Macready took a glum view of all this: ‘no amount of Martial Law or any other form of repression will make the men drive the trains, and if we put them all in prison, I fancy there will be more than the prisons over here can hold.’ All in all, he thought it ‘a little difficult to see where it will eventually end’.84 In late September Greenwood told the Cabinet that the situation had hardly improved over the last two months: ‘the Irish Government is very seriously embarrassed by the denial of the use of the railways, and its position is humiliating and discreditable.’85 Publicly, the government maintained that the railwaymen were ‘bitterly opposed’ to the action, ‘but such are the methods of intimidation employed by the Republicans that they have no option.’ Privately, it stepped up the policy of ‘throttling the railway system’. Mark Sturgis was put in charge of a small committee set up by the Minister of Transport, Eric Geddes, to control this. They even experimented with putting up bogus military stores to widen the stoppage still further, but soon abandoned this reckless stratagem. Otherwise, there does not seem to have been much substance to the ‘Geddes–Greenwood Plot’ to starve Ireland into submission, reported in dramatic terms by the mainstream nationalist press.86
On 9 November a meeting between the railwaymen’s leaders and a group of TDs looked, to Sturgis, like a sign that the workers’ resistance was crumbling. ‘We’re on top and I’m sure they know it.’ In fact, the rate of stoppages was still increasing sharply, peaking in the week ending 20 November. But at the National Labour Conference at the Dublin Mansion House that week there was plenty of depressing realism on display. Though a Derry representative insisted that ‘in the North they would carry the foodstuffs in their bare feet on their backs through the country rather than give in,’ the representative of the Broadstone men said there would soon be over 15,000 railwaymen out of work, and supporting them was simply impossible. They ‘would never be found wanting in their duty to their beloved country’, but ‘were not going to be content with false talk about fighting on when they knew in their heart and soul that they could not’. Others warned of the wider effects of a total paralysis of the rail system, suggesting that over 100,000 could be put out of work. ‘Mock heroics’ could not keep them alive. Tom Johnson issued the grimmest warning, that fighting on could risk ‘throwing back the social life of Ireland by a hundred years’.
But he also made the moral case for the strike in passionate terms that transcended ‘mock heroics’. Refusing to do work of ‘an abominable kind’ was part of a wider social struggle – asserting ‘that as workmen they had a right to be conscious co-operators in the end that was being sought … not merely cogs in the machine, but human beings’. Cathal O’Shannon argued that it was a model of popular resistance, a ‘new weapon’ against which ‘all the tanks, the machine guns, the “Black and Tans” and all their bombs, cannot in the end win out’. For others, the issue was a purely moral one: the men ‘were not waging this fight because they had a chance of success, but because they were right’.87
The conference voted almost unanimously to keep up the embargo. But pressures to abandon it were mounting, notably in the mainstream nationalist press. On 15 December the ILP/TUC Executive issued a statement that ‘the British authority which assumes governmental power in Ireland’ had deliberately undermined the plans drawn up to maintain food supplies and transport in the event of a total shutdown of the rail system. ‘They have seized the papers and records of our Food Committee, have arrested and imprisoned without charge the members of these committees, and have placed a barrier against the organisation of the motor transport service for the distribution of fuel supplies.’ Two days later a party of armed troops was carried for the first time on the Great Southern and Western Railway. On 21 December the railwaymen met at the Mansion House and voted unanimously for an unconditional return to normal working.88
‘IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO SHAKE THEIR BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF A REPUBLIC’
The summer of 1920 was a crunch moment for the government. The positive appeal of the republican courts, coupled with systematic intimidation of jurors and witnesses by the Volunteers, brought the British court system ‘virtually to a standstill’, as Sir John Anderson told the Cabinet on 25 July. In Monaghan, for instance, both magistrates and witnesses failed to turn up for petty sessions, and the summer assizes were adjourned when one plaintiff abandoned his case, explaining that ‘his life would not be worth very much’ if he persisted.89 (Direct threats were usually unnecessary: the general apprehension was enough.) Litigants were turned away by republican pickets; prospective jurors received notices that obeying the summons to attend Crown courts would ‘be considered an act of treason against the Irish Republic’. By August, over 300 magistrates had resigned, either out of patriotism or out of fear.90 The failure of the Summer Assizes represented, for Britain, a massive blow to the state’s legitimacy. Combined with the outcome of the county council elections, it could only be read as proof of the failure of British policy up to this point.
‘Everybody is yielding to Sinn Féin whether they approve of it or not,’ a Mayo resident magistrate reported. ‘They say they can do nothing else, and that the Government cannot or will not protect them, and the police can barely protect themselves.’ Republican police ‘patrol the town wearing the badge inscribed “Irish Republican Army” on their sleeves. They have been regulating the supply of flour … questioning people as to their movements, and regulating the control of licensed premises.’ In Galway ‘Sinn Féin activities have brought about almost a revolution in local affairs.’ In Leitrim ‘even loyal people are asking for republican permits and attending Republican courts.’ And though a Clare resident magistrate reported ‘considerable annoyance at the rate levied by Sinn Féin (6d in the £) from householders for the payment of their police’, in Roscommon the republican courts seemed to have ‘impressed the people to such an extent with the power of Dáil Éireann that it would be difficult to shake their belief in the reality of a Republic’.91
An almost random incident rammed home this reversal of power. On 26 June the commander of the 17th Infantry Brigade in Fermoy, Brigadier General Cuthbert Lucas, was kidnapped by the Cork No. 2 Brigade. He was on a fishing trip with two of his staff colonels, when the fishing lodge was stormed by a Volunteer group led by the brigade’s top officers – Liam Lynch, Seán Moylan and George Power. The motive may have been, as Moylan later wrote, to cut the British officer class down to size – ‘pull them down and see what made them tick’; or, as Lynch seems to have thought, to trade them for republican prisoners. Either way, the effect was dramatic, especially in London, where Churchill ordered a large-scale ‘drive’ to find Lucas, overriding Macready’s protest that this might endanger the general.
Macready had wanted to ‘arrest six men who were reported to be leading members of the Cork No. 2 Brigade IRA and lock them up until Lucas was forthcoming’. But ‘the civil and legal element’ had argued that they had no evidence of the personal involvement of the men, and – perhaps more significantly – ‘if they went on hunger strike and were allowed to die, we should be reverting to the former policy of interning untried and uncharged men.’ Henry Wilson fumed that Churchill and the Cabinet treated the capture of Lucas ‘as some sort of joke’, and utterly failed to grasp what needed to be done. ‘To drive Munster is a childish expedient’ – the only way out was ‘to declare war on the Sinn Feins’. (Struggling to find eight extra battalions to reinforce Macready, he added that ‘if we had 80 instead of 8 the present policy would make the presence of 135 battalions a useless waste of money.’ Having 100 to 150 detachments scattered across the country, ‘rolling a few soldiers around in 3-ton lorries’ while allowing the Sinn Féin courts to operate, he pronounced ‘an absolute waste of time’.)92 Churchill certainly suggested that Lucas had only himself to blame for his ‘carelessness’, which had put Britain’s prestige on the line. When the drive, and all later search efforts, failed, the government’s sense of frustrated powerlessness was palpable. This
was indeed ‘a sensation’, as the New York Times reported, and shockingly bad publicity.
Lucas himself was well treated, and was distinctly impressed that his captors had the power to allow him regular mail deliveries – as well as plenty of whisky, tennis and regular walks, on one of which he eventually made a dash for it. Seen from the other side, the incident revealed the limits of the republican machinery. Capturing the British officers turned out to be the easy part; simply moving them by car from the fishing lodge allowed them the chance of an escape attempt (planned by Lucas and Colonel Danford speaking, apparently, in Arabic) resulting in a violent fight. Though Lucas was successfully shuttled twice between Limerick and Clare, after a month looking after him and providing constant security became a heavy burden, effectively shutting down the normal operations of the unit responsible for him. As it became clear that the government would not negotiate for his release, the Volunteers faced the choice of killing him – an option they seem never to have entertained – or letting him go. In the end, as Michael Brennan’s account shows, they made no effort to stop him escaping.93
With its authority collapsing, the British government faced a choice between stepping up repressive measures and making significant political concessions. Anderson came out unambiguously in favour of a ‘Dominion Home Rule’ offer, suggesting that there could well be no alternative ‘not foredoomed to failure’. Indeed the whole new Castle administration, together with the Irish Law Adviser, William Wylie, formed a kind of ‘peace party’ urging an immediate political settlement. Once again the government preferred to ignore the advice of its top officials. But it now had to face the unwelcome fact that the shelf life of its prime repressive legal device, the Defence of the Realm Act, had expired. It was a war emergency law that was supposed to lapse at the end of hostilities – just as the Home Rule Act was supposed to come into force. The old Crimes Act was being used to create Special Military Areas, which allowed the authorities to control movement and ban public events, but without DORA it would be impossible to go on interning republican prisoners. If there was to be any move to use military courts to stand in for the crippled legal system, it would need new legislation – unless martial law was to be declared, as French had long urged. Ministers toyed with this option once again, but still found its political costs too high. As Macready told Greenwood in mid-July, ‘I do not for one instant think that the British public would stand for Martial Law for one week over here.’94 Instead, the optimistically named Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA), rushed through parliament in the first week of August, merely retitled the well-known DORA regulations. (So DORR 14B, allowing internment without trial, became ROIR 14B.)
The justification for these emergency powers, instead of DORA’s ‘public order and the defence of the realm’, became the ‘restoration or maintenance of order in Ireland’.95 Like so many of the special coercive laws passed under the Union over the previous century, it confirmed Ireland’s separateness from British norms. Along with the headline powers like trial by court martial, the Act suspended normal inquests involving coroners’ juries of the kind that had brought in verdicts of murder against the government in the Mac Curtain case. The Military Courts of Inquiry in Lieu of Inquest which replaced them were supposed to consist of two officers with a president ‘not under the rank of field officer’ (that is, a major or colonel), except when one was not available – ‘with due regard to the interests of the public service’ – in which case a captain would suffice. This proved quite often to be the case, as did a failure to display the ‘ordinary diligence’ enjoined on them in taking evidence. As a result the courts of inquiry, which became known as ‘courts of acquittal’, did little to deflect public suspicion that the Crown forces were at the very least trigger-happy. Over the following months they would consider the deaths of 182 policemen and 463 civilians, 233 of whom they would find to have been killed ‘by Forces of the Crown in the execution of their duty’. Of these, seventy-eight had failed to halt when ordered to, and thirty had attempted to escape after arrest. Eventually one court suggested that ‘in serious cases of arrest [sic] the prisoner should be at once handcuffed or otherwise secured, so … obviating the need for shooting,’ but this was a rarity.96 There were four cases of justifiable homicide, and only two people were found to have been killed illegally.
The ROIA has been described as ‘a halfway house towards martial law’, but the second part of the journey was much more sticky than the first.97 Political resistance to martial law was deeply entrenched, as we have seen, and this step would never be taken except in a limited and circumscribed way. While the Cabinet jibbed at extending wartime legislation into supposed peacetime, the army would pronounce ROIA procedures ‘too slow and cumbrous to be really effective against a whole population in rebellion’98 (a situation, of course, that the government preferred to deny). Still, the Act had dramatic effects on the republican campaign, even if the most important of them were unintended. By widening the use of military courts, it returned the army to the forefront of the counter-insurgency effort for the first time since April. A new surge was launched, but the army’s repertoire of anti-guerrilla methods was still restricted. Henry Wilson’s dismissive view of ‘drives’ said much about the army’s limitations. The heightened military pressure resulted not so much in more Volunteers being picked up as in more going ‘on the run’, and the result, as will be seen, would be a key development in republican military capacity. But on the vital issue of unity of command, the ROIA did not deliver. Outside the army, only Mark Sturgis in Dublin Castle seems to have grasped the importance of this. Early on he argued for a ‘dictatorship’ or at least a properly constituted war council to direct policy. But it never came. Months later, when Warren Fisher returned to reassess the Irish administration, he too came out for giving supreme power to the military C-in-C, but with no effect. Sturgis was still baffled by the fact that Lloyd George, who had firmly grasped the need for a single command on the western front, could not see ‘the absolute necessity for it here’.
As so often in situations of apparent strategic stalemate, the army reached for technological solutions. It looked to speed up its search operations by increasing motor transport, and strengthen patrols by adding armoured cars. But it would never have enough lorries, and many of those it had were already worn out by war service and ‘had to be carefully “nursed” ’. (‘The Disposals Board appeared to have sold all the best vehicles,’ the 5th Division believed.)99 Tanks had already been found to be of little use, and most of the armoured cars were obsolescent. When the new Peerless cars began to arrive in July 1920, they were too heavy (over 7 tons loaded) for any but the best roads – and in anything but fine weather. The best armoured cars, the Rolls-Royces, did not arrive until the beginning of 1921, and then only ten of them for the whole country. The army was forced to rig up its own fighting vehicles by ‘up-armouring’ its normal tactical lorries.100
Was a miracle weapon lurking in the wings? Alongside martial law, the use of aircraft had been one of French’s key ideas. It had come to nothing so far, but Macready took it up again in the early autumn, urging that there were ‘undoubtedly cases where fire from aeroplanes would materially assist the forces on the ground, with little or no danger to harmless individuals’. This danger, of course, was the key reason why the Cabinet had so far jibbed at the use of aircraft. The C-in-C now suggested that air–ground communications had improved, and that since aircraft could fly much lower in Ireland than they had been able to in France – because there was no risk of anti-aircraft fire – target identification would be easier. He thought that crowds might be fired on, if a warning had been dropped. And echoing French’s gleeful notion that air patrolling would ‘put the fear of God into these playful young Sinn Feiners’, he opined that ‘a few rounds fired from the air would have a great moral effect, even if no casualties were inflicted.’101
When Macready’s request arrived at the War Office, it was enthusiastically received – ‘the Ca
binet ought definitely to approve in principle’ bomb-dropping and machine-gunning by aircraft in Ireland, a senior member of the general staff thought. But he added, ‘I doubt if they will as it is a pretty big proposition.’ He was of course right, though this time it was not the politicians but the airmen who scotched the idea. The Chief of Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, bluntly dismissed ‘the policy advocated by the C-in-C’ as ‘both ineffective and highly dangerous’. Macready’s arguments were all wrong, he said: the difference between friendly and hostile people ‘would not be obvious to a man in an aeroplane’, and this ‘would lead to endless mistakes’; while as for the idea of dropping warning notices over a crowd, ‘I cannot believe that anybody who has had experience of aircraft can believe’ it could be done. Worst of all, the ‘reckless use of a powerful arm’ would lead to ‘a great popular outcry against the unfortunate pilots’, and ‘great bitterness will be engendered.’102
Trenchard’s alertness to the inaccuracy of air action, and his sensitivity to public opinion in Ireland, certainly diverged from the argument he was pressing in favour of ‘air policing’ in the Middle East and other parts of the empire at this time.103 But in both cases they were what the Cabinet wanted to hear – with one exception. Winston Churchill, the Minister responsible for both army and air force, was an enthusiastic supporter of air policing, and indeed may be seen as its primary instigator. He held that aircraft could provide ‘great protection to armoured car work on the road and a great deterrent to illegal drilling and rebel gatherings’, and put pressure on Trenchard to triple the miserable total of eighteen serviceable machines in Ireland. But amid political and professional resistance a truly effective way of applying this seductive technology remained elusive.104
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 21
