The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  But energy was just what was missing in many places. Collins darkly hinted that while he disliked drawing comparisons with other areas, ‘some will suggest themselves at once,’ and told MacSwiney that, if he could see the returns made by some areas, ‘they would simply drive you mad.’ In the spring of 1920 Collins wearily complained to Boland in America that ‘this enterprise will certainly break my heart if anything will,’ and that he had ‘never imagined there was so much cowardice, dishonesty, hedging, insincerity and meanness in the world’. He was provoked into furious exhortatory strategies, including a loan ‘blacklist’, which could alienate as much as inspire. Con Collins (no relation) lamented that this ‘sort of thing takes the heart out of a man … God knows I find it hard to ask for anything since reading it. What are our Teactas [Deputies] doing at all? Half of them at least might have done as well as we did. Is it all talk and suggestions once again?’268

  In spite of all the difficulties, the public response was remarkable. (It was materially assisted, O’Shiel was convinced, by the active part played by ‘the younger clergy’.) Many were surprised ‘to see how well the people responded to the call, even those who had supported the Parliamentary Party in the elections’.269 Though barely £10,000 had been received by the end of October 1919, the sum had risen by nearly £150,000 in April 1920, and rose almost as much again in May and June. By the summer of 1920 the first issue of the loan was oversubscribed by £40,000. Griffith hardly exaggerated when he credited the Finance Minister with ‘one of the most extraordinary feats in the country’s history’.

  As the money came in, Collins could act more like a normal finance minister, setting departmental budgets, hiring and firing government employees and commissioners. The proto-state had run up significant bills even before the loan was launched. The Irish Film Company’s promotional film for the loan itself cost £600, for instance. The President and the Secretary, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, were paid £500 a year, ministers £350. TDs were unpaid (sacrificing their Westminster salaries), but had travel and accommodation expenses of £250 a year. Darrell Figgis was appointed secretary of the Commission of Inquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland at £350 a year (with hotel expenses and third-class rail travel). Fintan Murphy, one of Collins’s assistants in Finance (and also an unpaid member of the Volunteer GHQ), had his annual salary raised to £180 in July 1919.

  The Commission of Inquiry into Resources and Industries was a flagship project with strong ideological underpinnings. It reflected Griffith’s faith in autarky, the national self-sufficiency preached by one of his heroes, the German economist Friedrich List, as well as the deeply entrenched nationalist belief that Ireland had been systematically impoverished by British policy. (Collins reiterated this in his first statement of the national finances, when he alleged that Ireland had been overtaxed by £290 million up to 1893, and another £100 million since.) Its mission was ‘to put the Nation in possession of exact information in regard to the national resources, and the best methods by which they could be brought into service’. The Commission had the advantage of being fairly cheap, and being concerned with future possibilities rather than actual policies; other Sinn Féin policies aiming at reafforestation and rebuilding the fishing industry quickly ran into problems. Envisaged as a broad national body, many of its forty-nine members were not Sinn Feiners. But expertise was in short supply in some areas: perhaps inevitably in light of Ireland’s economic structure, very few of the commissioners were industrialists of any kind. Despite its seemingly uncontroversial nature, the Commission’s activities came under the British ban on the Dáil, and it soon found it impossible to work openly. While its opening meetings in Dublin late in 1919 were undisturbed by the DMP, when it went out into the provinces it ended up playing hide-and-seek with the police in various towns. Its progress became disappointingly slow. Collins, who expected something to show for his investment, made no secret of his impatience with Figgis, even though the latter’s reputation was briefly enhanced by his repeated narrow escapes, which generated some international press interest.

  Other elements in what would be labelled the ‘constructive work of Dáil Éireann’, though in theory more difficult, were pushed ahead with more visible results. One striking initiative was the establishment of a Land Bank, aimed at breaking the financial bonds between Britain and Ireland as well as fostering a programme of land reoccupancy. Robert Barton, a Wicklow landowner who had moved from unionism through constitutional nationalism to Sinn Féin since 1916, and had some experience as chairman of a co-operative bank, headed the National Co-operative Mortgage Bank established with a £200,000 deposit of Dáil funds in September 1919.

  PROJECTING THE VIRTUAL STATE

  The British would eventually blame their loss of Ireland in large part on the effectiveness of republican publicity. Propaganda had become big political business during the war, and was widely thought to have the power to influence entire populations. Leading ‘information’ manipulators like the press baron Lord Northcliffe, who had become Britain’s first propaganda chief, were credited with having changed the course of the war. A natural propagandist like Arthur Griffith, who had battled skilfully with British censorship throughout the war, looked poised to exploit its power. In the event, the machinery of republican publicity was surprisingly slow to get moving. In spite of the fact that republicans constantly complained of getting a bad press from the mainstream Irish newspapers, no single republican agency to speak to the Irish people was ever set up. The Irish Independent and the Freeman’s Journal were in a sense the last bastion of Home Rule constitutionalism, even if their instinctive distrust of Britain made their coverage look ‘disloyal’ to British eyes.

  When the Dáil first met, Sinn Féin already had a publicity section, run by Robert Brennan, producing the journal Nationality, and as we have seen the Volunteer journal An tOglaċ was being issued by the GHQ Director of Publicity, Piaras Béaslaí. A Dáil Department of Propaganda was set up immediately, but its Director, Laurence Ginnell, had not got very far by the time he was arrested in May 1919. When his successor Desmond FitzGerald arrived there to replace Ginnell, the department’s target audience (as he stressed in his first departmental report to the Dáil) was outside Ireland, and ‘our chief means of publicity was by means of pamphlets.’ These were prepared by Sinn Féin’s Foreign Relations Committee, and distributed by Sinn Féin supporters wherever they could be found. The foreign press got its Irish news stories from correspondents in London, so the reporting tended to follow the British line. FitzGerald found that making effective contact with the foreign press was difficult, not least because ‘war experience has made them very chary of anything in the nature of propaganda.’270

  Oddly enough, both FitzGerald (who had been brought up in England) and the man he recruited as his deputy, Erskine Childers, spoke with markedly English drawls. It is possible that this, together with their cosmopolitan intellectual credentials, enhanced their international plausibility. Childers had made plenty of journalistic contacts in the course of a fairly distinguished career. He was an established author, who had written a study of cavalry tactics and an account of his own unit, a horse artillery battery attached to the socially exclusive Honourable Artillery Company, in the Boer War. His 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands, one of the most brilliant of the emerging genre of spy stories, was a best-seller. It was not least a fascinating study of the technique of sailing small yachts, and Childers had translated that skill into spectacular political action when he ran a thousand rifles into Howth for the Irish Volunteers in July 1914. His politics were complicated: The Riddle had pulsated with fear of German power, and when war broke out he did not hesitate to rejoin the British forces, becoming a seaplane pilot, ‘a brilliant officer and utterly fearless’.271

  In May 1919 Childers travelled to Paris, intending to join the Irish delegation to the Peace Conference, and spent the summer struggling to persuade French journalists to take the Irish case seriously. His clashes with arrogant
English colleagues – his ‘blind fury’ at ‘these cultured, cold-blooded, self-satisfied people making careers out of the exploitation of humanity’ – finally resolved his political ambivalence, and he moved house from London to Dublin in September. FitzGerald started a brief mimeographed news-sheet called the Weekly Summary of Acts of Aggression by the Enemy in July, and in early November the two of them launched a more substantial production, the Irish Bulletin. This was issued five times a week, and the Propaganda Department maintained this rate with impressive consistency through the next twenty-two months of intensifying conflict. In its first year its content mostly dealt with the crimes of England rather than the achievements of the Republic, recording police actions in a dry quasi-official style designed to bolster credibility. Until the Dáil complained in February 1920 that ‘just lists and bare details of incidents’ were inadequate, the Bulletin did not try to cover events in any depth. But it offered a useful alternative to British official sources, and the tendency of established journalists to buy the government line seems to have been redirected by the steady flow of counter-information. As republican publicity gained a hearing, and steadily enlarged its credibility, it increasingly threw the authorities on to the defensive.

  Childers took a distinctive line from the start. He later recalled that as soon as he had joined the department he had been struck by ‘the failure of the political side to take definite responsibility for the Army and its work – a fatal failure because the propaganda of the enemy was that the Army was a “murder gang” ’. Only by ‘insisting that it was waging a legitimate war of defence’ could the ‘torrent of defamation’ be met. Childers was clear that Griffith was responsible for ‘this curb on propaganda’ – ‘how far Collins opposed or conceded to him on this point I do not know’ – and that the argument would not be properly made until de Valera returned from America at the end of 1920.272

  Republican news secured a dramatic coup when, on 10 November 1919, the Archbishop of Dublin contributed £105 to the Dáil Loan. He emphasized his action through a public letter to Cardinal O’Connell in Boston, declaring that ‘none of our papers dare publish the fact’ that he was subscribing. ‘We are living under martial law,’ he explained, ‘and amongst the numerous devices to which our present Government has had recourse in its foolish attempts to crush the national spirit of our people’ was a ‘military order’ giving newspaper editors and managers ‘notice … of the fate that awaits any newspaper venturing to publish the names of contributors’. Driving disaffection underground, he said, was responsible for the upsurge of ‘crime’. ‘The “competent military authority” does not seem to realise that there is no possible remedy for this lamentable state of things, so long as the source of all the evil, the present system of military rule, is maintained.’ This intervention raised the possibility that the Catholic Church might, directly or indirectly, be moving to recognize the legitimacy of the republican counter-state. Though he described violence as ‘crime’, Archbishop Walsh clearly blamed it on the British authorities. Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam went further, declaring that ‘in this country at present people are engaged in a struggle for the natural right of self-government’ – ‘a distinct nationality such as we are, has a natural right within the limits of the moral law to govern itself.’ Archbishop Harty of Cashel denounced the government as having ‘proved itself an abject failure’: it had ‘trampled on the will of the people’ and ‘excelled acts of in repression and coercion’. The only ‘remedy for the Irish upheaval’ was ‘freedom’.273

  Not until de Valera returned from America did any republican leader launch a deliberate effort to secure formal recognition of the Republic from the Catholic Hierarchy. But if they had, it would have failed. Patriotic prelates like Walsh were probably in a minority, and the Hierarchy’s head, Cardinal Logue, Archbishop of Armagh, resisted any such political engagement. This did not make his stance at all acceptable from a British point of view: he declared that the ‘military regime rivall[ed] in severity even that of countries under the most pitiless autocratic government’. But he insisted that republican armed action was ‘lawlessness, retaliation and crime such as any man guided by God’s law must regret and reprobate’. Logue’s colleagues were not all so sure. When, in October 1919, he pressed the Hierarchy to issue a firm condemnation of violence, the bishops were divided enough to force him to drop the idea. In January 1920 they eventually issued a statement that followed only part of Logue’s line – the government with its ‘principle of disregarding national feelings and national rights’ was responsible for the ‘dreadful confusion and disorder’ of the country.

  Though this unquestionably helped to delegitimize the UK state in Ireland, it fell far short of formal recognition of the Republic. Still, there was a general assumption that, while the higher clergy tended to hold aloof from politics, a large proportion of the lower clergy supported Sinn Féin, and some even assisted the Volunteers.274 By contrast clerical condemnation of republican violence tended to be muted. In terms of open speech, this belief is hard to sustain: the number of recorded public interventions on both sides of the issue is very small, but clerical opponents of violence outnumbered its defenders by almost three to one. (While 144 out of some 3,700 Irish priests – less than 4 per cent – were recorded as speaking out against Volunteer military action between 1919 and 1921, a mere fifty explicitly supported it.) There is certainly evidence that some priests held arms and ammunition for their local companies, and that the soul-searching of many Volunteers about the legality of killing policemen and soldiers was eased by the tacit support of priests and curates. But recent research suggests that priests also continued to denounce crime – murder above all, but also other actions that damaged public security – most intensely where Volunteer activity was itself most intense.275 A resonant clerical warning shot was fired in 1919 by the Professor of Theology at Maynooth, Walter McDonald, in his book Some Ethical Questions of Peace and War. McDonald brusquely dismissed nationalist arguments about the continuity of Irish national identity reaching back to pre-Norman times, and insisted that the use of force in pursuit of independence was unethical. Full independence was not a legitimate aim.276

  As a declared advocate of Home Rule as against separatism McDonald was probably unrepresentative of the clergy in general, but his refusal to accept that republican armed action could be regarded as legitimate warfare was much more widely shared. This refusal was to be most sharply put by Cardinal Logue, when he asked after an attack in August 1920, ‘Am I to be told that this is an act of war? That it is lawful to shoot at sight anyone wearing a policeman’s uniform and honestly discharging a policemen’s duty?’ His answer was that it should be called ‘by its true name – a cool, deliberate, wilful murder, pure and simple’.277 The Soloheadbeg killings had been condemned as an ‘inhuman act’ by a Tipperary priest, who called on his congregation to ‘denounce it and the cowardly miscreants who are guilty of it’. A Thurles curate took the same view after the shooting there of an RIC district inspector in June 1919: ‘the memory of that awful deed would haunt the guilty man all his life, and would rise up before him on his death bed.’278 Others warned their flocks that defiance of God’s law, and usurping God’s unique power of life and death, might bring awful punishment on the community as a whole.

  ‘A CONDITION OF VEILED INSURRECTION’

  Cardinal Logue’s ‘pitiless autocracy’ did not yet quite live up to its billing. Some of the ‘acts of aggression’ paraded in republican news-sheets were not, it has been suggested, ‘exactly of the type that would ignite world indignation’ (for instance, the police raid on a hairdresser’s displaying a Dáil Loan poster in October 1919, in which the poster was ‘completely defaced’ with penknives).279 Even in the late autumn the authorities were only slowly putting together anything resembling a coherent policy for throttling the nascent Republic. The first meetings of the Dáil had impaled the Irish administration on the horns of a dilemma. Was an assembly of MPs illegal? Could it be co
nnected with the violence in Tipperary? Such questions paralysed British policy, or at least Ian Macpherson, who had just succeeded Shortt as chief secretary, and who helplessly confessed to the Prime Minister on 8 May 1919, ‘We did not and do not know how to act.’ Lloyd George was then away in Paris drawing up the new world order. He and his Cabinet colleagues certainly took the same view of the Dáil as did such intelligent English newspapers as the Manchester Guardian (‘theatricalism’) and The Times (a ‘stage play’). When Macpherson asked for Cabinet guidance on the government’s Irish policy, the Deputy Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law – a hardline unionist – suggested that it had been ‘clearly defined’. When the incredulous – and speechless – Macpherson ‘demurred by a gesture’, Bonar Law just went on to tell him he could ‘do whatever he liked’.280