Markievicz’s main job (nominally at least) was as minister for labour, in the Dáil ministry remodelled by de Valera on 2 April. The group of ministers labelled ‘the Cabinet’ in frankly British style was the core of the counter-state which set out to purloin the national administration from beneath the noses of the British authorities. De Valera himself became ‘Príomh-Aire’ (rendered in English as ‘president’, though possibly better understood as ‘premier’ or prime minister; de Valera occasionally described himself as ‘chief minister’). ‘Home affairs’ went to Griffith, defence to Brugha, finance to Collins, foreign affairs to Plunkett (who was later promoted to fine arts), and local government to W. T. Cosgrave. Eoin MacNeill was moved from finance to become minister for industries, and there were two non-Cabinet directors, Laurence Ginnell of propaganda, and Robert Barton of agriculture. Two days later de Valera added Ernest Blythe as director of trade and commerce.
The virtual state initially faced what might now be called a credibility deficit. When Blythe’s appointment seemed to create ‘two ministers for one department’, MacNeill happily admitted that he ‘had no special fitness’ for the post, and most people would have agreed.244 It quickly became clear that he had no intention of doing anything: he never came to meetings or set up any ministerial staff.245 Even sympathetic commentators found it difficult to see the republican government as anything more than a propaganda ploy. The Manchester Guardian, succumbing to an uncharacteristic fit of Englishness, had archly suggested in January that ‘the Ministers of Finance, Home Affairs, and all the other dignitaries will be hard put to it to find an outlet for any executive capacity they may possess.’
In general, the British press initially shared the government’s dismissive view of the separatist movement’s prospects. As the year went on, though, perceptions began to change. In May, Robert Lynd of the liberal Daily News – a rare Belfast Presbyterian nationalist – offered a remarkably perceptive take on the Sinn Féin strategy of resistance: ‘They seem to have a paradoxical belief that England cannot injure them without terribly injuring herself.’ Lynd reported that Sinn Feiners did not believe they could defeat the armed forces that might be sent against them, ‘but they believe that they could defeat the purpose of those who make use of the armed forces.’246 In November 1919 the radical commentator H. N. Brailsford penned a striking assessment of the phenomenon of the counter-state. To an outsider, he thought, the confidence with which the Irish ‘possessed their own mind’ was ‘first startling and then unspeakably impressive’. Sinn Féin ‘in its own amazing way has attained a positive result in spite of the stranglehold of the army of occupation. It has boldly declared that the Irish republic exists, and faith is realising this invisible State.’247
How widely the faith was shared would become a key question. Robert Barton later suggested that though ‘to the outside observer the demand for complete independence may have appeared to spring from the people, in reality the people were influenced by the leaders.’ To him the national demand had an egg-like quality: ‘So long as the shell was intact, compromise and disruption were impossible. The army and political leaders were the shell, the people were the fluid contents.’248 For three years, the shell held. The Dáil Cabinet, alongside Volunteer GHQ, was the most consistent institution of the Republic. It met weekly, in various places – a favourite being Sheila Humphreys’s big Ailesbury Road house – without ever being discovered. It did come close once or twice – the Harcourt Street headquarters had to be abandoned after Collins made a rooftop escape from a raid. Collins used the threat of a raid to keep discussions short, trying to limit meetings to one hour – roughly the time a raiding party would take to arrive after information reached them. Discussion was in any case often perfunctory, in part because most ministerial activity was ‘semi-fictional’, and the struggles over spending that form a large part of real governmental activity were minimal. But things were not entirely harmonious; according to Ernest Blythe, ‘there was from the beginning a certain amount of friction or tension’ between two leading ministers, Collins and Brugha.249 Brugha would bristle at opinions expressed by Collins (who was famously intolerant of fools) which he might have accepted from other ministers.
‘TO MAKE THE IRISH REPUBLIC A LIVING FACT’
A crucial issue that arose as soon as the Dáil government was established was the relationship between the new government and what was coming to be called ‘the army’. Cathal Brugha, the Minister for Defence, pressed for a declaratory oath that would make the implicit subordination of the Volunteers to the Dáil government explicit. After several months a formula was reached: every Volunteer would swear (or affirm), ‘I do not and shall not yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government,’ and ‘I will support and defend the Irish Republic, and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic …’
This was not quite the end of the issue. Florrie O’Donoghue sketched the official view of the process in a chapter of his biography of Liam Lynch, entitled ‘The army swears allegiance’, but his own unpublished account shows that it was not so simple. O’Donoghue noted that the decision to approve the oath was taken on 20 August 1919, but the oath was administered ‘during the autumn of 1920’.250 This delay is an indication that things were not straightforward. The Volunteers did not go quietly into ‘regular’ civil–military relations. The revolutionary flux, as one Executive member later noted, threw up ‘a set of circumstances and organisations in which the Volunteer Executive was the first in order of time, and practically the creator of that which subsequently became the superior body’. Some members of the Executive unsurprisingly held to the traditional Fenian physical-force line that politicians were not to be trusted, and that the Dáil might at some stage prove less steadfast for the Republic than ‘the army’. A similar view was indeed expressed in the Dáil debate on the issue by Alderman Tom Kelly, who invoked the fate of the original Irish Volunteers in the 1780s: when the Volunteer movement declined, the political gains it had secured were lost.
Beyond doubt, Brugha had reasons beyond impeccable liberal-democratic principle for pressing the oath. It would supersede the oath that bound together the IRB, an organization that he (like de Valera) believed should not have survived into the post-1916 national movement. Now the secret society was at best irrelevant, and at worst a threat to the supremacy of the Dáil. The IRB naturally did not share this view, seeing itself as a crucial guarantor of republican principles. Sub rosa resistance to the formal subordination of the Volunteers to the Dáil was led by the President of the IRB Supreme Council, Collins. ‘Collins and the IRB section contended that as most of the Volunteers had already taken a republican oath it was unnecessary for them to take a second oath,’ and that the Dáil was still ‘to some extent an unknown quantity’ – ‘members of it might be unstable in their political views.’251 The issue was in part a symptom of the growing personal antagonism between Collins and Brugha – which one of Collins’s biographers calls a ‘feud’ – as well as of the awkward relationship between the Dáil and the IRB. Collins was already in effective control of the Volunteer organization; Brugha was and remained marginal to it. As Mulcahy dismissively put it later, ‘Brugha did no systematic work in connection with carrying on of the military organization.’252 When provincial military leaders came up to Dublin, they almost all saw Collins, but seldom if ever met Brugha. Collins was ubiquitous and endlessly energetic, Brugha was at best a semi-active minister; most tellingly perhaps, the British took no interest in him.
The path to acceptance of the oath was paved by an odd compromise reminiscent of the Sinn Féin formula of 1917 (and maybe adumbrating the later dual-power arrangement of the Dáil and the Provisional Government after the Treaty): the Volunteer Executive was to remain in being as an advisory body to the Defence Minister (Executive member Seán MacEntee described it as ‘a sort of Cabinet and Directory for the Minister for Defence and the HQ Staff’). This arrangement would persi
st until the summer or autumn of 1921, when the Executive wound itself up. This odd compromise had no direct impact on the control of the army before 1922, but it would then provide republicans with a lever to set the army against the Treaty. There seem to have been no open divisions between the Minister and the Executive, but the suggestion of conditional allegiance was unmistakable, and its implications were potentially dangerous. And it is by no means clear whether the oath had any effect on the operational autonomy of the army.
It was still true that, ‘in terms of strict procedure, the Volunteers never ratified the change in their status,’ or made the appropriate alterations to their constitution.253 The Executive intended to recommend acceptance of the oath to the next Volunteer Convention, but in the circumstances that kind of full-scale assembly could not be risked. In June 1920, however, ‘it was unanimously agreed that there was no prospect of holding in the near future the Convention already arranged for’ (for which delegates had been appointed at brigade conventions in November 1919). Still, the Executive accepted that ‘the development of the National situation called for the immediate formal establishment of the Volunteers as the Army of the Republic,’ and its General Secretary called on all delegates to sign a form agreeing to the proposed oath (‘to reach me without fail by Wednesday 9th June’).254 Local units were eventually ordered to administer the oath, or signify that they refused to do so. In July GHQ issued a general order that the oath be ‘forthwith administered to’ all Volunteers – allowing that those with a conscientious objection should be allowed to ‘affirm’ rather than ‘swear’ allegiance. (GHQ called it an ‘Oath of Allegiance to the Irish Republic’ rather than to the government.) A special register of those who had taken the oath was to be prepared for each company, and each battalion and brigade staff. ‘Members of a Volunteer Company who for any reason are not present at the special company parade shall have the Oath administered to them in the presence of the Company at the next parade at which they are present.’ The process was to be completed by the end of August.255
It looks as though the majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, agreed; James Dorr, captain of the Kilmore company in Roscommon, recalled that ‘we had no objectors’; O’Donoghue held that ‘the decision was practically unanimous.’256 Some areas seem to have assembled substantial meetings. The Clogagh company sent two representatives 25 miles to a battalion ‘convention’ at Charagh ‘for the purpose of ratifying the Agreement under which the Volunteers came under the control of the Dáil’.257 Some at least made it a memorable occasion, like Seán MacEoin in Longford. Seán O’Sullivan’s battalion, part of MacEoin’s command, was assembled in a hollow square to be addressed by Frank Thornton. ‘He told us we no longer Volunteers [sic] were Soldiers of the Irish Republican Army and from hence forth every Soldier would have to take oath of alegeance and further that we were going to fight and that very soon, the Irish Republic was proclaimed and England had declared war on us … Make no mistake the IRA were going to fight and going to make the Irish republic a living fact.’258 But surprisingly few Volunteers seem to have recalled taking the oath. For some it was not a good idea. Todd Andrews ‘thought, or rather felt, that no outside organisation should have any say in the activities of the Volunteers … Nor did I like the change of name … to Irish Republican Army. The word “army” seemed to have overtones of professionalism which conflicted with the idealism of the Movement.’259
It remains unclear whether the oath was in fact ‘administered to every man in the army’, as O’Donoghue said, in 1920. Some units took the oath collectively, and some seem not to have taken it at all. What is clear is that the idea that the Volunteers ‘became’ the Irish Republican Army is too simple. Indeed the emergence of the title is something of a mystery. Though many (like Liam Deasy) remembered discussing in 1919 an order specifically transferring ‘the Volunteer organisation – under the title of “I.R.A.” – to the control of Dáil Éireann’, it seems likely that (as Piaras Béaslaí said) the title ‘IRA’ never had any official standing. An tOglaċ sometimes referred to the Volunteers as ‘the Army of the Irish Republic’, following 1916 usage, but that was, as Béaslaí noted, ‘a very different thing’.260 Presumably, however unofficial, the phrase ‘Irish Republican Army’ simply came more easily off the tongue. But its exact usage remains obscure. While it was back-projected by some to 1916 – even though Pearse had definitely used the title ‘Army of the Irish Republic’ – in 1920–21 its use may have been mainly oral and unofficial. Many units were still using the correct official title of the Irish Volunteers, Oglaich na hÉireann, right through to the end of the fighting. It would be tempting to suggest that this merely reflected the inconvenience of ordering new headed stationery, but the old title persisted in typed reports as well.
SINEWS OF POWER
The general consensus that Michael Collins was the most effective member of the Dáil ministry seems likely to endure, even if his military credentials – and indeed his character – may be impugned. His technical qualifications in finance were not particularly remarkable, but his phenomenal energy ensured that he got sensible, useful things done. His central challenge, obviously, was not so much to regulate expenditure or set economic policy – the functions of ‘normal’ finance ministers – as simply to generate income. The counter-state had no access to taxation; funds would have to come from public contributions. (Even Collins seems not to have considered the possibility of compulsory loans in the form of armed bank robberies, of the kind favoured by later urban-guerrilla revolutionaries.) Tantalizingly, big money had been collected in the USA by the Friends of Irish Freedom – over $1 million by mid-1919.261 But surprisingly little of this was actually finding its way to Sinn Féin’s treasury. The Dáil government set out to secure funding through its own Republican Loan. Within days of Collins’s appointment on 2 April, the Dáil authorized the ministry to ‘issue Republican Bonds to the value of £250,000 in sums of £1 to £1,000’. On 10 April de Valera enlarged the scheme to the value of ‘one million sterling – £500,000 to be offered to the public for immediate subscription … in bonds of such amounts as to meet the needs of the small subscriber’. Half was to be subscribed at home, half abroad (that is, in the US). The publicly stated aim of the loan would be to give Irish trade and commerce ‘free access to the markets of the world’, to develop and encourage sea fisheries, reafforestation and industrial effort, and to establish ‘a National Civil Service’ and National Arbitration Courts as well as a Land Mortgage Bank (‘with a view to re-occupancy of untenanted lands’). It would be used ‘to end the plague of emigration, by providing land for the landless and work for the workless’, and for ‘all purposes which tend to make Ireland morally and materially strong and self-supporting’.262
This was an ambitious project, even in a country with a tradition of political subscriptions reaching back to O’Connell’s famous ‘penny rent’, and including the Parnell tribute of the 1880s. The parliamentary party had never succeeded in raising much money by subscription. The fact that the 1918 anti-conscription fund had raised £250,000 might be a promising sign, or a warning that Ireland was ‘subscribed out’. (It turned out in fact that most of the money had been returned to subscribers; a grand total of £12,237 was passed on to the Dáil government in 1919.) Collins, typically declaring that ‘it will be essential to get on with a rush’, organized a ‘big advertising campaign’, involving printing a quarter of a million prospectuses and commissioning a short publicity film (in which he appeared with Griffith and MacNeill cheerily issuing bond certificates outside St Enda’s – using as a table, with a nice symbolic sense, one of Pearse’s most treasured relics, the block on which he believed Robert Emmet had been beheaded). Volunteers across the country persuaded cinema managers to screen it.263
But a series of delays meant that by the time the campaign got under way the obstacles to it had multiplied. The British had, as we shall see, at last decided to suppress the Dáil and all its works, while in the USA Judge Co
halan made much of the difficulty that since the Irish Republic did not exist in law its bonds had no legal status.264 Even when press advertisements for the loan in Ireland avoided using the name Dáil Éireann (and the title ‘Minister for Finance’ as well, merely describing Collins as the ‘Director’ of the national loan), none of the national papers would risk running them. When the Cork Examiner and some twenty provincial newspapers ran them, they were promptly suppressed. Correspondence and prospectuses were seized ‘in various parts of the country’, leaving Collins ‘extremely rushed as a result’.265 This ‘interference’ went on, and was more threateningly supplemented during the winter by British investigations of the undercover bank accounts used to conceal the Republic’s funds. (Collins, a finance minister with the unusual advantage of also running a death squad, would respond lethally by having the principal investigator, Alan Bell, hauled off a Dublin tram and assassinated in March 1920.)
But British action was not the only obstacle to raising the loan. Though half a million prospectuses were sent out in 1919, distribution and bond sales depended on local Sinn Féin organizations, and especially local TDs who became the principal loan agents. Collins urged ‘the great need for increased individual effort on the part of all members of An Dáil’.266 Local leadership proved (as in other spheres) highly variable. The Munster constituencies (with Limerick in the lead) subscribed almost as much as the rest of Ireland put together. Kevin O’Shiel’s North Fermanagh constituency subscribed just over £1,700 – a small amount by southern standards, as he said, but not bad for such a deeply divided area. He even got a few unionist subscribers – ‘chaffed by their fellow Unionists’, not for disloyalty but for stupidity: ‘they’d never see their money again.’ (The subscribers would eventually have the last laugh.) Terence MacSwiney in Cork was notably energetic, calling for 5,000 additional prospectuses at the end of September, ‘as we are about to begin the house-to-house canvass’. By February 1920 he had raised £4,817 in pound notes and £500 in gold. Collins told him in December 1919 that it was ‘very refreshing to have such a satisfactory account from you … It shows what work and energy will do.’267
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 13
