The cost of running the army was now a serious issue. Brugha, wondering whether it could be covered from government funds if levies and Volunteer subscriptions were suspended, asked for an estimate. Mulcahy put it at £200,000 a year – at least. This was ‘a very skimpy estimate’, which covered merely ‘training and administration’, and took ‘no account of the cost of arms or munitions production. He stressed to Brugha that there was ‘a very considerable difference’ between ‘the cost of running the Army in Truce time and the cost of running it during War’. Some local officers he had spoken to ‘considered the comparative cost to be as four is to one’.268 He had agreed, for instance, that the salary bill for 1st Southern Division staff was to rise from £36 to £100 a week.269
NEW GOVERNMENT, NEW ARMY
Late in August 1921 de Valera remodelled the Dáil Cabinet, drastically pruning its core membership to six, with seven subordinate non-Cabinet ministries. Among the latter, J. J. O’Kelly’s National Language Department was relabelled Education, while Count Plunkett was pushed out of Foreign Affairs into a new ministry of Fine Arts, which de Valera thought ‘gave the appearance of stability and progressiveness to their affairs’.270 The Propaganda Department became the (non-Cabinet) Ministry of Publicity, with Desmond FitzGerald edging out Erskine Childers to return as minister. Childers concentrated on preparing a series of pamphlets, The Constructive Work of Dáil Éireann, which marshalled some fairly impressive evidence of the Republic’s administrative achievements. The core ministerial group – Griffith, Collins, Brugha, Stack and Cosgrave – was joined by a new portfolio, Economic Affairs, which was given to Robert Barton. Barton, cousin and friend of Childers and former Agriculture Minister, had been out of the picture between his arrest in January 1920 and his release in July 1921. His inclusion may have been intended to strengthen the republican solidarity of the Cabinet, although it – along with the remodelling of the inner Cabinet – has also been seen by some as shifting the balance away from the fundamentalist republican wing.
The Propaganda Department’s change of name pointed to some problems of adjustment to the postwar situation. The department’s work had always been aimed primarily at overseas opinion, and it had never developed machinery to address an Irish audience. After the Truce its main publicity vehicle the Irish Bulletin suffered, it has been suggested, from ‘a lack of appropriate topics to publicise’. Reviewing past brutalities of the British did not have the same capacity to rouse public sympathy as it had during the war. Government publicity may even have suffered from a public sense that the republicans, no longer underground fighters, were now the incumbents.
In the country at large, a growing tendency for the Volunteers ‘to domineer over civilians and despise “politicians” ’ has struck some as a symptom of their post-Truce demoralization. Certainly the army’s political dominance, evident in the May election, was cemented after the Truce. The seepage of military leadership into local government had already become pronounced, but this, in a sense, simply mirrored the overlap at national level. Michael Brennan as chairman of Clare County Council, like Michael Collins as minister for finance, or Diarmuid O’Hegarty as Cabinet secretary, echoed the common ancestry of Sinn Féin and the Volunteers. Not everyone seems to have endorsed this position: in October 1921 Mulcahy heard of a case ‘in which a Company Adjutant who acted as a district Court Registrar was instructed to resign his court position and that he should not be associated with the civil administration’. He felt it necessary to point out that ‘this attitude is incorrect. There is no prohibition preventing a Volunteer occupying any position on the Civil side of our Administration.’271
But his efforts to stop the IRA ‘interfering in public appointments’ still ran up against hard realities. The mid-Limerick brigadier Liam Forde explained that he had put in Dr Brennan, a longstanding member of the Limerick Volunteers, as chief medical officer of Croom hospital in accordance with ‘the practice general in all countries of exercising their influence on behalf of the candidate who served in the war’. (Mulcahy underlined this sentence and put an exclamation mark beside it, but seems to have left it at that.) Forde accepted that his ‘interference may be considered irregular’, but pointed out that Croom was strategically located between the three Limerick brigades, and ‘as it will be a point of considerable importance on the termination of the Truce’ it needed to be run by ‘one whose service on resumption of hostilities would be entirely at the disposal of our army’ and could be relied on to ‘give secret and unremitting attention to the wounded of the three brigades’.272
The erosion of Sinn Féin’s party machinery under the impact of two years of war emphasized the resilience of the army’s, and this helped military attitudes to harden into something approaching militarism in some places. In Sligo ‘major divisions’ between the Volunteers and the county council soon became apparent. The non-Volunteer council chairman was denounced as ‘wholly unsuitable for the position he occupies’, and the question whether one clerk should be retained or let go seems to have produced a division prefiguring the civil war split. (The clerk’s supporters would all go anti-Treaty.) There were battles over Poor Law union reform, and the IRA took action against a councillor, Patrick Connolly, who had objected to the idea of adjourning the council as a mark of respect for the commandant of Ballymote battalion (who had drowned the day after the Truce), Tubbercurry Rural District Council being instructed to ‘rescind’ Connolly’s appointment to the council and replace him by ‘a better qualified councillor’. The Local Government Department was sufficiently worried by developments in Sligo to send an inspector, who commented wryly that ‘Sligo Brigade appears to have declared martial law for Sligo.’273 This may have been extreme, but it was not entirely unrepresentative.
The ending of active hostilities had a particularly damaging effect on the republican high command. For reasons that are still obscure, Cathal Brugha decided to assert his ministerial authority during the Truce. Mulcahy’s biographer thinks he ‘resented the fact that Collins and Mulcahy were … associated in the public mind with the IRA’, and may have ‘decided that it was time to break their hold on the army’.274 Brugha went as far as charging Collins and Harry Boland, the envoy to America, with misuse of funds in buying arms. GHQ’s reaction may be judged from the Adjutant General’s note asking Fintan Murphy to check the details – ‘you need not break your heart about this, as I know you won’t.’275 Mulcahy’s later irritated comment that Brugha ‘took advantage of the freedom of the Truce’ to meet people, listen to their complaints and ‘take an active and an interfering part in dealing with arms questions, and indeed with Defence matters generally’ seems coloured by the final violent split in 1922. But even in the late summer of 1921 the animosity between them was all too clear. On 30 July Brugha issued a stinging rebuke to Collins over the handling of the case of a man banished from Ireland on erroneous information, charging the Department of Information with ‘an amateurishness that I thought we had long ago outgrown’. A more calculated insult could hardly have been devised, and after what seems a very long period of reflection – over a month – Mulcahy opted to respond in kind, declaring that ‘the tone of your letter of 30th July is most unfortunate and must have a very destructive influence on the harmony and discipline of the Staff.’ He indicated that unless something could be done to ‘eliminate the tendency to revert to this tone when differences arise’, he could not be responsible for maintaining that ‘harmony and discipline’.276
This threat of resignation drew from Brugha some of the most remarkable written words that can ever have passed between a minister and a service chief. Wondering ‘what good purpose’ could have been served by ‘writing thus 5 weeks after the event’, Brugha suggested that ‘it seems a further development of that presumption on your part that prompted you to ignore for some months past the duly appointed deputy chief of staff.’ ‘Before you are very much older, my friend, I shall show you that I have as little intention of taking dictation from you as to how
I should reprove inefficiency or negligence on the part of yourself or the D/I [Collins], as I have of allowing you to appoint a deputy chief of staff of your own choosing.’ Brugha went on to add to his criticism of Collins’s amateurism a stark denial of Mulcahy’s credentials as chief of staff: it was ‘scarcely necessary to remind me’ of ‘your inability to maintain harmony and discipline among the Staff’, since ‘your shortcomings in that respect … have been quite apparent for a considerable time’. Six days later he told Mulcahy that, unless he produced a full dossier on the Robbie case (a businessman who had been ordered out of the country on insufficient information) within twenty-four hours, he would be suspended. Next day he duly told him that his services would no longer be required ‘until further notice’.277
This was an impossible situation. Forwarding the correspondence to de Valera, Mulcahy fumed that ‘it arises purely in a nagging spirit. It must be clear to you that its tendency must be devitalising and degrading.’278 He frankly – and rather shockingly – declared, ‘I cannot usefully discuss any matter with the Minister for Defence,’ or ‘accede to his request to preside at or be present at any meeting of the Staff’. Unless the position ‘be estimated and adjusted without delay’, it would ‘lead to the destruction in a very short time of the vigour and discipline of the Staff’. Again, such language can hardly ever have passed from a service chief to a head of government. Yet, ironically, Mulcahy was a firm believer in the subordination of the military to the civil authority. Possibly he really thought that Brugha was exceeding his constitutional role; but one gets the sense that these roles were still being ‘played’ among a group of equals. It is hard to see how he expected de Valera to ‘estimate and adjust’ the crisis except by removing either him or – presumably – Brugha. The President did neither, however, though he may have calmed Brugha down: Mulcahy was reinstated, but the situation went on.
Robert Barton, who was ‘filled with admiration’ for de Valera’s ‘self-control and patience’ in trying to ‘prevent an open rupture’, later noted that he tried several times ‘to discover from Collins the root cause of his antipathy to Brugha. I failed.’ But he found that ‘he bore resentment to de Valera for the impartial attitude he adopted regarding this quarrel.’ Fintan Murphy, a useful fixer in the background at GHQ, recalled ‘acrimonious’ meetings at which it was clear that the majority would side with Collins as they were ‘all IRB’. ‘Towards the end of the Tan War Brugha was very stiff.’ Brugha was, Barton thought, ‘a difficult man to work with. A man of iron will and scrupulous honesty he often argued fiercely over details that were of little moment and in a manner that was at times offensive though unintentionally so.’279 Murphy noted that ‘CB was quite the opposite type to Mick C for Mick C would jolly up a situation by saying “Come let us have a ball of malt.” ’ The bottom line for him, though, was simply that ‘whatever job he had’ Collins ‘was running the show’; he ‘wanted to hold power and he was not going to surrender his power to the M/D [Minister for Defence].’280 Sean Dowling, who was with Brugha in Dublin at the outbreak of the civil war, thought he ‘hated Collins like poison – it was pathological’. Like many others, Dowling saw it as simple envy of Collins’s capabilities. By that time, whatever its origins, it had become a paranoid obsession.281
Collins was unlikely to confide in Barton; he was only a little less guarded with his old friend Harry Boland – who had also felt the sting of Brugha’s ‘unintentional offensiveness’ over the issue of payment for the Thompson guns. (‘Surely a man of your intelligence must realise’, Brugha patronizingly lectured him, ‘that our plan of activities here is based upon our having a certain amount of money at our disposal.’) When Boland, using the partial code which the pair slipped into erratically, told Collins in mid-May that he understood ‘the question at issue between you and Porter’, Collins hinted at the depth of the enmity. ‘Indeed there is a question between the two men whose names you mention,’ and but for his own ‘forbearance’, ‘the thing would be simply a scandal.’ Boland, he added, though heavily bruised by American faction fighting, had ‘received no treatment at the hands of any of his enemies like one of these has received’ (he was referring to himself, not ‘Porter’/Brugha, evidently). He would tell Boland of Brugha’s ‘real motive’ ‘Some day … when, if ever, we have an hour together.’282 That hour does not seem to have come before the friends found themselves on opposite sides of a civil war.
In this poisonous atmosphere the Republic embarked on a radical rebranding exercise, the creation of a ‘New Army’. This project was designed to remove the remaining ambiguity surrounding the relationship between the army and the civil government. As a basis for this, at some point the Volunteer Executive met for the last time to liquidate itself and terminate the independent status of the IV organization. On 15 September 1921 the Dáil Cabinet agreed to the reconstitution of the army, but it was not until mid-November that Cathal Brugha formally notified GHQ of the decision ‘to issue fresh commissions to Officers, and to offer re-enlistment to all [other] ranks’. The rationale for this was the need, in view of ‘the possibility of further fighting’, to ‘put the Army in an unequivocal position as the legal defence force of the Nation under the control of the Civil Government’.283
This step seems to have taken many by surprise. When the Defence Ministry memorandum was circulated, the commander of 5th Northern Division noted that it was ‘the only intimation I have had’ of the New Army idea, and announced that he would have to ‘communicate with the chief of staff on the matter’ before reaching a decision on whether to accept a fresh commission. Seán MacEoin sent an almost identical message four days later.284 The OC 4th Northern, Frank Aiken, tartly remarked that ‘the circular was the first we ever received from the Minister for Defence’.285 Mulcahy himself, before he accepted the offer of a fresh commission as chief of staff, tried to get his powers over appointments to GHQ defined as he wanted. Such appointments should not, he suggested, ‘be made against his judgment and without his concurrence’. Unsurprisingly, Brugha replied that while the Chief of Staff’s advice would be ‘considered’, both he and the whole staff would be ‘appointed by the Cabinet on the recommendations of the Minister for Defence’.
This was not an abstract issue: as Brugha had pointed out, Mulcahy had been ignoring the man Brugha had nominated as deputy chief of staff, Austin Stack. ‘Since I received your letters,’ Brugha wrote on 8 October, ‘I have asked him did he attend meetings of the Staff lately, and to my surprise he told me that he did not, as he had not been summoned to any meeting.’ Brugha also queried Ginger O’Connell’s appointment as assistant chief of staff. ‘I don’t remember seeing the title A/C/S appearing until now,’ and he clearly thought it was the same post as ‘Deputy Chief of Staff – whichever you like to call it’. Had he been kept in the dark, or had he just not been paying attention? In fact Eoin O’Duffy had become deputy. Mulcahy now proposed that the GHQ staff simply be reappointed, but, as he had threatened, Brugha insisted on placing Stack as deputy (O’Duffy was to be director of organization). The issue was really what role the Minister should play in staff appointments – in essence, whether the post of deputy chief of staff was a military or a political appointment. Mulcahy once again threatened resignation ‘if the Ministry decide to make an appointment to such an important Staff position against my judgment’. He also held that Brugha’s proposal to reverse the existing seniority system, so that GHQ directors would be outranked by divisional commanders, would create serious difficulties. A meeting between GHQ and the Cabinet on 25 November to resolve these issues actually made the situation worse. O’Duffy had written to Brugha the day before to protest that he was ‘reluctantly compelled to interpret the reduction in rank as a personal slight and a grave dishonour which I submit I do not deserve’. At the meeting he became ‘a little bit shrill’ in repeating this complaint, and his ‘slight touch of hysteria’ (according to Mulcahy) provoked an alarming scene. De Valera – who had previously tried to uphold O’D
uffy’s position – ‘rose excitedly in his chair, pushed the small table in front of him, and declared in a half-scream, half-shout “ye may mutiny if ye like, but Ireland will give me another army,” and dismissed the whole lot of us from his sight’.286
De Valera’s impatience with the unseemly squabble may be understandable at one level, but he seems to have refused to face the issues put by Mulcahy and rule on them as he was plainly required to do. Mulcahy’s demands were not entirely reasonable, but they would have been irrelevant in a less contentious situation. The real issue was psychological; as Ginger O’Connell innocently blurted out at the Cabinet meeting, up to this point GHQ had been ‘a band of brothers’. As one historian has observed, he ‘could not have put the case both for and against the status quo more succinctly’. It is hard not to see in this spat a pre-echo of the eventual split, and de Valera’s resort to the word ‘mutiny’ was ominous. At this point, though, he was not taking sides so much as simply trying to keep Brugha in the frame.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 44
