The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The Millstreet case provided a shining example. Liam Lynch’s arrest of a gang of armed robbers, who had seized over £16,000 from two bank officials near Millstreet, Co. Cork, on 17 November 1919, was motivated by the widespread rumour that the Volunteers were themselves responsible for the robbery. Lynch wanted to vindicate his own organization as well as to combat ‘the menace of a criminal element in the community capable of carrying out robbery on this scale’. It was not easy, as the gang had planned their disappearance carefully, and until mid-March 1920 no clues had been found to their identity. Finally Lynch went directly to the Millstreet area, set up a formal investigation and put in a passable performance as a detective superintendent. On 24 April he issued warrants for the arrest of ten men, and eight of them were picked up by the Millstreet Volunteer battalion that night. They were ‘held in custody’ and tried by ‘a special Court’ – over which Lynch himself presided – three days later. Several of them had confessed – whether or not under duress we do not know – and nearly £10,000 was recovered. Seven of the eight were found guilty, two of them expelled from the brigade area and five deported from Ireland (for periods of eight, ten or fifteen years).49

  Reports in the nationalist press indicated a range of republican policing activity, including arrests for house-breaking as well as ‘riotous behaviour’ and fraud (the guilty party being a bookmaker who had made off from Barrastown Races in Tipperary with £67 12s in unpaid bets). Punishments included flogging as well as restoration of goods or repair of damage, fines, and removal to ‘an unknown destination’. In some places ‘prisoners were made to work on the bogs and farms until their charges were disposed of’ by the republican courts.50 When the RIC reported finding a group of convicts serving a three-week prison sentence on an island off the west coast, the prisoners refused to leave, declaring that they were loyal citizens of the Irish Republic. (No doubt, as one historian has suggested, allowing themselves to be liberated by the police would have exposed them to the risk of worse punishment – but this in itself showed how the republican justice system was securing credibility, a crucial precondition of legitimacy.)51 Where islands were not available, though, detention of prisoners was (as O’Malley said) ‘a drain on us’. They had to be fed and guarded, even though the guards ‘played cards with them, smoked, chatted and swapped stories’. O’Malley once ‘found the guard asleep in a deserted house whilst their prisoners were out on sentry duty with shotguns’.52

  On 19 June 1920 GHQ came up with a formula ‘pending the development of a criminal department by the Dáil’. Instead of inflicting punishments, ‘the convicted parties will be retained in custody until the following Sunday,’ when they would be paraded after mass, and ‘their name and address and offence … publicly announced’. Recognizing ‘the rapid development of the Civil side of responsible Republican Government’, a Republican Police Force was to be established, initially drawing its personnel from the Volunteers. Three or four men per company should be enrolled in the force, to work under policing officers appointed by the brigade commandant. This makeshift set-up was turned into a regular, distinct organization in November, when GHQ declared that ‘the point has now been reached in the development of the civil functioning of the Republic when it is becoming necessary to define more clearly the position and work of the Police Force.’53 The work had ‘hitherto been borne entirely by the IRA’, but the police were now to become a separate force. This assertion may have been more rhetorical than real at this stage, since it would have to be reiterated more than once over the next twelve months.

  Critics have depicted the republican justice system as irregular and unsystematic, a prey to ‘parochial faction-fighting’, whose formal elements like procedures had great propaganda value but less practical content. It has been argued that, judged by its own pretensions, ‘republican justice was a sham’.54 A key exhibit in this picture is the case in which two priests, Fathers Michael McKenna and Patrick Gaynor, faced down an ex-RIC man who had taken over a relative’s farm on the authority of the local republican court. McKenna (who actually commanded the local Volunteer battalion) arbitrarily dissolved the court, and personally confronted the ex-constable, Michael Connors, striking him ‘a hard blow on the face’. Then Gaynor – who was also close to the Volunteers though not actually a member – appointed himself acting police chief, and organized a convention of ‘all the authorities under the Irish Republic in West Clare’ to annul the previous order. When Connors – who carried a gun – refused to leave the farm, Gaynor issued an unambiguous threat: he would be back in half an hour, ‘but not alone next time: you have to decide whether you will walk out alive or be carried out dead’. He mustered three Volunteers to eject Connors from the farm, telling them that ‘they were in a position similar to that of organised armed forces in any country and were free, if necessary, to open fire on Connors without any qualm of conscience.’ In the end Connors ‘did not dare use his revolver against a priest and Volunteers on duty’, and gave way.55 All this demonstrates, it has been suggested, that ‘neither priests, policemen nor Volunteers showed great respect for the Dáil courts as constituted, though all shared a robust faith in the efficacy of force majeure.’56

  Yet something prevented the eruption of general gang warfare or vendetta. While republican publicity certainly exaggerated the regularity of the system, it does seem to have rested on some underlying consensus. The Dáil courts were able to rely on ‘the goodwill of litigants and communal pressure to make their decisions effective’.57 The local justices, officially called brehons, may have known nothing of the ancient brehon law that now supposedly superseded statute, but they were sensible people whose judgments reflected common sense (as the originals no doubt also did). Without idealizing it, it may not be too much to suggest that there was a real sense of public ownership of the republican court system.

  ‘A PANIC MEASURE OF RAISING 8,000 SCALLYWAGS’

  The erratic emergence of the republican guerrilla campaign had a compensating advantage: it helped to disguise from the authorities the scale of the threat they confronted. Emerging low-level insurgencies are not easy for governments to identify, and the measures needed to choke them off are uncertain. Over the next century this problem would be faced, with mixed success, by many states across the world. (Within a decade, indeed, a new Irish state would itself be grappling with the problem of liberal-democratic constitutions that ‘envisage no intermediate situation between profound peace and open civil war’.) At this point, Britain was baffled by the new phenomenon. The police force it had created in Ireland was designed to deal with occasional insurrections, and the rest of the time to monitor small, secret revolutionary groups. By the end of 1919, these functions were obsolete. The accumulated expertise of generations of intelligence-gatherers, ‘the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle’, was all but irrelevant. There was a substantial British military garrison in Ireland, some 40,000 troops in all – and though the number of ‘effectives’ fell from 25,000 in 1919 to fewer than 20,000 in early 1920, that was still more than twice the strength of the police. Yet the peacetime law made the use of military force problematic.

  Lord French, as we have seen, immediately identified the first attacks on barracks as ‘nothing less than acts of war’. The police were already a broken reed, especially in Dublin itself. ‘As the situation gets worse, Johnstone and the DMP appear to show greater and greater hesitation.’ But though he himself was always clear that the only possible response must be military rule, the GOC, Lieutenant General Frederick Shaw, did not see it the same way. ‘You know Shaw’s dislike to the proclamation of martial law,’ French told the Chief Secretary early in January 1920. At least ‘he has voluntarily suggested that the military should take up a great deal of the duty which now falls upon the police – in fact that the military should come first and the police second,’ or rather, as French preferred to put it, ‘the military take the initiative and the police follow’. But would this be enough? Either ‘a large number of men must
be arrested and deported, or else we must have martial law.’58 As before, though, neither would happen.

  The decision to pull back from the smaller police stations, which looked in retrospect like a serious political mistake, was practically unavoidable. The RIC was somewhat under strength in 1919 – nearly 1,000 below its establishment of 10,166. Even at full strength, it would have been overstretched as soon as its dispersion in over 1,300 local posts came under challenge. Many of these posts could not have been held even if reinforcements had been available. Most were either vulnerable because of their position, or structurally indefensible, whatever efforts were made to fortify them with sandbags and new steel shutters. The small garrisons frequently put up a sturdy and often effective fight, but the prospect of repeated attacks in isolated areas was hard to contemplate without strong mobile reserve forces to support them. Such forces would be created later in the year, but by then the traditional policing structure had been swept away, and in many areas the only viable police activity took the form of fairly strong patrols from central barracks.

  At the end of January 1920 the army launched an intensive programme of raids and arrests – which it thought were ‘the first arrests by military authority’, under Defence of the Realm Regulation (DORR) 55 – using police intelligence information. The results, according to the GOC, included ‘the capture of most valuable documents from which the organization of the Irish Volunteer Army has been deduced’. It was recognized to be ‘a very powerful organization’. Large numbers of its members were arrested: by mid-April 317 had been arrested and 250 interned. Hundreds were deported under DORR 14B, including twenty-seven brigade and sixteen battalion commandants. The biggest contingent of deportees by far were from Cork (eighty-three), Tipperary (forty-one) and Limerick (twenty-one); twenty went from Dublin, fifteen from Clare, nine from Kerry and one from Longford.59 This military surge initially seemed to seize the initiative from the republicans. But, as the army later admitted, ‘many of the raids and searches carried out during this period were … somewhat aimless.’ The impact on Volunteer operations of the military offensive was disappointing: apart from a brief drop in late March, the totals of ‘Sinn Féin outrages’ (as classified by the police) went on climbing as the year progressed.

  The core problem was that the programme of arrests made clear ‘how completely the RIC service of information was paralysed’. ‘The lack of information made success very difficult.’ The information supplied to the army was sketchy, ‘the police lists were out of date and to them every Sinn Féin club was a battalion.’ They had made no attempt to construct what the army would call the ‘order of battle’ – that is, the unit structure – of the Volunteers, and it was up to military intelligence to identify the military status of individuals listed for arrest.60 At this point the army realized that it would have to construct its own full-scale intelligence system, something that would take months if not years. But, as the GOC observed, even if the policy of arrests was hampered by defective intelligence, ‘no other course is possible’61 – apart, that is, from restrictions on movement, and curfews: in Dublin, from 23 February, no ‘civilian’ was allowed outside their home from midnight to 5 a.m.

  The speed and completeness with which the RIC was neutralized should not be exaggerated. The situation was obviously difficult: in May 1920 there were still many isolated rural stations with garrisons ‘so small that they were practically confined to their own immediate neighbourhood by day, and to their barracks by night’. Supporting them was a headache for the army, which had no spare wireless equipment and no trained wireless personnel, a problem that would persist throughout the conflict.62 Intimidation of the families of policemen reached a peak in the spring and summer of 1920: some 70 per cent of the 280 recorded threats, sometimes oral but usually written (certainly an underestimate, since successful threats were not likely to be reported), were made between March and October.63 Yet republicans still mostly held back from direct confrontation, and the police (as some of the tenacious barrack defences in early 1920, notably at Kilmallock, showed) were not as demoralized as many have assumed. Though resignations increased, a slight but noticeable surge in recruitment within Ireland indicated that the force had some hope of holding on even as it became more embattled. But British policy did not come to its rescue. Britain had already undermined the Irish party, its main Irish political ally, by delaying Home Rule. Now it effectively undermined its own ‘army of occupation’. It did this in two ways: first by turning the police into something much more like the ‘army’ of nationalist propaganda than the old RIC had ever in reality been; and second by political steps that multiplied the force’s pessimism and removed the restraints on its behaviour.

  The dangers of militarizing the Irish police remained clear even after Joseph Byrne’s removal. But by the spring of 1920 the process had achieved a momentum that proved irreversible. Oddly enough, this happened in spite of the government’s clear determination to rein back the power of the Viceroy himself, the man most directly committed to the expansion of the police by recruitment in Britain. The military surge of January–March proved to be General Shaw’s last hurrah. To French’s dismay he was replaced in April by a new military commander, General Sir Nevil Macready, accompanied by a new chief secretary, Sir Hamar Greenwood. Greenwood insisted that the traditional primacy of the Chief Secretary be restored. A group of key civil servants were transferred from Whitehall to Dublin Castle, to beef up what Disraeli had once called ‘the weakest executive in the world’. Ironically, this was a response to French’s own criticism of the Irish Executive, especially of the Under Secretary, Sir James MacMahon – ‘quite estranged from all of us owing to his violently Catholic leanings’. (French had effectively cut MacMahon out of the Castle decision-making process in 1919.)

  Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the UK civil service, who arrived to audit the administration in early May, reported witheringly that ‘the Castle administration does not administer.’ What he called the ‘mechanical side’, which had never been good, was now ‘quite obsolete’; in the still more vital sphere of policy formation ‘it simply has no existence.’ The real answer to the problem, he hinted, was to combine the civil and military command (a rather unBritish idea that prefigured some later set-ups, such as Malaya after the Second World War). Macready, he thought, was ‘admirably equipped to play the dual role of Under Secretary and GOC’. But this notion was too radical to implement. Instead Fisher proposed sending a ‘powerful civil servant’ to get the administration in order. He picked the outstanding official of his generation, Sir John Anderson, who joined Macready in Dublin on 22 May, bringing with him a hand-picked group of London officials headed by the former excise detective ‘Andy’ Cope as assistant under secretary. Interestingly, Anderson’s predecessor MacMahon was kept in post (apparently to avoid the political effects of sacking a Catholic). The odd arrangement of having two under secretaries might well have made the chaos in the Castle even worse, but MacMahon – already sidelined – evidently accepted his ornamental role.

  Macready was a significant choice as commander-in-chief because he had unique experience of internal crisis management. He had commanded the troops during the miners’ strike in South Wales in 1910, had been selected as the possible military governor of Belfast at the height of the Ulster crisis in 1914, and had run the strike-afflicted London Metropolitan Police after the war.64 He was put in place as a ‘political general’ in the good sense, a soldier with a ‘civilian mind’ and an alertness to public opinion. But when he arrived in Dublin his first reactions compromised his whole mission. He told Walter Long that within a few hours he was ‘honestly flabbergasted at the administrative chaos that seems to reign here’. Unfortunately for those who wanted him to take up joint command of the army and the police (a limited version of Fisher’s proposed civil–military union), he decided that the police were past saving. He turned down the double appointment, but then could not get his own preferred candidate to take the job as head of
the police. What followed was a damaging divergence between the two arms of the Crown forces that would become more serious over the next year.

  Macready also lost influence over the recasting of the police. The first British RIC recruits were already present in some numbers, but distributed across the country in small groups to reinforce individual barrack garrisons. The new chief of police, Major General Hugh Tudor, a friend of the War Secretary, Winston Churchill, supplied the regular RIC with much more military equipment – replacing their traditional carbines with rifles, for instance – but he also planned to set up a separate, special counter-insurgency force. The higher military authorities, including the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, were horrified at the idea (which may in fact have come from Churchill himself) of creating a ‘gendarmerie’ for Ireland recruited from ex-soldiers – a ‘panic measure of raising 8,000 scallywags’. ‘I can’t imagine what sort of officers and NCOs we can get,’ Wilson wrote in his diary. ‘I can’t imagine what sort the men will be, no one will know anybody, no discipline, no esprit de corps, no cohesion, no training …’