The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  82 { War of Independence

  Prime Minister Asquith appointed David Lloyd George (who would replace Asquith as prime minister later that year) to resolve the Irish home rule question once and for all. Lloyd George, relying heavily on the advice of Unionist associates, settled on a compromise in which Ireland got home rule but the six majority Protestant counties in the north remained part of the Union (the British Empire).

  To southern Nationalists, this was unacceptable. To make matters worse, the British army seized the weapons from Irish Volunteer groups in the south but allowed UVF forces to keep theirs. People in the south began to believe that the Home Rule Bill on the books was a charade.

  This gave Sinn Féin its big chance. Led by Éamon de Valera, a half-American mathematician who had taken part in the Easter Rebellion, Sinn Féin began to take Parliament seats away from the traditional home rule candidates. Sinn Féin’s stated goal was an independent, unified Republic of Ireland.

  Sinn Féin’s parliamentary successes were limited to Nationalist hotbeds until the British government gave them two great boosts: first, it extended army conscription to Ireland, an act the Irish had dreaded for years; second, it arrested de Valera and other Sinn Féin leaders on vague and insubstantial charges of a plot against the government. Both actions were highly unpopular, and they convinced the majority of the Irish that the British government was not serious about letting Ireland run its own affairs.

  While Sinn Féin was taking the road of politics, a twenty-seven-year-old Easter Rebellion veteran named Michael Collins was exploring an alternate path. Working with the IRB and the Irish Volunteers, he began organizing a paramilitary force that could put guns behind Sinn Féin’s claims of independence. This force became known as the Irish Republican Army — the IRA.

  Most Irish people deplored the IRA killings. Collins calculated that his systematic terrorism would provoke the English into an overly aggressive response. And that’s exactly what happened.

  The British shipped thousands of soldiers to Ireland and created a new police force called the Black and Tans to help keep the peace. The Black and Tans were composed primarily of former British soldiers who had neither the police training nor the familiarity with Ireland that the sensitive situation demanded. These men found Ireland very stressful — the people who murdered their fellow officers were indistinguishable from the people they were supposed to protect. So they responded with a campaign of reprisals that matched the IRA’s in brutality.

  This period of guerilla strikes and police reprisals is known as the Anglo-Irish War. Both sides lost hundreds of men. The IRA made little military headway, but the war’s impact on the opinions of the Irish people was devastating to the British. The peacekeeping strategy backfired — the brutal and often indiscriminate reprisals of the Black and Tans convinced people that Sinn Féin was right after all and that Great Britain was a repressive occupier that would only relinquish Ireland if forced out.

  The conflict was simultaneously playing havoc with British politics. English civilians were shocked by the daily stories of police brutality in Ireland. In composing the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war, Britain claimed that World War I had been fought to protect the rights of small countries to determine their own fates, and yet it had a small country in its own backyard demanding its own rights.

  Prime Minister Lloyd George called for a cease-fire and treaty negotiations. The fact that he was offering a treaty was significant; only sovereign nations can sign treaties with one another, so his offer made clear that independence was on the table. The Sinn Féin and IRA leaders agreed to the cease-fire, and a group of ambassadors led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins went to London in 1921 to negotiate.

  Both sides agreed that Ireland would take a dominion status similar to that enjoyed by Canada — independent, but still a part of the British Empire. The chief sticking points were whether the Irish would have to swear an oath to the king, and the final settlement of the Ulster question.

  After skillful negotiating by a British team including Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, the Irish contingent largely gave in on both points. The final Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and Ireland did not demand that Irish citizens swear allegiance to the king, but it did require them to recognize his dominion over Ireland. More significantly, the treaty established the six-county partition of Ulster pushed for by Unionists since 1914. This action, called Partition, created the political entity called Northern Ireland.

  Collins signed the treaty, saying it was the best that Ireland could achieve under the current conditions. After a bitter struggle, it was passed by the Dáil (the new Irish Parliament). Not everyone was happy, however; Éamon de Valera condemned the treaty, as did the majority of radical Nationalists in the IRA. These Nationalists said that they had fought for a united Ireland, and they wouldn’t take one cut into pieces. And so the Irish Civil War (1921–23) began.

  83 { Irish Civil War

  Like all civil wars, this one was marked by bitterness and atrocity. Collins was forced to organize an official military response against the same IRA men he had fought beside for years. Hundreds died, and Collins himself was killed in an ambush. The anti-treaty forces, however, did not have the support of the populace, and it was soon clear that they could not win. To stop the bloodshed, Éamon de Valera announced that it was time for Ireland to accept the treaty and move on.

  Ireland had peace and independence at last, but not without a cost. The scars of the Civil War haunted Irish politics for decades. More significantly, the division between the Irish Free State in the South and Northern Ireland had become real and immovable. Unionists in Northern Ireland, appalled by the violence of the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, resolved more strongly than ever to remain part of the United Kingdom. This unnatural division between North and South has plagued people on both sides of the border to this day.

  When the Irish Civil War ended, Ireland had peace and independence at last. Over the next fifty years, the people of Ireland worked through the difficult questions regarding their relationship with the United Kingdom, the role of the Catholic Church in their government, and the thorny question of Northern Ireland

  84 { Irish Free State

  The Ireland that emerged from the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was known as the Irish Free State. In many ways, it had the independence that Irish Nationalists had dreamed about for years. It had its own Parliament, the Dáil Éireann (doyl ayran), which was responsible for Ireland’s social and economic affairs. It inherited a British government infrastructure that allowed it to jump quickly into efficient self-government. Police and Irish home defense forces were now entirely under Ireland’s control, with a new, unarmed police force known as the Garda Síochána (GAR-dah sho-HA-na).

  But the Free State still maintained a number of ties to England. It was still subject to British international policy, a point made clear by the naval bases that the British navy maintained at Irish ports. A British “governor” continued to serve in Dublin, although the role was largely symbolic. The most powerful symbolic gesture was that Irish civil servants were required to swear the Oath of Fidelity (also known as the Oath of Allegiance) to the British Empire before they could serve. These remnants of the old relationship with England played a powerful role in the course of Irish Free State politics.

  The civil-war beginning of the Irish Free State accounts for the curious political divisions of twentieth-century Ireland: the fundamental political divisions in Ireland developed around those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who opposed it, rather than on the Liberal/ Conservative or Labor/Business lines seen in the political systems of most modern democratic states.

  The victorious pro-treaty faction created a political party called Cumann na nGaedheal (ku-man na gah-yehl), which had been the original name of Sinn Féin in 1900. Cumann na nGaedheal formed the basis of the Free State government. Its leader, William T. Cosgrave, tried to establish a stable Irish state within its constitution
al boundaries as a British dominion.

  But the opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty were still an important force. The opposing party, Fianna Fáil (fee-AH-na foil), was created in 1926 by Éamon de Valera. Fianna Fáil maintained that the provisions of the Anglo-Irish Treaty — the Oath of Fidelity and the partition of Northern Ireland — were unacceptable compromises. Although de Valera had called a halt to military opposition to the treaty, he still believed that Ireland needed to assert its independence. Fianna Fáil had limited influence in the early days because its members refused to swear the Oath of Fidelity and thus could not take their seats in the Dáil.

  The priority of the Free State government under Cumann na nGaedheal was to create a stable government. In 1924 a contingent of old IRA men within the Free State Army voiced objections to the new government. Rather than risk a military coup, the Free State government immediately removed all objectionable officers from power and placed the army under the command of a loyal Garda commander. The Irish Free State was going to be ruled by civil rather than military powers.

  Éamon de Valera dominated twentieth-century Irish politics. He led Sinn Féin (1917–26), the Irish provisional government (1919–22), the anti-treaty forces (1922–25), and then Fianna Fáil (for the next fifty years). He served for sixteen years as taoiseach (prime minister) and nineteen years as president. He retired from politics at the age of ninety-one and died two years later, in 1975. Throughout, de Valera was known as a fervent patriot, a devout Catholic, and an incorruptible servant of his people.

  85 { De Valera and the Fianna Fáil Path

  De Valera was born in New York in 1882 to an Irish mother and a Spanish father — hence his unusual name. This made him an American, which he used to his advantage throughout his political career. When he was three, his father died and his mother sent him to Ireland to be raised by his grandmother in Bruree, County Limerick. He studied mathematics in Dublin and became a teacher. He also came to love the Irish language and became involved with the Gaelic League, which led to his extreme Nationalism.

  De Valera was an intellectual and he looked the part — tall, thin, and bespectacled. He didn’t stand out from the crowd until he ended up in prison after the Easter Rebellion; subsequently, his eloquent letters and well-thought-out arguments for Irish independence began to inspire a generation of young men, and they soon chose him as their leader.

  In 1927 Fianna Fáil politicians agreed to take the Oath of Fidelity after an IRA assassination of a top Free State administrator threatened to renew factional violence. De Valera decided that the time had come to work within the constitutional framework in order to achieve his party’s goals. This strategy became increasingly effective after the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which gave imperial dominions — Canada, India, South Africa, and the Irish Free State — the right to disregard parliamentary actions that they did not believe should apply to them. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the Statute of Westminster effectively allowed dominions to make themselves independent in all but name.

  This was the chance de Valera had been waiting for.

  The 1932 general elections returned a majority of Fianna Fáil delegates to the Dáil. A few months afterward, de Valera announced that Ireland would no longer pay land annuities to England. These annuities were part of the Anglo-Irish Treaty: farmers who had benefited from English government loans to buy land were supposed to repay the loans to the Free State government, who would then hand the money over to England. But de Valera maintained that the land had been stolen from the Irish in the first place, so Ireland had a moral justification for withholding the annuity payments.

  The act was popular in Ireland, but the British Treasury was not amused. It immediately began a system of retaliatory trade measures to punish Ireland. British tariffs increased the cost of Irish cattle imports by up to 80 percent. British markets constituted 96 percent of Irish exports at this time, so the tariffs were costly, although they were partially offset by not having to pay the land annuities. This period of trade retaliation was known unofficially as the Economic War.

  Withholding the land annuities was a powerful statement of independence, but Fianna Fáil wanted to go further. In 1933 it passed legislation that removed the requirement for civil servants to swear the Oath of Fidelity. Again, the British did not like to see another breach of the treaty, but the Statute of Westminster made the Irish action perfectly legal.

  There were some in Ireland who thought that Fianna Fáil was going too far too fast. The old Free State politicians of Cumann na nGaedheal were still around, although their party had lost much of its power. In 1933, Cumann na nGaedheal joined with two smaller groups, the Centre Party and the National Guard, to form Fine Gael. The newly empowered Fine Gael advocated a more moderate position toward England than Fianna Fáil, and it tended to appeal more to large landholders and business interests, whereas Fianna Fáil traditionally appealed to small farmers and laborers. These differences aside, by European political standards the parties were, and still are, fairly close together ideologically. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have continued to this day as the two major parties of Irish politics.

  Fianna Fáil took a further step in 1936 by removing references to the Crown and the British governor-general from the Irish Constitution. This was a direct challenge to the basis of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but its reception in England was probably mitigated by the crisis over Edward VIII’s abdication. In any event, it was clear that Ireland was in charge of its own constitution.

  In 1937 de Valera made this point official by passing a new constitution that officially ended the Irish Free State of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This new constitution established a number of key points: Ireland was now officially a nation called Éire; the nation of Éire consisted of the entire island of Ireland, including the six counties of the north; and it allowed for religious freedom but reserved a “special relationship” with the Catholic Church. The constitution also created the position of an Irish president. The first person to fill that role was Douglas Hyde, the scholar and patriot who forty years before had rallied nationalist feelings around the Gaelic League.

  The reaction in England was resignation; the government under Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain was unwilling to fight the move, which was, after all, technically legal under the Statute of Westminster. The people in Northern Ireland were outraged by both the new constitution’s claim to the entire island, and by the pro-Catholic position of the new country. If the two states had been far from reunification before, this step put them that much further apart. But by this time, de Valera and his Nationalist supporters had mostly given up hope of a nearterm reunification of Ireland.

  86 { World War II

  The great test of Irish sovereignty came in 1939, when England and Germany went to war. The United Kingdom expected that Ireland would join the war against the Axis powers. Ireland refused. In addition, de Valera refused to allow the British navy to use its former naval bases on Irish soil. In Ireland, World War II was known as “the Emergency.”

  Ireland received a great deal of criticism for its choice of neutrality. Many English considered it a betrayal of their long-term relationship, and their government initiated an unofficial economic war of sanctions against Ireland. Americans were shocked that Ireland would not take an official stance against Germany. De Valera’s government was under immense internal pressure as well, from a population whose sentiments were overwhelmingly on the side of the Allies.

  But de Valera wanted to prove a point: Ireland was no longer a part of the British Empire, and the most decisive way to demonstrate that fact was to maintain firm neutrality in the war. One of the traditional arguments of the Republican movement had been that Irishmen should not have to die for another country’s empire. It was a tough stance to take, but de Valera was not going to lose his chance to take it. Moreover, Ireland was in no condition to fight; years of warfare had reduced it to a state of poverty with an army of only 7,000 poorly equipped
soldiers.

  Despite the official stance of neutrality, Ireland did support the Allied cause in a number of quiet ways. Thousands of Irish citizens were allowed to volunteer for Allied armies. While downed German airmen were interned, downed Allied soldiers were promptly handed over to Northern Ireland. When Axis bombing set Belfast ablaze in 1941, de Valera promptly sent fire trucks from Dublin, Drogheda, and Dundalk to help combat the fire. Ireland also suffered its own war wounds: a German bombing raid intended for Liverpool lost its way and bombed Dublin, killing thirty-four civilians.

  When the war was over, both British and American diplomats harbored resentment against Ireland’s seemingly unfriendly stance. But to de Valera and his government, Ireland had demonstrated once and for all that it was in charge of its own destiny.

  Meanwhile, Northern Ireland used the war to show its dedication to the United Kingdom. Thousands of Northern Ireland’s citizens volunteered to fight. Belfast’s shipbuilding industry played an important role in supplying warships for the British navy. Because of its economic importance to the Allied war effort, Belfast was the target of heavy German bombing; more than 1,200 people died in the “Belfast Blitz.” Northern Ireland’s sacrifices had a significant impact on its relationship with the British government in later years.

  87 { A New Republic