
Lloyd George gave up the unequal task, and, as Winston Churchill remarked, the government ended up with ‘no law and no men’. Then, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Great War ended. It is estimated that 28,000 Irishmen had given their lives in the Allied cause.
A long overdue general election followed in December 1918. For the first time all men aged twenty-one and over had the vote. Women—provided they were aged over thirty and were householders or married to householders—also got the vote. At a stroke the Irish electorate had been tripled. The 1918 election proved to be the most momentous of the twentieth century.
Sinn Féin had a spectacular triumph: it won 73 seats. The Irish Party lay in ruins: it won only six seats, and four of these had been the result of an electoral pact with Sinn Féin in Ulster. Helped by a much-needed redistribution of seats, Irish Unionists raised their representation from 18 to 26. Lloyd George’s wartime coalition swept the boards across the Irish Sea; and of great significance for the future of Ireland was that now more than half of all MPs were Conservatives.
Countess Constance Markievicz had the honour of being the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons. But she, like all the Sinn Féin MPs, abstained from Westminster. Instead they convened on 21 January 1919 in Dublin’s Mansion House as ‘Dáil Éireann’, the Assembly of Ireland. Reporters outnumbered the elected representatives, since thirty-four Sinn Féin MPs still languished in jail. At that historic meeting the Dáil unanimously approved a Declaration of Independence:
Whereas the Irish people is by right a free people:
And Whereas for seven hundred years the Irish people has ... repeatedly protested in arms against foreign usurpation:
And Whereas English rule in this country is ... based upon fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people:
And Whereas the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people ...
Now, therefore, we, the elected Representatives of the ancient Irish people, do, in the name of the Irish nation, ratify the establishment of the Irish Republic.…
Would the peacemakers in Paris also ratify the Irish Republic?
Episode 223
RETURN TO VIOLENCE
On 21 January 1919 Dan Breen and eight other Irish Volunteers ambushed two constables escorting a cart carrying gelignite at Soloheadbeg in Co. Tipperary. Volunteers shot dead the policemen, both of them middle-aged men well known in the locality, at point-blank range. On the following Sunday Monsignor Ryan declared from his pulpit in Tipperary town: ‘God help poor Ireland if she follows this deed of blood.’
The attack at Soloheadbeg took place on the same day as the first meeting of Dáil Éireann. Would the elected representatives sanction such acts of violence? There had been no talk of a renewed armed conflict. For the present Dáil deputies put their faith in their ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’, an appeal to the Paris Peace Conference.
Seán T. O’Kelly, representing the Dáil, took up residence in the Grand Hotel in the Boulevard des Capuchines. There he entertained lavishly and circulated the Dáil’s Declaration of Irish Independence. But O’Kelly’s voice was all but drowned by the clamouring of others.
At the conference dozens of delegations—including one led by Ho Chi-Minh seeking independence for the Vietnamese in French Indo-China—lobbied for the self-determination of their nationalities. There was a further problem: the Irish republicans in their 1916 Proclamation had claimed the now defeated Imperial Germany as an ally.
With the help of a duplicate key, Eamon de Valera, the President of the Dáil, escaped from Lincoln Prison in February. Off he went to the United States in a vain attempt to seek the backing of Congress for Irish independence. The Dáil set up an administrative apparatus and appointed ministers in an effort to supplant British government institutions. Over much of the country Dáil courts, assisted by republican police, operated remarkably well. But all that Prime Minister David Lloyd George had to offer was Home Rule and partition.
The Dáil Minister for Finance, Michael Collins, became convinced that independence would have to be fought for. Collins lost patience with fellow Sinn Féin deputies who were opposed to further violence. In May 1919 he wrote:
The policy now seems to be to squeeze out anyone who is tainted by strong fighting ideas.... It seems to me that official Sinn Féin is inclined to be ever less militant and ever more political and theoretical.... It is rather pitiful...
He and Cathal Brugha, the Defence Minister, encouraged local groups of Irish Volunteers, now officially designated the Irish Republican Army, to wage war on the Royal Irish Constabulary. In the words of a stirring rebel song:
I’ll take my Short revolver
And my bandolier of lead,
And live or die I can but try
To avenge my country’s dead.…
I’ve always hated slavery
Since the day that I was born,
So I’m off to join the IRA
And I’m off tomorrow morn.
Soon RIC men, for the most part Catholics popular in their districts, found themselves in mortal peril, liable to be shot down in cold blood. The terror spread as ordinary people, who failed to obey a decree to shun the police, faced punishment at the point of a gun.
As well as supervising Volunteer brigades throughout the country, Collins created an elite of skilled assassins in Dublin, known as the ‘Squad’. During the day Collins would appear for photo-calls as he raised money for the ‘Dáil Loan’ to finance the alternative republican government. At nightfall he crept into the headquarters of the Dublin detective force. There, with the assistance of detectives acting as double agents, he pored over secret British papers. Having identified civil servants and police most threatening to his cause, Collins then sent out his Squad to assassinate them.
The government’s answer was to fight insurrection with repression. It imposed military rule on the most disturbed districts. By the end of August 1919 7,000 troops were on active service, administering martial law. On 12 September 1919, the same day that Collins’s Squad shot dead an unarmed detective in Dublin, Lloyd George declared the Dáil illegal. By suppressing an elected body representing a majority of the Irish people, the Prime Minister unwittingly handed the initiative to Collins, Brugha and the militants within Sinn Féin.
The year 1920 witnessed an alarming upsurge in violence. Some police now retaliated with unauthorised reprisals. On 20 March RIC men in plain clothes and blackened faces murdered Tomás MacCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork and commandant of the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA. Other policemen resigned. To replace them, the government raised recruits in Britain. IRA propaganda portrayed them as the scrapings of English jails. Actually most were men demobilised from the British army, and all had to supply a reference, then known as a ‘character’. Many wore khaki trousers since there not enough of the dark green RIC uniforms to go round. The new recruits quickly became known as ‘Black and Tans’, the name of a pack of hounds in Co. Tipperary.
When Lloyd George unleashed the Black and Tans on the Irish countryside, he signalled the bankruptcy of his Irish policy.
Episode 224
TERROR AND REPRISAL
However much Prime Minister Lloyd George might attempt to deny it, he had a war on his hands in Ireland in 1920. Michael Collins’s assassination squad liquidated detectives, spies, government agents and public servants with cold-blooded efficiency. IRA men attacked police barracks, burnt over five hundred abandoned stations and destroyed income tax offices in twenty-two counties.
From the end of 1919 the government had been enlisting temporary recruits to the RIC, known as the Black and Tans. In July 1920 it added an Auxiliary Division, composed of demobilised army officers. These men, given no police training and free from normal military discipline, now brought further terror to the Irish countryside.
The IRA formed ‘flying columns’, mobile units each composed of around thirty-five men, serving for up to a week at a time. Tom Barry, a Great War veteran and commandant of the West Cork Brigade, led a particularly active flying column:
This prison scum in brown and black
No tanks or war equipment lack
Yet o’er the sea they’ll ne’er get back
If they’re caught by Barry’s Column.
With increasing frequency, the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans saw the dead or mutilated bodies of their comrades brought back to their barracks. Unable to get at the real culprits, they wreaked their vengeance on the ordinary people. On 21 September Volunteers shot an RIC head constable in Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. That night lorry-loads of Black and Tans overran the town, setting fire to shops and houses and—unprovoked—bayoneting two citizens to death in their nightshirts.
Similar reprisals followed in the towns of Milltown Malbay, Lahinch and Ennistymon in Co. Clare. Here one man was shot to death and cremated in the blazing ruins of his own house; and another was killed when he tried to help a neighbour whose house had been set on fire. One eyewitness wrote:
You never saw anything so sad as the sight in the sandhills that morning. Groups of men and women, some of them over seventy years, practically naked, cold, wet, worn-looking and terrified, huddled in groups. I met two mothers with babies not three weeks old, little boys, partly naked, leading horses that had gone mad in their stables with the heat, and then when we got near the village ... distracted people running in all directions ... with the awful thought haunting them that the burned corpse might be some relative of their own.... Every evening there is a sorrowful procession out of the village. The people too terrified to stay in their houses sleep out in the fields.
Shortly afterwards Black and Tans wrecked and burnt houses in Trim, Co. Meath, and Mallow, Co. Cork. For a time this reign of terror seemed to work. Winston Churchill exulted in recent successes in a speech delivered at Dundee:
We are going to break up this murder gang. That it will be broken up utterly and absolutely is as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.... Assassination has never changed the history of the world and the government are going to take care it does not change the history of the British Empire.
On 25 October Terence McSwiney, who had succeeded the murdered Tomás MacCurtain as Lord Mayor of Cork and commandant of the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA, died at Brixton prison after seventy-four days on hunger strike. An eighteen-year-old medical student, Kevin Barry, was hanged in Mountjoy Jail on 1 November after shooting dead a soldier of the same age. A week later Lloyd George declared: ‘We have murder by the throat!’
But did he? On the morning of Sunday 21 November Michael Collins sent out members of his ‘Squad’ to the Gresham Hotel and other places in Dublin. They shot dead twelve British officers, some in front of their wives. One victim was simply a veterinary officer. That afternoon Auxiliaries and RIC men opened fire on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary. They killed twelve civilians, including a woman, a child and a Tipperary player. The horrors of that ‘Bloody Sunday’ concluded with the killing of three men held by Auxiliaries in the guardroom of Dublin Castle.
On 28 November two lorries filled with Auxiliaries ran into an ambush prepared by Tom Barry’s flying column at
Kilmichael near Macroom, Co. Cork. Seventeen of the eighteen Auxiliaries were killed, almost certainly a majority of them after they had surrendered. Barry recorded that he drilled his men up and down the road among the burning lorries and mutilated corpses to stiffen morale shaken by the carnage.
Auxiliaries exacted vengeance on 11 December. They sacked the centre of Cork city, destroying the City Hall, the Corn Exchange, the Carnegie Free Library and most of Patrick Street. In 1921 worse was to come.
Episode 225
‘THE DREARY STEEPLES’
The sustained slaughter of the Great War seemed to accustom men to the regular use of violence to advance a multiplicity of causes. After the Armistice blood continued to flow. Foreign intervention against the Bolsheviks only intensified the miseries of civil war in Russia. There millions died. In the streets of northern Italy squads of fascist ex-servicemen and revolutionary socialists fought each other with knuckledusters and revolvers for supremacy. Spartacists and Freikorps threatened to stifle the infant Weimar Republic in its cradle. Admiral Horthy crushed Communists in Budapest with an army invading from Transylvania. In the new states emerging from four collapsed European empires ethnic rivalries flared into violent struggles. By the shores of the Aegean Sea Greeks and Turks slaughtered each other in their thousands.