The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  In neutering the British capacity to get at the republican organization, the most successful action was the assassination of Alan Bell on 26 March. A former resident magistrate, who had once pursued the funds of the Irish Land League, and was now (among other things) President of the Irish Banks Court, Bell was burrowing into the network of concealed bank deposits housing the Republican Loan funds. His investigation was far too effective for Collins’s liking. Remarkably, though two attempts seem to have been made already to kill him, Bell went on taking the tram to work. When a stranger asked him, ‘Are you Mr Bell?’, he confirmed that he was. The questioner was Mick McDonnell, who immediately announced, ‘Come on, Mr Bell, your time has come,’ and together with Liam Tobin dragged him off the tram into the street, where they shot him in the head and chest. The tram passengers were told by other Squad members to ‘sit there quietly and everything will be all right’; they did so, and no passer-by seemed to pay any attention to the ‘respectable young men’ who walked away from the corpse.195 This daylight public assassination was both dramatic and effective: it appears to have brought the pursuit of republican finances to a permanent halt.

  The destruction of the police intelligence service in Dublin was a real success, but it did not provide a template for the development of an intelligence service suitable for the army as a whole. Usable operational intelligence information could not usually be acquired through insiders, but needed a very wide spread of informants. Building up such a broad network proved to be a slower process. In fact, in GHQ’s view, this task was never properly engaged with. Its highly critical review of local units in March 1921 would find a ‘very faulty grasp generally’ of the key value of intelligence. This verdict is oddly similar to that of a British intelligence chief, who pointed out that with the ‘manifest advantages’ republican intelligence possessed, ‘it is surprising that it has not been better.’ He may well have been right about the basic reasons for this as well. Although frequent mail raids generated some high-grade material for a time, once the British stopped using the mail this source dried up. ‘The constant capture of complete offices belonging to leading rebels’, as against the ‘immunity to capture of those belonging to the Crown Forces’, gave the British a definite advantage. The republicans did not produce formal methods ‘to crystallise the Intelligence gained’ (in none of the many offices raided, for instance, had ‘any card index system been found’).196

  ‘ANOTHER MARTYR’

  At 5.40 a.m. on 25 October 1920, Terence MacSwiney died in Brixton prison on his seventy-fourth day of hunger strike. He had been arrested in a raid on Cork City Hall on 12 August – a few days after the passage of ROIA – and began a hunger strike even before he was tried. The raid was triggered by information that ‘persons holding important positions of command in Cork Brigade unit of the Republican Army had received “official” summons to attend a meeting in City Hall … A meeting of Commandants of Cork Brigade was being held either simultaneously or under cover of an arbitration court.’197 MacSwiney was in fact presiding at the Brigade Council meeting; he had succeeded Tomás Mac Curtain as Cork No. 1’s brigadier as well as lord mayor. Fortunately for Cork 1, the British did not know who any of the leaders were. They netted nearly all the brigade staff, including Seán O’Hegarty, with Liam Lynch (who had come for an IRB meeting later that day) as a bonus. This might, as O’Donoghue said, have been a ‘staggering blow’.198 But in an almost incredible intelligence failure, they released the lot apart from MacSwiney four days later. And, surprisingly anxious to demonstrate that ‘no interference with a Sinn Féin arbitration court was contemplated by the authorities’, they charged him only with possession of a police cipher (which, ironically, he had not possessed: O’Donoghue, one of the few who got away, had had it).

  MacSwiney’s trial proceeded on the assumption that he was a republican official, and he replied in the same coin: ‘You have got to realise, and will have to realise it before very long, that the Irish Republic is really existing. I want to remind you of the fact that the gravest offence that can be committed by any individual is an offence against the head of the state. The offence is only relatively less great when committed against the head of a city.’199 Only at the time of his death did the British finally realize that he was a senior Volunteer officer.

  Immediately after his arrest, MacSwiney stopped taking food, and by the time he was sentenced (to two years’ imprisonment) he was in the fifth day of what would become the most epic hunger strike of the revolutionary period. He told the court that he would ‘be free, alive or dead, within a month’. In the event, he survived seventy-three days. His ‘almost miraculous’ survival as his hunger strike lasted into its second month gave the British authorities plenty of opportunity to reflect on the significance of his protest. Although some ministers thought that MacSwiney had done nothing worse than ‘things … done by some of the leaders of the Ulster party’, the Cabinet this time dug its heels in, holding that ‘to give in to hunger striking meant paralysis of the law’. Releasing him would, Lloyd George insisted, ‘completely disintegrate and dishearten the police and military in Ireland’.200 Many thought that MacSwiney must be secretly receiving some nourishment.

  Eleven prisoners in Cork gaol were on hunger strike at the same time as MacSwiney. It is clear that the government was less preoccupied with the likely consequences of their deaths than of MacSwiney’s, but it is not clear whether that was because of his status or because he was being held on less serious charges.201 Still, there was no concession. The humiliation of the Mountjoy releases was still fresh in official memory. Collins thought that ‘the British Cabinet mean to finish this hunger strike weapon of ours, and do not intend releasing you.’ He ordered MacSwiney to ‘give up the strike as you will be ten times a greater asset to the movement alive than dead’.202 (He and Griffith would lead the way in bringing the hunger-strike policy to a halt after MacSwiney’s death.) At the Home Office, on the other hand, Edward Troup was writing, ‘I believe the Sinn Féin organisers think that the Lord Mayor will be worth more to them dead than alive.’ Like most British perspectives, this belittled MacSwiney himself, but it was a sharp view of the government’s dilemma.

  MacSwiney was the first republican leader to die on hunger strike since Thomas Ashe, and his death had the same kind of impact. His hunger strike had become a global media event, and the authorities could not prevent his funeral from being turned into another great republican manifestation. When his emaciated corpse was taken from Brixton to the Catholic cathedral in Southwark, it was laid out in his Volunteer uniform, and the bier was draped in the tricolour. After the service on 28 October, the funeral procession set out for Holyhead, with a huge crowd following it across London. The Daily News editor Robert Lynd suggested that ‘London learned more Irish history yesterday than it had ever learned before’ (he added realistically that perhaps it ‘only half-learned it’). ‘What London saw yesterday is an image of all Ireland.’ At Holyhead MacSwiney’s body was rerouted to Cork instead of Dublin, on Henry Wilson’s insistence, to prevent much greater demonstrations in the Irish capital. But even in its absence a requiem mass was performed by Cardinal Walsh in the pro-cathedral, and the streets were thronged with people. In Cork, at the lying in state, ‘the people … have filed past the open coffin in unending procession all day.’ The Dáil declared the day of his funeral, 31 October, a day of national mourning. In an open letter the Bishop of Cork set MacSwiney’s ‘heroic sacrifice’ alongside the deaths of legendary nationalist martyrs Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet and Pearse: he ‘takes his place among the martyrs in the sacred cause of the freedom of Ireland’.203 At the very least, Lady Gregory hoped – noting that Punch had just published a cartoon of the ‘Irish Volunteer Army’ featuring the kind of simian stereotypes for which it had been notorious in the past – the Lord Mayor ‘had not given his life in vain if only to contradict that’. His portrait was in all the national papers – ‘all the American ones’ as well.204

&nb
sp; MacSwiney’s ordeal had effects that rippled out beyond the ordinary media. It came to preoccupy Gregory’s friend Yeats, and precipitated his decision to publish, at last, his poem ‘Easter 1916’, which appeared in the New Statesman on 23 October (four years after it had been written). For all its studied ambivalence, its validation of the 1916 leaders was a potent indication of the way moderate nationalists were becoming increasingly ‘republican’. It brought his ‘great weight of cultural influence to bear on the unrest and discontent’, as Gregory had earlier urged him to. But whereas Gregory directly likened the Volunteers to the Italian fighters she had read about in G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic, Yeats held back from celebrating the rebels – rather he lamented the collapse of standards on both sides. With rules gone, ‘we … are but weasels fighting in a hole,’ he wrote in ‘Thoughts on the Present State of the World’. The Lord Mayor of Cork was perhaps an exception. Yeats now decided to mount MacSwiney’s play The Revolutionist at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It was ‘not a good play’ – MacSwiney had, he judged, ‘lived among harsh political types’ for too long – but it ‘certainly increases ones [sic] respect for the Lord Mayor. He had intellect & lived & died for it.’ Its ‘last pages would greatly move the audience who will see the Mayor in the plays [sic] hero’, and the play was indeed a big success.205

  A second notable death followed shortly after MacSwiney’s. In Dublin on 20 September a group of twenty-five Volunteers had jumped a military ration party collecting bread at a bakery in Church Street. After they had called on the troops to surrender their guns, a brief blaze of fire broke out before the attackers ran off. Three of the escorting soldiers were killed, and one of the attackers – Kevin Barry, a second-year medical student – was found under the military lorry with a loaded Parabellum. (It had jammed, demonstrating why many preferred to use less fancy revolvers.) Barry’s capture itself hinted at some of the Dublin Brigade’s operational problems. He had joined the attacking party at the last minute, having just heard of the plan the previous day. The attack went wrong – possibly because, as the military account had it, the Volunteers started shooting prematurely, or, as the Volunteers’ account had it, the attackers called on the troops to surrender their arms, but failed to cover one of the soldiers, who opened fire.

  Barry was one of the few republican fighters to have been captured while ‘levying war’, and was tried by court martial under ROIA. He refused to recognize the court, offer any evidence or cross-examine the witnesses, and was sentenced to death by hanging on 20 October. The sentence was confirmed by the C-in-C on the 27th, two days after MacSwiney’s death. At this point the publicity machines of both sides swung into action. Collins and McKee ordered Barry to swear an affidavit detailing his ill-treatment under interrogation, and Griffith announced that his execution would be ‘an outrage upon the law and customs of nations’. He should be treated as a prisoner of war. Griffith’s description of Barry as ‘a boy of 18’ was not relevant to his argument, but turned out to be the biggest issue of the whole case. The British authorities made the same point. As Macready told Wilson, ‘of the 3 men who were killed by him and his friends two were 19 and one 20’ – and as these were ‘army ages’, they were probably younger. But their identities had no resonance in Ireland, while Barry inspired one of the most resonant of all republican ballads. Archbishop Walsh and the Lord Mayor of Dublin led a campaign to secure a reprieve.

  It was hardly surprising that Barry was roughly treated by the unit he had attacked, and he certainly suffered a sprained arm. He was widely said to have been tortured, though there is no direct evidence for this. The issue may have been less significant in the end than the fact that the authorities went through with his execution, bringing an English hangman over for the purpose. ‘In order to avoid any bungling we ought to engage a professional from England if possible.’ (John Ellis was engaged for a fee of £15, with an assistant at £5; the Irish Office in London helpfully suggested that ‘if rope and other apparatus are required, Dublin Castle should telegraph’ – though ‘probably they have a set.’ Also, police protection might be necessary on their way back from the prison.)206 Barry’s execution was a highly charged symbolic moment. He was to be hanged ‘like a dog’, not shot ‘like a soldier’, in the words of his ballad. This was a notable shift from the procedure used in 1916, but the alternative never seems to have been entertained.

  Macready insisted that if ‘Berry’ were reprieved ‘it will irritate the troops to a very great extent, because here is a clean cut case of murder without any doubt … and if the man is not hung, how on earth can we prevent troops making reprisals?’ The government accepted that any flinching at this point would be a fatal blow to the credibility of the ‘restoration of order’ campaign. As Sturgis reflected, ‘I can’t see any reason to let him off if we are ever going to execute anybody.’ He sat in on ‘a really impressive interview’ on 31 October as Lord French reviewed the case – ‘His Ex said at the beginning that a life was at stake and the proceedings were thorough and anything but perfunctory.’ The Irish Lord Chancellor, Sir James Campbell, unlike the Archbishop and the Lord Mayor counted Barry’s youth as a mitigating factor – though Sturgis contemptuously judged that Campbell’s opinion was the product not so much of legal reasoning as of cold feet, or as he put it, ‘the frozen toe’. French overruled his advice. Whether this was a case of the law taking its necessary course, or a deliberate act of political propaganda, its effect was the same.207 It was left to an anonymous balladeer to ensure that Kevin Barry would become ‘another martyr for old Ireland’ and a deathless symbol of struggle for ‘the cause of liberty’ (though he is, rather oddly, included as one of the so-called ‘forgotten ten’).*

  ‘A CAMPAIGN THAT DID NOT SEEM TO BE LEADING ANYWHERE’

  Dublin District Command believed that there was a significant shift in the balance of power in late October 1920. Terence MacSwiney’s death ‘had a far-reaching effect in reviving confidence’ in the government’s firmness of purpose, and ‘a further deterioration’ of IRA morale was noticeable. Significantly, ‘for the first time ammunition was found abandoned by rebels,’ and several substantial ‘rebel arsenals’ were captured.208 On Armistice Day a lorryload of Auxiliaries pulled up in College Green at 11 a.m., ‘tumbled out and stood to attention for the two minutes’. The crowd – ‘many Trinity College students among them, no doubt’, as Sturgis reflected, ‘but still the Dublin crowd’ – sang God Save the King and cheered the Auxiliaries as they drove off; ‘I can’t think that anything of this sort would have happened a month ago.’209 On 14 November a military raid on the Republican Stores in Talbot Street was believed to have surprised a high-level Volunteer meeting. Seán Treacy, who ran out into the street and opened fire to distract the troops, was killed.

  In some rural areas, there seems to have been a sense of frustration towards the end of 1920. In the 3rd Tipperary Brigade, which lost its three leading lights when Robinson, Treacy and Breen went to Dublin, a group emerged ‘who wanted a new plan of campaign, who thought that ambushes and lying in wait might create a certain type of man that we did not want’. They seem to have wanted a more open kind of war. Eamon O’Dwyer (who had originally persuaded Seamus Robinson to move from Glasgow to Tipperary) represented them on a trip to Dublin to try to get more weapons. He met Brugha, the Minister for Defence, and told him ‘that it was very difficult for us to continue without a reasonable supply of arms; that we had quite a considerable amount of funds, probably £1,000’. Brugha ‘seemed to think that there was no difficulty in the matter’; he was ‘full of fight and the only question was to get the arms and go in and get the enemy, attack … them every way’. But when he was asked to make arrangements, he ‘told me that it was not in his hands, that I should see Michael Collins’. Collins, however, ‘was quite indignant that I should be looking for something which … I knew was not there’ – ‘there were no arms to be got.’ When any became available they would get their share, but th
ey ‘must carry on some way without arms’. When O’Dwyer suggested that ‘a good many of the crowd were not prepared to carry on a campaign that did not seem to be leading anywhere, only producing certain types we did not want,’ Collins made light of the issue. O’Dwyer ‘alluded to some of those things that had happened, such as robberies for personal gain, but he said the IRA ought to be strong enough to deal sternly with those fellows’. Collins ribbed him – ‘we seemed to be a very purse-proud crowd in Tipperary with this £1,000 we had to spend’ – and ‘on this jocose note we parted.’ O’Dwyer went on to talk to Griffith – acting as president in de Valera’s absence – who ‘did not like the situation that had developed and he feared for our ability to stick it out’. But as to what to do, the acting President was unclear. About the ‘departure from national idealism of some of our people’ he was ‘non-committal’. Asked whether he thought they should turn from ambushes to ‘strike big blows in other ways’, he ‘referred me to the army authorities’. O’Dwyer had come full circle: ‘I had got nothing for my journey.’210

  Mulcahy always urged local units that they could significantly increase their striking power by producing their own weapons. The manufacture of firearms was out of the question, but ammunition such as shotgun cartridges was relatively simple to make. Mines, too, which could play a key part in ambushes and attacks on barracks, were theoretically quite simple. Constructing reliable ones, though, proved to be a huge problem in most places. Rifle ammunition called for quite sophisticated machinery. The most useful weapon that could be home-made was the hand grenade. The Dublin Brigade showed what could be done, in the arsenal it set up in the basement of a Parnell Street bicycle shop. A group of engineers under the direction of Matt Furlong built a foundry, and cast iron cases (called shells) three days a week, and brass bodies for the firing mechanisms (called necks) one day. Casting brass created a large volume of white smoke, and ‘the filling of Parnell Street with a white cloud became so regularly a weekly occurrence that no one ever took any notice [or] attempted to send for [the] Fire Brigade.’211 In fact DMP detectives paid two visits, but took so long to look round the shop upstairs that the men in the basement were able to cover up their lethal products. The shells were finished on a lathe (which had been commandeered by the British from a Dublin jeweller but returned at his request), and safety levers cut from sheet iron by hand. The finished grenade shells were ‘no larger than a large duck egg’, and with firing neck attached would fit in a normal hand. Finally they were taken to a workshop in Dominick Street to be packed with gelignite and primed. By mid-1920 the output reached a hundred grenades a week, distributed among Dublin companies at the cost of manufacture, nine shillings each.