The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Unfortunately the officers themselves were not much more soldierly. Most of them were ‘absent without explanation or excuse’ from O’Malley’s battalion classes. But if they were less than keen on lectures, they could be interested in active training. ‘It was something new and it gave them more confidence,’ O’Malley later wrote. He thought it was not hard to teach ‘the applied use of weapons’, but characteristically believed that ‘with rifles and machine guns there was a great deal of musketry theory to be taught.’ This went less well. Fieldcraft, ‘the use of ground in relation to movement and formation’, was likewise easy, but ‘the applied tactics of weapons in relation to protective formation, ground and movement was harder.’ O’Malley found himself battling what he considered a dangerous mindset – the idea that ‘guerilla warfare should be waged without any regular army groundwork in technique.’ The danger of this was that they would not be able to anticipate their opponents’ likely methods. They tended to underestimate, if not despise their enemy – ‘there was a great contempt for the English as fighting men.’ This had its uses – it made it easier for ‘untrained boys’ to think of taking on the British army – but it needed to be adapted to deal with the reality.

  O’Malley theorized that they lacked not just training, but – ‘disarmed since the time of Elizabeth’ – any inherited familiarity with firearms. ‘Most of them had never had rifles or revolvers in their hands; hardly any had seen hand grenades.’ It was difficult to build up confidence for fighting unless men knew and believed in their weapons; the shortage of guns and ammunition made this a slow process. The sheer variety of rifles (O’Malley listed fifteen different types in the South Tipperary area) made regular musketry training complicated, even without the ammunition problem. O’Malley could only guess at the actual numbers of guns in the hands of local companies. ‘It was impossible to extract a reliable list of names, arms and stuff from a Brigade QM [quartermaster]. Companies were afraid the battalion wanted to distribute some of their arms to other companies; the battalion was afraid the brigade would transfer stuff to other battalions. The brigade always made the poor mouth to GHQ to extract more arms.’11

  O’Malley’s style did not work with everyone. He was, as he himself wrote, ‘on the outside’. (His theory about the disarmed Irishry had an Anglo-Irish tinge.) In a Roscommon company where he spent a week in the autumn of 1919, parading, drilling and instructing, he was ‘generally … not liked’. ‘He was too much of the “officer” class and did not succeed in getting himself down to the level of the ordinary country Volunteers and appreciate their problems.’12 Some came to accept that his intolerance of slacking or incompetence was driven by his passionate commitment to making the Volunteers into real soldiers, but other organizers faced similar problems where local officers were reluctant to accept external direction. The inculcation of military standards, especially of discipline, was not simple. Inevitably, a largely self-created and self-sustaining militia such as the Irish Volunteers had discipline issues rather different from those of a regular army. On 26 May 1920, GHQ found it necessary to issue a general order that ‘no action of anything like a military nature shall be taken or ordered to be taken by any Volunteer except insofar as this is covered by definite orders or permission actually received from his superior officer.’ Quite what problem this characteristically convoluted syntax was grappling with is not clear, but GHQ added another explanation – ‘the fact that actions of a certain type take place in one Brigade or Battalion area does not constitute such an order or permission.’13

  In March, the commandant of the Wexford Brigade, Thomas Sinnott, was court-martialled on two rather different charges of ‘grave neglect of duty’. One was that he had failed to discipline one of his battalion commanders who had told his drinking companions in a pub about an upcoming operation. Worse, perhaps, he had not reported this, and it accidentally ‘transpired in conversation with the Chief of Staff some weeks later’ about the delaying of the operation. The other charge was that he ‘failed to have issued properly and without delay Headquarters Order dated 19th January 1920’ (on ‘Raids and Robberies’). He was reduced to the ranks, and made ineligible to hold commissioned rank for a year.14 Other officers were court-martialled for such offences as ‘attempting to coerce an Officer of the Limerick City Battalion into joining another organisation’, and ‘instigating raids and robberies without the sanction of GHQ’.

  Such irregularities would persist, but by May there was a sense that the Volunteers’ military capacity was firming up. The tempo of attacks on barracks increased. On the 10th, O’Malley and Robinson led an assault on Hollyford barrack in Tipperary. They had to climb up on to the roof carrying ‘two revolvers each, grenades, bursting charges, supplies of fuse, detonators and hammers to smash the [roof] slates. On our backs a tin of petrol was tied, sods of turf which had been soaked in oil hung around our necks from cords. The oil sopped into our clothes …’ They poured in petrol and threw blazing peat through the holes they smashed; O’Malley’s bursting grenades pelted him with fragments of slate. ‘My hands and face were burning hot, my hair caught fire … My coat was alight.’ The defenders hung on desperately and the attackers were forced, after a four-hour battle, to withdraw. Their equipment was dangerously crude, but with enough determination it could be made to work. On the 25th, Kilmallock barrack in Limerick, which had been attacked unsuccessfully by the Fenians in 1867, was destroyed in an assault led by Seán Forde (the nom de guerre of Tomás Ó Maoileoin). By July, sixteen occupied barracks had been destroyed and twenty-nine damaged.

  In North Tipperary, though, the attack on Borrisokane RIC barrack reverted to the Hollyford pattern. An imposing force of 200 men was assembled by the brigadier, Frank McGrath, and all the approach roads were sealed off. But attempts to pour oil in through the roof were thwarted, and the use of grenades was inexplicably forbidden by the commander. After two hours of fighting, with the barrack in imminent danger of catching fire, a false alarm of approaching British troops led McGrath to order a retreat. The garrison was forced to abandon the building shortly after the attackers decamped, and one senior officer alleged that McGrath was afraid of reprisals against his own property. Even this failed operation, however, had some positive effects. ‘It was our baptism of fire,’ said Dan Gleeson of the Toomevara company. ‘It glamourised a lot of lads’ – ‘You know he was at Borrisokane’ became a local saying. But as Gleeson ruefully recalled, ‘if you were out five miles away, blocking a road, you got no mention.’15

  ‘TWO GOVERNMENTS WAGING WAR’

  Alongside the escalation of the military campaign came significant political developments. Mid-January 1920 saw the first round of local government elections, in the municipalities (the rural council elections were to take place in June). These were a crucial test of Sinn Féin’s capacity to displace its rival parties, and of Dáil Éireann’s status as an alternative government. Its Local Government Minister was a veteran Sinn Féin politician, William T. Cosgrave, with long experience on the committees of the Dublin Corporation to add credibility to his brief military flowering as a member of the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade fighting at the South Dublin Union in 1916 (though it was the latter that had ensured his election as MP for Kilkenny in 1917). In the longer perspective, this ministry became ‘a real government department’, not only trying to keep local government functioning as disruption spread across the country, but embarking on fundamental reforms which would be continued by the independent Irish state.16 In 1919, though, Cosgrave’s department had not hit the headlines (he seems to have spent much of his time working on a scheme for municipal milk distribution), while his colleagues focused on housing issues and Poor Law reform. But now as the elections approached things were hotting up. At the end of October the Dáil approved his proposed pledge to be taken by candidates – ‘I recognise the Republic established by the will and vote of the Irish People as the legitimate Government of Ireland.’

  Not only Cosgrave himself, but Sinn Fé
in more generally had ‘a strong tradition in local government’. A tenth of the Dáil’s members had some local government experience – an unintended consequence of the British local government reform at the end of the nineteenth century, which created the modern borough and county councils. The party held twelve seats on the eighty-strong Dublin Corporation by 1911, representing significant opposition to the dominant nationalist party, which it persistently charged with jobbery, corruption and inefficiency. Griffith regularly subjected both local authorities and the Local Government Board to his lacerating critiques. The ‘Corpo’ was a fair target, but there was a negative side to the deep immersion of men like Cosgrave in local battles: his political horizons, some thought, had been narrowed.

  Local elections, due in 1917, had already been postponed several times. In 1919 the British government decided to adopt proportional representation (to be introduced for Irish parliamentary elections by the new Government of Ireland Bill). Justified on the grounds of ‘minority protection’, PR was expected to peg back Sinn Féin gains. But by an agreeable irony it was actually an established Sinn Féin policy: Arthur Griffith had been advocating it for over twenty years, and so indeed had parliamentarian nationalists like John J. Horgan. The British had naturally not noticed this. So the slightly odd situation emerged in which (as the Daily News observed) ‘instead of opposing a change declaredly designed to cripple its power’, Sinn Féin ‘willingly helped in its development’. The party approached the elections cautiously, all the same, fielding just over 700 candidates for the 1,816 seats at stake – not many more than Labour, or indeed independent candidates. The election lacked the electric atmosphere of December 1918, and Volunteers seem to have been much less prominently involved, despite the temptation of a strong British presence in many towns. But there was a high turnout, and a substantial Sinn Féin victory, producing republican–Labour control of nine out of eleven municipalities and sixty-two out of ninety-nine urban councils. Though the unionist press first suggested that the outstanding feature of the elections was Sinn Féin’s ‘failure to sweep the country’, by the end of January 1920 the Irish Times recognized that ‘the local administration of the South and West of Ireland is in the hands of a party which publicly repudiates British government’. The resolution of Cork and Limerick corporations to pledge allegiance to the Dáil represented ‘deliberate and audacious declarations of war’.

  This step was not one to be taken lightly. When the Dáil approved the form of the resolutions of allegiance, it asked Cosgrave to draw up a report ‘showing definitely the results of taking a stand against the Local Government Board’. But it was fairly obvious that defying the LGB would mean at the very least the loss of central funding, with no immediately available alternative source. Though all the Sinn Féin-controlled authorities refused to put up people to act as high sheriffs, a fair number – led by Dublin Corporation itself – temporized for three or four months on the issue of pledging allegiance, and some waited on the outcome of the rural elections in June. Dublin confined itself to symbolic actions, such as (inevitably) flying the tricolour over City Hall and dispensing with the mace as the token of authority – though even Cork did not dispense with the title of lord mayor. When Dublin finally plumped for recognizing the authority of the Dáil on 3 May, it made sure to ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs to communicate its resolution to the US Congress.

  The Dáil Local Government Department tightened its grip on the process after Cosgrave had been arrested and replaced by Kevin O’Higgins, a man ‘diametrically opposed … in temperament, intellect and outlook’.17 Even so, the complexity of the financial issues involved, and the daunting implications of the shift, made it hard to fix a policy. A new committee consisting of two lord mayors, two council accountants and one council secretary had not come up with a definite recommendation by the time of the June elections. At the end of June yet another Dáil commission, of twenty TDs, councillors and local officials – together with a lone woman, Jennie Wyse Power – was set up, but had not met a month later. Eventually it was the British government which forced the issue at the end of July by demanding that all local authorities should declare allegiance to the LGB by formally undertaking to obey its rules and submit all their accounts for audit. This triggered a gradual evaporation of support for the LGB as councils made up their minds to reject the ultimatum.18

  The second round of elections, the rural council elections in June, underlined Sinn Féin’s dominance. On the platform of a properly local policy – expanding public housing, health and education – the party and its allies gained control of twenty-nine of the thirty-three county councils. At the same time, the party was becoming militarized; the Volunteers were more active in the elections than in January, and growing British pressure encouraged the military leaders to exert more influence. In Monaghan, candidates were selected by the brigade commander, who picked young men with little fixed property that might be at risk if the council defied the LGB. A judicious mixture of ‘intimidation and organization’ ensured that all the rival nationalist candidates in the county withdrew before the election.19 Likewise in west Clare, an officer of the 2nd Battalion, Mick McMahon – who thought that GHQ had issued ‘instructions for the Volunteers to get control of the Local Government bodies’ – was selected as a candidate for the county council by ‘a joint convention of Sinn Fein and brigade staffs’.20

  But though the unionist press denounced the use of Volunteers to guard polling stations during the election as intimidation, the electoral process seems to have been reasonably free, and the result was indisputable. The Local Government Department issued new instructions that chairmen, vice-chairmen and county council representatives to the General Council of County Councils ‘should be most carefully selected’ with ‘due regard being paid to National principle, ability and knowledge of local administration’. Most interpreted this as advice to elect Sinn Féin members – many of them Volunteers – even where they were in a minority on the council. The learning experience of Joseph Clancy, the East Clare Brigade’s training officer, was typical. With ‘no experience whatsoever’, he was elected chairman of Tulla Rural District Council. ‘All the new members were nominated by the Sinn Féin organisation but, like myself, many of them were “wanted men”.’ The council could not use the council offices, and ‘had to assemble secretly in all kinds of strange places’. Local Volunteer companies provided the protection for these meetings, which concluded ‘without being interrupted even once’.21

  The new councils adopted – often unanimously – resolutions acknowledging ‘the authority of Dáil Éireann as the duly elected government of the Irish people’ and undertaking ‘to give effect to all decrees promulgated by the said Dáil Éireann in so far as same affects this council’. (However, Cosgrave’s department waited until 12 August – a bit behind the wave – to issue a letter calling on all bodies to sever their connection with the LGB.)22 The ‘First Republican Council of Leitrim’ ostentatiously congratulated ‘the forces of the IRA on their many successes during the past year, and the many fortresses and seats of oppression destroyed, and we earnestly hope that they may continue their successes until victory crowns their arms’.23 Meath Council resolved that ‘the Republican flag fly over the County Hall’, and later voted to strike a rate of one and a half pence in the pound towards ‘the upkeep and maintenance of the Volunteers of this county’. Neighbouring Louth was less enthusiastic, though, worrying about the likely implications of transferring allegiance to the Dáil, and inducing Alderman Philip Monaghan (the Louth Brigade commander) to promise that ‘armed force would never be resorted to unless circumstances made it absolutely necessary.’24 In Monaghan it was thought wise to assemble the Sinn Féin councillors for instruction (by Fr McNamee) before the council met: ‘we were to repudiate the British local government and to stop paying the rates to them.’25

  In May the Irish Times lamented that the ‘whole south of Ireland has fallen under the government of Sinn Féin’. In trying
to alert Britain to the scale of the threat to the Union, it may have exaggerated a little, but not much. At the beginning of March, An tOglaċ delightedly noted that a French newspaper had just described the situation in Ireland as ‘two governments waging war on one another’. This was some way short of the international recognition originally hoped for, but it was heartening. The shift of the Propaganda Department’s efforts from turning out pamphlets to the regular production of the Irish Bulletin was having its effect. Its tempo, five issues a week, was important in ensuring that the official British version of Irish news items was permanently disputed. It was carefully targeted – circulated not just to press correspondents, but also to politicians, churchmen and other leading figures in several countries (including Egypt and India). The print run increased from fifty in 1919 to 600 in late 1920, and eventually to 2,000 (though the last figure may have been massaged by the department).

  The Bulletin tirelessly depicted the conflict as a foreign invasion of an independent sovereign state. The Republic existed de jure and de facto; after the second round of local elections the Dáil government had ‘the allegiance of 83 per cent of the Irish people’. (The identity of the remaining 17 per cent, and their grounds for refusing allegiance, were left vague.) In repudiation of the British authorities’ description of republican attacks as ‘outrages’, all British official actions were seen as ‘aggression’. The Bulletin attacked the distortions of British press coverage, notably the failure to report violent police actions (‘terrorism’ in republican parlance). In presumably deliberate contrast to An tOglaċ, the republican military actions themselves were downplayed or ignored – at least until Erskine Childers took over as editor in 1921. Childers himself characterized the ‘war’ in 1920 as a clash between ‘an organised army’ and a ‘well-nigh helpless’ civil population – a rather different perspective from the Volunteers’ self-image.26 Positive coverage of the Republic’s administration had to focus at first on the loan and the various commissions. These were not tremendously dramatic, and the long delays in producing reports did not help. In 1920, though, a project took shape that gave new substance to the image: the supersession of the British legal structure by republican courts and police.